As it's still Christmas, I can comment on Christmas carols. The Canberra Times had a piece on Christmas Eve in which Australian composers including Peter Sculthorpe and Stephen Leek bewailed Australia's "fixation" on the Northern Hemisphere's 'white Christmas' -- especially in music -- as "the ultimate cultural cringe".

Well, yes and no. I would certainly like to be utterly rid of 'red-nosed reindeers' and 'dashing through the snow'. Christmas cards with snow scenes are really silly in Australia. But for this Anglo-Celtic Australian, glorious Christmas carols such as Now we joy in this fest and Joy to the world are not 'cultural cringe' but cultural heritage.

For years, Leek has been trying to do something about it. And, earlier this month, his carol Under the Stars -- written with lyricist Anne Williams -- was published and aired. It celebrates the Australian tradition of carol singing in the open at night as well as the Christmas message of peace, love and compassion. The carol, commissioned for the ABC's Limelight magazine, had one airing on ABC Classic FM--and then nothing. Leek is disappointed but not surprised. Australian carols have long struggled to find their way into the popular consciousness, he says.

The most famous Australian carols are the series of fifteen by William James, composer, and John Wheeler, lyricist, written between 1948 and 1961. Both were employees of the ABC -- James as federal director of music and Wheeler as a scriptwriter in general programming. The carols ring with Australian images: tree ferns and Christmas bush; brolgas and wood larks; red dust and yellow moons. Favourites such as The Three Drovers, Carol of the Birds and The Silver Stars are in the Sky have remained a subtle presence in an Australian Christmas and were once learned by generations of Australian schoolchildren. But not so today, Leek says, as newer generations are less familiar with them. "The choruses are catchy but now seem dated. And the arrangements are less suited to a contemporary style of choral singing." Leek has since used some themes of these original carols and expressed them in his own musical language. One of the reworked carols, Southern Cross, features in the new edition of the Oxford Book of Carols. . . .

Only one James and Wheeler song, Christmas Day, has made it into Together in Song, the Australian hymn book used by many churches.

How many other Australian composers have written Christmas carols? There are a few and, as Leek observes, the European tradition is a hard one to break. Ross Edwards' Five Carols (1967) are unaccompanied motets for choir. . . . Peter Sculthorpe's Awake Glad Heart (1988) was written for the choir of King's College, Cambridge. "It's a setting of verse by 17th century English poet Henry Vaughan and the melody reflects this," Sculthorpe says. But his earlier carol, Morning Song for the Christ Child (1966), for treble voices set to words by Roger Covell, is, as he describes it, "very much in my own style".

Anne Boyd's The Burning Babe (1980) was written at Pearl Beach on the NSW coast, yet its inspiration is an English renaissance one. Set to verses by 16th century Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, it also reflects her strong Anglo-Catholic faith. "I write in my own idiom," she says. I don't think of it as a northern hemisphere one. It's the idiom that is right for the material and which resonates with my own musical style.

So why has a European flavour remained so popular in Christmas carols? Boyd makes an interesting observation: "When carols deal with religious subject matter they tend to go back to pre-industrial Europe." Sculthorpe has another theory. " A lot of it is driven by commerce," he says, referring to the idealised theme of a snow-covered Christmas which has been popular with retailers for over a century.

"Whatever the reason, its frustrating," Leek says. "A a proud Australian, I don't understand why we can't come to grips with this event in our own country. After all, the original nativity scene didn't happen in the snow. As composers, we have to define what it is to be Australian in all our diversity.

Now I have another theory for the reason Australian carols are not catching on -- copyright. The copyright in James and Wheeler's classics was long owned by the Australian subsidiary of the British Chappell company, but this has now been swallowed up and is now a Warner company. The only edition of James and Wheeler's carols now in print is published in Miami Florida!

James and Wheeler's carols are on an ABC Classics CD 446 975-2 by the Sydney Philharmonia Motet Choir. It also includes works by Ross Edwards, Elliott Gyger, Stephen Whittington, Malcolm Williamson, Anne Boyd, Peter Sculthorpe, and Andrew Ford.

Members of the American Religion Newswriters Association have ranked the items below as the top religious news stories of 2005. The one's I've marked in italics also seem to me to have been of interest to Australia. Also important here have been:

• (unsuccessful) church opposition to the Government's new industrial relations laws,
• continuing Christian opposition to mandatory detention of illegal immigrants, and
• concern about fear-mongering and ethnic tensions as a result of the Government's responses to terrorism.

-------------------------------------

1. The death of Pope John Paul II
2. The Election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.
3. The death of Terri Schiavo and the legal and ethical dramas surrounding it
4. The responses of churches and faith-based agencies to Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, the earthquake in Pakistan
5. Debate over homosexuality in mainline denominations
6. Debate on evolution vs. intelligent design
7. U.S. Supreme Court approves posting of the Ten Commandments outside the Texas State capitol but not inside Kentucky courthouses -- and a number of other similar cases.
8. Faith-based opposition to Bush's three nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court
9. The Vatican's release of its instruction on homosexuals and the priesthood
10. Billy Graham's farewell evangelistic campaign in New York City
11. Responses to the withdrawal of Israel from the Gaza strip and divestment by Protestant groups from Israeli business
12. Calls by some church leaders for immediate withdrawal from Iraq
13. Canadian approval of same-sex marriages and moves to ban such marriages in some American states
14. Rick Warren's "The Purpose Driven Life,"
15. U.S. Catholic dioceses continuing to struggle with child-abuse payments
16. Debate on stem-cell research
17. The U.S. Air Force's new guidelines on religious activity
18. Brother Roger of Taizé murdered
19. US Democrats hold conferences on how to reach out to people of faith
20. Interest in C.S. Lewis' life and thought, with the release of the film "The Chronicles of Narnia."

Nobody needs a car like this. But its fun to dream a little--not about the car, but about being so free of financial cares as to be able to be relaxed about the absurdity of buying one.



As Richard Feast asks in the New York Times (27 Dec.)

What . . . will the skeptics make of the Bugatti Veyron 16.4, the fastest, most powerful and -- no surprise -- most expensive production car in the world? . . . Not to worry; the Veyron's credentials speak for themselves.

Still, nothing prepares the newcomer for the reality behind the bald performance statistics. The Veyron is blisteringly, and effortlessly, fast. . . .

The car's two-tone paint, horseshoe-shape grille and center dashboard panel of engine-turned aluminum reach back to Bugatti's design heritage. The interior is exquisite; details like vents and door pulls are made of machined and polished aluminum.

Overall, the car represents an extraordinary blend of opulence and power. As luxurious as a Maybach, the Veyron provides a level of comfort far beyond that of exotic quasi racers like the Ferrari Enzo and Porsche Carrera GT, neither of which can match its acceleration, top speed or braking.

Thomas Bscher, president of Bugatti Automobiles, is just as proud of the car's refined manners. "This car can be driven by anyone," he said, a statement clearly begging to be substantiated. . . .

Venturing onto the highways here, near Bugatti's headquarters in the Alsace region of France, the car's rarity and value generate considerable apprehension. Embarrassment, injury, a big repair bill or worse await a driver who does not show proper respect.

. . . Everything about the Veyron is shaped by superlatives, but even Bscher acknowledges, "Nobody needs a car like this." Indeed, who could argue that it isn't a frivolous liability? On what roads can it be tested . . .? How relaxed would an owner be about leaving a Veyron in a parking structure for a couple of hours? How anxious would he be handing the ignition key to a young parking valet?

• Dimensions: 176 inches long and almost 79 inches wide (compact)
• Engine: 8-litre, 16-cylinder
• Power: 1,001 horsepower and 922 pound-feet of torque
• Transmission: all wheel drive through a 7 speed automated manual gearbox
• Mass: 4,162 pounds
• Acceleration: 0 to 125 mph -- 7.3 seconds; 0 to 250 -- 55.6 seconds
• Top speed: electronically limited to 253 mph for tyre safety
• Consumption: estimated 9 mpg in the city and 18 on the highway. At full throttle, would empty the 26 gal. tank in about 12 minutes
• Equipment: 10 radiators, a horsepower gauge and a titanium exhaust system, an audio system worth $US30,000
• Price: $US1.4 million; £800,000
• Production: annual sales of 50 worldwide
• Profitability: nil--losses are expected

Similarly to last year, part of my work in 2005 was to prepare Australia's annual Report on the Operation of the Aged Care Act 1997. The 2004-05 edition was presented to Parliament on 21 December, months after the legal deadline of 30 September. The work was finished on time, but it took many, many weeks to be approved; so the final result was late. Frustrating.

I also work on the aged care chapter of the Department of Health and Ageing's annual report, which this year appeared on time, unlike last year's report, which was much delayed by the 2004 elections.

King Chulalongkorn, Rama V (Phra Chula Chomklao Chaoyuhua) was the fifth king of the Chakri dynasty of Thailand (b. 1853, d. 1910; reigned 1868-1910). A reformer and moderniser, he was one of Thailand's finest kings. He is the great-great-grandfather of the present King, Bhumibol Adulyadej, Rama IX.

There are many pictures and shrines dedicated to Chulalongkorn, particularly in Bangkok. Interest in him has grown since the early in the 1990s, creating a form of veneration rather like that which some Christians have for a patron saint. Each October 23, the day of his death, is commemorated throughout Thailand. Each Tuesday (the day of the week on which the king was born) a large gathering takes place before a bronze equestrian statue of Rama V in front of the old National Assembly building.


James and I like Thai food and we've tried quite a few Thai restaurants. Almost all of them have a picture of Chulalongkorn displayed in a place of honour--including our Canberra favourite, Zenyai Thai. It's closed for three weeks (the owner is getting married), so we tried another last night. An entire wall of the other restaurant was dedicated to three large Warhol-like posters of Rama V, and his portrait adorned the menus. (The food, however, was very ordinary.)

According to the Revd Dr Giles Fraser (Church Times, 25 Nov 05) "Those who think the English Civil War ended in the 17th century ought to take a look at the (Church of England) General Synod."

There's definitely a Ph.D. thesis in it for someone. Casting my eye around Synod this year, it struck me that the reasons different factions rub each other up the wrong way might still be best described in terms of Roundheads and Cavaliers. We can all think of bishops who act like Charles I and have an allergy to synodical government, just as we can immediately recognise all those earnest, soberly dressed lay people up from Huntingdon on an important moral mission. Roundheads and Cavaliers don't just disagree: they have a deep and visceral dislike of each other's way of being.

One could turn Giles's characterisation into a table like this:

		IDEOLOGY
		Left wing	Right wing
T E M P E R A M E N T	Cavaliers Characteristics according to 'Roundheads': Self-centred pleasure-seekers, egotistical show-offs, cultural snobs, indifferent to morality, insincere, and obsessed with sex and parties and position	Champagne socialists, Bill Clinton, Giles Fraser, not too much (?)	Parts of Forward in Faith, Alan Clark
	Roundheads Characteristics according to 'Cavaliers': Grim, joyless, prudish, unfunny, provincial, unsophisticated, unsympathetic, cold-hearted, and cruel	The early British Labour Party, Keir Hardie, Rowan Williams	Reform, UK Independence Party, Anglican Diocese of Sydney

Ease of communication with not too much:

Easy

Reasonable

Hard going

"Forgive the generalisations", Giles continues, "but this is only a short column."

The Church of England was expressly set up in order to provide a Church where Roundheads and Cavaliers could co-exist without beating each other up. How do we do the same today, and put a stop to the construction of scaffolds?

The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for dialogue between those who disagree. I wonder whether some typology such as the above could serve as a sort of Myers-Briggs for churchmanship. At its best, Myers-Briggs can help squabbling couples recognise that the origins of their mutual bad-temperedness lie in something other than the desire to irritate intentionally.

Another suggestion: perhaps it is best to start a dialogue with those with whom you share at least an ideological or a temperamental affinity. It may be too difficult to start with a double difference. This may be why, for example, I am able to have a delightful lunch with the Principal of Pusey House, as I did last week, but I would think of a visit to the diocese of Sydney as a trip to Mordor. Whatever the difficulties, the motto is simple: it's good to talk.

Care to place yourself in the table? And then to start talking? I am happy to talk, but there is at least one topic for which each discussion is more and more like a tedious Mordorian (Mordorite?) journey (pic at right). But until there is change, one may have little choice.

December 25th looks like being typical of SE Australia in mid-summer; very warm, with a scorching northerly wind and a risk of bushfires. This little tune sets the scene:



The North wind is tossing the leaves, the red dust is over the town,
the sparrows are under the eaves and the grass in the paddock is brown,
as we lift up our voices and sing, to the Christ child the heavenly King.
-- from "Christmas Day", one of the fifteen Australian Carols by William James and John Wheeler (The full text and score are copyright)

Warm (and I mean warm) greetings to all my Internet friends on the Feast of the Incarnation of Christ.

The Scotsman (21 Dec) reports the first civil union ceremonies in Scotland, including that of John Maguire and Laurence Scott-Mackay in Edinburgh. After the ceremony at the India Buildings register office, the party proceeded up the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle to be welcomed by a lone piper in full Highland dress. After an outdoors champagne breakfast, the couple went to St Margaret's Chapel in the grounds of the Castle, for the wedding blessing. I've visited the Castle and the Chapel, which has an interesting history. What a setting for a ceremony!

The Rt. Revd. Richard Holloway, former primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, upheld his own long-standing convictions by blessing the couple. He said: "This is a wrong righted, it's an injustice corrected. There's no reason why same-sex people shouldn't have the same opportunities for love. Same-sex couples can now have the same protection in their relationship as the rest of us, and that is to be applauded."

The Constitution gives the Federal Parliament exclusive powers to make laws relating to marriage. Last year it defined marriage as being only between one man and one woman. Thus, the Federal Parliament has declared formalisation of same-sex relationships to be outside its jurisdiction. Legal authorities believe that this clears the way for the States and Territories to legislate for same-sex 'marriage', (so long as they don't make it out to be marriage). This what Tasmania has already done and the Australian Capital Territory is expected to do next year.

In a Press Conference on 22 December Prime Minister Howard was asked "In relation to the recent ceremony between Elton John and his partner, could you foresee a civil partnership law being passed Australia?" Mr Howard answered

I would be opposed to it. I think marriage is for men and women. That's why we amended the Marriage Act. I don't say that in any sense of hostility or discrimination towards gay people but I believe very strongly that marriage is exclusively a union for life of a man and a woman to the exclusion of others. That is the common understanding of marriage in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and I would be opposed to a recognition of civil unions, although I am strongly in favour -- as my Government has demonstrated -- strongly in favour of removing any property and other discrimination that exists against people who have same-sex relationships.

But this is simply not true (or at least not the whole truth). The Government has not acted to remove discriminatuion in federal law. Change is needed in areas like parenting and families, medical safety nets, taxation, superannuation, social security and veterans' benefits. Until now, the Australian government has only been willing to accept same-sex couples as couples for terrorism laws, some areas of immigration and passport laws, and for some aspects of superannuation choice for non-government employees. It recently rejected proposals for equal treatment under the Medicare and Pharmaceutical benefit safety nets.

Quoted in The Age columnist Matthew Parrish deprecates civil partnership ceremonies.

"Aargh!" he wrote in his Times column. "One of the joys of being gay . . . was the knowledge that at least half our acquaintances would never encumber us with wedding lists at Peter Jones or the social obligation to spend the better part of a Saturday in enforced merriment in the company of people we didn't know and would never meet again, and in a cause whose prospects we secretly knew to be patchy at best, but that we were obliged to celebrate as the beginning of perpetual bliss. And soon we shall be rushing to ape the heterosexuals in their demented rituals. Must we?"

Yes, it seems, one must. The truth, concludes Parris, "is that we are all calming down about the ridiculous issue of how and to whom we make love."

But, at least in Australia, we await legal and political justice.

From Faithful Agitator I learnt of a story in the the Dartmouth Standard-Times which alleged that a University of Massachusetts student was visited by agents of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security after he supposedly requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's 'Little Red Book' from the University library. The story turned out to be a hoax. In any case, the student could easily have found the complete text of Quotations from Mao Tse Tung on the web.

For the information of any government agents out there, I would be happy to provide a picture of my own copy of the "Little Red Book" -- not autographed, sadly, as Mao may not have time to sign all of the hundreds of millions of copies. The agents may also view a catalogue of many of my books.

There is a serious side to this. The American Library Association maintains a watching brief on the impact of anti-terrorism measures on intellectual freedom.

The American Library Association (ALA) opposes any use of governmental power to suppress the free and open exchange of knowledge and information or to intimidate individuals exercising free inquiry. . . . ALA considers that sections of the USA PATRIOT ACT are a present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users.
-- from ALA's Resolution on the USA PATRIOT Act (See also Resolution Reaffirming the Principles of Intellectual Freedom in the Aftermath of Terrorist Attacks.)

This is of interest to me as a librarian. The Australian Library and Information Association's Statement on professional conduct requires its members to protect their clients' rights to privacy and confidentiality. The Association's Statement on free access to information states "that library and information services have particular responsibilities in supporting and sustaining the free flow of information and ideas including . . . protecting the confidential relationships that exist between the library and information service and its clients." But when government laws override these principles, libraries, against their will become data collection agents for government spooks.

Related documents include:

• Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights
• Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; and
• International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions Statement on Libraries and Intellectual Freedom

In "Looking for an argument", their Editorial of 13 December 2005, the editors of Christian Century say that it is not the case that Christian denominations are constantly arguing over homosexuality. They are making lots of noise and many words, but not arguing.

Roman Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray once said that a genuine argument is a moral achievement--it's rare that people lay out arguments, listen to critiques and identify points of disagreement. In most church settings, that kind of argument over homosexuality is not happening.

Rather, in most settings one side of the homosexuality debate has already "won" and is busy pummeling the other side (usually not visibly present) into submission. [. . .]

Neither side has room for middle ground or space for argument. Shouldn't those in favor of inclusion acknowledge that all their opponents are not mindless troglodytes? Shouldn't the conservative side grant that one can make a genuinely biblical argument for inclusion based on Jesus' radical love that transgresses boundaries and on the gospel's preference for the oppressed?

When Peter Storey, former Methodist bishop in South Africa, was called to moderate a church in crisis, he would come before the church with two books. In one hand he would hold the Bible; in the other, the Methodist Book of Discipline. "We can solve this crisis with either of these two books," he would say. Usually the congregation would choose the Discipline. Each side in the dispute thought its rights would be better honored by the church's book of laws than by scripture's insistence on love of enemies and preference for repentance over claims of victory.

Denominational fights over homosexuality necessarily place strain on polities and rules of order. Recourse to that other book would keep us from wiggling off the hook as we score points against our enemy, and would call us to the difficult path of argument and reconciliation.

On the rebound from The Messiah comes choir practice for our Service of Lessons and Carols on the Wednesday evening before Christmas. I'm meeting a couple of the carols for the first time. Especially delightful is the very old English carol Make we joy now in this fest (as arranged by William Walton). You can hear it as recorded by Swiss group, musicmakers.

Deciphering words and music at sight from the cluttered Oxford score was a challenge at first!

Recent mob violence in Sydney's southern beach-side suburbs has received world-wide publicity. Trouble began on Sunday when gangs attacked people of Middle Eastern appearance in the beachside suburb of Cronulla. This was followed by retaliation against people and vehicles in Cronulla and other parts of Sydney. Trouble continues.

I am normally a rather left-leaning person. I accept that unemployment and discrimination are at the root of many of these troubles. But I am afraid to say that I have no sympathy with public rioters.

There has been community action to reduce tensions, notably the Wave of respect action at the Cronulla beach.

Meanwhile, the New South Wales Parliament has rushed new police powers into law. In a one-day emergency session yesterday, it passed the Law enforcement Legislation Amendment (Public Safety) Act 2005,

. . . to provide for a range of law enforcement and other criminal justice measures to deal with large-scale public disorder in any area for the purposes of securing public safety. [A] public disorder is a riot or other civil disturbance that gives rise to a serious risk to public safety, whether at a single location or resulting from a series of incidents in the same or different locations.

The powers given to the police are considerable :

• To assist in preventing or controlling a large-scale public disorder, a senior police officer may for up to two days authorise prohibition of sale or supply of liquor in an area and/or establish an emergency alcohol-free zone.
• If there is a large-scale public disorder occurring (or a threat of disorder in the near future) in a area, police may be authorised to cordon off a targeted area and/or set up a roadblocks. They may stop and search persons and vehicles, require people to disclose their identities, and may 'seize and detain' vehicles, and mobile phones for up to a week.
• The police may stop vehicles for the purposes of arrest, detention or search and may require occupants of vehicles connected with serious offences to disclose the identity of previous drivers of or passengers of the vehicles.

In recent debate about the Australian Government's extension to anti-terrorism laws, the State and Territory governments opposed expansion of national anti-sedition laws. Ironically, the sedition laws contain offences that could well be used to prosecute rioters. This is the new law, which will be part of the State and Federal common Criminal Code.

Criminal Code Act 1995
80.2 Sedition
Urging violence within the community
(5) A person commits an offence if:
(a) the person urges a group or groups (whether distinguished by race, religion, nationality or political opinion) to use force or violence against another group or other groups (as so distinguished); and
(b) the use of the force or violence would threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.
Penalty: Imprisonment for 7 years.

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Crimes Act 1914 also contains drastic powers:

24A Definition of seditious intention
An intention to effect any of the following purposes, that is to say: . . . (g) to promote feelings of ill will and hostility between different classes of Her Majesty's subjects so as to endanger the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth; . . . is a seditious intention.
24B Definition of seditious enterprise
(1) A seditious enterprise is an enterprise undertaken in order to carry out a seditious intention.
(2) Seditious words are words expressive of a seditious intention.
24C Seditious enterprises
A person who engages in a seditious enterprise with the intention of causing violence, or creating public disorder or a public disturbance, is guilty of an indictable offence punishable on conviction by imprisonment for not longer than 3 years.
24D Seditious words
(1) Any person who, with the intention of causing violence or creating public disorder or a public disturbance, writes, prints, utters or publishes any seditious words shall be guilty of an indictable offence. Penalty: Imprisonment for 3 years.

30A Unlawful associations
(1) The following are hereby declared to be unlawful associations, namely: . . . (b) any body of persons, incorporated or unincorporated, which by its constitution or propaganda or otherwise advocates or encourages the doing of any act having or purporting to have as an object the carrying out of a seditious intention (see subsection (3).
(3) In this section: seditious intention means an intention to effect any of the following purposes: . . . (d) to promote feelings of ill-will or hostility between different groups so as to threaten the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.

New Yorker, 20 December 2004.

Amen, Amen. A ----- men! And so came to an end our second and last performance of Handel's Messiah, last night.

I'd say the performance was of a good standard. We only had 35 choristers and 9 musicians, but we filled up the small church (150 seats) with fine, joyful, music and the audience loved it. Certainly it cost much, much, less than to hear the Messiah in the Melbourne Concert Hall where tickets were from $42 to $103!

Huge congratulations to Conductor Colin Forbes who directs and teaches brilliantly. I've learnt heaps from him.

During the intervals, drinks and Christmas cake under the trees in the courtyard in the cool night air were delightful. (No alcohol for the singers until after the show!) This picture (with James), is pretty terrible, but it's the only souvenir I have, so I'll post it anyway; the first time in my life that I've worn a bow tie!

It was quite an effort. Over 30 hours of choir rehearsals, including two mamoth run-throughs a couple of evenings before the first performance. I discovered that choir singing requires stamina; not so much the actual singing (I'm a bass-baritone), but the hours and hours of attendance at practice! After the last rehearsal, I was almost ready to quit, I was so tired. But I enjoyed the actual performances greatly and learned a lot. My sight reading is now quite good and vocal skills continue to improve!

After CAMRA's performance of The Sorcererlast year, critic Jennifer Gall wrote, "The members of St Philip's deserve a blessing from the Canberra community for making their church available for performances . . . which keep a wide, stimulating variety of music alive and thriving outside the more regimented performance venues. "

Now it's practice for a pre-Christmas traditional service of lessons and carols.

As I mentioned some weeks ago, I am honoured to have been elected one of the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn's delegates to the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia. Apart from the serious business of meeting together, one of the perks of being elected is a subsidised trip to somewhere else in Australia. But on 18 November 2005, the Standing Committee accepted an offer to host the General Synod in (wait for it!) . . . Canberra.

Our Diocese will have the honour of hosting the Synod on 20-26 October 2007, for the first time other than in a Metropolitan diocese. Although the opening service will be in the Cathedral in Goulburn, the main meeting place is expected to be the Rydge's Lakeside Hotel, a mere 15 minutes walk from my home. Until the 1990's, the General Synod always met in Sydney, but the past four triennial meetings have been in the other Metropolitan dioceses of Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth.

Take a look at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's simple but beautiful online exhibition of masterworks about "The Christmas Story"

Andrea Mantegna. The Adoration of the Shepherds, shortly after 1450. Andrea Mantegna. (Metropolitan Museum)
(Link from Topmost Apple)

Being a jeans and T-shirt person whenever I can get away with it (which is not often enough), I can't let my 501st posting go by without a nod in the direction of a certain rather well known brand of garment. I have a couple of pairs.

Designers may be the worst thing that ever happened to jeans. Which is why the No. 1 rule of jeans shopping is: if there's a designer's name on the back, they're not really jeans. Oh, they're denim all right. And they have an jeans cut. But they're not jeans-jeans. Furthermore, why are you spending $455 on miner's pants?

Paisley goes with nothing: a man's guide to style by Hal Rubenstein with Jum Mullen (Doubleday, 1995).

And now from the Vatican, an authoritative answer to a Really Important Question.

Actually, I rather like the answer, especially when Fr. McNamara urges circumspection when decorating churches and says that, "It is unnecessary . . . to fall under the spell of commercial enterprises which tend to anticipate the Christmas season."

From Zenit - Code: ZE05112920; 29 November 2005.

When to Set Up Christmas Decorations, answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University.

Q: What would you consider an appropriate time during Advent to put up Christmas trees, ornaments, lights and other decorations in churches and Christian homes?

A: This question is simple only in appearance because customs surrounding the celebration of Christmas vary widely among different cultures.

From a strictly liturgical standpoint the preparations for receiving the Christ Child intensify from Dec. 17 onward and this is probably a good time to set up the parish crib, except for the image of the child, which is often added just before Midnight Mass in more or less solemn fashion. Other parishes prefer to set up the crib on Christmas Eve. There are no official rites regarding this widespread custom. In those places that use the Advent wreath, it is placed on the first Sunday of Advent. . . .

Dec. 17 or the nearest Sunday might also be a good date to set up Christmas trees and other decorations in Christian homes, but it really depends on local custom and tradition. It is unnecessary, however, to fall under the spell of commercial enterprises which tend to anticipate the Christmas season, sometimes even before Advent begins.

Because some Christmas decorations have often lost their original religious meaning, churches should be rather circumspect about employing them and should do so with great discretion. If used at all, these decorations are best set up on Christmas Eve so as to respect the integrity of the Advent season.

Christmas trees are preferably located outside the sanctuary and church proper, and are best left in vestibules or church grounds. This has been the practice in St. Peter's Square from the time of Pope John Paul II.

As far as possible, decorations should be religiously themed, leaving plastic reindeer, sugar canes and Santa Clauses in the local shopping mall or at least within the confines of the parish hall for children's events.

Within the church proper, apart from the crib, Christmas may be evoked by using, for example, traditional poinsettias, holly and other traditional elements according to the culture. As I mentioned, different cultures celebrate Christmas in various ways.

At an open press conference today at the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly, the Chief Minister, the Hon Jon Stanhope MLA, announced the introduction of civil unions for same-sex and opposite-sex couples. The announcement was met with wild applause and a standing ovation. Mr Stanhope said he hoped the legislation would be introduced into the Legislative Assembly in about March next year. He said:

Civil union will deliver real, functional equality under ACT law for couples who either do not have access to the Commonwealth Marriage Act or who prefer not to marry. This includes opposite-sex couples and transgender and intersex Canberrans. Partners to a civil union will have the same legal recognition under ACT law as married couples.

Recognition of same-sex partnerships is occurring in many places throughout the world. Tasmania recently legislated for same-sex registration, and the United Kingdom's civil union regime comes into force on Monday next week. Just yesterday, the South African Constitutional Court found in favour of same-sex marriage. The proposed ACT legislation will be closely modelled on the New Zealand Act. The approach being taken here in the ACT is a reasonable and reasoned one, that will deliver symbolic and legal equity.

Today's announcement comes six months after the release of a discussion paper that looked at three possible options for delivering legal equality to same-sex couples - marriage, civil union and registration. The A.C.T. Government decided upon civil union as a new non-discriminatory model that could be used by opposite-sex and same-sex couples. Marriage would have be difficult for a territory government to provide achieved as, under the Australian Constitution, marriage is largely a Federal matter. The Federal Government's has amended the marriage law to exclude same-sex couples, denying recognition under federal law. A recognition of relationship that is not marriage, however, is a matter for state and territory law.

Mr Stanhope acknowledged that some would not welcome the announcement.

These laws will extend a basic social and legal right to a new group of individuals. This will not diminish or erode a right that is already held by the bulk of the population. I believe that, if anything, by offering all Canberrans the opportunity to enter into such unions, we will be strengthening the institutions and traditions that see most of us, at some time in our lives, drawn into family units for companionship, support and love. In offering same-sex couples the opportunity to declare such attachments we are saying, 'family is important, strong households are important'.

While the ACT Government had previously legislated to ensure that same-sex couples are on an equal legal footing with other de facto domestic partnerships, same-sex couples currently do not have equal legal recognition with married couples. Civil union will deliver that recognition in full, without conflicting with or changing the meaning of marriage.

The ACT's new laws will be more far-reaching than those of Tasmania, which has a registration scheme for same-sex couples. The scheme would be open to non-ACT residents as well. Couple from outside Canberra may well come to Canberra for official certification and celebration of their unions.

---

CIVIL UNION FACT SHEET
(Published by the A.C.T. Chief Minister)

Q. What is a civil union?
A. Civil union allows a couple to establish a domestic partnership by making a formal declaration of their intention to be domestic partners before the Registrar-General or an authorised celebrant.

Q. How does civil union differ from registration or same-sex marriage?
A. Civil union is a completely new option that can be used by anybody regardless of gender. It will give couples functional equality under ACT law with married couples but does not replace or duplicate marriage. Civil union differs from registration in that registration is simply evidence of a domestic relationship. Civil union is not only evidence of a domestic partnership, it creates that partnership.

Q. Aren't same sex couples already treated the same as opposite sex couples under ACT law?
A. Although the ACT Government has legislated for equal recognition of domestic partnerships other than marriage under ACT law, putting same-sex couples on the same footing as opposite-sex de facto couples, same-sex couples currently do not have equal recognition with married couples. Civil union will give couples equality in areas such as wills and the division of property where a person dies without having made a will.

Q. The Domestic Relationships Act 1994 already applies to same-sex couples. Isn't that sufficient?
A. The Domestic Relationships Act 1994 applies to a variety of relationships, including family relationships such as exist where an adult son or daughter has given up a career to provide domestic care for a parent in need. The Act essentially provides for an adjustment of ownership of property where two people have been in a domestic relationship for at least two years. The purpose is to extend and clarify the application of principles of equitable trusts as they relate to domestic situations. The Act does not create domestic relationships.

Q. Who can be an authorised celebrant for a civil union?
A. Anyone who is an authorised celebrant under the Commonwealth Marriage Act 1961 will be able to act as a celebrant for the purposes of an ACT civil union.

Q. Can opposite-sex couples enter a civil union?
A. Yes. The legislation will be non-discriminatory.

Q. Will people who are already married be able to enter a civil union?
A. No, nor will people who are already in another civil union. The rights and obligations flowing from a civil union are ones that attach to a primary relationship. There can only be one primary relationship at any given time. If a person who is in a civil union subsequently marries, the civil union is automatically terminated.

Q. What consequences will flow from a civil union?
A. In the ACT there will be no difference in legal effect between a civil union and a marriage made under the Commonwealth Marriage Act 1961. That means that laws that presently distinguish between married spouses and other domestic partners will need to be amended to accord equal treatment to civil-union partners.
One concrete example of the consequence of a civil union would be that where a person enters into a civil union after having made a will, that will is revoked by the civil union (unless made in express contemplation of the union). Similarly if, a civil union is terminated, any beneficial gift in favour of the former partner will be revoked, subject to the same considerations as apply to a beneficial gift to a spouse.

Q. Will the parties to a civil union need to live in the ACT?
A. No. The basis on which a birth, death or marriage is registered in the ACT is simply that the event took place in the ACT. The same will apply to civil unions.


Q. How will a civil union be terminated?
A. One or both of the parties will be able to terminate a civil union by giving notice in writing to the Registrar-General. If that notice is not withdrawn within one month, the civil union will be terminated. A civil union will also be automatically terminated on the death or marriage of one of the parties.

Q. Will the ACT civil union legislation conflict with the Commonwealth Marriage Act 1961?
A. No. A person cannot be in both a civil union and a marriage and an ACT civil union will always give way to a Commonwealth marriage. The meaning of marriage will not be altered in any way.

Q. Will an ACT civil union be recognised in other Australian jurisdictions?
A. A certificate from the ACT Registrar-General stating that two people have entered into a civil union may be used as evidence of the existence of a 'marriage like relationship' to access existing rights attached to such relationships in other jurisdictions. Direct recognition would require legislative action by the other jurisdiction to attach particular rights, responsibilities or other legal consequences to the relationship.

Q. What are other countries and other Australian jurisdictions doing in regard to same-sex union?
A. Tasmania was the first Australian jurisdiction to act. The Tasmanian Relationships Act 2003 is a registration scheme. In the first 18 months there were 49 relationships registered. Interestingly, the UK will soon recognise Tasmania's Relationships Act, treating couples registered under the Act as civil partnerships.
In New Zealand, the Civil Union Act came into force in April this year. There have been 250 civil unions so far. There have been 107 male-to-male unions, 101 female-to-female unions and 42 male-female unions.
Countries such as Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Liechtenstein, Hungary, Germany, France, Switzerland, and several US states have introduced civil unions or domestic partnership regimes. A smaller number (Belgium, Netherlands, Canada) allow same-sex couples to marry.
The United Kingdom recently passed the Civil Partnership Bill with overwhelming support in the House of Commons and a two-thirds majority in the House of Lords. The Act commences on December 5 - three days from now. The scheme is only open to same-sex couples.
Yesterday, the South African Constitutional Court found in favour of same-sex marriage.
United States President George Bush said during the last election campaign that he supported the concept of civil unions and would not object to states within the US adopting such regimes.

The death by hanging of Nguyen Tuong Van at Singapore's Changi Prison has been confirmed by the Singapore authorities. The execution was at 6:00am Singapore time, almost an hour before dawn.

It seems that such horrors must be done in the dark.

Singapore has a fine Yellow Ribbon Project to help offenders in their return to the community after release from prison. Not this time.

The "mission in life" of the Singapore Prison Service is "to get criminals out of prison." Seems there's more than one way to achieve that.

Facts

• The Caribbean has the world’s second highest HIV prevalence rate; the highest HIV-infection levels among women in the Americas are in the Caribbean; HIV-AIDS has become the leading cause of death in the Caribbean among people aged 15-44;
• 95 per cent of people living with HIV-AIDS come from low and middle-income countries;
• The fastest-growing AIDS epidemics are in East Asia (a rise of 50 per cent from 2002-2004), Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (a rise of 40 per cent from the same period);
• The number of people living with HIV continues to grow – from 35 million in 2001 to 38 million in 2003, to 39.4 million in 2004;
• Between 80 and 85 per cent of HIV-AIDS cases are the result of unprotected sexual intercourse;
• High-risk behaviour is on the rise in high-income countries, where the antiretroviral therapy is widely available, and new infections are being noted. In North America, the number of HIV-positive people was estimated at 950,000 in 2001; in 2003, the number was one million. Europe saw an increase of 40,000 new cases (from 540,000 in 2001 to 580,000 in 2003);

Figures

• 39.4 million, the number of people around the world living with HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) that causes AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome);
• 25 million of people living with HIV are in sub-Saharan Africa; 10 million of them are young people aged 15 to 24; this region holds just over 10 per cent of the world’s population but is home to more than 60 per cent of HIV cases and more than three quarters of all women living with HIV;
• More than 20 million people have died of AIDS since it was first identified in 1981;
• 15 million children have been orphaned by HIV-AIDS;
• 12 million new infections are estimated in Asia between 2005 and 2010; Asian nations have huge populations that even low national HIV prevalence translates into millions of people living with HIV;
• 5 million, the number of people newly infected with HIV in 2004 alone;
• 3 million, the number of people who died of HIV-AIDS in 2004;
• Only 1 in 5 people have access to basic HIV prevention services;
• Only 1 in 10 people living with HIV have been tested for the virus;
• Only 1 million people living with HIV are receiving antiretroviral therapy in developing countries, which means that only 15 per cent of those needing treatment receive it;
• $22 billion would be needed in 2008 to reverse the spread of AIDS in the developing world.

Sources: UNAIDS, CIDA, Reuters Alertnet collated by Anglican Journal

The spectacular finals of the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships were held in Melbourne last night and shown live on Australian Televison. For me, the highlights were the near-miraculous skills of Slovenians Mitja Petkovsek and Aljaz Pegan.

In the men's parallel bars, Petkovsek was the gold medalist with a score of 9.700 ahead of defending world champion Li Xiao-Peng of China (9.675) and France's Yann Cucherat (9.662).

In the men's horizontal bar, Pegan's routine drew gasps from the Melbourne spectators and from me at home as well. He won with 9.662, while Cucherat was second (9.650) and Ukraine's Valeri Goncharov was third (9.637).

In this small excerpt from a magnificent Thanksgiving sermon (preached at Grace Church, Sheboygan, Wisconsin), Fr Jerry Kramer OP of the (Anglican) Church of the Annunciation in New Orleans, begins his story with what it was like before Hurricane Katrina. (Read it all as I have deliberately selected only part of the story).

I'm grateful for this opportunity today to share with you the story of God's grace and glory [. . . ] Let me first tell you a bit about us before Hurricane Katrina landed on the shores of the Gulf Coast. 70125 is one of the poorest zip codes in Louisiana and the nation. Forty percent of neighbourhood families live below the poverty line. Forty percent of adults do not have a high school education. Eighty percent of all children do not live with both natural parents. On the national index of violent crimes, we score a nine out of a possible ten. Gunshots at night were a common occurrence.

Our schools were miserable. Medical care for the uninsured and working poor deplorable to non-existent. This past Easter Sunday, I had to go into the men's room of the church and change the catheter of an elderly, handicapped African American man because no hospital would take him, no ambulance would come. It was simply hard to believe at times that we were indeed living back in the U.S. This was no different from third world Tanzania where we ran a pharmacy from the Cathedral vicarage. I was working my way up to minor surgery and getting pretty good at diagnosing illness with some help from the Internet.

Standing in the middle of this mess, Church of the Annunciation is a beautiful tapestry of varied colours and walks of life.

I share this as an example of what can happen in a so-called "first-world" country when governments fail to do their job. Too much is left to the private market, and the devil take the hindmost. I fear greatly that much of Australia will be in similar circumstances should the present government remain in office for much longer. The signs are there already. Public dental treatment has gone. Direct billing by doctors to Medicare is declining as the payment rates become increasingly unrealistic. Public hospitals are under great strain and recruitment of nurses becomes difficult because of onerous work conditions. The state of public mental health care is a scandal. Services to rural and remote areas are on the wane, even as Australia struggles to provide good services for indigenous people (not always for lack of funds, but for lack of good policy). Meanwhile, churches and charities try to take up the slack.

Canon Dr Judith Maltby, chaplain and fellow of Corpus Christi College and reader in church history in the University of Oxford, writes that Advent is not only a preparation "for the celebration of Christ's first coming among us in his vulnerability, but also a time to reflect on his -- 'second coming' -- this time not in weakness but in power."

The second coming of Christ is a doctrine dominated by the language of exposure and disclosure and the resulting judgment and justice. The doings of the schemers and hypocrites will be brought out into the glare and open. [. . .]

But there is another way to understand the day of disclosure, in more corporate, less individualistic terms. More profoundly, this day brings judgment on communities that construct themselves in such a way as to make disclosure unsafe --- societies, institutions, communities and churches in which vulnerable people and groups whisper in secret, meet behind closed doors, because it is simply not safe to do otherwise. [. . . ]

We are not a place where disclosure can safely be made. The 1998 Lambeth resolution 1.10, which condemns homosexual practice, also demands with equivalent authority that the church "listen to the experience of homosexual persons". But given the culture of the communion, how can this be realised in any meaningful institutional way; how is it not to be at best a pious platitude, at worst a con and an evasion, a rhetorical sop to convince ourselves that we Anglicans are not really such intolerant chaps after all? The larger public sees through us without much trouble, especially the younger people, and thankfully finds it hard to see much of Jesus Christ in our global obsessions with sex. Could it be, as in the gospels, that those on the "outside" often understand him better than the paid-up, card-carrying disciples do? In any Christian theology worth its salt, Christ's return is part of the purpose of creation, not its redundancy notice. The day of disclosure will also be about fully becoming what we humans were created by a loving God to be, and becoming the community--"the kingdom"--we are called to be, one that rejoices over difference, that can "manage" vulnerability, a place, in the best sense, of safety.

"We are not a place where disclosure can safely be made", Canon Maltby writes. Why? Because disclosure of one's sexuality may mean loss of local church fellowship, loss of family, loss of ministry, and (in much of the so-called Global South) loss of life and liberty--and thus far, the church does little or nothing to prevent this. Unless and until the churches in the Anglican Communion act forcefully against such abuses, they cannot claim to have created the space necessary to fulfil the demand of the 1998 Lambeth resolution 1.10, that the church "listen to the experience of homosexual persons".

Radical hospitality is a gospel imperative. It includes the offer of safety to those whom some in church think to be sinners. And we are all sinners. Our lack of hospitality--our failure to offer safety for personal openness and disclosure--awaits the same judgement that was visited on that most inhospitable of cities, Sodom.

Fr Timothy Radcliffe OP, former Master of the Dominicans, has made a courteous attempt to square the circle by giving a "positive" assessment of the Vatican's Instruction on homosexuality and the priesthood, while seeking to be respectful towards gays. "[W]e may presume", he says, "that God will continue to call both homosexuals and heterosexuals to the priesthood because the Church needs the gifts of both."

Fr. Radcliffe asks what the Instruction means when it talks about a "deep-seated homosexual tendency" as a disqualification for priesthood.

It could . . . be interpreted as having a permanent homosexual orientation. But this cannot be correct since, as I have said, there are many excellent priests who are gay and who clearly have a vocation from God. Perhaps it is best understood as meaning that someone whose sexual orientation is so central to his self-perception as to be obsessive, dominating his imagination. This would indeed pose questions as to whether he would be able to live happily as a celibate priest. But any heterosexual who was so focused on his sexuality would have problems too. What matters is sexual maturity rather than orientation.

I agree, whether or not celibabcy were an issue, that maturity is far more important than sexual orientation (which is, in fact irrelevant). But I doubt that in practice the Roman Catholic church will interpret "deep-seated homosexual tendency" to mean what Fr. Radcliffe suggests. The Instruction provides opportunity for injustice.

Then, Fr Radcliffe continues,

there is the issue of supporting "gay culture". It is right that seminarians or priests should not go to gay bars and that seminaries should not develop a gay subculture. This would be to celebrate as central to their lives what is not fundamental. Seminarians should learn to be at ease with whatever is their sexual orientation, content with the heart that God has given them, but any sort of sexual sub-culture, gay or straight, would be subversive of celibacy. A macho subculture filled with heterosexual innuendo would be just as inappropriate.

But does supporting a "gay culture" mean only that? As the document says, the Church must oppose "unjust discrimination" against homosexuals, just as it does racial discrimination. That means that all priests must be prepared to side with gay people if they suffer oppression, and be seen to be on their side. . . . If one becomes involved in any opposition to discrimination, then one is liable to be misunderstood. It is a risk that one must sometimes take.

Indeed so. But the Rainbow Sash movement has found that the slightest protest may incur instant exclusion from Communion, for example. Could a priest wear a sash?

Finally,

there is the question of "spiritual fatherhood". This is not a concept with which I am familiar. Can only heterosexuals offer this? . . . There is little evidence of muscular Christianity in the Vatican. If the role of the priest was to be a model of masculinity, then he would be relevant to less than half of the congregation and one could therefore argue that women should also be ordained as role models of femininity. I presume that the "spiritual fatherhood" is above all exercised through the care of the people and the preaching of a life-giving fertile word, but neither has any connection with sexual orientation.

Exactly. I also agree with Fr. Radcliffe's essential point when he says that

If we are to form priests who will live their celibacy fruitfully then they must be at ease with themselves, in all their emotional complexity, without being deluded into thinking that it is the core of our identity. That is Christ. "It does not yet appear what we shall be, but when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (I John 3:2)

Similarly,

Our society is obsessed by sex and the Church should offer a model of a sane but not compulsive acceptance of sexuality. The Catechism of the Council of Trent taught that priests should talk about sex "with moderation rather than copiousness". We should be more attentive to whom our seminarians may be inclined to hate than whom they love. Racialism, misogyny and homophobia would all be signs that someone could not be a good model of Christ.

These things hold true for any Christian, ordained or not, celibate or not.

So far so very good. But, Fr Radcliffe does not address the statement in the Instruction that people "who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture [whatever these things may be taken to mean] . . . " in fact, find themselves in a situation that seriously obstructs them from properly relating to men and women." Does Fr. Radcliffe really believe this to be true? For in these words, the Instruction is deeply offensive.

Margaret Pomeranz of the ABS's At the Movies, reviewing Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, gives it four stars and says it's "It's a laugh out loud experience."

No it is isn't. The only time James and I laughed was at the end of the movie--because of the sheer ridiculousness of the thing. I'm still not sure whether it was very good or very, very bad.

"Robert Downey Jr, . . . is terrific as the film's hero and narrator." Well, yes, he was kinda cute.

I'm with AO Scott of the New York Times:

Shane Black's Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang is not an altogether bad movie. It's just a movie with no particular reason for existing, a flashy, trifling throwaway whose surface cleverness masks a self-infatuated credulity. . . .

As this shaggy-dog crime story hums along, you can almost convince yourself that something interesting is going on. And, in a way, something is, in that the film, as empty stylistic exercises sometimes do, offers its cast the chance to do some inspired, fast-paced riffing. [Robert Downey as Harry Lockhart and Val Kirmer as Perry van Shrike] engage in a lot of pixilated, hard-boiled banter, hurling one-liners, non sequiturs and riddles at each other with impressive speed and agility.

There are better ways to have spent 2 hours and $15 each.

In all the brouhaha about blessing of same-sex relationships, one document that doesn't seem to have had much international attention is the St. Michaels' Report. (There is also a Study guide.)

In 2004 the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada requested the Primate to ask his Theological Commission to "review, consider, and report" on "whether the blessing of committed same-sex unions is a matter of doctrine" The Commission called its June 2005 report called the St. Michael's report. It's worth a look, not so much from the point of view of same-sex relationships (on which is says nothing new) but for the way it defines 'doctrine' and the processes of doctrinal formation. This is the Report's own summary:

1. The Commission has concluded that the blessing of committed same-sex unions is a matter of doctrine.
2. The Commission understands the term 'committed same-sex unions' to mean committed, adult, monogamous, intended lifelong, same-sex relationships which include sexual intimacy.
3. The Commission is particularly concerned to call the whole Church to engage in furthering the discussion of this issue in a sustained, prayerful, respectful, and non-polemical manner.
4. The Commission recognizes that there is a range of interpretations given to the term 'doctrine', and that doctrines develop and change over time. We agree that the blessing of committed same-sex unions is not a matter of what is often referred to as a 'core' doctrine, in the sense of being credal doctrine.
5. The Commission does not believe that this should be a communion-breaking issue.
6. The Commission, recognizes 'the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the word of God, and to contain all things necessary to salvation (Book of Alternative Services p. 645). We acknowledge that the interpretation of Scripture is a central and complex matter and that, at times in the Church's history, 'faithful' readings have led to mutually contradictory understandings, requiring ongoing dialogue and prayer towards discernment of the one voice of the gospel.
7. The doctrine of the Church has always been definitively expressed in its liturgies; such a liturgy of blessing is no exception since in it the Church declares the activity of God towards the object of the blessing.
8. It is the view of the Commission that any proposed blessing of a same-sex relationship would be analogous to a marriage to such a degree as to require the Church to understand it coherently in relation to the doctrine of marriage.
9. Culture is the context in which Christians live out their faith and formulate doctrine. The challenge facing the Church is to see our cultural norms through the eyes of Christ and then, out of allegiance to him, to promote those norms that honour him and renounce those that do not.
10. Several doctrines are integral to the theological consideration of the blessing of committed same-sex unions: salvation, incarnation, the person and work of the Holy Spirit, theological anthropology, sanctification, and holy matrimony.
11. We recommend that any doctrinal discussion of the blessing of same-sex unions should seek a broader consensus on the relationship of sexuality to our full humanity in Christ.
12. The pastoral importance of this issue deserves a careful consideration of its doctrinal implications in a manner that is deeply respectful of the dignity and integrity of the gay and lesbian members of our church.

In the following quotation, I am assuming that the leaked version of the Congregation for Catholic Education's Instruction concerning the criteria of vocational discernment regarding persons with homosexual tendencies . . . " and Mr Robert Micken's translation are accurate.

[T]he Church . . . cannot admit to Seminary or Holy Orders those who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture. Such people, in fact, find themselves in a situation that seriously obstructs them from properly relating to men and women.

This statement is appallingly offensive. It is beyond belief that a credible institution could say such a thing. I leave aside the question as to what is meant by 'gay culture'. The Instruction seems to say that no gay man (or woman?) is capable of "properly relating" to any other person. Or rather that their gayness "seriously obstructs" them from such relationships.

I am a gay man. Am I not capable of love and caring relationship with my siblings or father? What was I doing when I visited the bedside of my mother as her life was approaching its end, and prayed with her? Was I not properly relating to my niece when I cared for her as a small child? How was it possible for me to listen and talk with my best friend as he considered marriage to another dear friend? (I was best man at the wedding.) And have I not had love and "proper relationship" with my partner, as we have shared all that we have and all that we are for almost a decade? If Benedict XVI has indeed sanctioned these words, he no longer has a shred of credibility.

P.S. I have been challenged, "If you are not Catholic, this really isn't addressed to you. You aren't going to be a Catholic priest."

No, I would not even contemplate being a Roman Catholic priest. But I have been completely excluded from the Anglican ordination on similar grounds to those set out in the Instruction. That said, should not any Christian have a concern for the truth in any context--especially when (as in this case) falsehood is causing great hurt to many? You may legitimately disagree with me, but you cannot contest that I have said it from a passionate concern for the truth.

I maintain my concern that that statement is wrong in fact and offensive in implication. In this context, my criticism of Pope Benedict had nothing to do with whether or not I am one of his flock, but rather because, as the person ultimately responsible, he has allowed such a statement to be published.

I have just seen the The Constant Gardener and recommend it highly. It looks glorious and the acting is very fine. The story does have some oddities; evidence the differing reponse of these New York reviewers.

New Yorker: A frenzied adaptation of a John le Carré novel, if that is not a contradiction in terms. Ralph Fiennes plays a refined but bumbling British diplomat who arrives in Kenya with his belligerent new wife (Rachel Weisz). Impatient with niceties, she goes after the pharmaceutical giants, who are testing a new drug and covering up the results. When she dies, apparently in an accident, her loving and uncomprehending husband is forced to retrace her steps and rekindle some of her fire. The movie is a curious, roiling mix of genres that stirs marital romance into a heated indictment of a vast, conspiratorial crime. Thriller junkies will find it tempting but fragmentary; how is one supposed to take a car chase that ends with both drivers getting out for a chat? The director is Fernando Meirelles, who has imported the busy style of his last picture, City of God, and given it an extra jolt; the images of Africa, forever in hot pursuit of one another, leave you not so much exhilarated as exhausted, long before the story is done. With Danny Huston and a mischievous Bill Nighy.

New York Times: In The Constant Gardener, Fernando Meirelles's excellent adaptation of John le Carré's novel, Ralph Fiennes plays Justin Quayle, a British diplomat whose main qualities seem, at least at first, to be diffidence, his interest in gardening and a fumbling, self-effacing kindness. His words half swallowed, his features perpetually tinged with guilt, Justin is temperamentally unsuited to being the hero of a globe-trotting political thriller, which is part of why The Constant Gardener is an unusually satisfying example of the genre. Another reason is that Mr. Meirelles's film actually bothers to say something about global politics. In pointedly applying President Bush's phrase "axis of evil" to multinational corporations rather than to rogue states, the movie shows a willingness to risk didacticism in the service of encouraging discussion. This is a supremely well-executed piece of popular entertainment that is likely to linger in your mind and may even trouble your conscience. Which is only proper, since the theme of the film, as of Mr. le Carré's novel, is the uneasy, divided conscience of the liberal West.

French photographer François Rousseau has produced an attractive book and online series of photographs imagining the coming of the Christ to the slums of Rio de Janeiro. With street scenes and portraits and using the text of the Beatitudes, Rousseau imagines Christ in Ochina, Rio's largest favela of about 200,000 inhabitants.

Supported by the French Association for Artistic Action (AFAA), the Maison de France cultural centre in Rio, and the Cultural Affairs office of the French Consulate, the project is presented in a book published by Fitway. Martin du Louvre gallery will present the photographs at its stand in the 2006 international art fair Art Paris. Proceeds from the book will be donated to ASPA, (Acción Social Padre Anchieta) a non-government body that works in the Rochina slum

However, French advertising standards watchdog, Le Bureau de Vérification de la Publicité ('an advertising self-regulation organisation') has controversially banned the advertsing campaign for the project "Au regard des dispositions déontologiques en vigueur, ces projets ne peuvent pas (. . .) être finalisés en l'état, car ils sont de nature à heurter les convictions religieuses d'une partie du public". ["With respect to the ethical principles in force, these projects may not be (. . .) completed in this country, for they are of such a nature as to offend the religious convictions of part of the public".]

So what's the problem?

The favelas have a young population and are full of life and diversity. Rousseau dares to present Christ as a buffed, long-haired, often-shirtless young man wearing only pants, and sometimes less. This raises the entire debate on use of semi-erotic (especially homoerotic) imagery in Christian art. It isn't a new question. Much of Michaelangelo's work was controversial in his day and remains so, for the same reason--not to speak of countless depictions of St. Sebastian and of Christ himself--who may well have been naked as he hung on the cross.



But more important is that Jesus must have worn the every day costume of his time. And I suspect in a street gathering of young men in a Rio slum, jeans and no shirt would be commonplace. In Ochina in 2005, I don't think Jesus would have worn black trousers, a white short-sleeve shirt with button-down collar and a narrow tie!

Amid all the huffing and puffing about a certain letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury from the 'Primates of the Global South', too little attention has been given to this equally robust response in a 17 November Statement from Lambeth Palace.

Lambeth Palace has issued the following statement following the publication of a letter from Primates of the Global South to the Archbishop of Canterbury:

'The Archbishop of Canterbury has made it clear since before the time of his enthronement that neither he nor anyone else has a mandate to change the teaching of the Church by fiat. He is committed to the process to which all the primates committed themselves and their provinces in the Primates' response to the Windsor report, contained in the communiqué following the meeting in Dromantine.

"If this letter is a contribution to that process of debate, then it is to be welcomed, however robust. If it is an attempt to foreclose that debate, it would seem to serve very little purpose indeed."

So there! Yah boo sucks to you too!

Commemorating the centenary of his birth, Australia's National Portrait Gallery is showing a exhibition of portraits by Sir Cecil Beaton that has previously been staged at the National Portrait Galley in London. There are reviews here and here. Beaton was the subject of the (London) National Portrait Gallery's first photographic exhibition in 1968, curated by Sir Roy Strong. Among the many intriguing portraits of society beauties and the good and the great, one of the most poignant was this picture of King Faisal II of Iraq, who was born in 1935 and became King at the age of four on the death of his father, King Ghazi. After a long regency, he took office in his own right in 1953, but was assassinated in a military coup on 14 July 1958, while working for federation with Jordan, ruled by his friend and relative King Hussein.

We're taking advantage of a vacation to soak up some art and music; yesterday to the National Gallery of Australia to see Transformations: the language of craft, an exhibition of contemporary Australian and international works in decorative arts and design--ceramics, glass, textiles, furniture, jewellery and metalwork--eighty-five artists in all. I found the glasswork especially appealing for its colors and shapes and the way it plays with the light. Toots Zynsky. Pennellata 2004. Glass 'Filet de Verre', fused and thermoformed colour glass threads approx. 27 x 59 x 31 cm

Kevin Gordon; David Hay, glassmaker. Quartz 2005, triple overlay glass, gold and silver leaf, diamond wheel-cut and fire-polished 44 x 12cm

Deb Cocks. Header 2004. Blown glass, reverse-painted, enamelled. 6 x 58 x 58cm. "Drawing on the long traditions of European painted glass, Deb Cocks' work provides a witty narrative of Australian rural life, where vermin and pestilence co-exist with the fecundity of native flora and fauna. Reverse-painted with images of native and introduced wildlife, and edged with a patterned, painted and engraved border, Header depicts aspects of Australian fauna in surreal and whimsical juxtapositions. The muscular and sinuous hare, and the attenuated, puppet-like human figure--seemingly frozen on toadstools in an absurd balancing act--invoke Alice in Wonderland and her looking glass. This glass, however, rimmed with its sperm-like shapes and faintly poisonous colours, focuses on the real and toxic long-term drama of destruction to Australia's natural environment caused by the introduced rabbit."

eX de Medici (Australia) Blue (Bower/Bauer) 1998-2000 (detail)

We also saw Moist: Australian watercolours. "Moist is not a history of watercolour painting in Australia. Instead it focuses on the liquid nature of watercolour, and how a diversity of artists have experimented with the medium to create unique representations of physical, emotional and atmospheric conditions, ranging from those that are highly figurative to images of a purely abstract emotional intensity": 90 works from the colonial period to the present. It was an eclectic mix, with finely wrought classic landscapes and modern work of startling variety. Steve Cox. Curtis dancing on E 2003

And so to the last of this year's Canberra performances of the brilliant Australian Chamber Orchestra, directed by Richard Tognetti. The feature piece was an arrangement by Tognetti of César Franck's Violin Sonata in A as a work for cello and orchestra with Pieter Wispelwey as soloist. Richard Tognetti is a musical genius, but I wondered whether I was witnessing one of his few mistakes. Ignorant of the original sonata, I found the orchestrated version formless, mushy and difficult to follow. And perhaps the deeper tones of the cello, necessary for contrast with the full orchestra, took away the original sharpness of the violin?

So I have played my usual game of 'consult the critics'. Thus Peter McCallum in The Sydney Morning Herald (14 Nov.), who harshly describes Tognetti's arrangement as an "untoward meddling with a noble work."

Instead of the grand resonance of the piano, which creates a duo of intimate drama and fine colour, the orchestral arrangement of the keyboard part lumbered and jabbed through this great structure, and failed to capture the swirling fleetness of the second movement, the ethereal floating moments of the slow movement or the vertiginous soaring climaxes of the finale. . . . [T]his most appealing of works did not win the friends it deserved.

I would not use such flowery language, but the conclusion is plain enough. And so to Clive O'Connell in The Age (21 Nov.)

Using the low string as solo changes the work's aesthetic dynamic strongly enough, but transcribing the virtuosic piano part did not prove successful. Wispelwey played with his familiar power and pinpoint accuracy but the work only revealed traces of its original character . . .

On the other hand I was delighted to also be at one with the critics in praising the brilliance of the second half of the concert as a splendid end to the season; McCallum again:

The second half rebounded with spirit. The orchestra bristled with vibrancy and colour in a suite of music from Rameau's Dardanus, while Haydn's Symphony no. 59 was a delight, bringing out all of Haydn's charm and innocent imagination with enormous style, taste and sensitivity.

. . . and O'Connell:

Much more compelling work came in a brilliant reading of Haydn's Symphony no. 59 and a suite from Rameau's opera Dardanus.

In discussing British proposals for legislation to curb incitement to religious hatred, Philip Pullman (The Guardian 19 Nov.) draws an interesting distinction between the social and public importance of one's actions rather than one's identity. This make me ponder whether my identity as a Christian (and Anglican, and gay, and Australian, and Anglo-celtic, and a scholar, etc., etc.,) is of any importance in comparision to my actions. Is our identity as Christ's uniquely privileged above any other identity? Is our identity as one-of-Christ's the only identity that has any value alongside or above our actions?

Now, of course, Scripture encourages us to make our actions conform to our identity in Christ. But not all of our many identities can or should have the same connection with our behaviour. I would not want it assumed that I exemplify all so-called attributes of Australian or Scottish popular culture! Pullman argues, for example, that the dissonance between identity and action is at the root of church non-acceptance of gays. It's not really about what homosexuals do, its about who they are. (The following is a small extract. read it all.)

Is the proposed "religious hatred" bill a bad idea? Of course it is. Of course it should be opposed. That's my instinctive reaction. But in trying to think about why I react like that, I've found myself wondering more and more about the question of "identity", because that seems to be at the heart of the problem. Is our "identity" a function of what we do, or what we are, or both?

It seems to me that:

1. What we are is not in our control, but what we do is.
2. On the other hand, and simultaneously, what we do depends on what we are (on what we have to do it with), and what we are can be modified by what we do.
3. What we do is morally significant. What we are is not.
4. With respect to the past: it's important to some of us to know that our ancestors came from this or that part of the world, to know a little of the history of our family, to feel a connection with a landscape, or a language, or a climate, or an artistic form of expression, or a religion that our ancestors knew as theirs.
5. With respect to the present: it's important for each of us to feel that we belong somewhere or with some group that is like ourselves in some way. We need to be free to live in a place and among people where we feel at home, and not in exile, or under threat.
6. Praise or blame, virtue or guilt, apply to our actions, not to our ancestry or to our membership of this group or that.
7. Belief or faith is partly the result of temperament. I may be temperamentally inclined to scepticism, you to belief in supernatural forces. As far as the temperamental component of our beliefs is concerned, I am not to be praised or blamed for my scepticism, nor you for your faith.
8. It's when we act on a belief that praise or blame comes in. That is where the temperamental component of religion ends and the moral component begins.

[. . .] For a long time now, the kind of religion the Church of England (or of Scotland, or in Wales, or of Ireland) embodies has been a mild, tolerant, broad-minded sort. There have been zealots, but they have tended to leave and form their own sects, not to occupy the parish pulpits or episcopal thrones. The tendency of the established religion has been liberal, worldly, inclusive. But this involved a certain amount of not-speaking-about-things. For example, there have always been clergy who had homosexual feelings, but while these remained unspoken about ("don't ask, don't tell" ), it never became an issue of public discussion, denunciation, exposure, justification, confession, condemnation, punishment, and so on.

That particular matter has become painfully inflamed in recent years, and now looks as if it might split the Anglican communion in two. The zealous faction has been feeling its power, and is beginning to exercise it, and it's partly over this "identity" business: the stress on being, rather than on doing. Canon Jeffrey John was prevented from becoming Bishop of Reading because although he lived a celibate life, it was what he was that mattered, not what he did. If you "are" homosexual, then even if you live an entirely celibate life, you will still be tainted and abominable and unfit to belong to the clergy. In the concise and unambiguous words of a poster brandished by an American preacher in a recent photograph, "God hates fags".

In some ways this attitude is a development of the Reformation emphasis on justification by faith. It didn't matter what good works you did: it was only when you made the commitment of faith that you were able to receive the divine grace of forgiveness and healing that made you righteous, and then you were utterly changed. Hence the modern American phenomenon of being born again: to be born again is not just to change your behaviour. It's to have a new "identity", to leave the old sinful one behind, to be someone different.

At its extreme, it can lead to a sort of cognitive dissonance, when people claim an inner "identity" that has nothing to do with their actions [. . .]

So "being", in the eyes of many people, apparently has its own moral quality, which may be good or bad, but which is resistant to any form of change except the miraculous (being born again). "Being" trumps "doing".

It's hard to convey the sheer bafflement and distaste I feel for this attitude towards "identity". I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity. Literally vulgar: from vulgus. It's crowd-thought.

Of course, someone might choose to wear a single kind of "identity" as a badge--perhaps a badge of difference, perhaps one of solidarity. If you're being discriminated against for one of the multifarious aspects of your complex entirety, then it makes every kind of sense to join with others in the same position, and deliberately and publicly adopt that "identity" ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever). But "identity" claims are not free of consequences. They narrow as well as strengthen.

For myself, I like it best when I have no such simple and public "identity".

If you want to lose your breakfast, read the accounts of revolting executions of religious believers by the North Korean regime as described in a report on North Korea released yesterday by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (1) The report contains eyewitness accounts of severe violations of freedom of thought, conscience and religion in North Korea. As described by the USCIRF's press release accompanying the report

The Kim dynasty is much more than just an authoritarian political regime. It holds itself to be the ultimate source of power, virtue, spiritual wisdom and truth for its citizens. Interviewees in the study talk about the portrayal of religion as evil. Heterodoxy and dissent are repressed quickly and efficiently, with punishment meted out to three generations of the dissident's family. . . .

Kim Jong Il fears that cross-border contacts will puncture the hermetic seal that he has tried, with considerable success, to place around North Korea -- the seal that preserves the Kim dynasty and its 'divinity.' Anything that casts doubt on the beneficence or omnipotence of the 'Dear Leader' has to be repressed . . .

In its most recent (May 2005) annual report, the Commission said

There are no personal freedoms of any kind in North Korea and no protection for human rights. In pursuit of absolute control of all facets of politics and society, the government under dictator Kim Jong Il has created an environment of fear in which dissent of any kind is not tolerated. Freedom of religion or belief is essentially non-existent, as the government severely represses public and private religious activities and has a policy of actively discriminating against religious believers. In addition, North Korean refugees report that any unauthorized religious activity inside North Korea is met with arrest, imprisonment, torture, and sometimes execution by order of the government. The massive human rights abuses of the government constitute an enduring security threat on the Korean peninsula. (p.29)

In the 2005 annual report, the Commission recommended that the President designate as countries of particular concern (CPCs): Burma, China, Eritrea, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam. It also placed the following on its 'Watch list': Bangladesh, Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, Indonesia (sectarian violence) and Nigeria. Other countries mentioned in the annual report were: Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Egypt, Europe generally (because of anti-semitism), France, Georgia, India, Iraq, Israel and the occupied Territories, Kazakhstan, Laos, Russia, Sri Lanka.

The big culprits in the oppression of religion are clear:

• dictatorial regimes, superstitious or atheistic or both, that suppress religion as means of political control (North Korea, China, Burma, Cuba, Vietnam);
• exclusive government support or enforcement of (a particular version of) Islam;
• governments unable or unwilling to control sectarian violence (Indonesia); and
• mutual support between governments and a national Orthodox church (Belarus, Eritrea).

Because my partner James is Korean, I have become especially concerned about the situation in North Korea. The whole world is aware of religious oppression by dictatorial, stalinist, etc., regimes. Less well known are 'Christian' sources of oppression. It's notable that, at present, in all countries where oppression favours a 'Christian' tradition, the oppression is associated with a national Orthodox church.
--------
The Eritrean government officially recognizes the Orthodox Church of Eritrea, Sunni Islam, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Lutheran-affiliated Evangelical Church of Eritrea. Although there is no state religion, the government has close ties to the Orthodox Church and is suspicious of newer groups--in particular, Protestant Evangelical, Pentecostal, and other Christian denominations not traditional to Eritrea. (p.39)
--------
President Lukashenko openly favors the Belarusian Orthodox Church (BOC, an Exarchate of the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church), resulting in a privileged position for the BOC in relation to other religious communities. In June 2003, when the Belarus government and the BOC signed a concordat setting out the Church's influence in government affairs and other facets of public life. Relations between the BOC and the Belarus government have created particular problems for many Protestant groups, which have sometimes been denied registration or permission to rent or build a place of worship by regional authorities who have been influenced by local Orthodox leaders. Several 'independent' Orthodox churches that do not accept the authority of the Orthodox Patriarch in Moscow have been denied registration, before and after the new law was passed. These churches include the Autocephalous Orthodox Church and the True Orthodox Church, a branch of the Orthodox Church that rejected the compromise with the Soviet government made by the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1920s. In March 2004, the Belarusian government granted the BOC the exclusive right to use the word "Orthodox" in its title, although there are other Orthodox communities in Belarus. (p.86)
--------
In Georgia, the former government failed to control and punish intereligious violence generally. Other concerns involve the role of the Georgian Orthodox Church, (65% of the population). The Constitution recognizes the "special importance of the GOC in Georgian history." In October 2002, the Georgian government signed a concordat, with the GOC, granting the Church some authority over state school textbooks, the construction of religious buildings, and the publication of religious literature by other religious groups. In recent years, other groups have stated that the GOC Patriarchate has often acted to prevent them from acquiring, building, or reclaiming places of worship. The Patriarchate has also reportedly denied permission for some Christian groups to print religious literature. "Despite general tolerance toward minority religious communities seen as traditional to Georgia, opinion polls and the Georgian media reflect significant societal intolerance towards Protestants and other religions relatively new to Georgia, seen as a threat to the GOC and national cultural values. Public opinion polls continue to show that a majority of Georgians view minority or new religious groups as detrimental and that violence against and the prohibition of such groups would be acceptable." (pp.87-9)
--------
"Russia has been of consistent concern to the Commission not so much because of the severity of the country's religious freedom violations, but rather due to its fragile human rights situation, including that of religious freedom. Of primary concern are the trends which have emerged in the past few years which raise serious questions about Russia's commitment to democratic reform and the protection of religious freedom. This is also critical because Russia continues to be a model, especially for other former Soviet states and other nations struggling to establish democratic systems after a history of despotism.

"Developments in the past few years . . . raise very serious doubts about Russia's commitment to the protection of religious freedom. Russian authorities have denied registration to certain religious communities . . . The Salvation Army has not been re-registered, despite a Constitutional Court ruling that overturned the government's decision not to register the organization in Moscow.

"Official efforts to portray 'foreign sects,' mostly Evangelical Protestants, as alien to Russian culture and society continue. . . . This official campaign appears to be part of an increased effort by the Russian authorities to promote the status of Russia's so-called "traditional" religions: Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism, and Buddhism. A "Law on Traditional Religions," first proposed in February 2002 and whose status remains unclear, would formalize benefits already granted de facto, in varying degrees, to organizations from these four religions. In March 2004, the Russian press reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin, while acknowledging the legal separation of church and state, said that he supports a legal initiative to "support the spiritual leaders of the traditional confessions," including on property issues.

"The Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) has played a special role in Russian history and culture. However, there is continued concern that the ROC enjoys a favored status among many Russian government officials, a situation that sometimes results in restrictions on other religious communities. Particularly on the local level, evidence suggests that the Orthodox Church has a very close relationship with officials and other state bodies. There continue to be frequent reports that minority religious communities must secure permission from the local Orthodox Church before being allowed to build a place of worship. Adherents of minority faiths . . . report that government officials sometimes create other barriers to their activities, often at the behest of representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church.

"Due to their perceived links to the decade-long conflict in Chechnya, Muslims throughout Russia are increasingly subject to widespread discrimination, media attacks and occasional acts of violence." (pp.90-91)
---------
1. "The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is an independent, bipartisan U.S. government agency that was created by the International Religious Freedom Act 1998 to monitor the status of freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief and make independent policy recommendations to the U.S. government. From time-to-time The Commission has demonstated its independence by criticising the administration for slow action in reponse to its reports on Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Eritrea. "'Country of Particular Concern' designation is not an end point, but the beginning of focused diplomatic activity required by the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA) from which important obligations in the form of consequent actions flow."

Charles de Gaulle famously once wondered aloud how one could govern a nation with so many kinds of cheeses (though no-one seems sure how many kinds of cheeses he mentioned.) Well, just four major codes of football seem to be enough to divide Australia: Australian rules, rugby league, rugby union and soccer. But last night, everyone was a soccer (international football) supporter. After 31 years of disappointments and difficulties, Australia defeated Uruguay to go into the next year's World Cup finals in Germany.



Michael Cockerill describes the match well (SMH 17 Nov.) but "The solution, in the end, was simple. Luck. Australia have rarely had it, and thus the Socceroos have endured three decades of failure in the quest to qualify for the World Cup finals. Last night, in front of a sea of gold at a jam-packed Telstra Stadium, they got it. And made the most of it. Such is the nature of a penalty shoot-out. Strong nerves and cool heads count, but ultimately it is a lottery. At long last, Australia won the prize."

As I've said before, I'm not much of a sports fan, but this was more than a game, it was a national occasion. Yes, I know it's silly, but there it is. With its ethnic rivalries, football has been one of the banes of Australian multiculturalism, but last night's match was a triumph. As Cockerill says, "In a multicultural nation in a fractured world, the Socceroos can bring together the sum of their parts: Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican. German, Lebanese, Polynesian, Croatian, Italian, Melanesian, Greek. It is a rich tapestry but last night they--and we--were one thing only. Australian."

Dutch master coach Guus Hiddink is the same man who brought South Korea into the semifinals of the last world cup. James and I were glued to the TV as the Koreans played. We arrived in Seoul for a holiday on the same day that the grand final was to be played in Japan. Korea was not in the grand final. But the were still fans a-plenty sporting 'Red devils'' red and white T-shirts. Millions turned out to cheer the players and chant "Dae Han Min Guk!"

Need to catalogue your personal or home library?

LibraryThing, a new online service, is excellent. It works by allowing users to catalogue their books in the LibraryThing database. To simplify the task and save keying, records can be retrieved simply from Amazon or from an increasing array of libraries, including the Library of Congress.

No software is needed. A free account allows for up to 200 books. A paid lifetime account allows for any number of books and costs $US10. As well as cataloging your own library, you can apply subject tags to books, look at other people's libraries, etc. You can download a file of your data. The Beta version is improving rapidly and I like it a lot.

So far I've catalogued over 600 of my books. I'm about half done.

LibraryThing allows users to see what books they hold in common with other users. Here, in order of popularity are the fifty-three of my thus-far-catalogued books that are also owned by at least ten other users of the LibraryThing. But I haven't tackled the fiction yet!

I wouldn't say that all of these are especially important or interesting to me, but some of them are!

1. Eats, shoots & leaves : the zero tolerance approach to punctuation / Lynne Truss (2003)
2. The elements of style / William Strunk, Jr.(1979)
3. The Prince (Penguin Classics) / Niccolo Machiavelli (1961)
4. Mere Christianity / C.S. Lewis (2001)
5. The brothers Karamazov / Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1993)
6. The wind in the willows / Kenneth Grahame; pictures by John Burningham (1983)
7. A moveable feast / Ernest Hemingway (1964)
8. The four loves / C.S. Lewis (1960)
9. Surprised by joy; the shape of my early life / C.S. Lewis (1955)
10. The cost of discipleship. 6th edn. / Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1948)
11. Alice in Wonderland / Lewis Carroll (1993)
12. Seven pillars of wisdom : a triumph / T.E. Lawrence (1940)
13. Collected poems, 1909-1962 / T. S. Eliot (1974)
14. How to read the Bible for all its worth / Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart (1981)
15. Toujours Provence / Peter Mayle (1992)
16. Three men in a boat: to say nothing of the dog / Jerome K. Jerome (1999)
17. Miracles: a preliminary study / C. S. Lewis (1947)
18. Letters to Malcolm: chiefly on prayer / C.S. Lewis (1964)
19. The imitation of Christ: musica ecclesiastica / Thomas à Kempis (1889)
20. Confessions / Augustine. Translated by R. S. Pine-Coffin (1961)
21. Travels with my aunt / Graham Greene (1972)
22. The abolition of man / C. S. Lewis (1947)
23. The voyage of the Beagle / Charles Darwin (1959)
24. Giovanni's room / James Baldwin (1956)
25. In Patagonia / Bruce Chatwin (1979)
26. New Testament exegesis / by Gordon D. Fee (1983)
27. Novum Testamentum Graece / post Eberhard et Erwin Nestle . . . Kurt Aland [et al.] (1979)
28. Reflections on the Psalms / C.S. Lewis (1958)
29. Christian theology : an introduction / Alister E. McGrath (1996)
30. Christianity, social tolerance, and homosexuality / John Boswell (1980)
31. A theology of the New Testament / George Eldon Ladd (1975)
32. HTML for the World Wide Web visual quickstart guide : with XHTML and CSS / Elizabeth Castro (2003)
33. Riding the Iron Rooster: by train through China / Paul Theroux (1989)
34. The postmodern condition : a report on knowledge / Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984)
35. What am I doing here / Bruce Chatwin (1990)
36. Your God is too small / J.B. Phillips (1953)
37. New Testament introduction / Donald Guthrie (1970)
38. PHP for the World Wide Web / Larry Ullman (2004)
39. The first Epistle to the Corinthians / by Gordon D. Fee (1987)
40. Who moved the stone? / Frank Morison (1958, c1930)
41. The old Patagonian express: by train through the Americas / Paul Theroux (1981)
42. The four agreements : a practical guide to personal freedom / Miguel Ruiz (1997)
43. The early church / Henry Chadwick (1967)
44. New Testament history / F. F. Bruce (1972)
45. Old Testament exegesis / Douglas Stuart (1984)
46. The art of loving / Erich Fromm (1975)
47. Becoming a man: half a life story / Paul Monette (1994)
48. Summary of Christian doctrine / Louis Berkhof (1960)
49. A book of common prayer . . . (1662)
50. Know why you believe / Paul E. Little (1967)
51. Life and holiness / Thomas Merton (1964)
52. Rumpole of the Bailey / John Mortimer (1978)
53. The Spanish civil war / Hugh Thomas. Rev edn. (1965)

During the past month we have enjoyed a delightful family visit by James' daughter, Kim Hojung and her friend Kim Minsoo. Both work in Korea as professional designers. Hojung does wide-ranging commercial design, including for high-end fashion brands. Minsoo specialises in typography and web design.

Hojung at byond

Minsoo at exp.typo

Rehearsals continue apace for CAMRA's performance of Handel's Messiah on 9 and 11 December. I'm beginning to get the hang of the tricky bits in the bass part. Our director, Colin Forbes, warns us to concentrate on musicality rather than emotion. Powerful, emotive music can tempt singers to become tense and stray off pitch!

For me, this is the most heart touching passage, yet it is also easy to sing.

I have just learned of the death on 1 November of Michael Rayner Thwaites, much loved Canberra poet, distinguished public servant and Anglican Christian. I've previously written about him and quoted his poetry here and here.

There are two hymns by Thwaites in our Australian hymn book Together in song. I like this one, which he wrote with his wife Honor Mary; it was sung at St. Philip's this morning and expresses Australians' thanksgiving for our land, sadness at the hurts of our history and prayer for our future. (It's sung to the tune Westminster Abbey).

Lord of earth and all creation,
let your love possess our land:
wealth, and freedom, far horizons,
mountain, forest, shining sand:
may we share, in faith and friendship,
gifts unmeasured from your hand.

People of the ancient Dreamtime,
they who found this country first,
ask with those, the later comers,
will our dream be blessed or cursed?
Grant us, Lord, new birth, new living,
hope for which our children thirst.

Lord, life-giving healing Spirit,
on our hurts your mercy shower;
lead us by your inward dwelling,
guiding, guarding, every hour.
Bless and keep our land Australia:
in your will her peace and power.

I'm less fond of Michael Thwaites' other contribution to our hymn book, a funeral hymn sung to Sibelius' tune "Finlandia". But it is a decent prayer for a very decent man.

Fare well. We come to send you on the way
we all must walk, so final, secret, strange.
In wondering awe, in grief and hope we pray,
pilgrims of time, to one who does not change,
whose love can lead us through the darkest night
to life and joy in everlasting light.

No more we hear your voice or see your face,
gone from our world, our close familiar home;
yet one who went before prepared a place,
his Father's house, with room for all who come,
whose love can lead us through the darkest night
to life and joy in everlasting light.

Now for your life, your love and labours here
our hearts give thanks. Your spirit we commend
to him who told his sad flock not to fear,
'Look, I am with you all, till time shall end',
whose love can lead us through the darkest night
to life and joy in everlasting light.

Far from our sight you journey: travel well.
All still are one who hear the promise given --
one battle joined to conquer death and hell,
one Lord of all, on earth as now in heaven,
whose love can lead us through the darkest night
to life and joy in everlasting light.

A couple of hours ago, Australian Capital Territory Chief Minister Jon Stanhope was presented with the Canberra Pride Award after he opened the annual SpringOut Festival. The award recognised his Government's long-term commitment to achieving legal equality and social inclusion for Canberra's Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender and Intersex people. The award is well deserved, and much has been achieved.



A few months ago, the A.C.T. Government released for public comment a discussion paper on options for recognising same-sex relationships (given that marriage is a federal matter). Accepting the award, Mr Stanhope said he expected to announce in a few weeks what his government would be doing, and commited himself to bring about recognition.

"In its first term, my Government amended 37 pieces of law and regulations that discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation or
gender identity, and expanded the existing protections against vilification. We also passed legislation recognising the reality and the value of families with same-sex partners and removed discriminatory provisions from the adoption process."

"In May this year the Government released a discussion paper looking at three possible models for formally recognising same-sex relationships registration, civil union and marriage. We had a very good response to that paper, receiving more than 300 submissions from members of the community, and are now finalising a Government position on how we should move forward."

11 November. A day of mixed remembrances for many Australians; Remembrance Day, when we remember the dead of too many wars . . .
. . . and the 30th anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam Labor Government by the Governor-General, still a matter of controversy. I was in Canberra at the time, as a student. I remember (that word again) how angry I felt at the eviction of the first progressive Australian government since I was a year old, how hopeful we were when it was elected just three years earlier, and how it had so mismanaged affairs that it brought about its own destruction. The campaign slogan "It's Time", so fitting when Whitlam was elected in 1972 after 23 years of conservative rule, remains a by-word in Australian politics. Now, in 2005, once again, It's Time!

There is still some chaos to be sorted out in my study after moving with James into our new apartment just one year ago. While cleaning out a corner, I came across this picture on a postcard I bought years ago. It reminds me of how much I would love to have a cat (which is impossible, because I live in an an apartment and am horribly allergic to cat hairs) to share my love of books.

Je souhaite dans ma maison: Une femme ayant sa raison, Un chat passant parmi les livres Des amis en toute saison Sans lesquels je ne peux pas vivre. "I wish to have in my home: a woman of reason, a cat among the books, friends for every season without which I cannot live." "The cat" in Le Bestiaire ou Cortè d'Orphée, by Guillaume Apollinaire, first published by Deplanche, 1911; illustrated by Raoul Dufy, woodcut, 33.0 x 25.2 cm. This is the cover of the reproduction published by David R. Godine (Boston, 1980)

A privilege of operating the bookstall at a church fair is first pick at the selections! These are what I found:

John Paul II, Veritatis splendor 1993,
D. Broughton Knox, Thirty-nine articles: the historic basis of Anglican faith 1967,
Hans Küng, On being a Christian 1978,
Edmund Wilson, The scrolls from the Dead Sea 1957,
Giuliano Procacci, History of the Italian people 1973,
C.P. Snow, Variety of men 1969,
Giles Milton, The riddle and the knight: in search of Sir John Mandeville 2001
Paul Davies, God and the new physics 1984,
Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil war Rev. edn. 1965,
and Rudyard Kipling's Just so stories for little children 1902.

I didn't know that Kipling was an illustrator. The picture is from his tale, "The cat that walked by himself"

I also got a copy of Longfellow's poems, which I hadn't read; they're so bad that I'm tempted to throw it away.

Our region is prone to strong thunderstorms. Last night there was bright lightning and the loudest thunder I have ever heard. After years of drought, we have had quite a lot of rain; our garden is luciously green. Gracious God, who sends rain on the just and on the unjust alike, we give thanks for rain, that the earth may give forth its goodness: food to sustain us, flowers to give us joy, and refreshment to every living thing: so may we praise you, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Bureau of Meteorology produces many fascinating maps plotting the ups and downs of Australia's rainfall patterns as drought continues. This November, local water use restrictions have been relaxed to Level One and the levels of local water storages have crept up to 65% from a low of under 45%. Though the Canberra region has had good rain recently, this map shows why we still have local water use restrictions. Measured over a three-year period, the mountains to the Southwest, where we catch much of our water, have been seriously deficient in rainfall. The January 2003 Canberra Bushfires also left the water catchment badly affected, with much of it burned and a lot of water rendered unuseable. It will take quite a lot more rain yet before the city's water storages return to a comfortable level.

Senator Gary Humphries
Senator for the Australian Capital Territory
Parliament House
CANBERRA A.C.T. 2600

Dear Senator Humphries

The Treasury has released a draft of regulations to allow for superannuation contributions splitting and has invited comments.

Superannuation contributions splitting will allow couples to re-allocate certain money paid into their superannuation funds to their spouse's account. This will be will be valuable to some couples, providing an opportunity for them to build up their superannuation more tax-effectively.

However, superannuation contributions splitting in its proposed form will not be open to all couples as same-sex couples are not classified as 'spouses' under superannuation or taxation legislation (even though de-facto heterosexual couples are). Same-sex couples are not eligible for the spouse contribution rebate for low-income spouses, or for reversionary pensions.

I am annoyed and dismayed that the Australian Government continues to systematically discriminate against same-sex couples in taxation and superannuation law. And those improvements that have been made specifically exclude Federal public servants, many of whom are your constituents.

I know from your contacts with the AIDS Action Council and other Canberra community groups that you oppose such discrimination. I urge you to do whatever you can towards its removal.

Yours sincerely

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are the 2005 winners:

• Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
• Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly
• Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
• Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.
• Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.
• Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
• Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
• Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.
• Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.
• Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease.
• Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.
• Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.
• Glibido: All talk and no action.
• Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
• Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.
• Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.
• Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.
• Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

The ABC 's 7.30 Report of 3 Nov. examined discrimination against same-sex couples in the provision of Defence pensions. The case of Jiro Takamisawa is also reported in The Sydney Morning Herald of the next day.

Jiro Takamisawa is mourning the death of his partner of more than 20 years, John George, who died a year ago, aged 83. He was a WWII veteran who served in the Pacific. John met Jiro in Tokyo in 1984. After six years of constant correspondence and travel between the two countries, Jiro was granted Australian residency. As John aged and his health deteriorated, Jiro became his full-time carer. This was recognised by the Department of Social Security and Jiro received a carer's pension, which ceased on John's death.

The Department of Veterans' Affairs acknowledges that John's heart disease was a war-related illness--one of the criteria for his partner to receive a 'war widow's' pension. Jiro applied for a pension, not expecting to receive it. But within weeks, the government granted him a pension and a repatriation health card, apparently assuming his Japanese name to be that of a woman.

Jiro feels he has a duty to honour his partner's memory by fighting for justice for all gay couples. Seeking to be honest, he informed the Department that he was, in fact, a man. The next day it cancelled the pension. As the veterans' entitlements legislation clearly excludes same-sex partners, Jiro has no viable option. In similar cases in the past, the Government has routinely ignored the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission and the United Nations Human Rights Committee, refusing to change the law.

Perhaps the law should not grant war pensions when the ex-servicenman or woman dies decades after military service and at an advanced age, especially when the 'marriage' also happend long after the military service ended. But this case illustrates yet again the Federal Government's haphazard approach to same-sex couples. In immigration, same-sex de facto relationships are recognised as interdependent. In some areas of superannuation, but not for Federal public servants, same-sex relationships are recognised. In many other areas--social security, taxation, veterans' affairs, family law--same-sex relationships aren't recognised and taken into account.

Aware of human fraility, I don't often find church politics actually shocking. But I am shocked, or at least dismayed, by this incident. The Sydney Morning Herald reports (5 Nov.), that Anglicare Sydney, a magnificent organisation, has suspended its membership of Anglicare Australia for 12 months in protest against Anglicare Australia's support for the consecration of women as Bishops.

Anglicare Australia has officially registered its interest in a case now before the Anglican Church of Australia's top legal body, the Appellate Tribunal, which is considering whether women may legally be consecrated as bishops despite the failure of General Synod last year to pass a law authorising such consecrations.

The Sydney Diocese has challenged the power of the Tribunal to consider the matter. Anglicare Sydney's chief operating officer, Peter Gardiner, said any decision by Anglicare Australia to be represented in the case was "not a decision canvassed with Anglicare Sydney": "We don't see it as appropriate for Anglicare Australia to be part of the debate." Anglicare (including in Sydney) is one of Australia's largest charitable organisations.

I strongly support consecration of women as bishops, but I am staggered that Anglicare Australia would jeopardise its vital work by becoming embroiled in argument on the issue. Equally, I am dismayed that Anglicare Sydney could be so small minded.

Right Rev. V. Gene Robinson addressed a gathering of about 150 people at St. Martin-in-the-Fields church in London to mark the 10th anniversary of Changing Attitude, a British group promoting greater acceptance of gay and lesbian people in the Church of England. Associated Press (5 Nov.) reports Bishop Robinson as saying he has hope for the gay clergy of the future and that "This is going to end with our full inclusion. We won't live to see it", he said, "but it's going to happen."

In fifty or more years, in other words.

The Church of England is in communion with the Church of Sweden through the 1992 Porvoo Common Statement. Some days ago, unclear news circulated about a decision by the Church of Sweden to bless gay civil partnerships. Thanks to the Church of England Newspaper (No. 5793, 2 Nov), it's helpful to have an English language account of the decision.

The Church of Sweden will bless gay civil partnerships, the Church's governing assembly, decided last week. By a vote of 160-81 the assembly, the Kyrkomötet, agreed to amend the title of Chapter 23 of its prayer book, from "Marriage" to "Marriage and Blessings" and has appointed a committee to draw up the appropriate rites. Swedish priests have long had informal permission to solemnise gay unions, and last Thursday's vote, speakers during the debate noted, merely codifies existing practices. The measure passed with the unanimous support of Sweden's bishops. Traditionalist members of the Kyrkomötet argued the move violated Scripture and the Church's traditional teachings on marriage and imperiled ecumenical relations. [. . .]

The Rev Yngve Kalin, a traditionalist leader in the Kyrkomötet, stated the vote "surprises no one," saying pressure from the Swedish government drove the decision. "The Social Democrats, the Folk Party (liberals) and Left Party (former communists) needed this decision in the Church in order to be able to proceed with their agenda to change society's marriage laws [introducing gay marriage] during the next parliamentary term." The Roman Catholic Bishop of Stockholm, Anders Arborelius, said the "decision will not lead us to break off ecumenical dialogue" but "will make future dialogue more difficult".

This is Australia's 11 November 2005 Remembrance Day poster. It shows Australian prisoners of war from Japan arriving in Sydney on HMS Formidable on 13 October 1945. The group includes Private John Towers (on crutches) and Private David Runge (being carried), who lost both legs due to ill treatment in captivity.

My father vividly remembers even worse as he helped some of the most injured and sick POWs disembark from military aircraft in Darwin. We may by God's grace forgive, but we must never forget.

The Communiqué of the Third Anglican Global South to South Encounter, Egypt, 25-30 October 2005, has much to commend it, but on the perennial question of human sexuality offers only the usual tired assertions:

21. Scripture demands, and Christian history has traditionally held, that the standard of life, belief, doctrine, and conduct is the Holy Scripture.

Agreed.

29. The unscriptural innovations of North American and some western provinces on issues of human sexuality undermine the basic message of redemption and the power of the Cross to transform lives. . . .

Rather, it could be said, the provinces in question have upheld scriptural standards and exemplified the message of the gospel by insisting that God excludes no one who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord.

These departures are a symptom of a deeper problem, which is the diminution of the authority of Holy Scripture. The leaders of these provinces disregard the plain teaching of Scripture . . .

It is simply an assertion, not a cogent argument, to say that American and some western provinces have disregarded "the plain teaching of Scripture." At least as far as homosexuality is concerned, there is no "plain teaching of Scripture". Else why would the present disputes be so difficult and some many complex exegetical arguments be used, on both sides of the debate?

. . . and reject the traditional interpretation of tenets in the historical Creeds.

I don't believe the creeds say anything about sexuality, or Scripture either, for that matter.

Postscript

At titusonenone, a posting of the text of the Communiqué attracted 146 comments. I commented as I have done above and the following discussion resulted. I copy it here mostly to illustrate yet again the attitudes that make conversation difficult and those that make it worthwhile.

Beacon: Brian, you contradict yourself. First you say 'the provinces in question have upheld scriptural standards' about sexuality, then 'At least as far as homosexuality is concerned, there is no "plain teaching of Scripture"'. If so, there can be no 'scriptural standards'. But the vast majority of the Church in every age doesn't agree with you.

Second, it is not true tout court 'that God excludes no one who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord'. Jesus warns us at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, 'Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven' (Matt 7.21).

Third, you say 'I don't believe the creeds say anything about sexuality, or Scripture either, for that matter.' The Creeds are not a 'body of divinity' but summaries of the biblical-patristic faith and trinitarian definitions. The reference here is not to sexual ethics but to the deeper heresies in ECUSA, of which sexual ethics is only a presenting issue (but certainly the canary in the mineshaft). "(The Holy Spirit) has spoken through the prophets" is a creedal reference to the Scriptures.

The statement from the Global South is genuinely global, embracing many of the profound concerns that face Christians there. It is bracing, faith-filled and mission-focused. Note, among other things, the encouragement to follow Uganda's lead in combating Aids through lives of sexual purity and faithfulness.

Brian: Beacon, you say I contradict myself. If there is no "plain teaching of Scripture", you argue, "there can be no 'scriptural standards'." That simply doesn't follow. Of course there are many scriptural standards -- justice, peace, humility, etc., etc.

Second, you argue that it is not true "that God excludes no one who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord". You quote Jesus who warns us at the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, "Not everyone who says to me Lord, Lord will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven" (Matt 7.21). Well, yes, but in speaking of one who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord I intend to mean the acting out of Jesus' Lordship in one's life, not simply the verbal assent/lip service that is criticised in Matthew 7.21

In response to my observation, that I don't believe the creeds say anything about sexuality, or Scripture either, you comment, "The Creeds are not a 'body of divinity' but summaries of the biblical-patristic faith and trinitarian definitions." Quite so.

"The reference here is not to sexual ethics but to the deeper heresies in ECUSA, of which sexual ethics is only a presenting issue (but certainly the canary in the mineshaft)." But what are they? And if this is so, why is it mentioned in the context of sexuality and not some other alleged sin, of which every church has many?

You also note that "'(The Holy Spirit) has spoken through the prophets' is a creedal reference to the Scriptures." Perhaps so, I don't know the history fully and thus may stand corrected to a degree. Nonetheless, I would say that there is a distinction between the (inspired) speaking of the prophets and the enscripturation of their words in text.

"Note, among other things," you say, "the encouragement to follow Uganda's lead in combating AIDS through lives of sexual purity and faithfulness." I agree that this is a good thing, as far as it goes. I'm not arguing for promiscuity! It is quite possible for homosexual people to live lives of faithfulness and, I would argue, of purity. But almost all of the spread of HIV (not AIDS) in sub-Saharan Africa is due to promiscuous heterosexual behaviour by males. Abstinence would be commendable, but every possible avenue of defence against HIV should be employed, including education, use of condoms, etc.

Bob: The gist of your post, in my humble opinion, seems to be that you are asking that if accepting/blessing homosexual lifestyle is not the only real big problem, what are the big problems? I do not have the resources at hand to lay out the 40+ year litany of liberal/reappraiser innovations in detail at this time, but you really already know all the issues because you have been hanging around here for quite some time and injecting your point of view on various topics. Nitpicking intricacies may distract, but you already know that accepting and/or blessing homosexual lifestyle is the straw that broke the camel's back. Ignoring and/or revising the meaning of scripture and tradition are some pretty good starting points for the resistance reappraisers are currently encountering.

In reply to the unscriptural act of North American provinces, you said ". . . the provinces in question have upheld scriptural standards and exemplified the message of the gospel by insisting that God excludes no one who acknowledges Jesus Christ as Lord." Show me a passage or reference in scripture that says accepting/blessing homosexual lifestyle (not the person, but the lifestyle) is something Jesus or the Apostles commanded us to do. I'm not looking for silence on the subject, but affirmation.

Brian: Bob, you say to me that, "Nitpicking intricacies may distract, but you already know that accepting and/or blessing homosexual lifestyle is the straw that broke the camel's back." I have no idea what 'homosexual lifestyle' means. What broke the camel's back was the acceptance or blessing of committed monogamous homosexual relationships between believers. If that is what the writers of the Global South Communiqué meant (as I agree they may well have done), they should not exaggerate by saying that such blessings "undermine the basic message of redemption and the power of the Cross to transform lives" and that the "leaders of these provinces . . . reject the traditional interpretation of tenets in the historical Creeds." These statements are simply not true.

You comment, "Ignoring and/or revising the meaning of scripture and tradition are some pretty good starting points for the resistance reappraisers are currently encountering." No one can change the meaning of scripture, although it has great richness and variety of meaning. We seek, rather to understand what scripture does in fact mean and not to be enslaved to ill-founded prejudicial interpretations. As for tradition, it is entirely possible that a tradition is simply wrong, or at least no longer relevant. Tradition is not to be held uncritically. Differing aspects of tradition have precedence over others. I argue simply that the primary values in our tradition must be love, justice, peace, righteousness, etc., and that other aspects of tradition must be criticised in the face of these values.

struggling in diocese of Mass.: Brian, if you really read the gospels, it is clear that Jesus is equally rigorous about our sexual lives as our corporate lives. I used not to think that Jesus was far more upset about our inattention to social justice than to sexual sin but ultimately (and truth be told, reluctantly at first) changed my mind. What we do with our bodies is as important to our discipleship as what we do with our money and how we manage our power. And the "high bar" of chastity is rigorous for all of us, and even those of us in committed and happy heterosexual marriages regularly fail to reach the mark, in thought if not in actual deed. We are all sinners in need of grace.

Bob: I believe I now understand your point. Scripture and tradition are most likely not valid, are not to be held uncritically, must be criticized in the face of these changing politically correct views of today's society. The only sin remaining is to believe in the faith handed down from the Fathers of the Church. I guess that rules out committing ourselves unconditionally to the saving grace of the Lord, and the faith handed down from the Fathers of the Church. Yep, it's past time for the Covenant. Bring it on.

Brian: Bob, you deliberately misconstrue what I wrote. I hope that merely sarcasm was intended. I neither said nor implied that scripture and tradition are most likely not valid. Nor did I say that the basis of criticism is to be "changing politically correct views of today's society." I did suggest that tradition is to be criticised in the face of eternal (and scriptural) values.

And concerning scripture I said, "We seek, rather, to understand what scripture does in fact mean and not to be enslaved to ill-founded prejudicial interpretations." This in no sense implies that Scripture is invalid, merely that sometimes our interpretation of it is wrong. That's plain enough. If plain meanings cannot be read plainly, it is small wonder we cannot even begin to conduct a sensible conversation.

Brian: "Struggling. . . ", I entirely agree that the Gospels set high standards for sexual integrity and that we are to use our bodies in a way that is holy (being the 'temples of the Holy Spirit'). (That, in part, is why I am very strictly monogamous and committed to one person for life.) And yes, we are all sinners, in need of grace. However I cannot see that this negates my point that the writers of the Global South Communiqué are exagerating when they imply that blessings of monogamous committed same-sex relationship "undermine the basic message of redemption and the power of the Cross to transform lives". How could this be so?

MJD_NV: Brian, why does being "very strictly monogamous" matter? Where in Scripture is monogamy a requirement? And how does following something not explicitly required in Holy Writ while practicing something specifically condemned follow the Gospels' "high standards" for sexual morality?

Brian: MJD_NV, the monogamy is simply an expression of faithfulness to the person to whom I have committed myself. I had supposed that faithfulness to one partner and the keeping of one's promises was a chaste and godly thing.

Bob: Brian said "If plain meanings cannot be read plainly, it is small wonder we cannot even begin to conduct a sensible conversation." It is strange that you would put that statement forward about plain meanings and sensible conversations. When reasserters use the plain meaning of scripture argument, they get jumped on for being simplistic and worse. Duh!

Brian: Bob, I entirely favour the acceptance of "plain meanings" in scripture and elsewhere when they are available. However, there a scholars aplenty on both sides of this debate who would accept that in respect of faithful, same-sex relationships (as distinct from promiscuity) the meaning of the New Testament is far from plain. See Homosexuality, Science, and the 'Plain Sense' of Scripture, edited by David L. Balch, Eerdmans 2002. There are, of course, plenty of other points in the New Testament where the meaning and application is contested - ministry by women being a contemporary case in point. What option have we but to make conscientious decisions and then rely on the grace and mercy of God?

Priscilla: ". . . there are scholars aplenty on both sides of this debate who would accept that in respect of faithful, same-sex relationships (as distinct from promiscuity) the meaning of the New Testament is far from plain." No informed and responsible modern scholarship says this. "Faithful, same-sex relationships" are no better than "faithful, incestuous" or "faithful, adulterous" relationships. We are talking about the authority of Jesus our Lord, and the plain meaning of Biblical Greek and Hebrew. See, as a way into sound scholarship, http://nwnet.org/~prisca/Brief.htm and the associated references; and other documents under http://nwnet.org/~prisca/Spirit&Sex.htm

Brian: Priscilla: Your comment is an example of how subtly a negative value judgement can creep into this discussion. No "informed and responsible modern scholarship", you observe, agrees that in respect of respect of faithful, same-sex relationships (as distinct from promiscuity) the meaning of the New Testament is far from plain. This has the immediate effect of branding those scholars who do say this as being ill-informed and irresponsible. It would seem that you too readily cast judgement on conscientious, scholarly and prayerful people, conservative and progressive alike, who have given much to the study and exposition of the Scriptures. Ill-informed? No more than anyone else. Irresponsible? I think not.

"Faithful, same-sex relationships" you say, are no better than "faithful, incestuous" or "faithful, adulterous" relationships. I understand what you are trying to say, but an adulterous relationship is unfaithful by definition. If we could just get away from calling others 'irresponsible' and 'unfaithful' and stick to the facts, there might be some hope of progress. That is my earnest prayer.

Struggling in diocese of Mass: Brian, point taken re: faithful same-sex relationships (as opposed to promiscuity). I do agree that one can believe in chastity and also believe that a faithful same-sex relationship can be blessed by God. This is no longer what I believe (the recently-departed Pope's "theology of the body" had much to do with changing my mind), but I know and respect people who believe as you do, and I do not assume that you (or they) take your discipleship cavalierly.

Brian: 'Struggling . . . ': Thank you. I truly appreciate your courtesy. I am slightly aware of Pope John Paul II's "theology of the body". Would you care to recommend one particular statement of it, please?

Clinton: Brian, (1) The message of scripture on homosexuality and how the Church down through the ages have understood it is plain. The only way out is to suggest that Scriptures is fallible and likewise the interpretation of the Church. (2) The Global south encounter, I believe, focus not so much on sexuality issue but the deeper values that has lead up to, for the first time, a confessing, practicing divorcee being consecrated as Bishop. Notwithstanding his ability to pastor, lead etc - it is an incredible innovation, won't you agree? Obviously, it is a culmination of the many steps taken to depart from the "faith once received" that has led some in the church to think this is 'alright.'

All the same, all of us need God's grace and I won't dispute that. I am just simply saying that those who are on the 'orthodox side' (including well informed Catholic and Methodist theologians) are not as 'unthinking' as some of these posts here may suggest. It is just founded on different premise. And looking at it objectively, history, tradition and scripture is on the side of the 'orthodox.' One has to revise, - and do so deeply at that - to make a case for what is happening in ECUSA for so long, of which Gene's consecration is just symptom of that.

Struggling in diocese of Mass.: Brian, truth be told, I read the "short" version of the Pope's magisterial work, and have lent it out--but the gist of what changed my mind was the proposition that gender matters enormously in our consideration of ourselves as sexual beings, as human beings, and hence--unavoidably--in how we view marriage. It would be hard to pull out one passage, just as it doesn't work well to pull out only one passage of Scripture. This notion that "gender matters" is something I've always resisted, and I am still struggling with its implications (hence my screen name!). Though I have been happily married for nearly thirty years, I have often felt that my marriage works well precisely because both my husband and I are somewhat more androgynous than average! And speaking more theologically, I have not yet heard a convincing answer to the question of why, if the Trinity consists of three "he's," a male-female pairing would necessarily best reflect the imago Dei. So those of us on the "reasserter" side of this issue are no more monolithic than those on the "reappraising" side--an important thing to remember even as we lament the fact that the Current Unpleasantness forces us one way or the other.

Mark Vernon, in "Coming out as friends" (The Guardian 28 Oct.) says that although civil partnerships will not be in effect in Britain until 21 December, commercialisation is already attempting to force them "into confetti-lined boxes embossed with the word marriage." But, Vernon asks,

is this rush to the neon altar really what gay men and lesbians want, and is it the best institution that civil partnerships can be?

There is a great risk that the answer to both these questions will turn out to be no--for reasons that have to do with the individual, the commercial and the philosophical.

Talking to friends in same-sex relationships who are thinking about civil partnership, I sense a profound hesitancy. Gay men and women are still often wary of public declarations of affection; the tone of the debate may have changed beyond recognition since the 1980s, but there is wisdom in caution when the world opens its arms to your love. I suspect that many may sign the forms, just to make life (and death) easier, but they probably won't ring the bells. [. . .]

This is very much my concern. Present laws in Australia do not allow full sharing of property, benefits and entitlements between members of same-sex couples in the way they do for opposite-sex couples, married or de facto. And there is essentially one man preventing that--Prime Minister John Winston Howard.

So what kind of relationship could civil partnerships be an expression of? The heart of the matter is, I think, that relationships between gay men and women are different from those between married couples. [. . . ] [I]t is about social history and the way in which the personal is political. In marriage, this is still caught up with notions of possession, for all that many would have it otherwise. Witness the persistent nostalgia for acts like the father giving away the bride.

For gay couples there is little sense of this. For example, gay men and women routinely remain friends with former lovers in ways that would be thought dodgy, even treacherous, in the married world. And I am much more likely to do something without my partner, like go on holiday, than my married friends are.

So what is the best model for civil partnerships? In a word, friendship. If erotic love is about having another and them having you, friendship is about knowing another and being known by them: close friends become "one soul in two bodies", as Montaigne put it--rather different from the nuptial notion of two bodies becoming one.

If this philosophy of friendship is right, it begs the question as to what ceremony is appropriate to express it. In the medieval period the church, ironically, provided the answer: so-called sworn friendship was a religious vow, made during mass. Clearly, the social recognition this afforded would not carry today. But the old practice stretches the imagination as to what is possible now.

It would be wonderful for such ceremony to be available for those who seek it. But I don't feel a great need of it myself. I'm not sure that ceremony of itself makes commitment truly stronger.

This might not only benefit homosexuals. Consider the contemporary decline in the institution of marriage. If people's ideal relationship today could be called sexual friendship, then it is notable that this is an element far from explicit in the older, possession-oriented institution. If civil partnership ceremonies can resist looking like maudlin imitations of weddings, they would show that friendship is worthy of public commitment. Contrary to what conservatives have said, they may even contribute to the reinvention of marriage.

It could be argued that to base civil partnership on friendship would be to push it back into the closet, since friendship is largely a private affair. However, friendship is itself coming out of the closet in our networked days and mobile lives. Civil partnerships could be an opportunity to shape, and not merely be shaped by, this trend in society too.

Mark Vernon is the author of The Philosophy of Friendship

My few but faithful readers will have noticed my preoccupation and concern with the Australian Government's determination to curtail civil liberties through the introduction of anti-terror laws. Dull mutterings only avail so much. Better to pray. I commend this ancient prayer of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, 1348.

O God, Almighty Father, King of kings and Lord of all our rulers, grant that the hearts and minds of all who go out as leaders before us, the statesmen and women, the judges, the people of learning, the people of wealth, may be so filled with the love of your laws, and of that which is righteous and life-giving, that they may serve as wholesome salt to the earth, and be worthy stewards of your good and perfect gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

ABC TV's weekly half-hour dancesport competition Strictly Dancing is always entertaining and one of the few things James and I watch whenever we can. I posted some pictures of Adam Francis and Alexander Bryan's convincing win in a semi final on 22 April.

Adam and Alexander won their 'Group Final' last night and will now go on the the Grand Final in a few weeks!

The other competing couples danced finely, but Adam and Alexander were audience favorites. Their dancing, though not flawless, was brilliantly energetic and meticulously rehearsed. But more importantly, they were wonderfully entertaining and good fun.

P.S.

In the Grand Final, Adam and Alexander, energetic as always with 44.7 points of a possible 50, were second. Athena and Lawrence, beautiful and skillful, were deserving winners on 45.6. Now I am grumpy that the ABC has apparently scrapped Strictly Dancing, perhaps thinking that three seasons are enough.

In its editorial of 29 Oct, The Tablet says that three proposals now before the British government to tighten its laws against terrorism "raise concerns that the Government wants to curtail civil liberty and human rights more than is strictly necessary. The danger is that in defending their way of life against terrorism, the British may lose much of what they value, especially the long-cherished and much-fought-over freedom of the individual against the state."

The Tablet concludes that "The current [British] debate is right and necessary, for the balance between security and liberty is not for governments alone to strike, but the whole community. It rests on public understanding and consent, and the limit of that is as far as the Government should go."

The Australian government would do well to take note.

Repeated bungling in the administration of inhumane immigration laws demonstates that the Australian Government cannot be trusted with detention powers such as those in the proposed anti-terrorism laws.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman, Professor John McMillan, says that a considerable number of Australian citizens and permanent residents (legal migrants) have been illegally held in immigration detention and warns that there is nothing to stop the same thing happening again. On ABC TV (26 Oct.) Professor McMillan, said that, of cases he's investigating, 23 people were held for more than a year and two were detained for more than five years. He condemned the treatment of Vivian Solon as "catastrophic" and is now investigating more than 220 cases where the Department of Immigration and Ethic Affairs believes it might have detained people illegally, although it is still unclear whether any of them are still in detention.

There are at least a few cases in which Australian citizens were detained. In all of the cases it is understood that the person was an Australian citizen, a permanent resident or otherwise lawfully in Australia. More than half were held for a week or less. But 23 people were held for more than a year and two detained for more than five years. Seven of the cases being investigated involve children and 11 others are people who may have had mental illness.

There is nothing to stop further illegal detentions. The law requires that a person must be taken into detention if an officer "reasonably suspects" the person is an unlawful non-citizen.

My Parish Priest, Rob Lamerton, writes in our weekly Parish newsletter (23 Oct.):

Great concern has been expressed this week about the Government's new "Anti-Terror" legislation. While I am appalled by the thought of terrorism in our country I ask how much new legislation is necessary!

Surely a crime is a crime but if it has not been committed it is not a crime! Yes there are situations where crimes and acts of terrorism are detected in the planning and by careful observation, surveillance and intelligence gathering the conspirators can be brought to account. Conspiracy to commit a crime or act of terrorism is in itself a crime but there are surely sufficient legal structures in Australia to deal with conspiracies and criminal acts. I am very concerned that we are digging a very deep dark hole of fear in this country and threatening the freedoms we so cherish. I recall reading at a dawn service one ANZAC Day the motto of the Returned Service League. It says The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Yes! Increase the resources of our intelligence networks but let us be very wary of some of the measures proposed in this "War on Terror."

I heard someone say that "Terrorism did not begin on 9/11" although some would have us think that! In fact terrorism was around in Northern Ireland and the UK, in the Balkans, South and Central America, in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, in South Africa and many terrorists had very just causes! Often thewy were motivated by great injustice, deprivation and inequality! I cannot help but believe that our country's involvement in the war in Iraq and the general misunderstanding and suspicion of Muslims in our society has helped to dig that deep dark hole of fear.

I am proud to be part of the Australian National University Chaplaincy which has become a model for interfaith chaplaincies in universities around Australia. During the month of Ramadan Muslims break their fast at sunset. On one of the days this month the Muslim Students' Association will host an interfaith meal at sundown in the chaplaincy.

Let us stop the construction of the deep dark hole before we fall into it ourselves and are lost forever! Just as Jesus confronted the Pharisees, the Herodians, the Sadducees and the Lawyers (note how all facets of authority are represented) with their misreading of God and humanity so must we. Did Jesus come to construct a superior religion called "Christianity"? I don't think so! What he did call for was a true acceptance of a humanity in need of relationships with each other and with God.

In the Sydney Morning Herald (24 Oct.), David Marr argues that the Australian Government's proposed anti-terrorism use allow intelligence rather than legal evidence to be employed punitively.

"It remains the very strong view of the Government [says John Howard]- it's a view I believe that is very strongly supported in the community - that the best weapon in the fight against terrorism is good intelligence." He's absolutely right. And the 900 fresh staff ASIO [the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] recruits over the next five years will be trained to gather that intelligence. Note: intelligence not evidence. The two aren't the same. They have different disciplines, different weight and different purposes. [. . .]

The faults of Howard's bill have been fiercely condemned, yet there's been little focus on its underlying purpose. It has nothing to do with gathering good intelligence. It's essentially about punishment--not on evidence tested before a court, but on intelligence in the hands of police and ASIO officers.

Howard is selling his bill as if it were designed just to keep an eye on troublemakers. But a fortnight's "preventive" detention in the slammer is punishment in anyone's language. And the control orders Howard has in mind have a precedent in NSW where home detention and electronic shackles exist as an alternative punishment to prison--but only after trial and conviction.

Howard's anti-terrorism laws provide no such old-fashioned formalities. Home detention--perhaps indefinitely--will be imposed without any trial at all. And because they will never necessarily know why their lives have been turned upside down, the detainees will never be able to contest their punishment effectively. Everything will be decided behind their backs. [. . .]

Our courts won't use evidence extracted by torture. Hearsay is the lifeblood of intelligence services all over the world, but that sort of second- or third-hand testimony is almost useless in court. [. . .]

None of these rules prevent intelligence--foreign and local--being used to protect Australia from terrorism. But they do protect Australians from unjust punishment. [. . .]

[I]t says something that the only lawyers defending Howard's plans are those employed by the Government. And where are Labor's lawyers? Pathetically silent.

According to The Age (21 Oct.), members of the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in same-sex relationships are about to be granted family benefits, and death and injury compensation for their partners. Until now, only the partners of servicemen and women in heterosexual relationships were recognised for housing assistance, removals, travel, leave and other benefits.

"The government has agreed to changes to ADF policy that will extend the conditions of service which apply to members with dependents and members with dependants (separated) to include ADF personnel in interdependent relationships," the ADF memo said.

"ADF members who are in interdependent relationships will be able to apply to have their relationships recognised by the ADF for the same range of conditions of service as members who are currently in recognised relationships."

[. . . ] The Defence Gay & Lesbian Information Service says the decision, which is expected to take effect on December 1, will help about two to three per cent of the ADF's personnel.

[. . . ] Under the changes, it appears partners of gay ADF personnel will have access to death and injury compensation for the first time, but it is not guaranteed.

This is progress. But are superannuation benefits included?

Meanwhile, after making at least some provision for "interdependent" relationships (which are hard to prove) in private sector superannuation and Defence force benefits, the government still does nothing to recognise same-sex couples for benefits (including superannuation) due to its civilian employees.

Describing the Government's decision to grant same sex couples access to defence force entitlements as a reluctant first step, Greens Senator Kerry Nettle congratulated the Gay and Lesbian community for their successful campaign and at the same time urged the Government to go further with same sex law reform.

In September 2003 the United Nations Human Rights Committee found that the Federal Government was in breach of article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights for its refusal to grant a veterans' affairs pension to the surviving spouse of a 38 year same sex relationship; So it's disappointing that the Government has taken so long to respond to this international condemnation.

The Government should do the right thing by backdating these entitlements to same sex couples who have previously been denied pensions by the Department of Veterans' Affairs. If the Government is serious about same sex law reform they should repeal all laws that discriminate against people on the basis of sexuality. The Government also needs to put more effort into ensuring that Gay and Lesbian military personnel are not bullied or harassed in the military and elsewhere in the community. In 2005, it's surely time for these homophobic attitudes to be consigned to the dust bin of history.

Concerning the Sydney Diocese's recent decision in favour of changing the Anglican Church of Australia's Constitution to make possible the severing of its link with Canterbury, the Primate, Archbishop Aspinall has said, "I think a large part of the church in Australia would be reluctant to lose its very close connection with the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury . . . Whether it [the motion] got sufficient support on a national scale in Australia to result in a change to the constitution I think is a very open question."

Dr Aspinall also told the Brisbane Courier-Mail that he would work to prevent a split within the Australian Anglican Church between liberals and conservatives. "I don't think it will happen and I'm working hard to ensure it doesn't happen," he said. "There is a large centre in the church, and then on the edges there is room for differences of view and opinion, and disagreement does not mean disintegration."

Dr Aspinall also said that it was "pretty inevitable" that women would be consecrated as bishops given that just under two-thirds of Anglicans in Australia believed it was right to consecrate women.

Meanwhile, Julia Beard, a member of Sydney synod from 1994 to 2001, has written in the Sydney Morning Herald (20 Oct 05) that "Churches need diversity more than unquestioning allegiance.

Forget Team America. Team Sydney is the one coming to take over the world. You might not see clerical gear swapped for khaki, but Archbishop Peter Jensen is a lot smarter than George Bush.

The similarities between the foreign policy of the Sydney Anglican Diocese and the United States are uncanny though: both fuelled by a disdain for secular culture and a fear of those who think differently, a belief they are the only ones on a divine mission, and a desire to free people whom they believe to be captive to errant ways of thinking, such as support for gays and lesbians, and women priests for example.

The Sydney diocese is gripped with a cold-war mentality--fighting liberalism as the Americans fought communism, with various offensives, covert operations and targeted support directed to those in foreign lands who agree with them. A little bit paranoid, a little bit clumsy, but clever, concerted and fierce.

This is why this week's synod--the annual gathering of Sydney Anglicans, much like their parliament - was so interesting.

On Monday night, the Sydney Dean, Phillip Jensen, won a decade-long battle to have churches planted in other parts of the country given official recognition, by affiliating them with the Sydney diocese. Sometimes the most significant victories can slip through unnoticed.

But we did notice!

These churches don't have to be Anglican, they can be independent, or renegades from other denominations. The pastors will be licensed by the Sydney diocese and receive financial and administrative support.

It's a move bound to lodge firmly in the nostrils of other bishops and denominations, as the Sydney Soldiers--many boomer priests who are still smarting from the secular cultural sweep of the 1960s and 1970s--march beyond their geographical boundaries.

Good luck to them, I say, if more people are reached with the Gospel.

In 1994, the synod passed a motion moved by Phillip Jensen to recognise that "planting and developing new churches is an effective way to reach our nation with the Gospel".

I happen to agree, but there's plenty of room to do this within one's own Diocese.

The former archbishop Harry Goodhew refused to license Sydney clergy to work in other dioceses, however, because the structures of the Anglican Church did not allow it. Defying him, some Sydney ministers still set up independent churches elsewhere.

We are witnessing a movement from Anglicanism to a non-denominational evangelical Christianity. Yet those behind this movement have the history, wealth and weight of the hierarchy of the Anglican Church at their disposal. There are three major paradoxes in Sydney:

First, the lawyer-driven, traditionally Calvinist Sydney synod is seeking to defy and redefine the constitution and the laws which govern it while using these same tools to get what it wants. Writing in 2000 about the need to plant churches outside diocesan boundaries, Phillip Jensen said that "the future of evangelicalism lies in brave hearts who will take action and not be constrained by the traditions of men--the lines that men have drawn on the ground, the rules that men have made about who conducts church how, when, where and by whose authority".

Second, the radical evangelicals who have long defied the authority of those in the hierarchy when they disagree with them, and are encouraging others to do the same, are now shoring up their own as they hold the power. The congregationalists are looking a lot more like centralists.

Third, they are, as seen this week, obsessively concerned with supporting their own--the churches they have planted around the country including on the Central Coast, in Brisbane, Orange, Bathurst, Canberra . . .

I wonder which Canberra church she means?

. . . and now Perth--as well as those in dioceses overseas which object to the ordination and marriage of homosexuals, and to women priests. They align themselves with Africans, or any persecuted conservatives, and chastise the British and Canadians.

But the mark of true leadership is not how you treat those who support you, or with whom you agree, but those who disagree. The Anglican Church should not be all about aggressive expansion, but nurturing its own and allowing for difference.

It is surely possible to do both.

A glance around the synod theatre this week revealed an almost total absence of the progressives who fought the battles of the 1980s and 1990s--judges, doctors, academics. Gone.

Team Sydney has efficiently cleaned out local rebels. Year by year, the progressive priests and parishioners trickle out.

Where are they?

This week, the Redfern rector, John McIntyre, was appointed Bishop of Gippsland. Just months ago, his nomination to be the new rector of the wealthy parish of St John's Darlinghurst was, surprisingly, knocked back by the diocesan nominators in a matter of minutes. They were not required to give a reason and did not. The only hint McIntyre--a powerful advocate for Aboriginal ministry and women's ordination, member of the synod's inner cabinet, its standing committee and a friend--was given was that, after years of battling in another inner-city parish, he had "no proven capacity to grow a church".

So a blow for the diversity of Sydney is a gain for Gippsland. For a lot of us, it's not all about the numbers.

Yet, numbers account for something -- see Acts 2. But in Acts 2, there was diversity among the many converts.

Our first rehearsal for The Messiah went very well on Tuesday evening. OK, so a performance of Messiah is commonplace, but it's special for me as it will be my first ever public performance as a choir member. I find the coloratura passages like this one quite tricky.

Coloratura? For a bass-baritone? Yes, I discover, a coloratura is not only the fat lady before whose singing it ain't over, but, according to Wikipedia "an ornate, flowery style in classical singing."

The term is correctly applied to any passage sung in this manner by any voice type, but it is also commonly used as a noun to describe operatic soprano roles characterized by flexibility and embellishments such as runs and trills, with a strong head voice including abilities in the whistle register, or the female voice that sings such roles (coloratura soprano).

Although most often associated with the soprano voice, the term coloratura as such does not say anything about the colour or range of the voice. There are coloratura parts for all voice types in different musical genres.

• Mozart's Allelujah (from Exsultate, jubilate) may be arranged for and sung by a properly trained contralto, mezzo soprano or soprano.
• The aria Every Valley Shall be Exalted from Handel's Messiah is an example of a coloratura piece for tenor.
• Osmin, a character in Mozart's The Abduction from the Seraglio, is a coloratura role for a bass.

In the bel canto era, all singers had to be coloratura specialists, that is, they had to be able to add ornamentations to the written music.

In its draft terrorism legislation, the Australian Government recognises same sex couples for the purposes of detention orders, while it declines to recognise us elsewhere for beneficial purposes.

In a new Division 105 Preventative detention orders, proposed to be inserted into the Criminal code by the new anti-terrorism legislation, is a section 105.32, allowing detained persons to contact family, employers and business partners.

Contacting family members etc.
(1) The person being detained is entitled to contact:
(a) one of his or her family members; and [. . .]

(2) In this section:
family member of a person means:
(a) the person's spouse, de facto spouse or same-sex partner; [. . .]

The same-sex partner of a terror suspect is recognised by the Government--but not the same-sex partner of a public service officer, a federal police officer, intelligence officer of member of the armed forces. The Howard Government's refusal to acknowledge same-sex couples extends to superannuation, taxation, veterans' entitlements, immigration, Medicare, health insurance and, of course, marriage.

Yet the government must acknowledge the reality of same-sex partnerships when considering the personal relationships of potential terrorists!

SSO reports:

National Greens leader Senator Bob Brown told Sydney Star Observer the move was "sadly typical of John Howard". "He wants to recognise same-sex couples only when he suspects them of terrorism," Brown said.

When the bill goes before the Senate next month, the openly gay Brown said he would attempt to attach an amendment to it that would see same-sex couples recognised under all other pieces of federal legislation. "That should be an interesting exercise," Brown said.

David Scamell, co-convenor of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, described the situation as "ludicrous. The government is willing to recognise the same-sex partner of a suspected terrorist but not the same-sex partner of a federal police officer or one of the troops serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Every state except South Australia has recognised same-sex couples in some sort of comprehensive legislative reform, and this federal government hasn't done so because it's playing politics. It's chosen to pursue a socio-conservative agenda and it's at the expense of gays and lesbians across the country."

Same-sex relationships are alluded to in other areas of federal law, such as superannuation and immigration, but instead of being named explicitly they come under the definition of "interdependents", a form of relationship which can be difficult to prove.

A spokesperson from the office of Attorney-General Philip Ruddock told the Star the term "same-sex partners" was used in the anti-terror bill because the section was referring to spousal arrangements only. "The term same-sex partnership is much more specific. Interdependency applies to a much wider range of relationships," said the spokesperson, who would not be drawn as to why the term is not used in other legislation.

A spokesperson for shadow attorney-general Nicola Roxon echoed, "It's been our policy for a long time to go through all the federal statutes and remove any discrimination that exists,: the spokesperson said.

Gay rights activist Rodney Croome said the situation was "worse than a double standard, it's demonisation. Someone who knew nothing about Australian society except what they read in the statute books would rapidly come to the conclusion that the only people who have same-sex relationships in this country are the kind of people you suspect of being terrorists."

The Australian government would be less audacious and outrageously ideological if it were facing a stronger opposition. The Australian Labour Party must accept blame for its failure in the last elections to at least to prevent government control of both houses of Parliament, including the Senate. The ALP coninues to fail to present clear, courageous, alternative policies that the people can understand and accept.

Now its own President, the redoubtable Barry Jones, has made scathing criticisms of his own party. Dr the Hon Barry Jones AO is a man of great intelligence and wit and a highly respected public figure. He is not one to make vacuous attacks.

The Age reports Jones as saying that the ALP is doomed to fail at the next federal election unless it undertakes major structural reform. He says the party is suffering "policy anorexia" and has been taken over by "factional warlords". According to press reports, the critique, published in the latest newsletter of the Australian Fabian Society, highlights 13 problem areas that Mr Jones says federal Labor must overcome if it is to win in 2007.

While not criticising Mr Beazley's leadership, Mr Jones attacks the party for failing to realign itself politically and for its "small target" policy strategy after 1996 -- the year Mr Beazley was first elected.

Mr Jones also savages the current make-up of Mr Beazley's front bench and notes that Labor's previous two returns to national government from opposition occurred under charismatic leaders. "The common elements when Labor won nationally in 1972 and 1983 were charismatic leadership, major party debates on policy and a serious attempt to engage the community."

Complaining of a long-standing lack of policy conviction in the party, Mr Jones says: "The last ALP national conference which made a significant impact on public policy was in 1981. It is difficult to recall any significant debates on public policy at national conferences in 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2004. The party dropped out of policy making federally between 1983 and 1996, when many policies were adopted top down and imposed on a reluctant party -- and after 1996, with the 'small target' strategy, we never resumed the practice of active policy formulation."

Describing the takeover of the party by "factional warlords" as "the elephant in the room" problem, Mr Jones says ideology has become irrelevant in the modern ALP and the "property theory of politics" has taken over.

Mr Jones highlights a lack of incentives for people to join modern Labor. "People once joined the party because of opposition to the death penalty and Vietnam. Did anyone join us because we sold Qantas or were silent on Tampa or David Hicks?"

With the party confused between notions of strategy and tactics, Mr Jones says the ALP had adopted a "lucky envelope approach to policy announcements" and is even confused about its core beliefs. "The 'democratic socialist' objective, last modified in 1981, is still in the ALP's national constitution. When was the last time we spoke to it or acted on it? Is there any policy that we would not give up, if asked nicely?"

I like and respect Barry Jones, but for the moment I'll maintain my support of the The Greens who at least are idea-driven in what they advocate, whether noble or nonsense.

In a recent address on "Rethinking progressive ideas in Australia.", Dr David McKnight, author of Beyond Right and Left, argues that:

the problems the Labor Party in Australia today is facing--its deep crisis of vision and meaning--arise from the inability of its ideas and vision to explain a raft of changes in society and to promote an appropriate and inspiring set of values. The idea and vision on which Labor was founded arise from a political tradition which went under various names such as socialism, social democracy etc. What we are witnessing is a historical shift in which the 150 year old tradition of socialism and its offshoots has collapsed. And this the collapse of socialism is not confined o the Labor Party -- it extends to the Left outside the ALP.

"In a more positive way", McKnight says, "the rise of the Green politics is in part due to its ideas--which constitute a new way of seeing the world--a vital but half formed philosophy based around human dependence on natural world. These ideas respond to very real issues and problems we all face.

The current attack by the Howard Government on working Australians is also a matter of ideas, McKnight says.

It is founded on the ideological and philosophical notion of choice--the primacy of individual choice in a market place. His [Howard's] vision is one in which individual employees will sit down and negotiate working arrangements which suit them, with their employer. These arrangements will be flexible, they will be tailored to personal needs and will expressed in an individual contract. In analyzing what's going on here it's important not to be blinded by our own hostility to this nonsense. These ideas of individualism and of choice are grounded in a philosophical vision which is usually described as economic liberalism, neo-liberalism or corporate libertarianism. The rise of the political ideas associated with economic liberalism are one of the most significant political changes of the last 25 years. They are significant because they are deeply appealing notions to many people today--they are built on a material abundance and choice which we call consumerism--and this combination partly explains the success of the kind of politics Mr. Howard represents.

The Australian Labor Party, and the left generally, must come up with some strong and convincing ideas and must do so quickly.

In the following extract ("Being vigilant about civil liberties", pp. 30-32) from their recent report, Countering terrorism: power, violence and democracy post 9/11 (Sept. 2005), a Working Group of the Church of England's House of Bishops makes very clear the dangers inherent in anti terorism laws of the sort now proposed by Australia's government.

Collapsing the boundaries between preventive action and anticipatory self-defence is symptomatic of a deeper malaise within the international body politic, which invokes a politics of fear to justify repressive and regressive policies that in other circumstances would be unacceptable. History is full of examples of the use of a perceived emergency to generate fear, and for fear to destroy the restraints that protect democratic societies from totalitarian remedies. The fact that fear makes populations tolerant of extreme remedies provides opportunities for the unscrupulous to create 'emergencies' so as to allow them access to 'emergency powers'.

The Third Reich began as a democratic response to an 'emergency' facing the German nation. Thereafter, whenever Adolf Hitler required more power he created emergencies, real or imagined, so as to justify the democratic suspension of democratic safeguards. Military coups in Africa and Latin America were all mounted on the basis of a 'national emergency', and to the extent that they received popular support, they were based on disillusionment with a democratic politics that had descended into chaos and the fear that things could only get worse.

While it is evident that Western democracies are built on substantial foundations, it is equally clear that 9/11 represents a real and major escalation in the threats to such societies. The lesson following the terrorist attacks on Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 is that the threat of terrorism is continuous and ongoing. The first responsibility of any government is to safeguard the lives of its own citizens. Nonetheless, if the twentieth century is full of examples of such seizures of power, there is no doubt that the current century is already producing, under the guise of the 'war on terror', a series of reductions in civil liberties. The language of 'protecting the rights of the law-abiding majority' and of 'rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of the victim' has wide appeal. Just as the purported threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction led to the waging of a war, so the increase of fear creates a population ready to accept the accretion of powers to the state. A tally of the new statutes that have found their way to the statute book since 9/11 and those anti-terrorist measures that look likely to be introduced to Parliament following the terrorist attacks on London in July 2005 testify to the power of fear to direct government policy and secure popular consent to a new 'balance', favouring security over civil liberty. A change in the balance might be right but continued vigilance is required to ensure that such a balance does not lead to a diminution in civil liberties.

None of this happens without protest. Each proposed erosion of civil liberties has been greeted by a negative response from lawyers and civil liberties groups. These protests have in turn produced concessions. The protest that greeted the proposal to oust the courts from reviewing asylum appeals produced a solution which, while less draconian, still reduced the capacity of asylum-applicants to appeal against deportation. The proposal to imprison without trial foreign citizens suspected of terrorist connections was modified in the light of a Law Lords' judgement so as to allow house arrest of British and foreign subjects--and that in turn has produced protests which will no doubt produce modifications. However, the process by which measures are proposed so as to meet what are perceived to be popular fears, and then modified in the light of protests, still engenders a steady erosion of liberties and an increase in the powers of the state. This is dangerous. It is also potentially counterproductive in the manner in which it sustains a breeding ground that supports a victim leading to martyrdom mentality amongst many terrorists and their sympathisers.

One argument perhaps insufficiently brought out during the recent debates over the British Government's counter-terrorism legislation was that there is a danger of contaminating the criminal justice system itself if legislators stretch it beyond what it can bear. The attempt to give judicial respectability to what are executive actions can be misplaced. There are circumstances in which it is better for the separation of powers and the integrity of the justice system to allow executive detention to stand or fall on its own merits for a limited period, testing the argument that the nation faces a wholly abnormal threat.

Such developments as these are the inevitable by-products of the politics of fear, and the creation of a war mentality, in which we are prepared for more and more 'tough' remedies against the danger which it is claimed that we are facing. Into such an environment the most repeated of all the Biblical injunctions comes with undiminished vigour: 'Fear not'. That command is not an inhuman requirement that we lose our fearful reactions when confronted with danger or shirk the taking of necessary precautions; rather it is an injunction not to act out of fear, but to let the power of love work its way with our fears. The history of Israel in the Bible is a history of prophets warning against false alliances and false divinities whose hold over the people was based on fear. We should warn our generation also that fear makes a bad basis for the ruling of a society.

The Australian Government's intended changes to workplace relations laws again illustrates its ideological determination to reduce the rights of the Australian people. Thus Tim Colebatch comments in The Australian (a conservative newspaper, today:

"After a week grappling with the detail of the Government's workplace changes, I am puzzled at how someone with Howard's understanding of the Australian people could produce such a one-sided reform, says Tim Colebatch. Because if you ignore the spin, the "WorkChoices" are in fact choices that workers already have under existing law. Aside from some minor exceptions, these reforms change the rules "in one direction only," removing rights, protections and bargaining power from 7 or 8 million Australian workers and handing them over to employers. One could see a case for this legislation if wage discipline had broken down and Australia was facing an inflation crisis -- but Australia is not in immediate peril. The problem is that "a cult has built up around Howard that treats him as infallible." When he is wrong, supporters don't tell him. But make no mistake, says Colebatch. What Howard is proposing is "the kind of change that costs governments elections, and flings parties into the wilderness." Australians will judge these reforms by what happens to them and their family in the workplace." This affects people's rights, "their ability to make ends meet, and their sense of fairness and satisfaction."

I agree with Senator Kerrie Nettle of the Greens that the draft ant-terrorsim legislation should not become law in a democratic society. She said (14 Oct)

Draft anti-terrorism legislation made public today confirmed the worst fears of the community. This legislation is anti-democratic and attacks our fundamental freedoms. Such legislation should not be introduced in a democracy like Australia. The proposals for preventative detention and control orders undermine the fundamental legal tenet that people are innocent until proven guilty. Under this legislation Australians will be able to be held under house arrest for up to 12 months. The legislation also allows bans on people from communicating with each other, attending their workplace and using telephones or the internet. Such draconian measures have no place in Australian society. Federal Police will be able to hold people for 48 hours on the basis of a suspicion of a terrorist risk, and up to seven days once States enact enabling legislation. State and Territory Labor Governments need to reconsider their support for this legislation. It should not be passed. Human rights should not be trampled on in this manner.

With many Australians, I am concerned and angry at the arbitrary secret detention, compulsory questioning, shoot-to-kill provisions and denial of civil rights and liberties that the Federal Government is considering for new anti-terrorism laws. The Howard government cannot enact a comprehensive regime of its own form of terror without the cooperation of the state and territory governments. But most have been strangely acquiescent--after all, to do otherwise would be tough politically.

But Jon Stanhope, Chief Minister of our small Australian Capital Territory, has continually raised questions and now has made public the draft bill that was supposed to have been confidential. This happened only only a day after the Federal Government had used its numbers in the Senate to limit its proposed inquiry into the legislation to a few days. The pre-emptive release of the draft bill at least gives time for longer informal public debate.

Angrily responding to the high-handed way that the Government is dealing with Parliament, Greens Senator Bob Brown said (14 Oct.)

The Prime Minister's latest laws on terrorism were withheld from parliament this week to avoid one month's scrutiny by a senate committee. When Defence Minister Robert Hill moved yesterday for a senate committee which must report by 8 November but not sit in October, the bills were in his back pocket. The government set out to cheat democracy. The Australian public's established fear of a terrorist ambush is being complicated by its different fear of the government's assaults on democracy. The Prime Minister will continue to erode this nation's time-honoured civil and human rights while ever he is in office.

Many Canberra people--a left-leaning lot, generally--will praise Jon Stanhope for his actions, including me. Today's Canberra Times (17 Oct) said "Jon Stanhope acts for free speech"

ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope has done a politically dangerous thing in making public draft legislation supplied to him by the Commonwealth, but he is guilty of no impropriety, and has indeed done the public a service. A service the greater because the Federal Government is engaged in a strategy to severely limit discussion, debate and time for analysis of the legislation, involving the most draconian shift in ordinary balances of human rights since 1939, and, arguably since Australia became a nation in 1901. And all the more so since the Federal Government's reaction to concern or criticism of the legislation consists mostly of saying "trust me", and because most of the Labor state leaders have abdicated any concern about the human rights balances lest they be smeared, as, on the Prime Minister's form, they would be (and Jon Stanhope will be) as "soft on terrorism".

Stanhope risks his "discourtesy" being somehow characterised as giving aid and comfort, or perhaps advance warning, to the terrorist community, or akin to the premature publication of sensitive commercial information or negotiations in process. Such analogies are false. The late working draft of a public law could only be improved by public discussion. But in practice, the Government may use it as an excuse to deprive Mr Stanhope, and thus the public, with other information or details of its plans.

The most worrying aspect of the new draft involves efforts to "update" old sedition laws. Such laws--that protect the state and groups within it from violent attack--are not, of themselves, objectionable, even if they have not been needed for more than 50 years. But they must carefully balance rights to freedom of speech, of freedom of assembly, and of a right to hold, even to propagate, views deeply hostile to a status quo, provided that one takes no active role in putting one's views into effect. In the context of the terror scare, for example, there is, or ought to be, no crime in being sympathetic to Islamist causes, rejecting Western civilisation, or believing that Western military intervention in Muslim countries is foolish or wrong. Holding such views may make you a legitimate person of interest to the security authorities--so that they can reassure themselves that you are not doing anything representing a basic violence to our system, our country, our laws or our men and women engaged in carrying out our Government's will--but should not, of itself, be illegal. Nor indeed should mere demonstration, perhaps even involving loud words or minor disorder, go into the sedition zone and be regarded as unlawfully confronting our system. Our system has, and was designed to have, broad shoulders and considerable scope for political dissent.

The draft makes passing reference to the human rights counter--balances, but, rather than putting them to the fore, makes them matters of defence. Assumption has shifted both towards a prima facie illegality of "disloyal" conduct, and to the serious risk of criminalisation of ideas and thoughts. And it overlooks the very real difference between public dissent and secret and unlawful conspiracy: it is, for example, very easy to imagine that anti-Vietnam or anti-Springbok protesters, those who protested in the streets for Croatian nationalism in the 1960s, or East Timorese nationalism in the 1980s and 1990s would have fallen within the ambit of this law.

Even assuming--with little real evidence advanced--that the actual danger from terrorists and their sympathisers is now so great as to justify detention without trial, movement laws, and compulsory questioning, it is clear that the regime of checks and balances on political abuse of the powers is quite unsatisfactory.

[. . .] And those who ought to be fearful should be anyone who has ever entertained an unpopular view, even one straight out of Western liberal tradition.

Cartoon: Canberra Times 17 Oct 2005.

From *Christopher and Annie (and now me) comes this:

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Fasting, almsgiving, and prayer have a long foundation in the Christian tradition stemming from our Jewish matrix. This triple counsel calls us to share signs of tangible grace with one another, reminding each of us to live in such a way that our very lives declare "God is gracious and bountiful, generous and merciful."

Our holiness is found in loving our neighbor as ourselves. Many saints past knew this. Fasting was not simply a matter of individual piety, but a matter of personal responsibility to sisters and brothers with whom we are intertwined. And so we find St. Catherine of Sienna fasting and giving her meals away to the hungry. We find Desert Elders selling their woven wares to purchase food not for themselves, but for those without sustenance.

In the last few weeks, a series of natural disasters have ravaged the earth, striking brothers and sisters far and near. Some leaders within the Christian community have taken this as a sign of God's wrath, singling out one or another sort and condition of human being for blame. Others are speaking up about taking care of our own first.

Rather than seeking to lay blame, to raise dividing walls for deciding who is our neighbor, or to get caught up in speculation about the end of days, we choose to discern in the signs of the times, that now is always the time for solidarity with those who are suffering. The signs of the times call us to live graciously as our Heavenly Father is gracious toward us.

To this end, we pledge to be signs of God's generosity through fasting, prayer, and almsgiving in solidarity in a particular way with our brothers and sisters: To begin each day with the Lord's Prayer, remembering that the Bread of Heaven at Holy Eucharist is intricately tied to striving so that all shall have daily bread; to abstain from a meal or simplify our eating habits each day; and to give the cost of this meal or savings from simplified eating to Episcopal Relief and Development) or equivalent relief organizations (in Australia, Anglicord--Anglicans Cooperating in Overseas Relief and Development) for the work of disaster relief amongst our sisters and brothers both far and near.

At a time when our Communion is impaired by conflict and many search far and wide for signs of God's tangible grace, we invite you to join us in the work of Christ, living into our Baptismal Covenant as we seek to serve Christ in all peoples, loving our neighbor as ourselves.

lux Christi vobis,
*Christopher and Annie

As a sign of your solidarity, consider cutting and pasting the letter above into a post to publish on your blog as an explanation, and place one of these icons on your sidebar, and consider providing a direct link to Anglicord or the equivalent Anglican relief organization from your province in the Communion. If you wish, you may circulate this letter beyond the blogosphere in your parish, diocesan office, wherever you feel the Spirit is calling you to point us again toward Christ, our compass and our guide.

"If there's no solution, there's no problem." - James Kim

Cricket, especially test cricket, the only sport that regularly interests me as a spectator/TV watcher/radio listener, though I did enjoy the football World Cup. Australia's football seasons (AFL and NFL) are ended and this summer's international cricket matches are beginning.

Australia's loss to England in the "Ashes" series in September caused much pessimism about the future of Australian cricket. But there was great praise for the quality of the games and the sportsmanship of both sides. Commentary in the British press extended even to a religious paper, The Tablet which, in its 17 September issue, described the series as a "Masterclass in sportsmanship", comparing cricket and cricketers favourably with the state of football and the behaviour of some highly paid fottballers.

Given the British habit of inventing games and sports for others to beat them at -- cricket, rugby, soccer, golf, to name but a few -- [tennis? badminton?] England's hard-won triumph in the Ashes series against Australia looked out of character. But that is to misread the English. They can rise gloriously to the occasion, on the battlefield as well as on the playing field, but only when they care enough and usually after things have started badly. England began the recently concluded series of Test matches against the team universally regarded as the best in the world by letting themselves be thrashed. Since then they have won two and drawn two, and even in the latter cases they out-played the Australians. Much eulogising about cricket and the national character has occupied the newspapers and television channels since, and large crowds turned out just to glimpse their heroes. In a welcome touch not before seen in English cricket, the England women's cricket side, who also have just beaten the Australian women after a similar long drought of victories, were given equal prominence in the festivities.

The nation's focus lasted for game after game, not least because England's tactics were to be as aggressive as the Australians traditionally are. Aggression brings excitement: in this case it meant almost unbearable tension, not least on the final day of the final game.

English cricketers, asked to say how they felt, repeatedly preferred to praise their team colleagues and their Australian rivals than to bask in personal glory. On the field, an exemplary degree of courtesy and care towards their opponents was manifested by both sides. These cricketers did not dispute the umpires' decisions, nor did they play-act to trick them into unfair verdicts. Even the highly partisan English crowd made clear how much it admired the amazing cricketing skills of the visitors. That was sportsmanship at its best.

The Tablet even finds a moral dimension to the story.

The "spirit of cricket" may defy definition, but it has a high moral content. The discipline it demands is primarily internal. Though cricket has famously reversed the decline in public interest the game was suffering from,

[in England; it has long been the most popular game in Australia]

success brings its own dangers. While it would do football immense good to study and emulate English cricket, it would be a wise cautionary move for English cricket to study the other national game -- and be warned.

As the world's best team, Australia was challenged to play a 'best of the rest' international side, which it thrashed 3-0 in a series of one day games ending yesterday. Now for a five day test match.

The length of a cricket game (one to five days) makes it impossible to watch or listen to all of it on an ordinary work day. But cricket on the radio is a popular national institution!

A survey of social attitudes by the Queensland University of Technology says that Australia's defence force is our most trusted institution; 82% of Australians had confidence in the defence forces, up from 68% in 1995.

The survey covered 12 categories of institution, including police, universities, parliament, the public services and the churches. Only 35% of Australians expressed confidence in the churches, down from 43% in 1995.

"There has been a lot of negative publicity surrounding the church, particularly on the inappropriate behaviour of members of the clergy and this must have eroded a lot of confidence," Professor Clive Bean said.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic church does not seem to be doing much to improve the situation. As neither a Roman Catholic nor an American, I have been reluctant to refer to the inquisition now beginning in the American seminaries, but this piece that Topmost Apple found in the Boston Globe has a wider international application and echoes my thoughts on the matter. Small wonder Australians are losing their trust in the churches (and of course we Anglicans aren't blame free either!)

"A Catholic moment of truth" by James Carroll Boston Globe (3 Oct. 2005).

ROME. To be a A Roman Catholic in Rome this week is to remember, among so much else, the way in which leaders of this church have squandered their moral authority in recent years.

In 1968, it was the disastrous anti-birth control encyclical "Humanae Vitae," which opened a gulf between the hierarchy and the laity and which lately has the church on the wrong side of the global fight against HIV/AIDS. The coterie of American bishops chosen by Pope John Paul II failed their greatest test by protecting abusive priests instead of the children who were their victims. Now, church authority stands on the edge of yet another act of moral self-mutilation with a coming ''instruction" banning homosexuals from seminaries. Such a policy threatens to turn an imminent program of "apostolic visitations" of US seminaries, which overtly targets "heresy," into a full blown sexual witch hunt.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have had direct and indirect contact with well-connected Catholics here -- hardly a hotbed of liberalism -- and the coming instruction is regarded as a catastrophe in the making. With boards of Vatican-appointed investigators poised to swoop down on American schools in which new priests are trained, interrogations of candidates and loyalty tests for teachers already betray a nostalgia for the bygone era of thought-control and snitching. A formally licensed obsession with homosexuality will push the investigation into a realm, as one senior priest put it to me, more of Joseph Stalin than Jesus Christ.

Instead of asking hard questions about the root causes of the priestly sex abuse scandal -- facing problems of the clerical culture itself, including celibacy, authoritarianism, discrimination against women, the immaturity of church teachings on sexuality -- Rome is preparing to scapegoat homosexuals. The idea is astoundingly foolish, based on fantasies of sexual deviance. Supposedly aimed at seminarians, the new discipline is an attack on the priesthood itself, especially on those openly gay men who have proven themselves as faithful servants of the church. It is an invitation for such men to return to the closet, a retreat into psychological imprisonment. Such demonizing of homosexuals is profoundly unjust.

But the policy, combined with the investigation's threat against all nonconformity, infantilizes every present or would-be member of the American Catholic clergy. During the abuse crisis, the ineptness of bishops brought stern challenges from the middle ranks of clergy. Are bishops now attempting, with this ruthless discipline, to eliminate the capacity for independent moral thought that made those challenges not only possible but necessary? [ . . . ]

Will it work? The people I talk to here think not. There are gay bishops in the church, some of whom will feel forced to support the new scapegoating. What happens when, in return for their hypocrisy, they are "outed"? Theologians, whose work of rational inquiry requires a free play of the mind, will reject the strictures of a heresy hunt. Gay priests will refuse to be closeted again, and their straight brothers will not participate in the denigration. Religious orders will defend their members. When the grand inquisitors arrive at seminaries, candidates for the priesthood who have any self-respect will simply walk away. The Catholic people will not allow their good priests to be insulted further.

Can the church be spared this disaster? As of now, the power to avert it rests with one man. The new policy has not been formally promulgated. Pope Benedict XVI could call it off. Whether that is likely to occur is not the point. The world has been awaiting the revelation of his capacity for moral leadership. It is here.

I'm at a loss to describe, let alone understand, the senselessness of the bombings in Bali on Saturday. These pictures show the place where two of the bombs exploded. Jimbaran beach is a simple place, a fishing village now crowded with fish cafés on the beach; a great place to idle away a peaceful evening with some good food, a few beers, and a view of the sunset, often to the entertainment of skilful buskers. These are not my pictures -- I took them from the web (with apologies) -- but they could have been mine, as James and I enjoyed an evening there just a few years ago.

Yes, more people die in Iraq almost weekly and thousands more have died in the war of terror. But why do the bombers kill and injure local people by the score (and only a few tourists) at a pleasant beachside eating place that should not offend anyone? Is it because the Balinese are mainly non-Muslim and, to a fundamentalist, more pagan than the tourists they entertain?

I'm picking up on a test from *Christopher's site again. According to The Politics Test on OkCupid, I am a Social Moderate (56% permissive), and an Economic Liberal (21% permissive). I am allegedly best described as a "Democrat".

In Australian terms, this would be similar to membership of the right-wing faction of the Australian Labor Party (which we would mark as 'red', and the conservatives as 'blue'). I'm actually a member of the Australian Greens, who are more socially liberal, and economically left-leaning. My result on this test is similar to my result from The Political Compass, which I prefer.

Paul at Prodigal Kiwi writes about an article by Patrick W. Collins, "From illusions towards truth: Thomas Merton's 'true self' and gay spirituality." The Way, Jul 2005, pp. 71-84.

Collins' essay draws attention to something critically important to our faith-development, formation, and growth as a human being and as a Jesus-follower -- the nurture and growth of our 'true selves' -- to be at home with whom we were created to be. I think something of St. Augustine's sense that we are all "restless until we find our rest in God" has something to do with our not-at-homeness, our not being at home with how we are known and loved by God.

Thomas Merton: ". . . I must . . . know myself, and know both the good and the evil that are in me. It will not do to know only one and not the other: only the good, or only the evil. I must . . . be able to live the life God has given me, living it fully and fruitfully, and making good use even of the evil that is in it . . . To live well myself is my first and essential contribution to the well-being of all [humanity] . . . To live well myself means for me to know and appreciate something of the secret, the mystery in myself: that which is incommunicatable, which is at once myself and not myself, at once in me and above me . . ."

Collins notes that we are all in search of our unique, God-created identities . . . ours is an 'evolving humanity'. . . Full spiritual maturation is unattainable from a closeted environment . . . The process of 'coming out' relates to what Merton called the journey from the false self toward the True Self within each person . . . We need, on that journey to learn to stop looking primarily outside of ourselves to find our true identity and the truth of who we each uniquely are. Being and identity are discovered on the difficult but necessary interior journey. Many never make that journey; many remain their whole lives in the fragile, unsettled position of having their identity defined for them by what they do and how others see them; their spiritual maturing and growth remains stunted; their life is always other that life God invites them to live freely, fully and fruitfully.

Merton, as highlighted and utilised in Collins essay, is a helpful guide to a growing humanity, whether you're gay or heterosexual. (Prodigal Kiwi's emphases)

Recently, I outed myself to my regional church community. But it has taken too long to get to be a bit confident about my 'True Self' in the way that Collins, following Merton, describes.

Work, years ago, with the AIDS Action Council of the ACT, Inc was a wonderful early step. When I arrived in Canberra in 1986, as well as growing my career and church life, I wanted to do some kind of community work, and ended up with the local AIDS Council. This was helped my 'coming out', as for the first time I met and worked with other gay and lesbian people on a common project. I did quite a lot of quasi-legal and other work, and was on the Board for a few years. But I haven't had the time to do much recently. A few days ago, as I do every year, I attended the Annual General Meeting and was astonished to be awarded a life membership - Fabulous memberships they're called!

In this unflattering picture, taken at the AGM, I'm posing with Richard Allen (centre), recipient of the 2005 President's Award and the incoming 2005-06 President, John Guppy (right).

Australia has done well in the struggle against AIDS and Canberra's small local AIDS Council has done some pioneering work. But, worryingly, the rate of infections is again increasing slowly. The Australian Government has at last, belatedly released the Fifth National HIV/AIDS strategy, 2005-08. It's a well-written document, but makes little commitment to funds or resources.

Australia can be proud of its network of HIV/AIDS primary care providers, its specialist referral centres, its world-class research, its innovative health promotion and education and its active and engaged community sector. Australia has also made HIV/AIDS treatments available that have significantly increased the survival rates of people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). These things did not appear by accident but through the deliberate planning that followed the development of a national strategy for action.

The job is not over--HIV/AIDS has not, and will not disappear from Australia while the HIV epidemic continues. Rises in new HIV infections in recent years have shown the need for a revitalised approach to HIV/AIDS in Australia by adapting to the changing epidemiological and social features of the epidemic. In formulating this Strategy the following issues have been of major importance:

• From the low levels achieved in the late 1990s, the number of new HIV diagnoses has shown increases throughout Australia, still principally in gay and other homosexually active men and more recently among the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population. Rates of sexually transmissible infections (STIs) in gay and other homosexually active men have shown marked increases in the past five years.
• Individuals who were born overseas are overrepresented in new HIV diagnoses.
• Although another blood borne virus, hepatitis C, is endemic in those who inject drugs, that population has avoided a significant HIV/AIDS epidemic. This may be explained by the fact that needle and syringe programs (NSPs) were introduced before HIV/AIDS became endemic in this population of injecting drug users. Should the emphasis on harm reduction and peer education diminish, there remains potential for HIV/AIDS to spread among injecting drug users.
• The lifespan of individuals infected with HIV/AIDS has increased since the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy in the mid 1990s. This has led to a change in the focus of HIV/AIDS management from acute intervention for opportunistic infections to chronic management of therapy related side effects and non-infectious complications of HIV/AIDS (such as lymphoma, metabolic disturbances and neuropsychiatric disturbance).

-- National HIV/AIDS Strategy: revitalising Australia's response 2005-2008. Introduction p.1.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra led by Richard Tognetti, with Steven Osborne, pianist, last night played Mozart's Adagio and Fugue K.546, and Piano Concerto No. 12 in A, K.414. In the second half of the concert we had an exciting rendition of Britten's Young Apollo for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, Op.16 (1939) and his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937). The Bridge variations brought the first attention to Britten as a composer of substance and are described by the Musical Times in its Britten obituary as "a work of breathtaking technique, brilliance and wit, where he can be heard to be stretching his musical muscles and, moreover, giving new hints of expressive power."

The ACO always plays well, Steven Osborne is very accomplished, and Mozart is simply . . . Mozart. But I had heard little Britten before, other than snippets of his operas, an omission which I must repair. Both works were most interesting and powerful.

But yet again, the concert was quite short -- just 70 minutes. There is but one more concert in this year's ACO season and, sadly, James and I will not enjoy next year's season. At $55 per person for each concert of just over an hour, they're a bit pricey and we've decided to spend our music dollars elsewhere.

For example, at last night's concert, I was delighted to buy Angela Hewitt's superb 2-volume recording with the ACO of the complete Bach keyboard concertos (Hyperion CDA67307 and CDA67308), the two of which cost us rather less than one concert seat. These recordings complete Hewitt's project to record the complete Bach keyboard works.

---

P.S. It's amusing to compare one's conclusions with thos of the critics. The Age said (26 Sep)

Pre-interval was all-Mozart for which the ACO strings produced another re-examination of a staple, the Adagio and Fugue K. 546. Plenty of detached bowing, sharply etched interplay and a dynamic vehemence in asserting the fugal entries turned this sometimes laborious work into an exciting construct.

But I still found it dull.

Britten's variations . . . showed off the ACO's virtuosity as an ensemble, each divided line articulated truly and making a decided impact. This score is well-tailored to the Sydney-based ensemble, thanks to its variety in mood, technical demands and only a few stretches of rumination.

Agreed.

British pianist Steven Osborne worked with impeccable taste through the Mozart Concerto No. 12 in A. Here was Mozart straight, without tarted-up phrasing or interpolated random ornaments. The results underlined the concerto's charm and distinctive jauntiness, notably in the final happy Rondeau.

Osborne also took the flashy solo in Britten's Young Apollo , suppressed by the composer in his lifetime for obvious reasons.

Oh? And what were they?

The Australian, reviuewing the Canberra concert, agreed with me that Mozart's Adagio and Fugue K456, arranged by him for strings

. . . made a somewhat sombre opening to this concert. Richard Tognetti directed each subject entry clearly and, although Canberra's Llewellyn Hall tended to swallow the countersubjects (where the real compositional interest lies), there was true feeling in the grave closing bars.

Mozart admitted that his Piano Concerto No.12, K414, was not too difficult, and in his cadenzas he was content with a couple of modulations and a brilliant arpeggio or two. Pianist Steven Osborne, making his Australian debut on this tour, had little opportunity to show off in this piece, but he compensated with a slow movement of unfussy clarity and singing beauty.

The concert's second half presented a twentysomething Benjamin Britten, pre-opera and pre-reputation. Young Apollo allowed Osborne to reveal a more formidable side to his technique; the second violins in particular warmed to the task of balancing the broad, burnished sound of the piano with a rich tone.

Critics, musicologists and Britten have all worried over Young Apollo's flash and its finger-blurring piano part that threatens to become merely technical. Audiences couldn't care less and this one loved it.

The Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Britten's tribute to his composition teacher, afforded the pleasant view of the ACO stretched to its considerable limits. The piece includes a solemn Adagio, a funeral march and an arduous Moto perpetuo, but the most staid concert audience couldn't fail to see the humour in an Aria italiana, with second violins, violas and cellos strumming away like a street band.

By evening's end, the subtle overall arch of the concert had emerged.

Too subtle for me, I'm afraid!

A solo quartet appeared briefly from within the larger ensemble in Mozart's opening fugue and again in Britten's closing set of variations; the fugue that opened the concert was balanced by Britten's fugue finale. Piano in the middle, strings on either side: a program as neatly proportioned as a Mozart movement.

Err . . . another internet test, discovered thanks to *Christopher's "Friday Test" post. My results are rather as I expected and rather less brilliant than *Christopher's! I try hard to be empathetic, but often simply can't do it. I need to ask people to tell me how they feel, and then I try (usually successfully) to be sympathetic, caring, etc., etc. On the other hand, I enjoy being aware of what's going on in science and my natural surroundings. I was a science librarian for a long time, was good at it and enjoyed it. (The results layout needed editing to conform to XHTML)

Much More Scientific: You have 77% scientific intuition and 55% emotional intuition.

The graph on the right represents your place in Intuition 2-Space. As you can see, you scored about average on emotional intuition and well above average on scientific intuition. Keep in mind that very few people score high on both! In effect, you can compare your two intuition scores with each other to learn what kind of intuition you're best at. Your scientific intuition is stronger than your emotional intuition.

Your Emotional Intuition score is a measure of how well you understand people, especially their unspoken needs and sympathies. A high score usually indicates social grace and persuasiveness. A low score usually means you're good at Quake. [Absolutely not -- computers are work, not play. I think they refer to this.]

Your Scientific Intuition score tells you how in tune you are with the world around you; how well you understand your physical and intellectual environment. People with high scores here are apt to succeed in business and, of course, the sciences.

This test tracked 2 variables; how you compared to other people your age and gender:

	You scored higher than 86% on Scientific
	You scored higher than 19% on Interpersonal

(The 2-Variable Intuition Test written by Jason Bateman.)

In yet another beat up article about Anglican divisions, Reuters (20 Sep) quotes the Church Times editor to say that "Anglicans face spectre of schism over gay rights." I think we knew that.

"That is why Rowan Williams is looking so haggard nowadays," Church Times editor Paul Handley said on Tuesday as the spiritual leader of 77 million Anglicans worldwide fought to keep the church united. [. . .]

"The longer this sort of rhetoric goes on, the less people will make the effort to stay together with people they disagree with," Handley told Reuters. "I can't see them wanting to leave each other alone." [. . .]

"It looks as if we are heading in the direction of schism," said Rod Thomas, spokesman for Reform, an evangelical movement opposed to the ordination of women and gay priests.

"Rowan Williams is part of the problem and not the solution," he told Reuters. [. . .]

"Mutual respect and courtesy is one of the things that holds this vague organisation together and that is in short supply," Handley said.

After the latest moves by Nigeria, liberals were reluctant to pitch into the increasingly bitter war of words.

The archbishop [of Canterbury]'s office declined comment.

And, so on, and so on. If we are going to split, should we not just get on with it as courteously as possible and stop this useless blather? Anything to stop the endless flow of meaningless words about who may live with whom and what bits of anatomy may be found attached to a priest. Never was so much said by so many (including me) about so little. Yes, I know its supposed to be about serious questions concerning the interpretation, use and authority of scripture. So why can't the Communion talk about those questions?

OK, so this is just an rant. It would be easy to divide the international Communion, which seems to me to be of little consequence. But partitioning of a national church, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, would be horrendous. The very best thing to do would be be to talk much less, to be silent, listen, and allow the Holy Spirit to bring the wisdom and knowledge of the truth that Christ promised.

Catholic World News reports (10 Sep) that Pope Benedict XVI has approved a new Vatican instruction that that homosexual men should not be admitted to seminaries even if they are celibate, "because their condition suggests a serious personality disorder which detracts from their ability to serve as ministers." Prepared in response to a request by Pope John Paul II as long ago as 1994, it is expected to be issued in late October by the Congregation for Catholic Education. CWS notes that a similar policy approved by Pope John XXIII remains in effect but has been widely ignored. CWS says that:

The pending release of the Instruction, in the face of certain criticism from liberal forces in America and Western Europe, demonstrates the determination of the Vatican to improve the quality of priestly ministry, and to protect the Church from some of the scandals that have recently shaken the Catholic community--and no doubt deterred many men from entering priestly training.

There has been much comment on this as well as an official inspection of 229 Catholic seminaries in the USA to look for 'evidence' of homosexuality and for proper instruction on celibacy (among other things).

Damien sets out the arguments in response very well. I can't add anything except to agree with a sad and exasperated, "Sigh."

In an audience on 29 Jan 2003 Pope John Paul II, speaking from Wisdom 9:1-6,9-11, said that:

The Canticle found in the ninth chapter of the Book of Wisdom reminds us that true wisdom comes from God. This wisdom is not just knowledge, or talent, or skill, but rather is a sharing in the mind of God himself. In fact, King Solomon asks the Lord to send forth the gift of wisdom so that he may learn what is pleasing to God.

Without this wisdom we amount to nothing. But with it we are guided to holiness and righteousness. It allows us to understand history, helping us to look beyond mere appearances and to appreciate the deepest meaning of life. With Solomon let us beg the Lord for his gift of wisdom, to enlighten our hearts and minds in the ways that are pleasing to him.

Amen. It's a theological puzzle that a church that so earnestly seeks God's wisdom makes such silly decisions.

Chusok, "autumn evening", is a Korean harvest festival on the 15th day of the eighth lunar month. In Korea this year, the Chusok holidays extended over three days, Saturday 17th to Monday 19th September.

Chusok is believed to have originated during the ancient Shilla Kingdom, when a month-long weaving festival was held. For the contest, the king divided the city into teams and appointed princesses to lead them. The king announced the winner on the day of the eighth full moon and the losing team had to provide food, drink, and entertainment.

Early on the Chusok morning, Koreans traditionally offer the first fruits of the harvest to their ancestors as a thanksgiving for good fortune. Some Christians are uncomfortable with 'worshiping' ancestors and prefer to honour them with prayers and hymns rather than bowing or offering them foods. Chusok is a harvest moon festival, but it's also a thanksgiving day and one of the most important Korean festivals, celebrated by farmers and city dwellers alike, with much fun, feasting and drinking.

Songp'yon, a crescent-shaped rice cake, is a traditional food for Chusok. Traditional gender roles persist. Women spend days cooking and preparing for the Chusok ceremony and family gathering, while men relax and enjoy the festivities.

Chusok celebrates ancient traditions but is also being changed by modern life, especially as massive transport congestion makes it hard for people in the large cities to return home for a family gathering -- millions of people travel to visit families and ancestral graves during the three-day holiday and most people honour and enjoy the time of thanksgiving in some way.

Chusok, a time of family gathering, reminds us of the sad the division of families between North and South ever since the Korean War. It has been over fifty years since many people have had any contact with their loved ones. Some South Koreans may be thankful that North Korea has said it will abandon its nuclear ambitions. But most will rightly be sceptical.

Here, in far-off Australia, James and I give thanks for our families, our peaceful home, and the abundance of good things we enjoy.

The theme of the Canberra and Goulburn Synod last weekend was Living the mission. A highlight was the Bishop's annual presidential address. Our Bishop, the Rt Revd George Browning, always speaks interestingly and challengingly. I want to mention what he said about gay and lesbian people, but I must give some context first. The Bishop began,

Our theme is Living the Mission! [. . .] We are moving to a networking of shared enthusiasms for the Gospel of Life: may the Wind of the Spirit link us together in faithfulness to our common mission.[. . .]

Imagine God really has only one idea, a very large idea, an all-consuming idea; but never the less, one idea. In the Old Testament this idea is called Sabbath, or Shalom while in the New Testament it is called the Kingdom of God. I want to suggest the human vocation is to run with the idea of God -- Misseo Dei! Nothing can be more exciting, more all consuming, or more important.

I also want to suggest that this idea, the understanding of it and the living of it, is essential not just for eternal salvation, but also for the sustainability and wellbeing of life on this planet. [. . .] The idea of God to which we are committed knows no boundary and has no restricted sphere of interest.

If we run across folk who seem to be fanatical, narrow, or condemnatory, or who use faith as a weapon of power, it is immediately clear that these folk have lost sight of the single idea of God and are either reacting out of their human desperation, or have developed an ideology which while claiming its origins in the eternal story of faith, has never the less perverted it, making a monster out of it, denying the very sources of life that Jesus lived and proclaimed.

It is the contention of all religions that God's idea(s) are knowable; it is the contention of the Christian faith that God's idea is a choice for life. [. . . ] Living the mission is simply to place ourselves within the prevailing wind of God that we might run on the energy of God rather than our own.

To explain what Living the Mission might look like for us, Bishop Browning then took three headings: money and possessions; sex; and power. In talking about sex and gender, he rejoiced in the growing role of women in leadership and service within Canberra and Goulburn. This is part what he said about sexuality:

There can be few aspects of human life that are more clearly creative than our sexuality, but few that are more in need of redemption. Gender, for the vast majority of us, is a relatively uncomplicated matter, it is essentially about difference. However, we are increasingly aware that for a significant minority it is not simple at all. [. . .] The attraction that many feel for intimacy with someone of the same gender is a complicated mix of the biological and the cultural. [. . .]

[I]t is true that Christianity has appeared to focus more on the "dirtiness" of sexuality rather than its beauty. There is absolutely no doubt that the emphasis should be the other way around. We should emphasise the wonderful, life-giving beauty of human sexuality as a gift from God for human fulfilment.

[. . .] The homosexual debate continues to have the power to divide our Church. [. . .] In Australia there is universal loyalty to the Lambeth decision that no practicing homosexual will be ordained and that same sex partnerships are not to be addressed with the same language as a heterosexual marriage.

And then came the words that so affected me:

As I look down on the floor of Synod I know that some of the laymen and women present are gay or lesbian [. . .]. I want to sincerely say how glad I am that you are here and I hope you feel safe and welcome. As you Live the Mission the one thing expected of you is expected of us all, namely that we not enter a relationship in which there is an inappropriate balance of power and that we are faithful to the relationships we are in.

I recognise that as a relatively small minority in our midst, you suffer most pain in the discussions of the Church. I want to acknowledge this and recognise the inequity of it for you.

By this time I was in tears.

As debate continues, I do not believe it is possible for us to have a common mind, in this Synod, or in any other convocation of Church life. This is partly because we are more comfortable entering debate and relying upon well rehearsed, and for us, authoritative scripture, than we are entering the life and story of those so different to ourselves. This is a painful reality for us to live with. There will be a few in this Synod who believe that any form of homosexual activity is like a sickness that, under God, can be cured. Many will simply believe the matter is irrelevant. Most will be somewhere between. I believe that to live the Mission of God we must have communities in which all feel safe and expect that in them respect is offered to all across the divide of opinion. Whatever our standpoint, we must speak and act with the intention of embracing the Sabbath rest.

A little later, there was time for responses to the Bishop's address. I said to the Synod that if the Bishop has the courage to say to gay and lesbian members that we are welcome, then I must have the courage to publicly say,"Thank you." I was humbled but happy that many members applauded loudly. (Another member, a lesbian, said a similar thing and was applauded too.) Quite a number of people shook my hand.

Later that day, Synod members voted in various elections and I was chosen to be one of our five lay delegates to the 241-member General Synod of the Anglican Church of Australia, our national governing body. I am glad that they were able to do this after hearing my public acknowledgement of the Bishop's welcome of gay and lesbian people.

P.S. To give a complete account what Bishop Browning's views, I should mention that he also said,

A summary of my position in relation to the Anglican Communion is that on the one hand I not only accept, but promote, the Lambeth resolution on the non-ordination of practicing homosexuals, for while I accept that some believe it to be unjust, to do otherwise is to present a massive stumbling block to the community of faith and to vote for the possible end of our Communion. On the other hand I do not accept the fairly aggressive stance being taken by some Primates and Church leaders against the Church in the USA and Canada. If one is to lay strong weight upon biblical injunctions, those that relate to wealth and money are clearer and less ambiguous than the ones dealing with gender, and yet inequity and justice is treated by some of the same leaders with mere lip service. I strongly resist the notion that in the mission of the Church, matters of personal piety and morality are some how of a higher priority or status than matters of public justice and equity. Within the story of God both have equal importance.

No entries for a few days, as I'm off to Goulburn to attend the first three-day session of the 42nd Synod of the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn. The cathedral of the Diocese, St Saviour's, is in Goulburn and was built before the now much larger city of Canberra, 100km to the south, was even contemplated. Its Forster and Andrews pipe organ (1884) has been recently restored and sounds wonderful.

The word 'synod' comes from a Greek preposition meaning 'together'. Synodical government of the Anglican church in Australia began with the growing independence of the Church in the Australian colonies and election of bishops rather than their appointment by the Crown. The first synod of the then Diocese of Goulburn was held in 1866. Our Synod has about 300 members. The Diocese has about 60 parishes covering a large area, including most of south-east New South Wales, the eastern Riverina and the Australian Capital Territory.

Goulburn continues to face extreme difficulty because of drought. Its people have endured severe water restrictions. We wondered whether Synod might be held elsewhere. But Goulburn's civic leaders have urged us to come as a way of supporting the city.

One item of business will be 'Life Giving Justice' a statement that will put some detail into the mission objective of 'working for social and environmental justice'. 'Life Giving Justice' recognises that questions of justice are best served by partnerships led by people of vision and energy. Care for the environment and a determination to live well with the whole of God's creation are an important part of building networks of justice.

I always enjoy these gatherings, the worship, the conversation and the fellowship with people from across our region.

To help learn the bass chorus parts of Messiah I've been playing them over and over, while following from the score. My long time favourite recording is by Sir John Eliot Gardiner with his Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, and singers Marshall, Quirke, Robbin, Brett, Rolfe-Johnson and Hale.

Recently I bought a recording by The Cambridge Taverner Choir. Originally a full-price EMI, it has been reissued by Virgin Veritas at a bargain price. In a review for gfhandel.org, Handel musicologist David Vickers rates this recording at 9 out of 10.

They are quite different in sound, but equally splendid; precise, sharp, recorded with orginal instruments and with forces about the same as Handel would have used -- so much easier to learn from than a huge mushy choir and orchestra. Gardiner says in his notes,

Our approach has been to try to recapture not just the flavour but the musical syntax and style of Handel's own performances. The essential simplicity of his sound-world, as well as many of the imaginative pictorial and theatrical effects he calls into play, emerge quite naturally through the use of an orchestra of the same size and type that Handel himself used. The light yet penetrating sonority of Baroque instruments when played idiomatically, allow phrase lengths to emerge as clauses, with appropriate "commas," forming intelligible sentences, as opposed to the smoothed-out legato of their modern counterparts.

. . . It is crucial that all the singers as well as the players can identify with -- and thus convey -- the full range of moods encompassed by Handel. These vary from the open defiance of "Let us break their bonds" and the sceptical malevolence of "He trusted in God" to the chilling moment at the end of "All we like sheep" when man's mindless vacillation gives way to the collective realisation that it requires the redemption of Christ to set matters aright.

The delight in all of this lies in combining the agile adult voices with the transparency and expressive range of period instruments. Their combined technical virtuosity serves not as an end, but as a means of ridding Messiah of its Victorian, sanctimonious pomp. In this way the Handelian yoke is made easy and his burthen light.

Finely said; I hope my burthen will be light as I attempt to learn Handel's notes.

I'm not sure why the events in New Orleans have so captured my attention; bad as they are, the situation in Darfur and Niger is much, much worse, for example. Have we forgotten so easily? And maybe it's gauche of me to notice a small sidelight amid such tragedy and high drama. But anyway . . .

Reports such as this, mention that amid the aftermath of hurricane Katrina a small parade behind a tattered rainbow flag made its way up Bourbon Street on Sunday, celebrating Southern Decadence. It's normally a large event; at the same time last year, more than 110, 000 attended. The group of about two dozen people all said they lived in the largely gay French Quarter. They say they're not about to leave. The French Quarter, the oldest neighborhood in New Orleans, sits on higher ground than most of the city and escaped the worst of the flooding. But water entered most buildings and Katrina did much damage. There is no electricity or piped water and food is short. Some of the marchers were among the poorest people of the neighborhood -- the barbacks, clerks, part-time waiters and the unemployed who lived above the shops and clubs in the Quarter. The rainbow flag was taken from the front of one bar. It was ragged and worn but it had survived the hurricane. "It's New Orleans, man. We're going to celebrate." one marcher said.

Nathan at Here I Stand comments, "And you know what? For all of those who want to know where God is -- I don't know where he is today, but yesterday he was parading down the French Quarter."

Or, as Towleroad ponders, was the celebration simply disrespectful of the dead and injured and in appallingly bad taste and selfishness?

It reminds me of 2 Samuel chapter 6:

[King] David went down and brought up the ark of God from the house of Obed-Edom to the City of David with rejoicing. . . . David, wearing a linen ephod, danced before the Lord with all his might, while he and the entire house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets. As the ark of the Lord was entering the City of David, Michal daughter of Saul watched from a window. And when she saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord, she despised him in her heart. . . . When David returned home to bless his household, Michal daughter of Saul came out to meet him and said, "How the king of Israel has distinguished himself today, disrobing in the sight of the slave girls of his servants as any vulgar fellow would!" David said to Michal, "It was before the Lord, who chose me rather than your father or anyone from his house when he appointed me ruler over the Lord's people Israel--I will celebrate before the Lord. I will become even more undignified than this, and I will be humiliated in my own eyes. But by these slave girls you spoke of, I will be held in honor." And Michal daughter of Saul had no children to the day of her death.

The Mississippi Delta was shining Like a national guitar I am following the river Down the highway Through the cradle of the civil war I'm going to Graceland, Graceland . . . Poor boys and pilgrims with families And we are going to Graceland . . . But I've reason to believe We all will be received In Graceland . . . And I see losing love Is like a window in your heart Everybody sees you're blown apart Everbody feels the wind blow . . . And I may be obliged to defend Every love, every ending Or maybe there's no obligations now Maybe I've got a reason to believe We all will be received In Graceland.

I wonder if it makes sense to get angry against a disease? I am really upset today about cancer.

Almost all of my relatives who have died during my lifetime have been killed by cancer: my mother's mother Judith (top left), father's father Alexander (top centre), my father's sister Christina (top right) and their brother Donald (bottom right) -- as well as my favourite uncle, Geoff, whose funeral was a few weeks ago. My mother had cancer, though it was not the cause of her death. Another aunt is very seriously ill with cancer. All this is terribly ironic, for those in my family who have escaped cancer have had long lives.

Recently we learned that James' youngest sister, Mal Ja, has terminal cancer.

Yesterday I had news that my accomplished, quite young, and beautiful cousin, Julie, who was in remission from cancer, has suffered another outbreak and may die within two weeks. (She is pictured bottom left, with her family.) I wept bitter tears in church today.

---

cancer
- noun 1 a disease caused by an uncontrolled division of abnormal cells in a part of the body. 2 a malignant growth or tumour resulting from such a division of cells. 3 something evil or destructive that is hard to contain or eradicate. Origin Latin, 'crab or creeping ulcer', said to have been applied to tumours because the swollen veins around them resembled the limbs of a crab - Compact Oxford English Dictionary

Cancer is all too common in Australia and a major national health problem. The Cancer Council of Australia says that one in three Australian men and one in four women will be directly affected by cancer before the age of 75. Excluding non-melanoma skin cancers, more than 88,000 new cancer cases are diagnosed, and there are over 36,000 deaths due to cancer, each year. The most common cancer (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) is colorectal or bowel cancer, followed by cancers of the breast and prostate, melanoma and lung cancer. There are more than 100 different types of cancer, but these five most common types account for 60% of all cases. In men in Australia, the most common cancers are (in order) prostate, colorectal, and lung cancers and melanoma. The most common cancer in women is breast cancer, followed by colorectal cancer, melanoma and lung cancer.

Some extracts from Don Maclean's American Pie

How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they'd be happy for a while.
. . .
Did you write the book of love,
And do you have faith in God above,
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock 'n roll,
Can music save your mortal soul,
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
. . .
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage.
No angel born in hell
Could break that satan's spell.
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
. . .
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
. . .
And they were singing,
"bye-bye, miss american pie."
Drove my chevy to the levee,
But the levee was [wern't!] dry.
And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye
Singin', "this'll be the day that I die.
"this'll be the day that I die."

Like many others, I've been wrestling with my thoughts in response to Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. The hurricane was simply a natural physical process, glorious yet terrible. We cannot avoid sometimes serious loss of life through natural and accidental events. To pretend otherwise is simple arrogance.

The moral, sinful, dimension of the story begins with the human foolishness that failed to prepare for an entirely predictable event, that placed life and wellbeing at risk without justification. As Jeff Sharlet writes in The Revealer,

[I]f this is a religion story, it's not about an act of God or the banal use and abuse of the Bible as substitute aid for people dying of literal thirst; it's about sin. And no vague, blustery "pride of man" stories about ill-preparedness or mistakes by the Army Corps of Engineers will address the original sin of this event. We need theologically-charged, morally outraged, investigative historical reporting to tell us why and how the dead of New Orleans died, and when their killers -- not Katrina, but the developers and politicians and patricians who are now far from the city -- began the killing. It wasn't Monday, and it wasn't last week. We need journalists, not just historians, to look deeper into the American mythologies of race and money, "personal responsibility" and real responsibility. This isn't a religion story because God acted, but because people acted. It's not about what they didn't do, it's about what they did do, under the cover of civic development and urban renewal and faith-based initiatives that systematically eradicate the possibility of real, systemic response to a crisis that is more than a matter of individual souls.

The root of the word 'religion, religare, tells us what kind of religion story can be reported from the Superdome. Religare means "ties that bind." Those should be bonds of community. But in New Orleans -- and in every other poverty-stricken city in America -- they're chains.

Anthea Butler, a historian of African-American religion at the University of Rochester, describes the events as 'genocide'.

The port that took in the bodies and souls of Africans to enslave them in America is the same place in which their descendents are dying because of the neglect -- and virtual genocide -- foisted upon them by a lame duck and lame president and an ineffectual government. Read it all.

I do not want to take a 'holier than thou' stance here. Far from it. Hurricane Katrina must remind many Australians of Cyclone Tracy, a small but unusually intense tropical cyclone that passed directly over the northern city of Darwin on Christmas Day in 1974.

Many were poorly prepared. Wind speeds measured at over 217 km/h and the loose design of many buildings resulted in the almost complete destruction of the city. Darwin was evacuated by air and road and placed under military command. Evacuation was difficult as the distances between Darwin and Australia's other cities are great. Over three-quarters of the city's people left. Darwin was eventually rebuilt, with better attention to building quality and disaster planning.

Australia's Aboriginal peoples have long understood how to live in a harsh landscape. The rest of us are learning slowly. There are hazards from storm, flood, fire, earthquake and drought. Drought is the most devastating in the long term. Whole suburbs of Canberra were burnt by bushfire recently. Much of the city of Newcastle was flattened by earthquake not so long ago. I believe we are ever so slowly coming to understand that these things are part of living in a "wide brown land", though our conservative federal government actively prevents change.

From the huge-scale to the parochial: the mission statement of my local Anglican diocese of Canberra and Goulburn attempts to get to grips with some of these challenges. It calls on us to:
      proclaim the gospel;
      provide for the worship of God;
      baptise new believers and teach and nurture all believers;
      respond to human need through loving service;
      seek to transform the unjust structures of society; and
      strive to safeguard the integrity of creation.
Living in Australia has taught us that justice and fairness are bound up with respect for the natural environment. All Christians concerned for human need are challenged to a radical criticism of unjust and incompetent social structures and politics.

Lord of grace and gentleness, we pray for a world in which even ordinary humanity fails so often.
We pray for those who are called government ministers -- servants -- in every nation.
We pray that those who lead and take on great responsibilities may not simply wish to seem great in the eyes of others, but may genuinely serve their peoples, searching for policies and strategies which will be for the good of all, especially for the weakest and most vulnerable.
We ask this for the sake of him who is both servant and Lord, Jesus Christ. Christopher Avon Lamb.

The IPIP-NEO (International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO PI-R^TM) is going around the blogs I read, so I thought I'd give it a go.

IPIP-NEO Narrative Report

EXTRAVERSION - 54: Friendliness 75, Gregariousness 36, Assertiveness 79, Activity Level 93, Excitement-Seeking 5, Cheerfulness 25. An Average score on Extraversion indicates neither a subdued loner nor a jovial chatterbox You enjoy time with others but also time alone.

AGREEABLENESS - 82: Trust 75, Morality 85, Altruism 77, Cooperation 82, Modesty 60, Sympathy 47. A high level of Agreeableness indicates a strong interest in others' needs and well-being You are pleasant, sympathetic, and cooperative.

CONSCIENTIOUSNESS - 57: Self-Efficacy 62, Orderliness 6, Dutifulness 69, Achievement-Striving 78, Self-Discipline 71, Cautiousness 71. An average score on Conscientiousness means you are reasonably reliable, organized, and self-controlled.

NEUROTICISM - 77: Anxiety 93, Anger 84, Depression 60, Self-Consciousness 23, Immoderation 19, Vulnerability 99. A high Score on Neuroticism indicates that you are easily upset, even by what most people consider the normal demands of living People consider you to be sensitive and emotional.

OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE - 55: Imagination 2, Artistic Interests 88, Emotionality 52, Adventurousness 23, Intellect 84, Liberalism 67. An average score on Openness to Experience, indicates that you enjoy tradition but are willing to try new things Your thinking is neither simple nor complex To others you appear to be a well-educated person but not an intellectual.

'Alexandra', is an art teacher from in the English Midlands. Her discovery of the male form as a major subject for her work came by accident when one of her male students offered to model for her. Usually she paints males clothed, but allows the sensuality of the figure to show through. Her paintings are characterized by intense contrasts and colors; the backgrounds tend to be filled with detail, emphasizing the mood of the subjects. I find this understated image far more intriguing than 'in your face' nudity. (Hotel Tijuana, 2003, Oil on canvas, 39 x 31 inches )

It vaguely reminds me of Cézanne's Jeune homme à la tête de mort (Boy with skull), which I once saw at a Barnes Foundation special exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris in November 1993.

CAMRA, the Canberra Academy of Music and Related Arts, a community music society that that performa in our parish church at St. Philip's. Many of our parish members also are members of CAMRA and my singing teacher, Pat Forbes and her husband, Colin, are its musical directors.

On 17th and 18th September 2005, CAMRA will combine with St. Philip's to perform, Ordo Virtutum by Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) in English translation, to coincide with Hildegard's feast day.

It is a mystical morality play, set to music, about the Virtues, the Soul and the Devil. Arguably, it is the earliest morality play ever written. Hildegard von Bingen was a German abbess who was an extraordinary visionary, poet, scholar and composer. She exercised a wide influence, numbering emperors, kings, prelates and saints among her correspondents. She stands out as a model for the role and influence of women for all time.

I will not be singing in Ordo Virtutum. My first ever outing as a choir member will be in CAMRA's performance of Handel's Messiah on 9 and 11 December. After a quick run-through of the bass part of the Hallelujah Chorus, Pat and Colin reckon that my baritone voice will manage the bass parts of the choruses (they're scored for soprano, alto, tenor and bass).

It will be great fun. So I've dragged out and begun studying a battered copy of the Schirmers's full score of The Messiah that I bought (new) for $1.75, thirty five years ago. They're still going for as little $US2.00 on Abebooks and $US7.50 on Amazon

Thinking Anglicans, helpfully draws attention to this article (19 August) on civil partnerships by the Rt Revd Dr Peter Selby, Bishop of Worcester.

Concerning committed same-sex partnerships, Bishop Selby says that if the the Church, "cannot speak hopefully about what are clearly signs of commitment and responsibility, perhaps it would have been better to say nothing." Quite so. In a few weeks I will attend the Synod of my diocese, the Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn. The agenda papers will arrive soon. I fervently hope that there will be nothing on the notice paper about sex, sexuality, marriage, etc. If a discussion on one of these comes up, depending on how the discussion goes, I may be tempted to use the Standing Orders to move, "that Synod proceed to the next item of business". Bishop Selby writes:

Those responsible for crafting [the CofE Bishops'statement] worked long and hard, endeavouring to accommodate the widest range of opinions. But the opinions they sought to accommodate were chiefly those of the House of Bishops. More than once I asked that we might involve some who were considering entering a civil partnership, clergy and lay, in the preparation of the statement.

Had we done so, we would have acted on the encouragement given by the 1998 Lambeth Conference resolution to listen to the experience of lesbian and gay people, and would have heard the views of others affected. At the very least, we would then know what their reaction would be to what we were proposing to say.

My suggestion was rejected on the grounds that, as the proposed document represented no change in the Church's teaching, there was no need to consult in that way. At the level of words on the page, it may be true that it represents no change in the Church's stance on homosexual relationships. The document is based on Issues in Human Sexuality (Church House Publishing, 1991), reiterating the main points of its teaching, and in particular making its well-known distinction between the responsibility of lay Christians who are gay and that of those who are ordained.

However, contexts affect meanings profoundly, and, even if the document is based on Issues in Human Sexuality, it is specifically produced to take account of the new Civil Partnerships Act. That Act has the purpose of enabling people of the same gender to order many of the practical and financial aspects of their life together along lines that follow automatically for those who are married.

The fact that the bishops deem it necessary to respond to that new context by reiterating (as they see it) the teaching of Issues is itself a message that was bound to be heard negatively by those affected, and has been. The message being sent is that entry into a civil partnership will arouse the suspicion that the teaching of Issues is being contravened, and those who decide on that course must be ready to give assurances that it is not. This will not only affect those who are gay, but will also lead many who are not gay and who choose to share their lives to refrain from exercising their rights under the Act, for fear of the interpretation that would be put on their doing so.

Those who put this statement together are certainly not seeking to be oppressive or to add to people's burdens: there are plenty of sentences in the document that show how much struggle went into putting it together, and I believe that in many, if not most, dioceses, it will be interpreted with gentleness and compassion.

Yet this pastoral sensitivity runs up against the dominant force that drives the bishops' response to the social reality of the increased public recognition of lesbian and gay relationships, and to the availability of civil partnerships in particular: what they fear is that marriages, and the institution of marriage, are somehow threatened by this development.

I find this fear difficult to understand, since nobody has ever been prepared to tell me that their own marriage was threatened by the public recognition of gay relationships. My experience of lesbian and gay friends in relation to my own marriage is only of support and insight. There is room, surely, for a much more hopeful response.

It should be a source not of fear, but of delight, that many who do not aspire to matrimony, or to whose circumstances it is inappropriate, wish none the less to order their lives by means of as many of the aspects of the married state as are made available to them.

Is it not a vindication of all that has been revealed to us about the contribution of marriage to human flourishing that, often in the face of sustained public and ecclesiastical disapproval, and the presence of some very destructive lifestyles within the "gay scene", many gay and lesbian people have aspired to order their lives in the kind of faithfulness and responsibility that civil partnerships involve?

I am aware that the decisions of such Christians represent a challenge to our received understanding, and I am personally committed to continuing to sustain respectful conversation about the biblical and interpretative issues involved. But we must surely find ways of continuing that conversation, however difficult it is, without at the same time making such a grudging and fearful response to those who have made conscientious decisions in relation to their lives, and believe that they are best ordered within the new context of civil partnership.

[. . .] I dare to hope that bishops will find better ways of relating to such couples than seeking assurances, and I believe many of us will. But, sorry as I am to need to say so, the words we have uttered on this topic will not help either bishops or those to whom they minister. For the desire of people to enter civil partnerships, and the willingness of the Government to make that possible, represent something far more hopeful than this document makes it appear.

Sustaining the Church's doctrine of marriage is a challenging task at this time, almost entirely for reasons that have (if we are honest) little to do with homosexuality. If our difficulty as Church with particular life-choices means that we cannot speak hopefully about what are clearly signs of commitment and responsibility, perhaps it would have been better to say nothing.

Accordingly to a somewhat overwrought story in The Telegraph (8 August), a number of gay British clergy are to defy the bishops over 'no-sex' unions, some saying that they had no intention of assuring their bishops that they will be sexually abstinent when they "marry" their partners. "One said he was 'furious' with the way homosexual clergy were being treated and gay rights activists predicted a widespread revolt."

(The bishops' guidance said that clergy could enter into partnerships but only if they first assured their bishops that they would abide by Church teaching that sex should be confined to heterosexual marriage. It also told clergy that they should not offer formal services of blessing to couples who had been through a civil partnership ceremony. The bishops argued that the new law would not introduce gay marriage because it did not presuppose sexual relations.)

One clergyman, the Rev Stephen Coles, the vicar of St Thomas in Finsbury Park, north London, and a member of General Synod, is quoted as saying, "If a bishop asks me if I am having sex I will say, it's none of your business. Frankly, it is a breach of my human rights for him even to ask."

Another article in The Telegraph mentions an Anglican clergyman who continues in a 30-year same-sex partnership. The civil partnerships issue, and the bishops' statement, has provoked him into public defiance.

The Revd David Page, vicar of St Barnabas in Clapham Junction, south London, said he and Howard will "marry" sometime next year, the 30th anniversary of their first meeting. He said he wanted to "legitimise" his relationship and have it formally recognised by society as well as to provide legal rights for his partner in areas such as pensions.

"Is it going to be quiet and private or is it going to mushroom into something that loads of people want to come to? We have to sort that out between us," he said. But how would he react if the Bishop of Southwark, the Rt Rev Tom Butler, asked him for a reassurance that the couple would remain chaste?

"I am not prepared to give any assurances to anybody about what the nature of that relationship is. I shall want to tell him of my plans. I'm sure we will have a conversation. But he will know that I won't give him that assurance."

I'm usually mild-mannered, but the need for this discussion makes me angry. My ministry has been circumscribed because I refuse to answer bedroom questions. Why must the church insist in knowing what happens my bedroom?

Of course I oppose violence, abuse and exploitation. Of course unfaithfulness, promiscuity and lack of love do not meet God's best. But offensive questions and simple verbal assurances do nothing to prevent such sins, so why bother?

Do not church leaders trust God the Holy Spirit to direct through their consciences men and women devoted to Christ? Is not that sharp sword, the Word of God, able to act on the conscience to convict us and direct us to what is right? Is not the working out of salvation, "in fear and trembling" the duty of every Christian? I cannot abrogate my duty of conscience in order to answer questions about my private behavior that are entirely irrelevant to my vocation, fitness and ability.

Yesterday evening, James and I attended a joyous celebration to mark to completion of a building extension for our former parish. The service was wonderful and the hospitality superb. We were welcomed by so many of our friends. The parish is growing apace, which is exciting. Yet there was still a small twinge of pain from last year.

Several people gave short talks about the parish's story and vision. Of them, a good friend of ours, said that she praised God for the great diversity of people in the parish: "young and old, rich and poor, simple and clever, from various faith backgrounds, and a rich array of ethnic backgrounds -- all there to praise God and looking to encourage one-another in living out their faith authentically." But queer-and-straight wasn't in the pattern of diversity; the space for us had been too small to live out our faith authentically.

Our Bishop, George Browning, was there. He spoke from the Sunday readings, which included Genesis 45, the reunion of Joseph with his brothers. Joseph was not content until all the brothers were together, including Benjamin, the youngest. Thus Bishop George said that the church is not complete until all the tribes are gathered. +George praised and encouraged the parish for gathering many tribes. But it hurt that my 'tribe' was not being gathered and could not serve.

Yet, James and I love the people and love the place. We'll keep going back.

A few extracts from an interview between the Most Rev. Frank T. Griswold, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the USA, and Frank Lockwood of the Lexington Herald-Leader (13 Aug). Bishop Griswold was in Berea for ECUSA's international youth convention, "where he was welcomed enthusiastically":

I see my ministry as one of connecting pieces, reminding people of a variety of points of view, that they don't have a corner on God's truth. God's truth has many dimensions. The Anglican tradition has always . . . been a tradition in which widely divergent points of view have been held together not by one point of view capitulating to another but by common prayer focusing, beyond opinions, on the person of Christ.

Q: What will it take to heal the divisions in the Anglican Communion?
A: Well, I think I see the healing already taking place. There is the public rhetoric, and then there is the actual reality. . . . There are all these webs of relationships across the communion that are strong and doing good work. And certainly none of the provinces of the Anglican Communion are monochromatic. You may have angry words coming from a particular place, and yet on the ground, the relationships between bishops here and bishops there are quite strong and very positive. I think it's a question of mutual respect, time, and reliance upon the Holy Spirit, who can do amazing things in overcoming divisions.

Q: Here in Kentucky,members of three Episcopal churches have voted to leave the denomination. They said that the church has departed from historic Christianity. What would you say to these people?
A: We all claim the authority of scripture. The ancient creeds, the doctrine of the trinity, the nature of Christ -- all these things are not up for negotiation. . . . I would say if sexuality becomes the ground on which division occurs, then it means that sex is more important than the doctrine of the holy trinity and the divinity of Christ, which is a very sorry situation to find oneself in. Isn't it ironic that people can overlook Jesus' words about divorce and remarriage and claim biblical orthodoxy and become hysterical over a reference in the letter to the Romans about homosexual behavior? The Bible, of course, didn't understand homosexuality as an orientation. It only understood it as a behavior. Clearly, the biblical writers presumed that everyone was naturally heterosexual.

Q: What would you want people in Kentucky to know about the Episcopal church?
A: The Episcopal Church is a questioning community. . . . It's confident that Christ is at its center, and that gives it the courage to look at things that are difficult. It also is a church which has lived with open-ended questions. It doesn't need to reduce things to absolutes. We can deal with shades of gray, we can deal with paradox and ambiguity without feeling that we are being unfaithful.

The 3 Variable Funny Test by Jason Bateman at OkCupid says that my stye of humour is that of the " Prankster" (whatever that means) -- 19% dark, 30% spontaneous, 26% vulgar. I've never thought of myself as a prankster but I like some of the description:

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | LIGHT

Your humor has an intellectual, even conceptual slant to it. [Yes -- but I don't mind terrible puns, either, and things that are are really absurd.] You're not pretentious [Hope not!], but you're not into what some would call 'low humor' either [True]. You'll laugh at a good dirty joke [Only if it's really funny, not just smutty.], but you definitely prefer something clever to something moist [That's for sure].

You probably like well-thought-out pranks and/or spoofs [Not really] and it's highly likely you've tried one of these things yourself [Nope]. In a lot of ways, yours is the most entertaining type of humor because it's smart without being mean-spirited. [I hope so.]

Thanks to a link on Bending the rule, I've just seen a review of Wounded prophet: a portrait of Henri J M Nouwen, by Michael Ford (London: Darton Longman and Todd, 1999)

BBC producer Michael Ford met Nouwen while interviewing him for a TV program and later took a leave of absence to write this book. Ford says it is not intended as a full-scale biography. Nevertheless, he succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on Nouwen's inner life, particularly his angst regarding his homosexuality.

I had not the least idea that Nouwen was gay. The book of his that I first read was Reaching out, which I bought in Scotland shortly after it was first published in 1975. Nouwen described this book as "closer to me than anything I have written" that "tries to articulate my most personal thought and feelings about being a Christian." He talks about three movements: from Loneliness to Solitude, from Hostility to Hospitality, and from Illusion to Prayer.

. . . Ford is at his best when he probes Nouwen's emotional turmoil and describes his consuming need for affection, intimacy, and friendship. Nouwen wanted to be the center of attention. He had a network of friends around the world and often called them in the middle of the night to talk about his loneliness. He yearned for intimacy, but felt constrained by his commitment to the celibate priesthood.

Nouwen frequently expressed his need to be physically held. Once, after he gave a speech, an obviously distraught Nouwen returned home and asked one of his friends to simply hold him. "He just clung to me fiercely, and I hugged him tight in return," the friend recalled.

. . . Ford says it is impossible to "understand the complexity and anguish of the man" without considering his homosexual orientation, something he was aware of from the time he was a boy, but started to come to grips with only in his final years.

At Menninger, he wrestled with his homosexual leanings, which he regarded as a disability, a cross to bear. While Nouwen was at Harvard, he was hard on gay students, telling them that homosexuality was an evil state of being. In time, he became friends with many homosexuals and was under increasing pressure to go public. Other friends, however, advised him to keep his secret, saying he would lose all credibility as a famous Catholic writer if people knew he was gay.

Before he died in 1996, Nouwen was becoming more vocal in his support of gay men and women, saying they had a "unique vocation in the Christian community." Ford speculates that had Nouwen lived, his next major book might have been a study of homosexuality. Nouwen was troubled by the possibility that people would reject him if they knew about his sexual orientation. "This took an enormous emotional, spiritual and physical toll on his life and may have contributed to his early death," Ford says. There is no indication in the book that Nouwen was anything but celibate.

Other writers generally have avoided the question of Nouwen's sexual orientation. To his credit, Ford has given us a fuller picture of Nouwen and demonstrated the depth of Nouwen's anguish about his sexuality and issues of intimacy in general.

Yet another book I think I should read!

Yes, Virginia, it does snow in Canberra (though not often). Icy cold Antarctic air today brought snow showers to Canberra and good falls on the nearby mountains as low as 600 meters. For the the first time I had to walk from my office to the car park through falling snow. Overnight temperatures are well below freezing.

IDN38200 - ACT ROAD WEATHER ALERT
BUREAU OF METEOROLOGY - CANBERRA METEOROLOGICAL OFFICE
Issued at 1451 on Wednesday the 10th of August 2005: Motorists are advised of snow on elevated roads within the ACT today and
tonight.

Perhaps this picture of a certain much respected Australian sportsman bears out the words of Australian punk rocker turned jazz crooner Ignatius Jones,

"Clothes . . . are clothes.

. . . Fashion is a Mistake."

(Ignatius Jones. True hip: instant style for the modern desperado Ringwood: McPhee Gribble, 1990, p.29)

But as I loathe obligatory uniformity and conformity in clothing, I say that the certain much respected spunky Australian sportsman ought be able to enjoy wearing (or not wearing) what he pleases, black finger nails and all, without silly conclusions being drawn as to his sexuality, his fashion sense, taste or any other such rubbish.

As Iggy Jones says (p.107)

[O]ne of the most fundamental rules of Hip is that: Public Opinion Is Vulgar; Conventional Wisdom Is A Contradiction In Terms -- You Have Better Things To Do. . . . Public Opinion, or Herd Mentality, sucks for One Big Reason: it is a substitute for thinking. All that the Pseudo-Hip have done is replace the mentality of the Large Herd with that of a smaller, much groovier get-down far-out Herd. They are still Lemmings.

That's where Mr Thorpe wins out; he thinks (though perhaps not when he chose these clothes) and says interesting things.

Recently I quoted "Love is the answer" a piece by Giles Fraser in The Guardian of 29 July, in which he comments on the Church of England's response to the introduction under British law of civil unions for same sex couples. Now in "Why you need love and more" in the Church Times (5 August), Mr Fraser is dismayed that the Bishops' statement fails to mention love at all.

"All you need is love," sang the Beatles. It's a great song, but is it true? What they need in Niger is food; what they need in Palestine is justice. For such as these, the Beatles' love is a luxury affordable only by the comfortably off.

This might be why there is an increasing reluctance to use the word "love" in theological debate. Speaking up for love is like speaking up for good things and attacking bad things: so axiomatic as to be effectively contentless. Apparently, love is for teen magazines, not for serious-minded theologians. It's a wishy-washy concept that goes down well as a piece of engaging rhetoric, but easily falls apart under scrutiny.

Furthermore, love has been so hijacked by Hollywood that it has come to mean little more than sexually charged emotional intensity. It's true: we live in a culture that has been submerged by bucketloads of the most damaging and morally illiterate sentimentality.

All this said, it still shocked me that a lengthy statement from the House of Bishops on civil partnerships did not include the word love at all -- not once. What is at the heart of the debate about gay partnerships is the reality of two people in love. Many of us believe that gay couples ought to have the same opportunities to express that love -- both physically and in the context of the legal institutions that help cement faithful relationships -- as straight couples.

The Bishops discuss sex in their statement. But, by refusing to mention love, they divorce sex from the context of loving relatedness in such a way that it is bound to be seen as morally inadequate. The love that dares not speak its name isn't sex; it's love itself.

Partly, I blame Anders Nygren and his wrong-headed book Agape and Eros (English translation 1932, 1939). Following that book, Christians commonly trot out a simplistic distinction between a love that is selfless and caring -- agape -- and that which is apparently self-seeking and appetitive -- eros. It's a false distinction that allows erotic love to be conveniently ignored or condemned. The love of God is passionate, personal, and, in the person of Jesus, physical. God's love is both agape and eros.

During a wedding I conducted on Saturday, the best man read those familiar words: "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal" (1 Corinthians 13.1, RSV). What better comment could there be on the House of Bishops' statement?

The Sudanese community in Australia has been deeply saddened by the death of Sudan's First Vice President and the President of the Government of Southern Sudan, Dr John Garang de Mabior, whose funeral was yesterday.

James and I visited our former Parish, St. George's, for the Saturday evening service as we had been invited to dinner with some friends afterwards. St. George's has a large congregation of Sudanese, and were gathered for a prayer to remember Dr Garang and their homeland. They spoke of cautious optimism that the newly found peace will contine.

These words are by Safi Hareer Representative of the Sudanese Darfurian Union in Australia

Dr. John Garang: words of grief and gratitude

Dr Garang, you have left before you had a chance to tie the boat carrying our dreams of peace to its proper dock, It is sad and difficult to believe this bas happened. Your departure is indeed a great loss and we, the Darfurians, are here wondering why it happened this way.

Saturday, July 30th 2005, was a day of full of activities and dreams for all we Sudanese, and for all those who loved you and your vision. Some were busy preparing to welcome you as the beloved son, others had come from far away to Rombek,; all were hoping to witness the birth of a free Sudan and to honour the first national Sudanese hero. Instead of joy and new beginnings, we heard news we did not want to believe.

Dr Garang, we are talking to you today, listening to your speeches from our archives, and starting to learn from you again; just as our queen mother, Rebecca, advised us to do on your behalf. Yes it will take us time to fully understand the contents of the theory you left behind, but believe us, you found the formula. Congratulations, Doctor, and thank you forgiving us your vision. The rest is up to us, we will follow in your footsteps and carry your ideas to fruition -- but it would be better if you were here to supervise our steps.

We are left at a crossroads and don't know which is the right path to take: Darfur here, Eastern Sudan there, and only 21 days since Navasha was implemented. Yet the peace is spreading to cast its shade on our faces. We are here on behalf of all Sudanese, and Darfurians in particular, to repeat your own words to our brothers and sisters in the South: "Sudan is free now, everybody can go and do what he or she wants to do to connect with friends and relatives, the war is over and it is a time for justice." These words are a passport in our hands to the fulfilment of our dreams.

And to our queen mother, Rebecca -- we have suffered an enormous loss, gone is a great leader and unique philosopher; but if our loss is great, yours will always remain greater. Our hearts are with you and all your family in this time of awful sadness.

Thank you Dr. John Garang, and farewell, we will miss you.

Dr Granang is succeded by Salva Kiir. The Economist comments:

Mr Kiir says his movement remains wedded to the peace agreement, as does President Bashir. On Wednesday, Mr Kiir had meetings with America's special envoy to Sudan, Roger Winter, and South Africa's foreign minister, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, at which he also pledged to strive for peace in the western region of Darfur, where government-backed Arab militiamen have been terrorising black Africans for more than two years.

But Mr Kiir takes over at a delicate time. A new constitution is still being negotiated for the south. And he will need all his skills to manage the SPLM, which currently has no constitution, since Mr Garang had recently dissolved its leadership council and its quasi-parliament, the National Liberation Council.

Is Mr Kiir up to the task? Like Mr Garang, he is a Dinka, from southern Sudan's largest ethnic group, and is widely respected by southerners as a military commander in the bush. On the other hand, he has taken little part in the negotiations, and his relatively low profile means he may lack the charisma to cajole everyone into line as Mr Garang did. He is also a little known to the international donors now risking billions of dollars to try to rebuild Sudan. Everyone involved knows that if he slips up, the hyenas -- from within his own ranks, let alone those in Khartoum -- are waiting to pounce.

My internet friend Christopher, of Bending the rule has written the following protest. I agree with it so completely that I could have said it myself. So I hope Christopher will allow me the liberty of quoting him in full, with a heart-felt "Amen"

Either Or Sucks

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

I'm perplexed. I must admit. Why is it that in the Episcopal Church, too much of our attention is given the Spong(e)s and the Virtues? And I don't mean sea critters and faith, hope, and love.

Why is it we continue to speak of "two sides"? When we speak as such, we set ourselves up on "higher" ground that hides that 1) we struggle, or 2) we have points-of-view, or 3) our thinking is contexted, not objective, or 4) we too are sinners occasioning schism by our lack of charity, or 5) we are not neutral, and our "neutrality" is no guarantor of not sinning against another during a critical juncture in our life together. We may hold it together by our "neutrality" and scandalize another to the loss of his or her faith. No, we have more than two sides, supposedly the genius of our tradition, and many of us are multifaceted.

Take myself. I tend toward a seamless, consistent life ethic with a pastoral bent. I recognize that we make hard choices in life, and sometimes we have to weigh options without clear knowledge of which is best or we have to valuate which option among many, all unappealing, is the better option under the circumstances. I also know that if we come to discover we've made a choice that harms others or ourselves or our relationship with G-d, the G-d I know and worship in Jesus Christ offers us ample opportunity to turn and begin again. Mine is a faith willing to admit to being mistaken. Being able to admit to being mistaken frees us to live, as James Alison, OP makes so abundantly clear in his writings.

So, honestly, my wrestling with any ethical issue involves a whole lot more than simple dismissal or retreat from new insights. I love Holy Scripture. I've probably read the Bible more times than most Episcopalians. I read more Tradition than most do in a lifetime. My reason may be my greatest downfall, but only if logic is the only test of Reason. I look for principles, virtues, values that undergird passages, texts, thoughts as well as consider literal meanings. How do these play out, how do they treat others as myself, does this open or close the Good News to the sister or brother anxiously standing before me?

I do know that we cannot go wrong by speaking kindly, praying for one another, eating together, or remaining silent if we cannot say anything at all nice, to quote my great grandmother. And even when I disagree with someone, as I put it to a commenter a few posts back, "here we tend to keep it kindly".

Regardless of my wrestling with an ethical issue, theologically I'm fairly conservative. I can say the creeds without crossing my fingers, I'm hesitant to mess with the liturgy without careful attention to what we're saying and drawing upon the works of our ancestors in the faith to keep us honest, I'm probably most akin to Moltmann and Lossky and Williams and Underhill, but being a good Anglican Christian, you'll probably never be able to pin me in or down because my deepest conservatism affirms that no matter what we say about G-d (and our creeds are apophatic in nature, excluding rather more certain conclusions than saying G-d "is" ), our saying always will be limited, so please be careful not to take the Lord's name in vain in marching off as to battle. As Joe S. put it so nicely, we have sign- not hitching posts. And the greatest of these is love.

But it seems that doesn't matter in our current media and self-presentations in our infighting. And I've grown just as weary of "two sides" as I have of "reappraisers" and "reasserters". Why? Because I'm automatically lumped into one side merely because I happen to be gay and because I happen to think that doing gay can be okay and fine and holy within the confines of monogamous commitment. Huh?

As if I came to that conclusion without some serious work and a lot of painful wrestling that moved beyond dichotomies in search of conversations and integrations and syntheses that honor my sexuality and my faith. That seeks to take seriously the love of G-d I have met in Jesus Christ, but have met too little within the confines of the Church.

I guess I just wish we could stop attaching one's conclusion on a particular ethical issue {Ahem. Homosexuality.} to how we line up on the theological spectrum to ask deeper questions of our faith and tradition beyond the obvious that we're doing something different. Especially, in a tradition that claims the Reformation as part of its tradition. Break with tradition is also a part of our tradition.

I find myself equally dissatisfied with the "don't rock the boat", "throw the baby out with the bathwater", and the "tradition never changes" responses. I want a little more engagement beyond the pro-gay unions = heterodox, anti-gay unions = orthodox; pro-gay unions = just, anti-gay unions = unjust. Is that honestly the best we can offer? If gay unions are acceptable, surely it is because they are orthodox, they somehow correct our vision or clarify what we understand to be most True?

And if we're something like pro-gay unions and orthodox, but wanting to keep it together, we've still taken a side on the multifaceted Body we call the Episcopal Church, USA

(The same goes for the Anglican Church of Australia.)

The question becomes not are there sides, or have we taken one, but is there charity, do we love? Are we going to continue regardless of the side we've taken to pour ourselves out for the life of the world?

So, I pray that regardless, we might still join one another at the Table, sinners all around, partake of the Blessed Sacrament, and above all else, love one another with upbuilding words and embrace. But perhaps we are beyond change?

Your brother in Christ,
*Christopher

In the Church Times of 5 August, the Rt Revd Derek Rawcliffe, former Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway, reviews six books on Christianity and sexuality. Two of the books reviwed interest me. Of Face to face: Gay and lesbian clergy on holiness and life together, by Jeffrey Heskins (SCM Press), Bishop Rawcliffe says:

The Lambeth 1998 resolution on gay relationships says that the bishops commit themselves "to listen to the experience of homosexual people". They have not done so, says Jeffrey Heskins in Face to face. In the production of the Windsor report, how many gays were listened to? Many people have had their views of gay people changed when they have come to know individuals personally. Heskins himself is straight and married; so he is not parti pris.

The book "refuses to play the game of winners and losers": it lets gays and lesbians speak, and does not claim to have the final word. Heskins took the opportunity to do this when he spoke to a gay and lesbian clergy meeting, at which I was present, and asked members to offer themselves for interviews in which they could tell him their stories.

The book uses these stories to make a number of points. First, we must listen to gays and lesbians in small groups or face-to-face encounters rather than in big conferences. The way to holy living involves serving God openly and honestly. He recognises that gays emerging from imposed celibacy or enforced loneliness feel liberated. But they become a challenge to those parts of the Church which cannot accept them.

So often, said some, bishops just ignore gay priests, which leaves them "in a lonely and dark place". Anger and calls for repentance do not make for holy living. Repentance means a change of mind, which might lead one to view such relationships more sympathetically.

Publishers SCM Canterbury have an interview with the Revd Jeffrey Heskins about his book. He says, "I would like to hear something that tells me that generous listening has taken place instead of the same old voices trotting out the same old platitudes which is boring Joe Public to tears. You have to listen with the ears of God if you want to speak the word of God -- that's Dietrich Bonhoeffer, not me; and it makes a lot of sense." Heskins contributed a "service of affirmation and blessing" for homosexual couples, used in his church in south London to Courage to love (Darton, Longman and & Todd) a controversial collection of prayers published in March 2002.

Bishop Ratcliffe also reviews The right true end of love: sexuality and the contemporary church, by Stephen R. White (Columba).

In The right true end of love (quotation from John Donne), Stephen White, Dean of Killaloe, shows how ideas of God's impassibility, and the adoption of Greek dualism by the early Church, led to a cruel and inhuman form of Christian ethics. He deals with the difficulties of appeals to scripture -- "because God says so". Scripture is not always clear; it is often used selectively, and interpretation has often changed. All this has led to a negative approach to the enjoyment of our bodies and sexuality.

What alternative does he propose? Our ethics must spring from our doctrine, and therefore from the creativity and love that God is. Then we can see sex as being for more than procreation, and can begin to argue for equality of homosexual and heterosexual loving. Eros and agape may both be ways of giving and receiving love, and of growing into holiness.

White says that the chaotic fudged resolution on women priests by the Church of England is now being copied on the question of homosexuality. Other provinces, more honestly, will accept only a resolution that is completely negative. The Church must either fully accept or fully reject homosexuals: it is the only logical way forward. The book explores ways in which the Church can go beyond toleration, and say "Yes" to homosexuals, healing instead of inflicting guilt. It must not be a Church that "knows" and "dispenses", but one that recognises the provisionality of its teaching, and is capable of living with difference.

Here is an announcement of White's book from the Church of Ireland Press Office.

Daffodils are my favourite flower. I love their yellows and golds, bringing an early message of spring. But the Canberra climate confuses them. Thanks to James' plantings, there are dozens of brave blooms in our courtyard. But they struggle in the overnight frost that signals another day of bright winter sunshine.



Dear God,
We celebrate spring's returning and the rejuvenation of the natural world. Let us be moved by this vast and gentle insistence that goodness shall return, that warmth and life shall succeed, and help us to understand our place within this miracle. Let us see that as a bird now builds its nest, bravely, with bits and pieces, so we must build human faith. It is our simple duty; it is the highest art; it is our natural and vital role within the miracle of spring: the creation of faith. Amen.
-- Michael Leunig. A common prayer, HarperCollinsReligious, 1990.

In an earlier post on Google Earth I commented on the great detail that can now be seen in photography from satellites -- and I am sure the Western military alliance has access to very much higher detail that Google Earth! Potentially, then, every human being on the Earth can be observed, at least while outdoors. There are echoes of this in this poem from poem from The New Republic (8 August)

Distribution
by Victoria Chang

It might be anything: cowries, eggs, pigs, hoes.
In Bangalore, they use dry fruit, in Iceland,

dried fish--a horse shoe for one fish, a pair
of woman's shoes for three, casket of butter for

one-hundred twenty. The paper dollar on my desk
has value because we think it does.

The antelope against the barren hills is running
across the field because we think it is.

Satellites hang in space to spy on the French man
tilling his field, the Russian man filling jam jars

with florets of fruit, the Chinese man opening
his palm of starfish. A science experiment gone

according to plan, the laboratory--us. The problem:
one earth, one football field, one home

in the suburbs, too many of us. What if there is not
enough grass to trample, and the rain never cleans

the streets, just pushes things around, like a broom
sweeping in a room with no door?

In its latest State of the Blogosphere report Part 1, Technorati says that one new blog is created 'every second'. It now tracks more than 14.4m blogs, up from 7.8m in March, and the number of blogs is doubling every five months. Part 2 of Technorati's report says that the number of new posts is currently at about 900,000 per day, but fluctates as attention-catching events come and go.

In the face of such competion, I am honoured, gentle reader, that you favour me by reading my poor offerings.

It also says to me how important it is that this be something I want to do for its own sake, whether it is read by thousands or just one -- me. That's also why I decided to make it "Not so much a blog as a scrapbook." No, it's not just the "Life of Brian!"

June Norton McKinlay née Hitchcock daughter of William and Judith sister of Nanette wife of John mother of Brian, Robin, Pauline and Noella Ann grandmother of Karen, Tracy and Victoria born: 31 May 1922 died: 2 August 2004 picture taken at her debutante ball in the 1930s

Giles Fraser in The Guardian (29 July) is always quotable.

Love is the answer: Anglican clergy should be allowed to bless gay couples

"Civil partnerships are not a form of marriage," the bishops of the Church of England have just asserted, nervously. Yeah, right. Imagine the scene: in front of a registrar and two witnesses, the happy couple will make binding commitments to each other, surrounded by their nearest and dearest. Tears will be shed, hands will be joined. And then off to the reception for a few glasses of pink champagne, followed by a lifetime of faithful love, companionship and sexual intimacy. Is this marriage? Who cares what bishops think? They don't have a veto on our use of the word.

The bishops present themselves as the great defenders of marriage (though I have yet to understand how a gay couple getting hitched is a threat to my marriage). In reality, most are plain terrified of gay sex claiming a greater degree of moral validity and social acceptability. Many bishops want the image of homosexuality confined to public toilets -- so much easier to condemn. Consequently, clergy have been forbidden from blessing civil partnerships. We can bless battleships, and cats and dogs at the pet service: just not gay couples wanting to commit to a lifelong relationship.

The church may think of itself as the last bastion of family values and married life, but it was not always thus. The early church often held a dim view of marriage, believing it to be a distinctly second-best arrangement for those not gifted with continency. Jerome sarcastically suggested that only men who were too afraid to sleep on their own ought to marry. Christians were to be the virgin brides of Christ.

Jesus himself was single and celibate -- his greatest love being, apparently, a man -- the mysteriously named "disciple whom Jesus loved". And even St Paul offers the reflection: "It is good for a man not to marry." This isn't a common text at wedding services. But there again, it's surprisingly difficult to find suitable texts. Many opt for the wedding at Cana of Galilee, on the assumption that because Jesus once went to a wedding, he must have been keen on them.

Yes, the writers of the New Testament did offer ad hominem support for marriage, but didn't provide a comprehensive theology of marriage for the simple reason that most didn't believe the world was going to be around long enough for that to matter. Hence St Paul's advice: if you are married already, fine -- but don't make plans if you are not.

It's precisely this sense that the world is about to end that gives the New Testament its moral genius. It concentrates the mind on what's important. And their answer wasn't the institution of marriage -- it was love. Whether within a marriage or in a civil partnership, it surely matters not: love and all its commitments, that's what counts. And when present, that's what will make a civil partnership holy.

On Friday, James' elder daughter, Ho Jung, became an Australian citizen. I joined them at the citizenship ceremony -- the first time I had been to one. It was welcoming, simple, but solemn. The Speaker of the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly, Wayne Berry MLA, gave a short speech of welcome. The candidates then became citizens by making the pledge of allegiance.

From this time forward, under God, I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

Mr Berry presented each new citizen with a Certificate of Citizenship and we sang "Advance Australia Fair" together.

Here are James and Ho Jung, a little sad at another tie with Korea being broken, but happy to be Australians together.

Australians all let us rejoice For we are young and free We've golden soil and wealth for toil, Our home is girt by sea: Our land abounds in nature's gifts Of beauty rich and rare, In history's page let every stage Advance Australia fair, In joyful strains then let us sing Advance Australia fair.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross, We'll toil with hearts and hands, To make this Commonwealth of ours Renowned of all the lands, For those who've come across the seas We've boundless plains to share, With courage let us all combine To advance Australia fair. In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia fair.

Muriel Porter, interviewed on The Religion Report (ABC Radio National, 6 July 2005), concerning the ACC suspension of the North Americans.

David Rutledge:Dr Muriel Porter is a Melbourne-based author and academic, and she's also a former lay representative to the Anglican Consultative Council. I asked her to explain the significance and some of the history of the ACC.

Muriel Porter: It was a very significant body when it was founded towards the end of the 1960s, a time of great interest in the role of laity. That was the body that actually gave the go-ahead for women clergy in the Anglican communion, way back in the early '70s. And this body was set up really to be a sort of Anglican communion standing committee. In other words, you've got all the bishops meeting once every ten years, at the Lambeth Conference. The idea was that the Anglican Consultative Council would meet every three years and become a sort of standing committee, look after the Anglican communion in the in-between times.

Very quickly however, when this body moved to say Yes, they could have women clergy, the Lambeth bishops moved to set up the primates as a separate body who now meet annually. They have become effectively the standing committee. So the ACC has been a bit sidelined.

David Rutledge: Given that the vote was so narrow, doesn't that indicate that the conservatives aren't quite as dominant a force on the Council as it may appear?

Muriel Porter: Yes, it does indeed indicate that. But nevertheless it got there. By excluding the Americans and the Canadians, the conservatives were able to edge over the line. I think that indicates what I believe is really what's happening internationally. This isn't about homosexuality, it isn't about the Bible, it's about power. And the game that is being played internationally is a power game of a very ugly kind.

David Rutledge: And you've indicated that there may be knock-on effects now for women clergy, women's issues. What might these be?

Muriel Porter: Well it's already happening. Just recently, just the last few days, a group of bishops in England, including one of the most senior leading, intelligent, forward-thinking bishops, Bishop Tom Wright of Durham, have put out a letter saying it's not time to have women bishops at the moment because the communion is in such strife anyway. So you see, it's already happening. If you create all this disunity over one thing, then other things, such as women bishops, can then be held back on the basis that this is going to be even more fracturing to unity.

David Rutledge: You say this is predominantly about power. Is it also about the fact that the worldwide Anglican communion, in lacking any centralisation of power or authority, is actually ungovernable, and that that's the issue here? Sexuality just happens to be the current catalyst, but it could just as easily be some other controversy?

Muriel Porter: Well that's an interesting question because you see we've never really thought of the Anglican communion as something which should be governed. The consensus has always been Yes, this might strain our unity, but let's find ways in which we can still keep together. That happened over women's ordination. I remember there were talks about schism there, but the general consensus was Well you do it if you want to do it, but don't expect us to do it if we don't want to do it. But we'll still be talking to each other. And that's the way that we expect the church to operate; it happened over divorce reform, which was a far more contentious issue a century or so ago. Now we get the gay issue, which if it followed the path that the Anglican communion has followed in the past, would say Well the American church happens to believe that this is the way they should go, we don't agree with you, we won't introduce it, but we will honour your right to go that direction. In the same way that we in America or Australia or England will say to churches in Africa, which has been said, We don't like polygamy, it's not part of the way we would want to operate, but in your cultural circumstances, we can see that you might have to allow a man who converts with more than one wife, not to put some of those wives aside, because in that culture, that would be terrible for them. That's the way the international church should operate, not by people from outside America saying We won't accept that you have a right to behave in the way you have behaved.

David Rutledge: I wonder though if there's also a degree of politics being played among the centrists, or even the liberals, in that nobody's ever going to lose by opposing homosexuality, you know, gay clergy, and people in same-sex relationships will always be in a minority, and so the safe course of action when the time comes to nail your colours to the mast is to side with the majority. How prevalent do you think that sort of pragmatism is among the clergy on this issue?

Muriel Porter: That is exactly what's happening. Because gay issues, gay people, are in the minority. It's interesting, you see, that this same schismatic situation didn't occur over women's ordination, because women are 52% of the population. Or over divorce. Divorce, much more to do with exactly what Jesus said in the Bible; if we're talking about absolute adherence to the plain teaching of Scripture, look what Jesus had to say about divorce. But, the church came round into a different pragmatic situation because lots of people in the community who were churchgoers, were either going through divorce themselves, or their children, or their brothers or their sisters, or someone was being divorced. And so the situation became that the churches had to really re-think their attitude to marriage in that regard. Because these were not minority issues.

David Rutledge: You say that you don't feel that we're quite at the point of schism yet. What would schism look like if we arrived at that point?

Muriel Porter: Not quite sure what schism would look like, because it's already a very loose-knit federation, the international Anglican communion. I guess what it would look like would be that that would become even looser, but some people would go to one form of Lambeth Conference, and other bishops would go to another one, that one group of churches would meet together at one level, another at another level. I think that might be what might happen; it might be what needs to happen, David, rather than for, as you said, pragmatic people to say "Oh, look, my heart's really with gay people because I've got a gay son or nephew, or neighbour" or whatever, but "because we've got to hold the church together I'll vote in the other direction". That's very dangerous spiritually.

David Rutledge: And so you're saying that you feel a split within the global communion is inevitable and perhaps in a way, desirable?

Muriel Porter: No, I didn't say a split, I said different ways of operating, different ways of working together. Because the whole way we work together as an Anglican communion now only dates from the late 19th century, when the first Lambeth Conference was held. Before that, there were churches from the Anglican communion in other parts of the world that didn't feel this necessity to have this sort of absolute agreement on things. So I think going back to a more fluid, looser situation might be a way forward.

The newly-elected Anglican Primate of Australia was inteviewed in the Sydney Sun-Herald of 24 July.

"Some divisions in the church might be seen in better perspective if they took second place to the most important thing, which is the mission of the church, communicating that and entrusting that to the wider community," he said.

Asked, "Do you mean the issues of women bishops and homosexuality?" Dr Aspinall replied,

Not that they're unimportant, but I think the mission of the church, communicating the gospel, the notion that God is real, that God accepts and welcomes and loves people and that the way to find fulfillment in life is by being in touch with God. Everything else becomes secondary in relation to that. They're not unimportant issues, don't get me wrong. But that overarching issue about the good news of the kingdom of God is our primary concern.

Archbishop Aspinall's emphasis on the good news of the gospel and the kingdom is right and important. Sadly, however, the present attitudes of the church towards women and (male and female) homosexuals give the Australian people a negative impression and understanding of gospel and God's kingdom. Until the Australian church assertively removes barriers of sex, sexuality, social class, culture and ethnicity, its proclamation of the Gospel to Australians is hindered.

Postscript:
In response to a similar comments that I made on Titusonenine, 'Silvanus' asked me to "reflect on why the Anglican Church is most vigorous in Sydney, where incidentally thay have an Aussie Chinese bishop and new outreach to ethnic groups is underway, under Peter Jensen's visionary leadership."

"Lumping together acceptance of homosexuality and women's ordination with 'proclamation of the Gospel' ", Silvanus said, " is empty rhetoric with no basis in reality. The fact is, the Anglican Church in Australia has declined practically everywhere except Sydney."

Silvanus makes the mistake of assuming that coincidence is cause. Yes, to its credit, attendances in the Sydney Diocese are growing. But, to my knowledge, there is no evidence that is because of exclusion of women and homosexuals from ministry. Rather, perhaps, it is because the Sydney churches vigorously proclaim the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. Perhaps they might grow even more quickly if they were more inclusive.

Similarly, if some Australian Anglican churches outside Sydney were to proclaim Jesus more assertively and welcomingly they also might grow more. That is only to be encouraged, of course.

The Australia Institute has published a 'Webpaper', Mapping Homophobia in Australia, by Michael Flood and Clive Hamilton (June 2005). Some of the findings are unsurprising, but the results comparing membership of Christian denominations with attitudes to homosexuality are interesting.

[A]mong those who declare a religious affiliation, Catholics are the most tolerant in Australia, with only 34% believing that homosexuality is immoral (although those affiliated with the Anglican and Uniting Churches have similar scores). The most homophobic religious community in Australia are Baptists -- where 68% believe homosexuality is immoral. They are followed closely by evangelical Christians (62%). These counter-intuitive findings suggest that the Catholic Church has less doctrinal authority over its congregation than some other Christian and non-Christian churches and that Catholics have become adept at interweaving their own moral instincts with the various proscriptions of their church.

It is interesting to note that while homophobia is high amongst Methodists (46%) the difference of opinion between Methodist men and women is particularly wide, with twice as many men (60%) than women (32%) believing homosexuality is immoral.

Those who say they have no religion are the most tolerant on this issue in Australia with only 19% believing homosexuality to be immoral.

The paper uses the word 'homophobia' to refer to "unreasoning fear or hatred of homosexuals and to antihomosexual beliefs and prejudices. While not a phobia in the literal sense, it is a useful term of social description for everyday emotional tension about sexual identity that is widespread among heterosexuals. While not everyone who is homophobic engages in discriminatory behaviour towards gay men and lesbians they are more likely to contribute to a general attitude of intolerance."

In the study the degree of 'homophobia' is identified by counting those who believe that homosexuality is immoral. This is used a proxy for homophobia, although the two concepts are not identical, as attitudes to this question are known through a large public opinion database complied using self-completion interviews with 24,718 respondents aged 14 and over.

Overall, 35% of the Australia's population aged 14 years and above believes that homosexuality is immoral, including about 43% of men and 27% of women.

Within the major cities there are substantial variations in the level of homophobia by region. In Melbourne, the inner city is the least homophobic and the outer East and South the most -- these are the areas most likely to include archetypical conservative nuclear suburban families.

Overall Australia's most homophobic areas are in SE Queensland (excluding the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast), Central/South-West Queensland and the Burnie/Western district of Tasmania where 50% believe homosexuality is immoral. The least homophobic region is the Inner City of Melbourne (14%), followed by Central Perth (21%) and Central Melbourne (26%). Northern Sydney, Central Sydney, Melbourne North and Melbourne Outer North-East, Western Brisbane and Adelaide Eastern all have percentages only slightly less tolerant.

Older Australians are considerably more homophobic than young adults. But boys aged 14 to 17 are much more inclined to hold antigay views than young and middle-aged adults.

Homophobic attitudes are closely related to levels of education--25% of those with tertiary education hold homophobic views compared to 40-50% among those who did not complete high school. Partly reflecting this, people in higher socioeconomic groups are less homophobic than people in lower socioeconomic groups.

There are weaknesses in the Australia Institute's paper, as Andrew points out

If we look at other polling on this subject, this distinction between the feelings and the act seems to be there. For example, in a 2001 Morgan survey 36% of people thought that homosexuality was immoral. But in the 1999-2000 International Social Science Survey 57% thought the sexual relations between adults of the same sex was always or almost always wrong. If the question had been about sexual acts rather than sexual feelings the Catholic response may have been different.

The Australia Institute authors . . . draw a link between attitudes as to whether homosexuality is immoral or not and 'homophobia', though they concede that 'not everyone who is homophobic engages in discriminatory behaviour'. But I think they are nevertheless missing important distinctions that we can see in other polls. While perhaps most people would rather not think about two men or two women having sex, this doesn't necessarily even influence attitudes, let alone behaviour.

Way back in 1991-92 the Rights in Australia survey found that more than 60% of respondents gave approval or qualified approval to homosexuals teaching in schools and more than three-quarters approved of homosexuals holding prominent positions in public life. In a 1995 Morgan poll only 25% of respondents nominated homosexuals as people they would not like to have as neighbours. These surveys suggest that some people don't like the idea of homosexuality, but they are not 'intolerant'. It's a pity that the Australia Institute's survey could not explore these distinctions. As it is, we are left with little idea as to whether Catholics are less 'homophobic', or just have different ideas about what causes homosexual feeling.

Just what we need in our Parish, a self-cleaning church!

In Rome, the 'Dives in Misericordia' church, designed by U.S.-based architect Richard Meier, is made of self-cleaning concrete that stays white. Meier won an international competition called by the Vicariate of Rome in 1995. Work began in 1998 and it took 5 years to build the church. Meier based his project on masterpieces of the past such as Alvar Aalto's churches in Finland and Le Corbusier's work in Ronchamp. Three curved sails of white cement stand out above the surrounding buildings and fields.

Italcementi, the project's principal technical sponsor, provided innovative high tech materials for the construction of the church, including new Bianco TX Millennium white cement. "Now we have to change and think of the product not just for architectural purposes, but also for environmental purposes," said Francesco Galimberti, spokesman for Italcementi.

In a test, the company coated 75,000 square feet of road surface on the outskirts of Milan with photocatalytic cement. It found nitrogen oxide levels were reduced by up to 60 percent, depending on weather conditions. A similar experiment in France found nitrogen oxide levels were 20 percent to 80 percent lower in a wall plastered with photocatalytic cement than one with regular cement. Encouraged by such results, the European Union last year earmarked $2.27 billion for a project to develop "smart" construction materials that would break down nitrogen oxides and other toxic substances. (Thanks to Oh la la Paris!)

In its first term of office, the Australian Labor Party government of the Australian Capital Territory, led by Jon Stanhope, made much progress in law reform towards greater equality for gay and lesbian people. The Stanhope team was reelected to government last year, with a first-ever absolute majority in the Legislative Assembly. Thus emboldened, it is now seeking public comment on proposals for recognition of same sex relationship in the ACT.

Introducing a discussion paper for public comment, Chief Minister Stanhope, said that his Government,

believes that every individual is entitled to the right to participate fully in society and receive the support and protection of the law, whatever their sexual orientation or gender identity. In its first term of office Labor reformed a number of ACT laws to eliminate entrenched discrimination against gays, lesbians and transgender and intersex members of our community.

In its second term it wants to address the significant question of how our society might formally and legally recognise relationships between couples from the gay, lesbian, transgender and intersex members of the community.

This discussion paper invites public submissions on the general question and three possible options: registration, civil union and marriage. Registration would allow same sex couples (and unmarried opposite sex couples) to register a qualifying relationship with the Territory Registrar-General, in much the same way as a birth, death or marriage is registered.

Civil unions are non-religious legal unions that give parties to the union the same legal status and formal recognition as marriage. A formal ceremony would be required. The State of Vermont was the first jurisdiction in the United States to introduce laws to allow civil unions. The Vermont law states as a general principle that parties to a civil union will have all the same benefits, protections and responsibilities under law as a husband and wife in a marriage. New Zealand has followed a similar approach.

The ACT Assembly could also legislate to state that the definition of 'marriage' under Territory law includes a relationship between two persons of the same sex. A significant obstacle to this is the position of 'marriage' under federal law, as the Constitution gives the Federal Parliament overruling power concerning marriage law.

I favour the civil union option. To enter into a partnership that is intended to last for life is a solemn and serious matter. A public ceremony would give proper emphasis to its importance. It would also be great opportunity for celebration and public acknowledgement of love and commitment!

Gay and lesbian employees of Australia's federal government are still waiting for equal access to superannuation benefits that the goverment granted to all people working in the private sector in June 2004. The Government pledged to remove discrimination toward same-sex couples from all super legislation as a concession for its much-publicised ban on gay marriage, but has done nothing. The offensiveness of the government's inaction is starkly clear from a recent newsletter of advice from ComSuper, the agency that administers Australian Government employee superannuation.

Where your pension goes when you die? -- Eligible Spouse

When we determine whether a spouse is eligible for a pension, de facto spouses are generally viewed the same way as legal spouses. The test applied is whether or not the person had a 'marital relationship' with a pensioner at the time they died. To be eligible, the spouse would have lived with a pensioner as their husband or wife on a permanent and bona fide domestic basis at the time the pensioner died and for three years before.

The use of the words 'husband' and 'wife' in the legislation mean that same sex partners cannot be eligible spouses.

The blame is not with ComSuper, but the conservative Howard government. Many states and territories provide equal benefits to same-sex partners of their employees. The harm is particularly vicious in Canberra, where both members of a same-sex couple are likely to work for the federal government.

Due to the Government's stalling, we have a two-tiered system where equality exists in the private sector and not in the public sector. Gay rights activist Rodney Croome has speculated that the Government is stalling until it figures out a way to avoid mentioning "same-sex couples" in public sector superannuation legislation. They got around this in the private super amendments by labelling them "interdependent relationships". Australia's federal government employees, meanwhile, are excluded from equality of access to superannuation.

Beginning today, 27 July, at the initative of the National Council of Churches of Australia and others, many Australian Churches began 40 days of prayer in the face of drought. Our local church, St. Philip's is participating. And our minister blessed us all with a sprinkling of water, as we sang:

In water we grow, secure in the womb, and speechlessly know love's safety and room. Baptizing and blessing we publish for good the freeing, caressing safe keeping of God. In water we wash: the dirt of each day, its trouble and rush are carried away. In Christ re-created by love's cleansing art, self-will and self-hatred dissolve and depart. Brian Arthur Wren

In water we dive, and cannot draw breath, then surface alive, rebounding from death. Our old self goes under, in Christ dead and drowned. We rise, washed in wonder, by love clad and crowned. In water we dwell, for by its deep flow through bloodstream and cell, we live, think, and grow. Praise God, love outflowing, whose well of new birth baptizes our knowing, and waters the earth. Tune: Paederborn (1765)

There has been some rain, even flood, in some areas, but very much more is need to overcome the deep dryness and empty reservoirs left by years of low rainfall. Some areas are still without any rain.

But the days prayer are not simple to ask for rain, but to reflect "in the face of drought". We in Australia, the world's dryest continent, have not done well in our use and management of water. The is very little reuse of water by cities, for example and irrigation practices often are inefficient in use of water.

Thus the National Council of Churches says:

[W]e understand that when we make our prayers of intercession at this time -- and at any time -- we are expressing our own longings, our yearnings, in a way that links them with the promise of God for well-being and wholeness. We do it in faith, because of our faith story--a story that speaks first and foremost about the gracious coming of God to us and of God's initiative, God's desire to have us whole. It is a story that speaks of the beginning of a new creation. We do it that we might be in tune with and open to the Spirit of God.

But when we pray, we must know, too, that God's promises come to reality as we give our 'yes', our consent. So, when we pray during this season of 40 days of prayer, we know that we are also praying that we might be so open to the Spirit of God that there will be a response of repentance and transformation: repentance for the ways we misuse the environment, cause great destruction to natural resources and changes to weather patterns; and transformation in our behaviour and in government policy, not least in terms of water conservation.

All things look to you, O Lord, to give them their food in due season; look in mercy on your people, and hear our prayer for those whose lives and possessions are threatened by drought. In your mercy restore your creation and heal our land. So guide and bless your people, that we may enjoy the fruits of the earth and give you thanks with grateful hearts, through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

God our heavenly Father through your Son you promised to those seeking first your kingdom and your righteousness all things necessary for bodily welfare: send us, we pray, in this time of need, rain to water the earth, that we may receive its produce to strengthen and sustain us and always praise you for your bounty; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (APBA, p. 205)

Another piece from the The Tablet, 23 July 05, caught my eye: "My conscience: right or wrong?" written by Sabtiri Ghosh. Here is a summary.

On 28 June, Canadian New Democrat MP Charlie Angus voted with his party to support legalisation of same-sex marriage, despite a threat from his local priest that he would be barred from Communion. Mr Angus had become a politican because of his faith. "In many ways, Mr Angus and his family epitomise the very vision of marriage the [Roman Catholic Church] is trying desperately to uphold.", Ghosh writes.

Mr Angus's priest and his bishop gave mixed signals on whether they might withold communion the MP support the Government's legislation. Canadian Catholic statements had been much influenced by Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2003. Ghosh writes that Mr Angus's situation "is only the most glaring example of how the CDF document threatened the Canadian Church's outreach to politicians -- and, in the process, virtually scripted the drama surrounding Mr Angus's vote.".

Some Canadian Catholic bishops would have preferred to recognise that the fairest way to reconcile the equality demands of gays and lesbians with the vital need for freedom of religion and freedom of conscience was to take marriage out of the public realm and to adopt a new system of governance for adult interdependent relationships. But that was something the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops felt unable to accept. Thus some local priests like Fr Lemire of Mr Angus's parish were not restrained against imposing formal disciple. "It was not an idle threat," said the priest of his ultimatum. He made it, he explained, only after intensively studying the CDF document and finding that "it is very, very clear on the obligation of Catholic politicians".

None of the the Canadian Catholic bishops, other than Bishop Henry, who is Fr Lemire's bishop, had instructed that politicians be denied Communion or excommunicated for acquiescing to gay marriage. "You do not lose your right to belong to a community because you do not vote in the right way," Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Quebec told a parliamentary committee on 13 July when pressed for his views on Mr Angus' case. Yet, Mr Angus was left to describe himself as being "suddenly in the category of notorious public sinner, simply because I did what I was elected to do, which was to reflect and vote on civil legislation." "I felt that whatever else was at stake, I couldn't allow the Eucharist to be used as a political pressure point."
-----------------------------------
Footnote: Extract from Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons

10. If it is true that all Catholics are obliged to oppose the legal recognition of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are obliged to do so in a particular way, in keeping with their responsibility as politicians. Faced with legislative proposals in favour of homosexual unions, Catholic politicians are to take account of the following ethical indications.

When legislation in favour of the recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic law-maker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.

---

Not only is the Vatican attempting to nobble politicians, it appears to be considering a strenghtening of barriers against gay men entering the priesthood, celebate or otherwise -- though as yet there is no indication the Pope's intentions. In the National Catholic Reporter, 4(39), 8 July 2005, John L. Allen Jr. writes:

Sources indicate that the long-awaited Vatican document on the admission of homosexuals to seminaries is now in the hands of Pope Benedict XVI. The document, which has been condensed from earlier versions, reasserts the response given by the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in 2002, in response to a dubium submitted by a bishop on whether a homosexual could be ordained: "A homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency, is not fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders." That reply was published in the Nov.-Dec. 2002 issue of Notitiae, the official publication of the congregation.

It is up to Benedict XVI to decide whether to issue the new document as it stands, to send it back for revision, or to shelve it on the basis that for now such a document is "inopportune." Several American bishops [. . .] hope Benedict will decide to put the document in a desk drawer for the time being, on the grounds that it will generate controversy and negative press without changing anything in terms of existing discipline. As one bishop put it . . ., "the policy against ordaining homosexuals is already clear -- the only interesting question is, what do you mean by a 'homosexual'? At one end of the continuum, it could refer to anyone who once had a fleeting same-sex attraction; at another, it could be restricted to someone who is sexually active and openly part of a 'gay pride' movement. Most people would exclude those extremes, but where is the line drawn in between?" . . .

I keep saying that even as a non-Roman catholic, I find The Tablet to be an fine publication. The 23 July 2005 edition has an interesting feature article by Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad, who teaches Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Divinity at University of Cambridge, is imam of the Cambridge Mosque, and chair of the Muslim Academic Trust. He says that Wahhabism, the hardline ideology at the core of current terrorism, has cut deep wounds in Islam, and helped alienate young UK Muslims. He considers whether Islam in the UK can be freed of this influence.

Fortunately, serious moves are under way to challenge the extremists on religious grounds. The most recent was an ecumenical conference in Jordan, held between 4 and 6 of July, at which the assembled leaders of Sunni and Shia Islam issued a joint statement banning the key Wahhabi practice of considering other Muslims to be unbelievers. The immediate context for the conference was Wahhabi violence against Shia and other non-Wahhabi communities in Iraq; but the problem was acknowledged to be global.

The article is well worth reading, though no doubt a few Muslims may disagree with it. Murad has written numerous articles on Islam, including, on this topic, The poverty of fanaticism, and Recapturing Islam from the terrorists.

There has been wide coverage of the public hanging of two allegedly gay teenagers in Mashad in north eastern Iran on 19 July 2005 for the 'crime' of homosexuality. One youth was aged 18 and the other was a minor under the age of 18. The alleged offenses were committed when they were but 16 years of age. Before execution, they had been imprisoned for 14 months and beaten with 228 lashes. Iranian law allows hanging of girls as young as nine and boys as young as fifteen.

Peter Thatchell, spokesman for London-based human right group, OutRage! said:

This is just the latest barbarity by the Islamo-fascists in Iran. The entire country is a gigantic prison, with Islamic rule sustained by detention without trial, torture and state-sanctioned murder. According to Iranian human rights campaigners, over 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979. Altogether, an estimated 100,000 Iranians have been put to death over the last 26 years of clerical rule. The victims include women who have sex outside of marriage and political opponents of the Islamist government. Last August, a 16 year old girl, Atefeh Rajabi, was hanged for 'acts incompatible with chasity'.

Harley, at Gayety.net, himself no slouch as a gay activist, splashes the cold water of objectivity on the more hysterical commentary, such as that above.

Two boys are dead; hanged, ostensibly for the knifepoint rape of a 13 year old. It is hard to keep a level head in the face of haunting images leading up to their execution, especially when we are told they share our sexual minority. Yet, this is exactly what we must do if we are simultaneously being fed alarming information about the executioners by those currently engaged against them in propaganda warfare. Before we turn into righteous vigilantes, avenging the lives of two cute young gay boys by engaging in a modern crusade, we owe it to splash some cold water on the issue.

The first news agency to publish was Iranian local publication, Quds, with the statement that "the two had abducted a 13-year-old boy a year ago and raped him at knife-point. The report added that both convicts were also given 228 lashes each for drinking, disturbing the peace and theft."

Harley goes on to note that Andrew Sullivan, OutRage! spokesman Peter Thatchell, and those following them, notably avoid the rape of a 13 year old boy at knifepoint, but add plenty of words of abject disgust so that "selective reporting of only part of the story has resulted in a maelstrom amongst the queer community, usually skeptical members of the liberal Left, now firmly against the Islamic world, and totally oblivious to being hookwinked" "Thankfully, the mainstream media, who can afford to hire respectable reporters capable of objectivity," Harley adds, "has come to the rescue of those who value truth in a world of propaganda."

I accept the point Harley makes. Nonetheless I mention all this, not to add to a ghoulish story, but to urge readers to protest to the Iranian Ambassador in their countries and to demand that their governments at the very least protest. Regardless of their offence, flogging and hanging of teenagers, or adults for that matter, is barbaric. Western governments are slow to condemn this murderous regime, preferring aid and trade. The European Union has refused in the past three years to table a resolution at the United Nations Human Rights Commission to condemn the violations of human rights in Iran. Instead, it has engaged in a feeble "human rights dialogue."

Postscript: Topmost apple has assembled some more information.

Cartoon: Kevin et Alex

Links:
Full story in Farsi from ISNA, with three photographs from http://isna.ir/Main/NewsView.aspx?ID=News-556874. Information in English from http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2916 and http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/07/iran_executes_2.html

Surely it must have occurred to Icebreaker that their model, who is spectacularly not wearing their wonderful fine merino clothing, could only be described as horny?

In Time 10 July 2005, Andrew Sullivan writes of the "quiet power" of British stoicism in the face of the recent bombings.

Americans often react to crises with action and emotion. They see a problem and want to fix it. Brits' reflexive instinct at such times is often calm and steady endurance. In London last week, the immediate quiet was perhaps the most striking thing--followed by an insistence on normality. [. . .] It's not callousness or indifference to carry on as normal; it's quiet defiance. [. . .] The English, as Orwell once observed, celebrate their freedom in small ways: gardening, sports, pets, pubs, stamps, crossword puzzles. Part of this is now patriotic mythology. But part is also the enculturated national DNA to see these things not as trivial but as integral to the life of a free people. These things didn't stop, even during the Blitz, when thousands lived through night after night with the prospect of being incinerated by bombs from the sky. Part of fighting the war, the Brits realized, was military. But part was also a refusal to change a way of life, however small its detail, however petty its peeves.

[I]t seems to me we need both approaches in a war on terrorism. We need to fight back militarily when appropriate. We need boldness and aggression. But we also need to steel ourselves for casualties, for failures, for mistakes along the way. Victory in this war will be elusive and never complete. As long as some maniac wants to kill himself and others in a subway or supermarket, we will not be able to stop him. And so stoicism matters. Getting on with our lives matters. Spelling bees, college football, celebrity gossip, high school proms: the simple continuance of these things is integral to the meaning of freedom.

Or so the British have long proved [. . .] [W]e could do worse than remember their stoicism. And how modestly powerful it is.

An Australian victim of the London bombings died yesterday. Australians have experienced the Bali bombing, the December tsunami and, at home, injury, loss of life, and heavy destruction of property from bushfire, cyclone, flood and earthquake. These, and Mr Sullivan's essay, set me to thinking about how we respond to such things.

We are more free with our emotions than our British cousins; our culture is more mixed. Australians are quick to 'lend a hand' when trouble strikes. Volunteers are the life-blood of rural fire-fighting, householder emergency assistance, first-aid, lifesaving and the coastguard. Many millions are given to national asistance appeals.

Australians have a strong 'business as usual' streak as well. We've kept much of the Britsh defiance. We have a peculiar mixture of national pride and self-deprecation. We are quick to forget the troubles of the past and live in the present. This makes us optimistic. But sometimes, it seems to me, we lack the political will for the long haul. We make it difficult for our politicans to invest in things that will pay dividends to us and our neigbours not next year, but long into the future. For instance, Australia, to our shame, is one of the very few countries that has joined the U.S. in not signing the Kyoto protocol on climate change.

Oddspot: There was a savagely unfortunate irony in the wording of the placard advertising the movie The Descent that adorned the side of the no. 30 bus bombed in London's Tavistock Square last week.

United Nations special rapporteur on arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, has called for an immediate review of the process that led to a man in Northern Nigeria being sentenced to death under Islamic Sharia law after admitting to homosexual sex. The man had been accused of having sex with a much younger man and was acquitted of that charge. But after the judge asked him if he had previously had homosexual sex, the man said yes. The judge then sentenced him to be stoned to death.

In his recent Presidential Address to the General Synod of the Church of England, Archbishop Rowan Williams said that the 'listening process' on homosexuality set up by the Anglican Consultative Council will fail, "if it does not listen to the voices of homosexual people within the developing world, so often horrifyingly at risk of violence and persecution, just as much as it will fail if it does not listen to those churches in the developing world that are struggling with great difficulty to find a pastoral way forward that is true to their convictions and does not expose their people to real danger."

The sentencing of the Northern Nigerian gives brutal context to the cultural and pastoral dilemma faced by some African Christians concerning homosexuality. Archbishop Akinola has been noted for his strong views, but it would be most fair to him to read his views at reasonable length in a 2003 (?) Church Times article.

[H]omosexuality is flagrant disobedience to God, which enables people to pervert God's ordained sexual expression with the opposite sex. In this way, homosexuals have missed the mark; they have shown themselves to be trespassers of God's divine laws. Protagonists of homosexuality try to elevate this aberration, unknown even in animal relationships, beyond divine scrutiny, while church leaders, who are called to proclaim the undiluted word of God like the prophets of old, are unashamedly looking the other way.

. . . The acceptance of homosexuality and lesbianism as normal is the triumph of disobedience; the enthronement of human pride over the will of God. This lifestyle is a terrible violation of the harmony of the eco-system of which mankind is a part. As we are rightly concerned by the depletion of the ozone layer, so should we be concerned by the practice of homosexuality.

The power relationships are complex. On 1 March, 2005 at a conference in Nigeria of 300 bishops, Nigerian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has praised Anglican bishops from Africa for what he called their principled stand. He told the bishops he had followed "with keen interest your principled stand against the totally unacceptable tendency towards same-sex marriages and homosexual practice. Such a tendency is clearly un-Biblical, unnatural and definitely un-African." Michael Akanji, of Stonewall Initiative - Nigeria, has written on Unholy alliance: how power fuels homophobia in Nigeria

In such an environment, it is understandable that ordinary church members in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa fear for their security should they be seen to be 'soft' on homosexuality. Memories of terrible civil war in Nigeria are not far distant. But one must oppose the imprisonment and judicial murder of gay and lesbian people. African Christians surely cannot support such things.

I have no sympathy at all for church leaders anywhere who compromise the church's stance on justice and freedom by entangling themselves in mutually supportive power relationships with governments.

Link: Behind the Mask is an excellent information resource on gay and lesbian people in Africa.

The Tablet of 9 July 2005 reports that Cardinal Varela of Madrid told Pope Benedict XVI last week that in Spain "there is a denial not only of faith, but also of human intellect, as can be seen in the recent legislation on marriage and the family". (The Spanish Parliament passed legislation on 30 June that makes same-sex unions legal in Spain.) In response, the Pope quite reasonably asked Spaniards to spread the word of God "in a society thirsty for real human values, which is suffering from such great divisions". "You must go to the very limits of society," he said, "to bring to everyone the Light of the Word of Christ about the meaning of life, the family and society, even reaching those who live in the desert of neglect and poverty."

However, a more strident tone was evident in an opinion piece by Francesco Valiente in the official Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano dated 4 July 2005 in which same-sex marriages are seen as a "defeat for humanity". Zenit offers extracts in English:

The article says that the Catholic Church's opposition to this initiative involves, not a "war of religion," since the family is not something imposed by the Church, but rather the heritage of great cultures. "It belongs to the whole of humanity because it is inscribed in nature from its beginning. And it has survived, throughout the centuries, the screening of philosophical, scientific, anthropological and social systems."

"The Christian dignity of marriage, instead of diminishing a profoundly human value, consolidates and reinforces it. For this reason, any attempt to change God's plan for the family is also an attempt to disfigure the most authentic face of humanity."

"The triumphalist tones with which some 'progressive' politicians and intellectuals have commented on the law that legalizes homosexual unions, equating them to heterosexual marriage, elicits incredulity and bitterness," the article asserts. "Not only believers, but any person with common sense, free of prejudiced blinkers, cannot but recognize in this act a degrading defeat for humanity," it adds. "Whether the 'enlightened' politicians (and their entourage of obliging 'maîtres à penser') like it or not, the family, based on marriage between a man and a woman is not an invention of Catholics."

"It is singular that a state which proclaims itself 'secular' and 'liberal' attempts to impose its own ideological system on such a complex reality," Valiente argues. It is the task, not just of believers, he says, "to stop this degeneration of humanity by guarding the original 'vocabulary' of the family, of marriage, of love which for millennia has written the history of generations."

There are only assertions here, and no argument. The 'logic' breaks down. The Pope does well to encourage us to spread the word of Christ. The Roman Catholic church generally does well in supporting the family. But there is no connection at all between same-sex marriages and any purported attack on the family, attempt to transform "God's plan for the family", or disfigurement of the "authentic image of humanity." The 'vocabulary' of family has not been fixed for millennia but has changed constantly since the beginning of history.

In response to my mention of snow on the hills near Canberra, a couple of my American friends were surprised that there is any snow in the 'sunburnt country'

Australia's snow country covers about 6,500 sq km in Tasmania and 5,200 sq km on the mainland, the combined area being only 0.15% of all Australia. The Snowy Mountains, the closest snowfields to Canberra, have one of Australia largest areas of snow country -- about 2500 sq km. The 'snow country' includes small alpine areas above the treeline and subalpine covered areas down to about 300-500 metres below the treeline (around 1,300 metres above sea level on the on the main land). Much of the 'high country' is now at last part of an integrated system of Alpine National Parks The alpine areas are tiny and especially precious. 'Alpine' means those areas between the treeline and any zone of permanent snow and ice cover, of which there is none in Australia -- it all melts in the Spring. The alpine treeline occurs where the mean temperature of the warmest month is about 10 degrees C, a physiological limit of tree growth. As the Australian alps are not far from the sea, their summer climate is cool and moist and the treelines, at about 1,800 to 1,850 metres, are lower than more continental mountains with more extreme temperatures (such as the Rocky Mountains of North America). Only 250 sq km of the Snowy Mountains is truly alpine, including an area of about 100 sq km surrounding the 2,228 metre peak of Mt. Kosciusko (about 0.001% of Australia's land area!). This small area supports species of plants that are endemic (unique to the area) and has rich, diverse and distinctive communities of wonderful plant life.

Within a few hours drive from Canberra, there are good ski resorts at Thredbo and Perisher Blue, and there are resorts in Victoria, further away. One of my favourite places is Mt Buffalo in Victoria, with its grand chalet dating from 1910.

The bombing in London makes everyone's comments on the Olympic victory (including mine) rather trivial by comparision.

Media reports include several near miss stories from survivors. My own such story relates to the hijacking on 4 December 1977 of Malaysia Airlines Flight 653 from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, a Boeing 737 aircraft (9M-MBD). The aircraft descended from an altitude of 21,000 feet to a few thousand feet before leveling off and apparently continuing on autopilot. It eventually plunged into a swamp 50 km southwest of Johor Baharu, some hundreds of kilometres beyond Kuala Lumpur. All 93 passengers and 7 crew were killed. Investigations later found that both pilots had been shot.

I left Penang for Kuala Lumpur on the same day. But at the last minute I decided to go by road and rail, so that I could see the sights on the way.

I find this picture of Father Michael Lee with one of his plants delightful. Gardening is one of the activities for the chidren cared for by the BanSongDong Sharing House.

Recently I wrote a quite long post about the Anglican Church of Korea. Australia's Anglican Board of Missions (which produced the picture) has supported Christian work in BanSong over many years. BanSongDong is a suburb of the large regional city of Pusan. The land is inferior to that of Pusan proper and infrastructure is poor. The community of 70,000 people lack good roads, cultural activities, medical services, welfare institutions and employment. "So in this place" ABM says "you can find isolated and ill elderly people, single parent families, school children without lunches and breakfast, runaway youth, unemployed people and the BanSongDong Sharing House."

Begun in the 1970's with the support of ABM, the Sharing House meets many needs -- food banks for the hungry, breakfast for factory workers, support for low income families, hospice care for the elderly and ill, free medical care for poor women, employment programs for the unemployed and more. Australians are now supporting the development an after school program for children with anti-social behaviour, learning difficulties and from low income families. This is a pioneering program in Korea.

ABM is also helping with a specialised program for children with learning disorders that often are the result of family dislocation or dysfunction. From reaching and helping this group of children, the Revd Michael Lee has the vision of beginning a new church with their families. Good food and nutrition helps with well being and improvement in behaviour. The tea drinking not only teaches social skills of etiquette and communication important in Korean culture but the tea is good for the children. The particular teas drunk assist with concentration, prevent tooth decay and improve overall well-being. There are also outings. Even though the children live close enough to the beach to smell the ocean, many have never been there.

London's victory in the contest for the 2012 Olympics brings back some reminiscences. At the time in 1993 when Sydney was awarded the 2000 Olympic Games, I was on board an Air France flight from Australia to London via Paris. When I eventually reached my accommodations in Notting Hill Gate, I was tired and jetlagged, but also hungry and thirsty. This being London, it didn't take long to find a pub, the Walmer Castle. The first person I met, the barman, proclaimed himself an Aussie, said that Sydney had won, that he was soon to return home, and asked whether I wanted to buy his Drizabone.

Your #1 Match: INFJ

The Protector You live your life with integrity, originality, vision, and creativity. Independent and stubborn, you rarely stray from your vision -- no matter what it is. You are an excellent listener, with almost infinite patience. You have complex, deep feelings, and you take great care to express them. You would make a great photographer, alternative medicine guru, or teacher.

Your #2 Match: INTJ

The Scientist You have a head for ideas -- and you are good at improving systems. Logical and strategic, you prefer for everything in your life to be organized. You tend to be a bit skeptical. You're both critical of yourself and of others. Independent and stubborn, you tend to only befriend those who are a lot like you. You would make an excellent scientist, engineer, or programmer.

Your #3 Match: ISFJ

The Nurturer You have a strong need to belong, and you very loyal. A good listener, you excell at helping others in practical ways. In your spare time, you enjoy engaging your senses through art, cooking, and music. You find it easy to be devoted to one person, who you do special things for. You would make a good interior designer, chef, or child psychologist.

Your #4 Match: ISTJ

The Duty Fulfiller You are responsible, reliable, and hardworking -- you get the job done. You prefer productive hobbies, like woodworking or knittings. Quiet and serious, you are well prepared for whatever life hands you. Conservative and down-to-earth, you hardly ever do anything crazy. You would make a great business executive, accountant, or lawyer.

Your #5 Match: INFP

The Idealist You are creative with a great imagination, living in your own inner world. Open minded and accepting, you strive for harmony in your important relationships. It takes a long time for people to get to know you. You are hesitant to let people get close. But once you care for someone, you do everything you can to help them grow and develop. You would make an excellent writer, psychologist, or artist.

From Giles Goddard of InclusiveChurch.net

The result of the vote at the Anglican Consultative Council in Nottingham on Wed 22nd June represents a serious challenge to the future of the Anglican Church. It is vital that those who celebrate the breadth and depth of the Anglican tradition begin to take seriously the threat to the future of our church.

St Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians 'Now the body is not made up of one part, but of many . . . The eye cannot say to the hand, "I do not need you." ' It is clear that the continued exclusion of the Episcopal Church of the USA and the Anglican Church of Canada, in spite of their open, honest and generous responses to the Windsor Report and the Primates' request is a contradiction of the words of St Paul.

The preface to the Book of Common Prayer, published in 1662, opens with the words "It hath ever been the wisdom of the Church of England to keep the mean between two extremes." The Church has lived with diversity and difference since its foundation. Anglicans from a vast breadth of theological and liturgical understandings have respected one another's right to be members. The path has not always been easy but the Church has held together over nearly five centuries.

The Anglican Church has made a unique contribution to Christian witness. We have always been Catholic and Reformed, standing between the extreme certainties which caused such terror and suffering in the Reformation era. We are commtted to maintaining the value of that inheritance. We are not surprised when something that has so much within it that works for good and redemption is under attack.

But this Church that we love is now under threat. The Gospel of broad and generous inclusion is being undermined by a dangerously monochrome interpretation of scripture.

The loss of our voice; the change in our ecclesiology; the equating of our Anglican tradition with other hard-line, protestant, or neo-conservative churches would be a serious and permanent diminishing of Christian witness to the world.

InclusiveChurch and its thirteen partner organisations in the Church of England have welcomed the process of reception of the Windsor Report and the institution of the "Listening process" agreed by the Anglican Consultative Council. We are working closely with other groups within the Anglican Commuion, both in the UK and abroad. We are committed to this so that we can try to ensure that the ecclesiology of the Anglican Communion is not subverted.

The decision taken at the ACC meeting in Nottingham to include all the Primates as full members of the Anglican Consultative Council sets an alarming precedent. There is a real possibility of imposed doctrinal and theological positions from a conservative grouping.

We cannot risk becoming a church where the Primates can equate homosexuality with bestiality; or where there is permanent subjugation of women and institutionalised inequality; or where genuine debate and searching are replaced by an imposed orthodoxy.

We are aware that the Church faces very different challenges around the world, and we have no wish to exclude from the church those who have a different interpretation of the Gospel. But for the sake of the Church we repeat clearly that we are committed to finding ways to ensure that the diversity of the Anglican Communion continues to be celebrated and encouraged.

InclusiveChurch deeply regrets the continued exclusion of ECUSA and the Anglican Church of Canada from full participation in the life of the Anglican Communion. We express our full support for their respect for the Anglican Communion and their membership of it.

We believe that the Gospel witness we offer must continue to grow and to that end we call on all members of our Communion to become aware of the risks we are facing. 'The eye cannot say to the hand - "I do not need you." '

Dr Muriel Porter, former Australian lay delegate to the Anglican Consultative Council writes in writes in The Age (29 June 2005) of "A church that seems beyond healing". She takes not of the considerable long term consequences of the decision to discipline the North American branches of the Anglican church.

Conservative Anglicans around the world must be jubilant. Their long-term strategy of isolating the liberal North American Anglican churches from the mainstream Anglican communion has paid off. [. . . ] Ironically, the harsh decision was only possible because the North Americans had voluntarily removed themselves from the vote. [. . .] So their generosity in the face of the conservatives' demands has blown up in their faces.

[. . .] The primates' initial request for the American withdrawal was ostensibly to allow some breathing space in the Anglican Communion [. . .] It seems likely that the requested withdrawal had a much more sinister motive. Instead of giving breathing space, it ruthlessly cut off the oxygen supply to an important segment of the international church. And it cleared the way for conservatives to dominate and polarise the Anglican decision-making body, which until now had been both moderate and irenic [aimed at peace].

The Anglican Consultative Council [. . .] is the legal entity for the international church and the only forum in which Anglican lay people can participate in decision-making. It has also been the place where the voice of women, and particularly women clergy, could be heard.

Without the North Americans there are just two women priests (including one Australian), no women bishops, and only 11 laywomen.

The close vote did not just endorse the banishment of the North Americans. It also explicitly endorsed the hardline stance against homosexuality that has been the cause of all the trouble.

Well, at least presenting cause. The essential divisions are much deeper

The loss of the North Americans in the council's deliberations is significant not just because of their potential votes. They have always brought an important cultural perspective to the international church, as well as a level of energy and confidence not readily found among other first-world Anglicans.

In particular, their absence has allowed the ultra-conservative African churches to dominate the council. [. . .]. Without support from the Anglican Consultative Council - and ironically, without their own voting power - the North Americans will find it hard to be accepted back into the Anglican fold. Their permanent exclusion is now a real possibility, and with it, the dismantling of the Anglican communion. And all because they refuse to accept that the conservative, even fundamentalist, viewpoint on homosexuality is the only respectable Christian position.

Make no mistake, their sidelining has significant implications for other important matters in what might be termed "cultural Christianity". Watch for the same determined undermining of women clergy as the conservatives become more bold. And even the reduction of the lay voice.

This has already happened as the thirty plus primates have been added to the membership of the Council.

Conservative churches are inevitably hierarchical, clerical and male-dominated. Not just gay people will be the victims of the ingenious repositioning of the Anglican communion that has happened this week.

On 30 June, the Spanish Parliament voted to legalise same-sex marriages. Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero made a remarkable speech in which he said that the changes were for "a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members." Here are some excerpts, translated by Rex Wockner and quoted by Doug Ireland. Sadly, these are not words I expect to hear from the leader of either of Australia's main political parties.

We are not legislating, honourable members, for people far away and not known by us. We are enlarging the opportunity for happiness to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and, our families: at the same time we are making a more decent society, because a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members.

In the poem The Family, our [gay] poet Luis Cernuda was sorry because, "How does man live in denial in vain / by giving rules that prohibit and condemn?"

Today, the Spanish society answers to a group of people who, during many years have, been humiliated, whose rights have been ignored, whose dignity has been offended, their identity denied, and their liberty oppressed. Today the Spanish society grants them the respect they deserve, recognizes their rights, restores their dignity, affirms their identity, and restores their liberty.

It is true that they are only a minority, but their triumph is everyone's triumph. It is also the triumph of those who oppose this law, even though they do not know this yet: because it is the triumph of Liberty. Their victory makes all of us (even those who oppose the law) better people, it makes our society better. Honourable members, there is no damage to marriage or to the concept of family in allowing two people of the same sex to get married. On the contrary, what happens is this class of Spanish citizens get the potential to organize their lives with the rights and privileges of marriage and family. There is no danger to the institution of marriage, but precisely the opposite: this law enhances and respects marriage.

Today, conscious that some people and institutions are in profound disagreement with this change in our civil law, I wish to express that, like other reforms to the marriage code that preceded this one, this law will generate no evil, that its only consequence will be the avoiding of senseless suffering of decent human beings. A society that avoids senseless suffering of decent human beings is a better society.

With the approval of this Bill, our country takes another step in the path of liberty and tolerance that was begun by the democratic change of government. Our children will look at us incredulously if we tell them that many years ago, our mothers had less rights than our fathers, or if we tell them that people had to stay married against their will even though they were unable to share their lives. Today we can offer them a beautiful lesson: every right gained, each access to liberty has been the result of the struggle and sacrifice of many people that deserve our recognition and praise.

Today we demonstrate with this Bill that societies can better themselves and can cross barriers and create tolerance by putting a stop to the unhappiness and humiliation of some of our citizens. Today, for many of our countrymen, comes the day predicted by Kavafis [the great Greek gay poet] a century ago:

Later 'twas said of the most perfect society
someone else, made like me
certainly will come out and act freely.

---

Speech by Prime Minister Mr Paul Martin in the Canadian Parliament on 16 February 2005, introducting legislation to reinforce the legality of same-sex marriages throughout Canada. The legislation has now, at length, been passed.

I rise in support of a Canada in which liberties are safeguarded, rights are protected and the people of this land are treated as equals under the law. [. . .]

This bill protects minority rights. This bill affirms the Charter guarantee of religious freedom. It is that straightforward, and it is that important. And that is why I stand today before members here and before the people of this country to say: I believe in, and I will fight for, the Charter of Rights. I believe in, and I will fight for, a Canada that respects the foresight and vision of those who created and entrenched the Charter. I believe in, and I will fight for, a future in which generations of Canadians to come, Canadians born here and abroad, will have the opportunity to value the Charter as we do today -- as an essential pillar of our democratic freedoms. [. . . ]

We will be influenced by our faith but we also have an obligation to take the widest perspective -- to recognize that one of the great strengths of Canada is its respect for the rights of each and every individual, to understand that we must not shrink from the need to reaffirm the rights and responsibilities of Canadians in an evolving society. [. . .]

We embrace freedom and equality in theory. We must also embrace them in fact.

[T]here are some who oppose this legislation who would have the government use the 'notwithstanding' clause in the Charter of Rights to override the courts and reinstate the traditional definition of marriage. And really, this is the fundamental issue here. [. . . ]

Ultimately, there is only one issue before this House in this debate. For most Canadians, in most parts of our country, same-sex marriage is already the law of the land. Thus, the issue is not whether rights are to be granted. The issue is whether rights that have been granted are to be taken away. [. . . ]

This question does not demand rhetoric. It demands clarity. There are only two legitimate answers -- yes or no. Not the demagoguery we have heard, not the dodging, the flawed reasoning, the false options. Just yes or no. Will you take away a right as guaranteed under the Charter? I, for one, will answer that question. I will answer it clearly. I will say no. [. . .]

The Charter is a living document, the heartbeat of our Constitution. It is also a proclamation. It declares that as Canadians, we live under a progressive and inclusive set of fundamental beliefs about the value of the individual. It declares that we all are lessened when any one of us is denied a fundamental right. [. . .]

Let us never forget that one of the reasons that Canada is such a vibrant nation, so diverse, so rich in the many cultures and races of the world, is that immigrants who come here -- as was the case with the ancestors of many of us in this chamber -- feel free and are free to practice their religion, follow their faith, live as they want to live. No homogenous system of beliefs is imposed on them.

When we as a nation protect minority rights, we are protecting our multicultural nature. We are reinforcing the Canada we value. We are saying, proudly and unflinchingly, that defending rights -- not just those that happen to apply to us, not just that everyone approves of, but all fundamental rights -- is at the very soul of what it means to be a Canadian.

This is a vital aspect of the values we hold dear and strive to pass on to others in the world who are embattled, who endure tyranny, whose freedoms are curtailed, whose rights are violated. [. . .]

We have not been free from discrimination, bias, unfairness. There have been blatant inequalities. [. . .] Over time, perspectives changed. We evolved, we grew, and our laws evolved and grew with us. That is as it should be. Our laws must reflect equality not as we understood it a century or even a decade ago, but as we understand it today. [. . .]

The people of Canada have worked hard to build a country that opens its doors to include all, regardless of their differences; a country that respects all, regardless of their differences; a country that demands equality for all, regardless of their differences. If we do not step forward, then we step back. If we do not protect a right, then we deny it. Together as a nation, together as Canadians: Let us step forward.

On Wednesday, more than 160 ships and vessels from 63 countries, including contingents from 35 navies, countries gathered off England's south coast to commemorate and re-enact the Battle of Trafalgar, which occured almost 200 years ago, on 21 October 1805. The Queen conducted a naval review to commemorate Britain's victory in the battle, which made Britain 'ruler of the waves' for more than a century. During the battle, British admiral Horatio Nelson was killed by a French sniper.

I was in England as a tourist in 1993 and, entirely by coincidence, I went to Portsmouth on 21 October. It was not until I was there that I realised it was Trafalgar Day. H.M.S. Victory, Nelson's flagship, which is in the Portsmouth naval dockyard, was flying the signal "England expects that every man will do his duty" that Nelson flew in the Victory at 11.15 am on 21 October 1805. I took this picture (scanned from a slightly dodgy print.)

Though in permanent dry dock, H.M.S. Victory is maintained in permanent commission as the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief Home Waters of the Royal Navy. The Commander-in-Chief's pendant is flying at the mainmast head. A commissioning pendant and the White Ensign designate the ship as in commission. The great cabin is fitted out for ceremonial dinners on great occasions. On Trafalgar Day, the toast is "The immortal memory." On Trafalgar Day, a wreath (circled) overhangs the spot where Nelson fell and flowers are placed in the orlop at the spot where he died.

At the Anglican Consultative Council, currently meeting in Nottingham, the Revd Abraham Kim of The Anglican Church of Korea spoke of the concern created by North Korea's announcement that it has nuclear weapons. During the discussion Bishop Nathaniel Makoto Uematsu of Japan acknowledged that "The separation of two states in that peninsula was in some ways a result of Japanese colonistic policy to invade Korea before World War II. Therefore we are obliged to support the peaceful unification in Korea. If a conflict takes place on the Korean peninsula, it will be inevitable that Japan will be involved."

In a unanimous resolution, the ACC said that it:

- expresses its profound concern about the deepening crisis in the Korean peninsula, consequent upon the announcements by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) that it is developing nuclear weapons and by the USA that it is contemplating the use of military force against DPRK in order to prevent this;
- believes that for the sake of peace in North East Asia and the world, armed conflict in the Korean peninsula must be prevented, and to that end the DPRK and the USA should renounce the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the use of military force respectfully and endeavor to resolve the present crisis through dialogue and negotiation; and
- recognizes that the origin of the present crisis threatening peace in the Korean peninsula and North East Asia lies in the division of the Korean peninsula into two states, and therefore supports and encourages the Anglican Church in Korea in its work for reunification of the two Koreas.

One can hardly imagine that the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il cares much for the concerns of the Anglican Communion. But this is to miss the point. The Anglican Christians of Korea, along with all the Korean people, are to be supported as they strive for peace in their divided land. Reunification of divided Korea is controversial. But, overwhelmed as we are by the world's many crises, perhaps we fail to pray sufficiently for Korea.

The Anglican Church of Korea began with the consecration of its first missionary Bishop in 1889. Educational institutions, medical services and social work centers were created. Ways were sought to grow a indigenous church within the Korean culture. Theological training of local clergy began in 1923, leading, through several stages, to the eventual creation of the government-accredited (Anglican) SungKongHoe University in 1992. Some significant church buildings were constructed, notably the Cathedral Church of St. Mary the Virgin and St. Nicholas in Seoul.

The mission languished during the 36-years of Japanese colonial occupation and in the post-war years. But the consecration of the first native-born Korean bishop in 1965 began a period of growth and change. There were three Dioceses, Seoul, Taejon, and Pusan by 1974. There are now over 100 parish and mission churches with about 50,000 members. The Anglican Church of Korea became a Province within the Anglican Communion in 1992, finally becoming an independent national church.

Some more links

The Korean Mission Partnership was founded in 1889 by Charles Corfe, first Anglican Bishop of Korea, to support the work of the Anglican Church in Korea. It's website includes the current issue of its newsletter, Morning Calm, published regularly since 1890.

In Anglican Urban Network October 2004 Newsletter, Revd Ambrose Kim Hong-Il writes On the mission and spirituality of The Sharing House which seeks to reach 'new people' and 'new communities' through living with the poor of Korea.

Inter Faith Dialogue and Christian Mission in Korea is discussed by Revd Dr Guen Seok Yang of the Anglican Church of Korea on the site of the Anglican Network for Inter-Faith Concerns (NIFCON).

The Korean Anglican Community Centre in London, serves the Korean community there, including Korean students in London.

The winter is here in strength and there is snow on the hills around Canberra.



Often we have quite cold nights, followed by chilly clear days with fine sunshine. On other days, it is typical winter gloom. The chill reminds me of a verse by Judith Wright set in Canberra called "Going outside":

I stepped out into the day without thinking. It rushed at me took me by the throat turned me back and slammed the door after me. -- Blast you can't you ever remember your coat and gloves?

The verse is part of a larger poem, "Brief notes on Canberra." Wright's sharp, whimsical, observations of our city are very fine, though now a bit dated as Canberra has become much more diverse than when these verses were published in 1976, a year after I first came to Canberra as a student. Here's the whole poem.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Brief notes on Canberra"
by Judith Wright
from Fourth Quarter, Angus and Robertson, 1976, pp. 15-21.

i. City and mirage The tawny basin in the ring of hills held nothing but the sunlight's glaze, a blue-blank opaline mirage, sheep cropping, flies, the magpies' warble. Burley Griffin brimmed it with his gaze. Cloud-architecture in reflected image: arena, amphitheatre, gallery on gallery of quivering marble, rose from his mind -- great circles, radials . . . Over the clear-strung air his fingers played conjuring a rhetorical opera-city for that bald eagle, King O'Malley. Fantasies of power. The grey sheep nibble, dogs snap at flies. Shoddy officials argue his job away, confuse his plan. Mirages, changed to lakes, lap sewage. Cities are made of man. ii. Sculptures Canberra's sculptures are mostly hollow sharp-edged with cold metal claws -- waiting for handouts? The one I like has curves and no edges. One sweeping closed line describes that naiad. Between the Reserve Bank the Law Courts the Police and the insurance offices she's cleared a space for herself; she has a small fountain and never stops watching it. Maybe she daren't look up. iii. Military aircraft This basin in the hills holds a lens of clear air. Day looks down through it like a blue-eyed jeweller. Tiny invisible midges draw over it snail-trails of glistening snot. Day why don't you wipe your eye?

iv. Nobody looks up Canberra specializes in clouds -- great haughty ones small frisky ones marble acropolises whiteheaded eagles tableaux, processions, galloping cavalry, cottonwool snowscenes with snowmen by Thurber. They act so extravagantly swirling their cloaks and striking great poses -- Look at me. Look at me. Canberra residents don't seem to find them strange, but maybe the newspapers ought to review them. v. Oaks, etc. It isn't that I don't like European trees. Why, my great-grandfather came from . . . Some of my best friends are . . . But huddles together in clumps and plantations or lining the roads like an official welcome they look a bit lonely slightly on guard, rather formal, wishing the visit was over; like the staff of an Embassy at a party they don't really trust. vi. Going outside I stepped out into the day without thinking. It rushed at me took me by the throat turned me back and slammed the door after me. -- Blast you can't you ever remember your coat and gloves? vii. Ecological comment Considered as an ecosystem Canberra is impossible. No balance between input and output; a monoculture community whose energy goes entirely into organization. Too little diversity means instability the scientists say. No fooling. Too many predators. Too few producers. Too little feedback and very few refuges for prey species. Somehow it continues to exist as an ecological miracle.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Much as I love Judith Wright's poetry, I think she was a bit hard on our city! A different take on the so-called 'artificiality' comes from poet and long-respected Canberra resident Michael Thwaites.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Psalm for an Artificial City"
by Michael Thwaites,
Part V of "A place of meeting: glimpses of a national capital", from The Honey man and other poems, 2d edn, Canberra: Trendsetting ,1993, p. 26.

When enemies cry against you
with vipers' tongues shooting malicious darts
sneering "unreal, alien, artificial",
rejoice, be glad
grapple their empty slanders to your soul
and glory, glory in being artificial
as are those Aboriginal artefacts
strewn in your valleys, shaped by human hands
aeons before such things as cities were.
Rejoice, yours is a noble sisterhood
as artificial as the brick and marble
on Tiber's seven hills, the Acropolis
wearing its Attic crown, Hangchou, the lake
man-made, the scholars' garden, Xanadu,
or Arnold's dreaming spires
where oxen found a place to ford the Thames.
Rejoice in man's and nature's partnership.
Be glad that from contending tongues of Babel
at length clear voices and wise choice prevailed,
that some, where others wavered, held their hope,
prophets of a wilderness that yet should flower.
Be glad that Burley Griffin,
before surveyor's pegs, huts, buildings, highways,
long before fountain, lake that bears his name,
stood on this ground
lifted his eyes to the hills, sun, mist, and cloud,
the singing light, the beckoning Brindabellas
and willed his plan the servant not the master
of a chosen place.

15-22 July is Different Religions Week, which encourages people to attend services of faiths different to their own.

Founded in 2003 by Nathan Black, a published writer and student at Rice University in Houston, Different Religions Week helps us to be be less ignorant of other faiths. Ignorance too often leads to intolerance and violence. (Instance: Bosnia, Northern Ireland, etc., etc.)

There is no organised 'event'. During the Week. people are simply encouraged to find and attend an unfamiliar religious service at their convenience during the week. (Atheist and agnostic meetings count too.)

Nathan wrote about Different Religions Week in Christian Science Monitor, 7 July, 2003. The Monitor also published this graphic by Dean Rohrer.

The Different Religions Week website has more on the 'how' and 'why' of the movement and some links to local groups of many world religions (mostly American). The idea has been taken up officially by a number of States in the US, for example, Michigan, South Carolina and Tennessee, and is observed by people in many countries. Maybe write to your local newspaper and political leaders to commend Different Religions Week?

For quite a while I have been thinking of attending some Greek Orthodox and Quaker services. Different Religions Week is a good idea.

I am unsure whether I was too harsh in my criticism of the decision of the Anglican Consultative Council to endorse the Primates' request that "in order to recognise the integrity of all parties, the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada voluntarily withdraw their members from the Anglican Consultative Council for the period leading up to the next Lambeth Conference" Curiously the decision is being seen by some as a victory for the 'liberal' cause.

The Church Times explains that the closed session had used a secret ballot to substitute this decision for an earlier proposal that "The ACC . . . further requests that the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada withdraw their members from all other official entities of the Communion for the same period."

In its place, The Church Times says, was substituted a clause that spelled out the limits of the request to withdraw: "The ACC . . . interprets the reference to the ACC to include its standing committee, and the inter-Anglican finance and administration committee."

The original, more severe, resolution had been proposed by Stanley Isaacs (South East Asia), supported by representatives from several African provinces, among them the Most Revd Peter Akinola, Primate of Nigeria.

I note one comment at Thinking Anglicans that "the original ACC resolution was amended for one simple reason; they do not have the authority to tell the North Americans that they are banned from all positions of leadership within the Communion. They can only address membership within the ACC, and its committees, which they did."

Thus Inclusive Church says in a press release of 22nd June 2005, that it "welcomes the reinstatement of the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada within the bodies of the Anglican Communion." This is stretching things a bit. The decision of the ACC, in effect confirmed the suspension already in place.

However, the Revd Giles Goddard, Executive Secretary of Inclusive Church did have point when he said that, "The Church is not polarised in the way people have assumed. The simplistic characterisation of the Global South and the West has been shown to be false." The Revd Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement makes similar comments, also in a press release:

This is a very significant vote. The narrowness of its success and the fact the Americans and Canadians decided not to attend as voting delegations shows the Communion does not have the heart for the agenda inspired by American conservatives and led by the Archbishop of Nigeria.

My hope is that they will stand back now and rethink. They may have forced this humiliation on their American and Canadian sister churches, but they can now see that they have not won the hearts of most Anglican Provinces.

We had been led to believe that the views of the conservatives were practically universal, that is patently not the case. After the presentations from Canada and America justifying their positive stance towards homosexuals, I talked to three delegates from Asia, Africa and South America, each said they had changed their view and were reconsidering their position.

There has been far too little open debate outside North America and Europe - hearts can still be changed.

Food for thought, methinks.

(This discussion illustrates how easy it is to get information about events such as this while at the same time being unable to ensure that the information is complete and accurate. Electronic communication provokes commentary before we are even certain of whether we have the full facts. In the case of the Anglican church, we would be less likely to encounter problems and create misunderstanding if we had a quicker, more thorough and more comprehensive official church new service.)

(With thanks to Thinking Anglicans)

Stress relief device. Click the face of the pig at this link

ACNS news reports that the following "Resolution following the Primates' Statement at Dromantine" dealing with the participation in the Anglican Consultative Council by the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church of the USA passed with a vote of 30 in favour, 28 against, and 4 abstentions. (The resolution would not have passed had the Americans and Canadians voted.)

The Anglican Consultative Council:

1. takes note of the decisions taken by the Primates at their recent meeting in Dromantine, Northern Ireland, in connection with the recommendations of the Windsor Report 2004;
2. notes further that the Primates there reaffirmed "the standard of Christian teaching on matters of human sexuality expressed in the 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10, which should command respect as the position overwhelmingly adopted by the bishops of the Anglican Communion";
3. endorses and affirms those decisions;
4. consequently endorses the Primates' request that "in order to recognise the integrity of all parties, the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada voluntarily withdraw their members from the Anglican Consultative Council, for the period leading up to the next Lambeth Conference";
5. interprets reference to the Anglican Consultative Council to include its Standing Committee and the Inter-Anglican Finance and Administration Committee.

I believe the action of the ACC to be a disgrace. Even if the Americans and Canadians are sinfully wrong, the decision lacks charity and is a poor testimony of the manner in which the church should behave. Jesus was willing to sit with sinners. If there are sinners in our midst, since when should we not sit with them? None of the churches participating in ACC is blameless on every question of Gospel-based ethics. Sexuality is but one of the questions that could be raised with which to condemn each other. "Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone." I am disconcerted that such a decision should be taken in a secret ballot. In any parliament worthy of the name, members must cast their votes in full public view.

Matthew 18:15-18 is not really a justification for the ACC's action.

If your brother sins against you,[a] go and show him his fault, just between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over. But if he will not listen, take one or two others along, so that 'every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.' If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector. I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

If some members of the American and Canadian churches have sinned, they have sinned only against God, and possibly against other Americans and Canadians. The other Communion members are not harmed by their actions (but if they are, they should forgive). Certainly the other churches have not been "sinned against in the terms referred to in Matthew. In any case, does not Matthew refer to the sins of individuals, not groups. Surely we do not advocate the concept of collective guilt -- that would simply be evil.

It is true that ECUSA had been cautioned that its actions may offend others, but 'offence' is not a sin worthy of expulsion. It has been suggested to me that ECUSA was told that Christians who live nears Muslims would be at risk for their lives, and that their mission would be hampered if ECUSA acted. [. . .] Therefore, I am told, in an act of charity, the larger body is acting to correct the deviance of the local body, to the health of the whole.

I'm far from persuaded that it is to the health of the whole to expel the Canadian and Americans now, by a slim margin of votes in a secret ballot, before completion of the "listening process" called for by Lambeth 98, the Primates and now the Anglican Consultative Council itself. And why is sexuality the only issue at stake here? Surely there are very many aspects of Christian life in the West offensive in the Global South and to Muslims. (I have lived as a Christian for two year in a Muslim developing country.) I am not persuaded that Anglican churches in countries with significant Muslim populations lack the wit and wisdom to draw distinctions between themselves and Christians elsewhere. The diversity within the church, thus evidenced, differs little from the diversity within other faiths.

Is the issue is not about being willing to sit with "sinners", but about communion with heretics? Heresy is a failure to uphold the foundational/essential tenets of the faith, though we may disagree on what they are. The American and Canadian churches have not disagreed with the creeds, for example. It is true, nonetheless, that creeds and other great statements of the church have been formed in response to heresy, as the church struggled to declare clearly what it understood to be the truth. In our context, I guess that is what the Lambeth Conference tries to do and most recently did in 1998. And it would be fair enough to say that the American and Canadian actions do not accord with Lambeth 98. On the other hand, in Anglican polity, Lambeth resolutions are not normative. So it is a messy tangle. In sum, perhaps we should take our time and get really clear and as much as possible in agreement about what the Anglican Communion as a whole believes to be essential to the very heart of the faith, before we start expelling each other from fellowship. We need to be prepared for this to take a long time. Some of the early church's disputes took centuries to resolve. The listening process requested by Lambeth and endorsed by the Primates and the ACC, which is yet to happen, should be patiently completed before disciplinary action of this kind is contemplated. I remain unpersuaded that the ACC has acted in a good and godly fashion.

On the difficulties of discussion with reasserters

I made some comments on this debate on titusonenine. In reply, one reader found that I am "hopelessly enculturated and demonically deceived." "Deal with that", he said, "as I deal with your contempt for those who disagree with you." I had expressed contempt for no one on the basis of disagreement. I trust that I guard myself from deception thought examination of conscience. I refrain from boasting of the fruits of my ministry. At the end, we all depend on the mercy of Almighty God.

I deeply appreciate titusonenine as a ministry that bring us all much useful information. I will continue to be a regular reader. But I have found once again that to comment there is impossible without subjecting oneself to personal attacks from the "Reasserters". These are even more difficult when people do not accurately read what others say before rushing in with abusive responses. Will it ever be possible to discuss the issues without ad hominem comments? So have spat that particular dummy. I will not comment on titusonenine again.

P.S. I have since relented on this decision.

On diversity

The Episcopal Church of the USA gave ACC a statement of its theological thinking about same-sex affection in a document To set our hope on Christ (large pdf file). There is much that is good and encouraging in the statement. I am still reading and thinking it through, but I especially appreciate the views in the section Unity in difference: the church lives from and for the Holy Trinity. Some extracts:

[4.17] The unity maintained by Anglicanism, in contrast to other churches, has always been a unity in difference (Windsor Report 66), a rich and diverse unity (Windsor Report 62). A unity with this degree of internal diversity requires a communion that is exhibited and maintained, not by simple agreement among all parties, but by respectful listening to those with whom one disagrees (Windsor Report 65), by a willingness to render account to one another in love, and a readiness to learn from one another (Windsor Report 67). "At best the Anglican way is characterized by generosity and tolerance to those of different views. It also entails a willingness to contain difference and live with tension, even conflict, as the Church seeks a common mind on controversial issues" (Virginia Report 3.4). [. . .]

[4.18] Rather than think of unity and communion as matters already achieved, we are consequently always on the way to greater communion and greater unity. [. . .] With the help of our bishops we are therefore to strive to become the Anglican Communion, not assuming that we already are, or were but are no longer that communion. We believe, moreover, that communion as achieved agreement, or unity in the form of an already established consensus, should never be presumed a final stopping point, a stopping point that might keep us from heeding a God who ever calls us beyond our narrowness of vision for human life, a stopping point that might inhibit us from following in faithfulness the lead of the Spirit who moves ahead of us in surprising ways. [. . .]

[4.19] At the present time part of the Church believes that it recognizes members of same-sex affection who are living Christ-like lives of generous self-donation, costly witness, and courageous acts of discipleship in conformity with the pattern Christ establishes for us. And this part of the Church is calling the rest to "come and see" if this isn't in fact the work of the Holy Spirit. It is according to this understanding of possible change in taken-for-granted views and of movement thereby towards greater unity and communion that the ministry of gay and lesbian persons is offered for the whole Church. [. . .] We believe that God takes our differences, which the world would wickedly harden into divisions, and embraces them by the power of Christ and the Spirit within those blessed differences-in-relation of the Divine Persons; in this way the Church's life of conversion and difference may become ever more fully a sharing in that blessed communion which is the life of God the Holy Trinity.

[4.20] Bishops are the symbol of unity and communion not by reflecting some easy prior existence of those things, but by symbolizing in their persons the way a life of mutual responsibility and love in Christ can be created and sustained in these between-times of brokenness and disagreement, before Christ comes again to bring us all final reconciliation and peace. We might reflect here on the place where Jesus builds his new community -- at the foot of the Cross. [. . .] We could do worse than to imagine meeting those from whom we feel most estranged at the foot of the Cross.

[4.21] The communion we all seek to share more deeply with one another can only be that which Jesus won for us at the cost of his passion and death. Putting our whole trust in him, we find strength, for the sake of a broken world, to reach beyond a unity of mere like-mindedness towards that blessed Divine Communion which alone can heal the world's divisions. Such communion is manifest and brought to light out of the diversity of voices through which surprising movements of the Spirit are discerned. [. . .] They are signs not only of the Church's unity but especially of its diverse and comprehensive catholicity. It is by way of this very diversity-in-unity, by way of all these diverse voices, including those previously unheard, brought together in a communion of mutual listening and learning, that we are brought more fully into the fullness of God's truth.

[4.22] The whole community benefits from the raising up of previously marginalized persons into leadership positions in the Church. In and through their leadership, the Spirit leads us beyond the little loves of ours that are idolatrous, into the greater, more comprehensive love that God has shown us in Christ. [. . .]

[4.23] Anglicanism at its best has been attentive to human fallibility, and has therefore especially prized humility and mutual forbearance as primary Christian virtues. The need for correction by others in a diverse Body of Christ and the need for openness to others in love, even and especially a respectful attentiveness to those with whom one most fervently disagrees, have always had a basis in this characteristically Anglican realism about the likelihood of moral and intellectual failure among the people of God. It is only in and through a diverse Communion that allegiance to any one particular viewpoint is prevented from replacing the allegiance that all of us owe to Christ, the one Head who alone can hold all of us, its diverse members, together in love. [. . .]

[4.24] "The experience of the Church as it is lived in different places has something to contribute to the discernment of the mind of Christ for the Church. No one culture, no one period of history has a monopoly of insight into the truth of the Gospel. [. . .]

On listening

The following "Resolution on the Listening Process, as requested by the Primates at Dromantine" passed unanimously.

In response to the request of the bishops attending the Lambeth Conference in 1998 in Resolution 1.10 to establish "a means of monitoring the work done on the subject of human sexuality in the Communion" and to honour the process of mutual listening, including "listening to the experience of homosexual persons" and the experience of local churches around the world in reflecting on these matters in the light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, the Anglican Consultative Council encourages such listening in each Province and requests the Secretary General:

1. To collate relevant research studies, statements, resolutions and other material on these matters from the various Provinces and other interested bodies within those Provinces; and
2. To make such material available for study, discussion and reflection within each member Church of the Communion; and
3. To identify and allocate adequate resources for this work, and to report progress on it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the next Lambeth Conference and the next meeting of this Council, and to copy such reports to the Provinces.

Now, will there actually be resources (money) for this work and action?

The newly appointed Archbishop of York, the Most Revd John Sentamu, has told BBC News he wants to banish homophobia from the Church of England. He said that homophobia had "no place" in the Church. He wanted people to stop using "ghastly" language that implied people were "not human beings" because of their sexual orientation.

I want to say to people, 'Please, please, please don't use such ghastly words,' because every human being regardless of their sexual orientation are standing in for God, each one of them is actually loved of God. And when you use language which implies they were not human beings who are you to do that because you did not create them?'

I have commented previously that 'homophobia' is an inadequate word for all the many uses we try to make of it. That said, I much like Royce Clements' essay, How to avoid the charge of homophobia. In his summary, he says,

if you would avoid the charge of homophobia you must demonstrate:
- the sensitivity that chooses tactful words;
- the rationality that offers arguments rather than assertions;
- the consistency that expresses equal indignation about other social issues; and
- perhaps most important of all, the humility to admit that you might be wrong.

I have consistently found this last point to be the most difficult. Too often, people on either side of the debate confuse assertion with argument, using Scripture texts and aspects of tradition as though they were talismans. Clements continues,

You may complain that pro-gay speakers and writers do not show such consideration to you. Instead your sincere moral convictions have been denounced as homophobic bigotry. I acknowledge that this could be true. But, however unfair the misrepresentation of your views, the situation is not symmetric. Christian gays are not trying to eject you from the Church or from ministry, you are trying to eject them.

In law a verdict of "Not Guilty" requires only the establishment of "reasonable doubt". Even if you feel the case against gays has been proved, there are other members of the jury who are less convinced. No one wishes to shut you up, but what you say and how you say it makes a huge difference.

So I use Oliver Cromwell's famous words, from a letter to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650, to say to those who think their case is proven 'beyond reasonable doubt', "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

Odd spot

From The Times, June 20, 2005

HIGH EXPECTATIONS
From Mr Tony Peters
Sir, You report (June 17) that women bishops and euthanasia will be debated at the General Synod. As separate items?

A. R. PETERS
Great Cubley, Derbyshire

Our Vision is to be a caring Christian community
which embraces and honours difference
and offers a place to celebrate and grow spiritually.

I have been licensed by our Bishop, the Rt Revd George Browning, to be a lay minister in public worship and preaching, within our parish of St. Phillip's, O'Connor. There was a simple commissioning as part of this morning's Eucharist. I especially appreciated the prayer:

Look with favour upon those whom you have called, O Lord, to be Lay Ministers in the worship of your Church; and grant that they may be so filled with your Holy Spirit that, seeking your glory and the salvation of souls, they may minister your Word with steadfast devotion, and by the constancy of their faith and the innocence of their lives may adorn in all things the teaching of Christ our Saviour; who lives and reigns for ever and ever. Amen.

This simple joyful beginning was also an end to what for James and me has been long story (told here, here, and here).

The commissioning service includes two questions:

• You have been called to a ministry in this congregation. Will you, as long as you are engaged in this work, perform it with diligence?
• Will you faithfully and reverently execute the duties of your ministry to the honor of God, and the benefit of the members of this congregation?

I pray that my answer of "I will." will be found abundantly true.

A potentional rebellion of government MPs, led by Petro Georgiou, and including Judi Moylan, Russell Broadbent and Bruce Baird, has forced the Government to make changes to the impact of Australia's policy of detaining illegal immigrants, including refugees and asylum seekers. I congratulate Mr Georgiou on his political courage.

• The Immigration Minister's discretionary powers will be widened, giving her flexibility to free people into the community and to grant visas to people in detention.
• A limit of six months has been put on the processing of protection visa applications and reviews by the Refugee Review Tribunal.
• The Immigration Department will have to report six-monthly to the Ombudsman on people who have been in detention for more than two years. The Ombudsman will make recommendations to the minister, who will not be bound to follow them but must table them in Parliament.
• The Ombudsman will have full access to Immigration Department records to investigate cases and will be able to recommend release into the community, permanent residency, or continued detention.
• About 4,000 outstanding applications are to be finalised by the end of October. Almost all of them are expected to get permanent residence.
• All women, children and families currently in detention centres and residential housing projects will be freed into the community with reporting arrangements.
• When families are detained in future -- usually when they breach orders to leave the country -- they will be put in residential housing projects and assessed. This will have to be done within a month.
• The changes will be overseen by an interdepartmental committee headed by the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (indirectly this is a censure of the Department of Immigration and Ethic Affairs). The committee will regularly discuss progress with Mr Georgiou and the other 'rebel' MPs colleagues fortnightly.

However, the Prime Minister refused to meet the rebels' demand to scrap indefinite detention. Inevitably, some have praised the changes and others haved damned then as inadequate or useless. I am glad that at least some progress has been made.

An irony of all this is that much of it will be achieved by extending the powers of the Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. In much of what she decides, the Minister has little option but to rely on the advice of her department. Not only has there been argument about the rights and well being of refugees and asylum seekers kept in detention, but also about obvious mal-administration and negative corporate culture in the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. (Opposition Leader Kim Beazley attacked expanding the powers of "an incompetent minister" and a "dysfunctional" department and renewed his call for a royal commission.)

There have been many cases, notably the of detention Australian permanent resident Cornelia Rau, the wrongful deportation of citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon, the seven-year detention of Peter Qasim and the recent mishandling of Chinese political defectors. In its editorial of 18 June The Age says:

The debate about Australia's treatment of asylum seekers has not lacked conviction or passion [. . .] What is lacking is a proper public assessment of the problems, which the Government admits includes Immigration Department culture. That fact has not been altered by the policy concessions that brought about yesterday's Liberal truce [. . .]. By resisting the need for a public inquiry, it is still denying Australians the information they need to pass judgement on policies and their impact.

In times when governments shamelessly spin and cover up, an insistence on voters being able to exercise this right can seem almost quaint. Yet this is the basis of our democracy.

[T]he Government has confidence in its policies and the department, it should expose them to public scrutiny. It has no right to expect Australians, in whose name its border protection policies have been enforced, to accept secret inquiries into issues that divided the Liberal Party itself.

Also in The Age of 18 June, Dr Leslie Cannold, a fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, makes the important point that "It needs more than public opinion to say our detention policy is right." Some edited extracts:

The time has come for some clarity in the minds of public figures and commentators about what public support for something does - and does not mean - in terms of morality. [. . .] The truth is that there is no necessary relationship between what's popular and what's right. At the end of the 1800s in the US, the majority supported slavery; last century most Afrikaners supported apartheid. Until relatively recently, in historical terms, many Australians gave the White Australia policy a tick. [. . .] [P]ublic support for a policy indicates nothing more than that most people like it.

To gain an ethical seal of approval, the policy must conform to more abstract standards about decision-making wisdom, maximal utility or principles that crudely reduce to the golden rule and a steadfast commitment to never using others as a means to our ends.

According to any such criteria, serious questions can be raised about the Prime Minister's claim that the Government's approach to unauthorised arrivals is "right". [. . .]

It's hard to argue that a person of good character would permit others who've committed no crime - and have good odds of eventually being found to be a refugee -- to be detained for lengthy periods or indefinitely. This makes the Government's migration policy problematic for those espousing Virtue Theory.

Utilitarians are about weighing overall benefits against harms. Present migration policy was adopted to contain the claimed risks posed by large numbers of bogus asylum seekers, yet since its inception, changed politics in the region have seen such arrivals slow to a trickle. The cost to individual asylum seekers, however, remains vast and includes physical and mental health problems that in some cases lead to self-harm, and - when it comes to children - what experts claim may be irreversible developmental damage. Negligible benefits and vast and significant harms: where's the morality in that?

Finally, at the heart of "do unto others" is a recognition of the human needs - and human rights - of others. Yet while the Government recognises the human rights of Australians, detainees are treated as though they are less than fully human, somehow deserving of the loss of dignity, justice and freedom they suffer.

I find little in ethical theory to persuade me that the Government's policy of mandatory detention is right. If the Prime Minister believes otherwise, he should welcome debate on the issue, rather than attempt to gag it, as a chance to make his case.

In a further ridiculous irony, in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, just a few days ago, Mr William Farmer, head of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) "for service to the community through contributions to Australia's international relations and to major public policy development including domestic security, border systems, immigration, multicultural affairs and Indigenous service delivery." This less than three weeks after Mr Farmer had apologised to a Committee of the Senate for the actions of his Department.

We profoundly regret what has happened in some cases. We are intensely conscious that our day-to-day business affects people, it affects their lives, and it is distressing and unacceptable that our actions have in respects fallen so short of what we would want and what we understand the Australian people expect. We are deeply sorry about that. (Senate Legal and Constititional Affairs Committee, Hansard, 25 June)

On Tuesday, at the meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Nottingham emissaries of ECUSA and the Canadian Anglican Church will respond to the invitation of the primates to explain "the thinking" behind their decisions and actions in the 'homosexuality controversy'. Stephen Bates comments in the Church of England Newspaper of 17 June:

In truth, it is hard to see what purpose will be served by this charade. Positions on both sides of the gay row are much too deeply entrenched for that and indeed, at its deepest level, the dispute is as much about a political power struggle for control within American Episcopalianism as it is about what the Bible says about homosexuals.

It is clear that the North Americans are no more going to retreat from what they [. . .] perceive to be a more realistic, tolerant and Christian attitude towards gays in the clergy, than that the bishops of the Global South will be struck by a blinding revelation that homosexuality does not have to be the defining, now-or-never, communion-breaking issue for Anglicanism.

[ . . . ] As in any divorce, schism or civil war, it is when the two sides not only stop talking to each other but also cease listening -- a process which implies the possibility of change and even reconciliation -- that breakdown is inevitable. They may not openly admit it, but too many people in Anglicanism just want to bring that on.

Well, the time has come. It is surely evident that the strains of keeping together an international communion, traditionally based on mutual affection and respect for each other's traditions and provincial autonomy, are just too great when stretched across societies of vastly different cultural, social and religious realities, particularly when it is evident that there is no mutual understanding and appreciation left to hold the show together.

I join with others to pray that Bates may be wrong, though I suspect that he could be right. My concern is not so much the separation of the various national churches as possible fragmentation within national churches, especially in the West. The Australian church, for example, is divided. I've mentioned before the comment one Australian theologian made to me that it will take a century to resolve the 'homosexuality' question (just as it took many years to solve some divisive questions in the past.)

Why then can't we just 'cool it' and wait for the Spirit to do the Spirit's work? Bates continues:

[. . .] there is no mutual understanding and appreciation left to hold the show together. And particularly when both sides -- but one side in particular -- is insisting on its own, exclusive, definition of orthodoxy. There is absolutely no sign that this is going to change in the next three years, so should we really wait for the Archbishop of Canterbury to make the invidious choice then of who is, and who is not, acceptable in his sight at the next Lambeth Conference in 2008?

[. . .] [P]erhaps it is time to face up to realities, cut through the hypocrisies, evasions and pieties, and work out a way to move apart with dignity and honour. It won't be a clean-cut break.

[. . .] But it would have the merit that the coercion, the bluster and the politicking could stop and that everyone could start talking about other things, like God, for once.

In the latest round of Australian honours, His Eminence Cardinal George Pell has been made a Companion in the Order of Australia (AC), "for service to the Catholic Church in Australia and internationally, to raising debate on matters of an ethical and spiritual nature, to education, and to social justice." Companion is the highest degree in the Australian system of honours and is "for eminent achievement and merit of the highest degree in service to Australia or to humanity at large." No more than 25 awards are made in a year (usually rather less). The process for making all awards is free of political patronage and governed by an independent Council of 19 members.

Cardinal Pell's contribution to "to raising debate on matters of an ethical and spiritual nature" has largely been to adopt the Vatican hard line on such questions and push it strongly within Australia. A very quick search will reveal the hostile relationship between the Cardinal and gay and lesbian groups, for example. Cardinal Pell expresses his views frequently and strongly (one cannot fault him for that). Here's a good example.

Dr Pell's friendship with the equally conservative Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Jensen, has been an example of local church cooperation, but has constrained ecumenical work at the national level, which requires a certain give-and-take, not only between churches, but between the differing points of view within each church.

I suppose the Cardinal has been "raising debate". But I would prefer that my country's highest civilian honour went to those who bring us together, not divide us:

• Revd Dr Peter Carnley was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1999, " for service to the Anglican Church of Australia and to the community through his contributions to theology, the nururing of ecumenicalsm between the churches and their faiths, and in the cause of social justice."
• Revd Tim Costello was made an Officer of the Order (AO) in 2005 ," for service to the community through contributions to social justice, health and welfare issues, international development assistance, and to the Baptist Church.

Emma Tom has written a particularly caustic commentary in The Australianof 15 June.

George Pell, Australia's most powerful Catholic, reckons the answer to widespread youth godlessness is for teachers to tell their charges to worship more. [. . . ] The Cardinal's views on solving youth heathenism were aired in the press this week when it was revealed that His Eminence was one of seven people to receive a Companion of the Order of Australia . . .

While it's important not to take these bureaucratic knighthoods too seriously (other recipients include bungling Department of Immigration officials), surely someone at the Honours Squad is having a go.

After all, George Pell's reign has been marked by disservice to the Catholic Church (he makes it look sclerotic and totalitarian) and quashing debate (he insists there is only one true view and obstructs liberal discussion within his organisation). The Cardinal's commitment to social justice is highly selective (oppressed homos and aspiring she-priests need not apply) and, if Operation Youth Worship is anything to go by, his approach to education is naive, bordering on witchdoctor-ish.

Ordering pubescents about is a spectacularly unsuccessful way to influence their behaviour. The Archbishop might have suggested decapitating chickens or juggling goat entrails for all the good his Worship More recommendation is likely to achieve.

But pragmatism is a dirty word on Planet Pell where hardline moral absolutism is seen as the only way to address an alleged "crisis of faith". As a result we continue to endure Pellisms such as homosexuality-is-more-dangerous-than-smoking, abortion-is-a-worse-moral-scandal-than-sex-abuse-by-the-Catholic-clergy and so on.

Well, here's an ethical and spiritual debate for you: What's the point of claiming moral superiority if your position does zip to help the causes for which you claim to be campaigning? Isn't it just self-indulgent hubris?

Ms Tom refers to a conservative American Baptist church called 'Liquid Ministry' that seeks a more productive approach. "[G]iven that the world's citizens are unlikely to abandon their disparate views and suddenly fall into uniform agreement on everything," Tom says," Liquid's intriguing 'third position' is probably the closest we'll ever get to the community unity so many church leaders say they're seeking. Who knows? Maybe it'd even encourage bucket-bonging youngsters to be more receptive to churchy messages of responsibility and consequence instead of writing such institutions off as dusty display cases for mono-minded fossils. Sorry to be rude. I mean mono-minded fossil ACs."

Link: Nominal Me discusses the possibility of a 'third way'

Claiming the Blessing is a collaboration of justice organizations in the Episcopal Church, focused on promoting wholeness in human relationships, abolishing prejudice and oppression, and healing the rift between sexuality and spirituality in the church. Through a piece in The Witness, and on its own website it asks every member of the worldwide Anglican Communion to join in a Candlelight Vigil of Prayer for the work of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) meeting in Nottingham, England, 19-28 June, 2005.

We ask your fervent prayers that the presence of the Spirit of Anglicanism -- the Via Media or "Middle Way" defined by Scripture, informed by Tradition and Reason -- be made manifest.

Representative members of the ACC from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada are attending in voluntary observer status only. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church has invited several people to join these members to explain the theology of the Episcopal Church's decision that the celebration and blessing of committed, faithful relationships between two people of the same sex is within our common life as is the ordination of gay and lesbian people to the holy orders of the diaconate, priesthood and the episcopacy.

We ask that on Sunday, June 19, you light three candles -- one for each "leg" of the three-legged stool of Anglicanism: scripture, reason and tradition. You may choose to light all three candles on Sunday and use this as an opportunity to reinforce the teaching of the foundational principle of Anglicanism. [. . .]

We ask that you join us in prayer for all those in attendance, especially those who are presenting before the council [. . .]

We ask that you join us in this ancient prayer of the Church:
O God of unchangeable power and eternal light:
Look favorably on your whole Church,
that wonderful and sacred mystery;
by the effectual working of your providence,
carry out in tranquillity the plan of salvation;
let the whole world see and know
that things which were cast down are being raised up,
and things which had grown old are being made new,
and that all things are being brought to their perfection
by him through whom all things were made,
your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Steering Committee of Claiming the Blessing

Today to the Old Parliament House in glorious winter sunshine, for lunch and to see the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery's exhibition Eureka Revisited: the Contest of Memories. The events of the Eureka Stockade at Ballarat 150 years ago remain part of Australia's national consciousness. The exhibition reflects on the events of the Stockade using artworks and memorabilia from the 1850 and traces its place in Australian thinking and action since.


Swearing Allegiance to the Flag, 1854. Charles Alphonse Doudiet.

Though trivial in scale compared to civil wars elsewhere, Eureka has been an inspiration for many Australian artists, writers, composers, photographers and poets, transforming Eureka and its great symbol, the Southern Cross flag, into a legend. "Debate continues about the meaning and significance of Eureka. Was it a protest against the denial of democracy, a plea for a republic, a call for better working conditions, lower taxes or a 'fair go'? The Eureka is seen some as a defining moment in Australian history and has become a legend and part of our national identity?" (temporary exhibition web page) The Eureka rebellion had some influence in making the Australian colonial parliaments among the first in the world to have universal suffrage for men and women.

Read more at the Ballarat Fine Art Galley's Eureka page.

The most potent symbol of Eureka is its flag, which has often has been appropriated to promote various causes. I've written about it previously, here.

Yesterday was a wintry indoors day so we watched a DVD of Finding Neverland, with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet (reviews here and here) about J.M. Barrie and his friendship with the Llewelyn Davies family, especially its its young sons who inspired him to create the classic play and children's story Peter Pan. We liked the movie a lot.

James Barrie was a curious and complex character. Anthony Lane has a very fine article on JM Barrie in the New Yorker of 15 November 2004. After the deaths of their parents from cancers, he became guardian of the Llewelyn Davies boys, the last of whom, Nico, died in 1980. Two of the five boys died before Barrie: George in Flanders during the First World War, and Michael who drowned in 1921 at Oxford, in the arms of a friend who may have been his lover. (The relationship between Peter and his friend Rupert Buxton is explored in Barry Lowe's play The death of Peter Pan.) The deaths of Arthur and Sylvia and two of their sons in such ways deeply saddened Barrie for the rest of his life, and also took its toll on esteemed publisher Peter Llewelyn Davies, after whom Peter Pan was named. He killed himself in 1960. In his article, Lane speculates whether it was coincidence that this was shortly before the centenary of Barrie's birth, which would have brought renewed attention to Peter Pan.

Barrie was to become wealthy and famous and was made Sir James Barrie, Baronet, and a member of the Order of Merit. The Order of Merit is more interesting than most of the other British honours, as its members are chosen by the monarch personally, not recommended by the government. It has a maximum of only 24 full members, who are honoured for achievement in the arts, sciences and other fields of learning and endeavour. The OM is one of the highest royal honours, above all knighthoods except than the Order of the Garter and the Order of the Thistle (which are also bestowed by the monarch personally).

This being her official birthday, the Queen has made three new appointments to the Order: naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, former politician and first woman Speaker of the House of Commons, Baroness Boothroyd, and military historian Professor Sir Michael Howard. There have been just 168 members of the Order since it was founded by King Edward VII in 1902, about half of whom have been appointed by the present Queen during her long reign.

The current membership is an interesting indication of the Queen's views on merit and distinction: (in order of appointment) The Duke of Edinburgh, Professor William Chadwick, Sir Andrew Huxley, Dr Frederick Sanger, Dame Cicely Saunders, Baroness Thatcher, Dame Joan Sutherland, Sir Michael Atiyah, Lucian Freud, Sir Aaron Klug, Nelson Mandela (Honorary member), Lord Foster of Thames Bank, Sir Denis Rooke, Sir James Black, Sir Anthony Caro, Professor Sir Roger Penrose, Sir Thomas Stoppard, The Prince of Wales, Lord May of Oxford, Lord Rothschild, Sir David Attenborough, Baroness Boothroyd, and Sir Michael Howard.

In comments on his site, concerning Benedict XVI's recent speech j-tron agrees that what the Pope says about marriage generally is quite sound. "So it is all the more peculiar when he begins his rant against gay marriage."

Now, he is speaking not just of same sex unions here, but also of societal devices that are used to make marriage temporary and easily dissolved (free unions, quickie divorces, and the like). In this sense, he is likely onto something, though I might argue that these innovations are less about devaluing the body and more about devaluing the nature of spiritual wholeness. But I see his point. However, the concept breaks down when monogamous committed and covenantal same sex unions are thrown into the mix. This displays a deep ignorance on the Pope's part as to the nature of these relationships. It comes, in short, out of the tacit assumption that the purpose and driving force behind all same sex unions is not 'the vocation of love' that the Pope speaks of so eloquently above but rather a kind of sexual fetish. He believes that same sex unions by nature are merely bodily, containing no spiritual or emotional weight.

J-tron does me the honour of quoting a paragraph I wrote in my own comments on the Pope's speech leading to an exchange of comments with wb that bring out why it is so difficult for Catholics to take a reconciling position matters of sexuality.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
wb (commenting on j-tron's post): I read [Benedict's] speech, contra not too much, not as characterizing homosexuals *themselves* as anarchic or libertine, but their behavior as *expressive of* an anarchic, libertine, and false anthropology. And this, to my mind, is an important distinction (and something altogether different, by the way, from the tired mantra 'love the sinner; hate the sin), because it bears directly on the issue of culpability. If I am understanding Pope Benedict, he is identifying a *teaching*, an anthropology, as libertine, anarchic, and (ultimately) sinful.

My response: I take the point. I should have said (and now do say) that "the Pope's generalised characterisation of all people who commit themselves to same-sex relationships, whether people of faith or not, as thereby expressing anarchism and libertinism , is simply mud-slinging and a disgrace."

wb: A latent assumption of Pope Benedict's [. . .] is the Church's magisterial commentary on scripture. In other words, the Pope isn't just making this up as he goes along, he's repeating and clarifying a consistent continuum of doctrine. This fact, combined with a catholic attitude toward the limina of hermeutical prerogatives, produces Pope Benedict's understanding of human sexuality. Its not even necessarily that he believes homosexuality is wrong (though I'm sure he does believe its wrong). Its just that he would be overreaching his authority to teach the logical compliment of a catholic dogma. He can't do it, because what the Church has already said is, in fact, the truth.

My response: I grant that the Pope "isn't just making this up as he goes along," and that he may perhaps be "repeating and clarifying a consistent continuum of doctrine", though there is some room for argument there, if one goes back far enough in history. But it is precisely because the structures of the Roman Catholic church do not allow it to change what has previously been said to be true (even though it may be an error), that it is obliged to maintain teachings that have become a disgrace to the Gospel message.

In other words, I deny root-and-branch the Roman Catholic Church's claim to magisterial and universally normative teaching authority. The self-revelation of God in truth and wisdom is its own authority and needs no other. The naming of that truth and wisdom is the task of the whole people of God, led and guided by the Spirit.

Wisdom is the application of truth for the good. As science and theology teach us about who and what we are, the Spirit of Wisdom allows us to repent of mistakes of the past and to use new knowledge for the good.

wb: "The self-revelation of God in truth and wisdom is its own authority and needs no other." -- What basis do you then have for criticizing, for example, the snake-handlers of Appalachian churches?

My response: Criticism of the snake handlers would, of course, have to be based on sound exegesis of relevant scripture, through the application of wisdom and reason. In other words, we seek to understand and apply what God has made known. But it is God's self revelation that is authoritative, not our humanly interpretation, which is always subject to error and correction.

wb: "The naming of that truth and wisdom is the task of the whole people of God, led and guided by the Spirit." -- I agree with you on that point. But I think Catholicism has a rather fuller notion of what constitutes 'the whole people of God, as they hold that it includes not just us, and not even primarily us, but the Communion of Saints too. And the discernment of God's truth and wisdom is the task of the WHOLE Church, militant and expectant. We have inherited from the Saints not just the nice bits of Christianity (love one another, the eucharist, the notion of sanctification, etc.) but the whole deposit of faith, what it means to be a Christian. For me, therefore, Catholic ecclesiology is the only one that makes sense. Because the whole notion of the Christian life is something we have inherited, not something we have invented. And *our* life as Christians means, first, obedience to *their* form of life and the doctrine that is expressive of it, even when it doesn't seem especially to make much sense to me (as is the case with the Church's teaching on sexuality).

My response: That's fine, but the saints of the past were human. They were thus capable of error and therefore have no entitlement to be obeyed beyond what is wise and true. And of course, the saints of (say) the 15th century had no way of producing theological wisdom contextualised for the 21st century. Church history has much to teach us that is wonderful, but it is riddled with mistakes, sins and errors, some of which even the Roman church has acknowledged. We cannot avoid re-reading scripture, experience and context afresh in every generation, and the challenge of uncertainty that brings.

*Christopher quoted Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan "Tradition has a vote, not a veto." and GC Chesterton, "Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors", before saying: It's kind of like holding these two fine lines on tradition in tension. Our ancestors in the faith have handed to us much wealth to savour and yet refining and deciding what is gift and what is not is a part of continuing in tradition, so that on a specific concern, we have to take into account how our ancestors' attitudes square with "love thy neighbor as thyself" and with continual discernment of what G-d is doing in our times in light of the Salvation Story. Our ancestors did some things we would not countenance as being acceptable, and yet, they got so much right living in their times and cultures.

Quite so. For a superb and scholarly account of the role of tradition as an agent of change, there is nothing better than David Brown's two volumes Tradition and imagination: revelation and change (Oxford 1999), and Tradition and change: Christian tradition and truth (Oxford, 2000).


------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Time on 2 May 2005, Andrew Sullivan described the dogmatic system that the Pope represents as a "circular system that's immune to reasoned query"

Augustine has kept me company for more than 20 years," Pope Benedict XVI once wrote. One of Augustine's key arguments was that human beings were so profoundly flawed they couldn't begin to figure out the meaning of life on their own. They needed something transcendent to bring them up from their knees. That was the message of the New Testament, the promise of the Christ. It was, in Ratzinger's words, "a matter of announcing to man the unthinkable, novel, free Act of God, something which cannot be drawn up out of the mental depths of man, because it announces God's unreckoning, gracious decision." What decision? To save humankind from itself.

For the new Pope, faith is a gift, not an acquisition. In Christianity, he once wrote, mankind comes to itself "not through what he does but through what he accepts " The Christian identity is not made or debated or thought through. It is "received." Because it is received, it cannot be altered. "Christianity is not 'our' work," Benedict told Italian journalist Vittorio Messori in the 1980s. "It is a revelation; it is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose."

Alas, the Gospels do not tell us everything. Jesus never mentions, say, abortion, homosexuality, reproductive technologies or a celibate priesthood, to name just a few of the issues confronting the Roman Catholic Church. How do we know what is "revealed" about them? According to Benedict XVI, only the church hierarchy decides that, with the Pope as the ultimate authority. Because these truths are simply received from God and are therefore nonnegotiable, don't bother asking any questions. Faith, Benedict once wrote, comes "not from reflecting (as in philosophy). Faith's essence consists in the rethinking of what has been heard." No wonder Benedict, in his former role as guardian of church orthodoxy, silenced so many theologians who had the temerity to reflect.

[. . .] Gay people are often born homosexual Benedict has argued. But they are beset by an inherent tendency toward an "intrinsic moral evil" and are of thus by nature "objectively disordered." A whole class of human beings are naturally more disposed to evil than others? Don't ask the obvious questions, just accept the answers. And if the result is enormous human suffering, as women and gays labor under discrimination, condescension and prejudice? Suffering brings them closer to Christ.

Reading Benedict for a struggling gay Catholic like me is reading a completely circular, self-enclosed system that is as beautiful at times as it is maddeningly immune to reason. The dogmatism is astonishing. If your conscience demands that you dissent from some teachings, then it is not really your conscience. It is sin. And if all this circular dogmatism forces many to leave the church they once thought of as home? So be it.

There is slow drizzling rain in Canberra today. It is so long since we have seen this that it makes the continuing drought seem all the more stark.

The dryness has now penetrated so deeply into the subsoil in some areas that it will take years of above average rain to recover. This many never happen. Subterranean aquifers are drying up or slowing as they have not done in decades. Much could be written about this, on greenhouse effect and many other things. One leading expert known to me suggests that in some localities, we may have to become accustomed to a virtually permanent level of water availability 20% lower than we have been used to.

The water storages of the City of Goulburn (about 100km from Canberra and the oldest inland city in Australia, with about 22,500 people) have dropped from 100% of capacity to about 22% over five years. The City is enduring maximum-level water restrictions and only bottled water is drinkable. Water for industry has been cut by a third and may soon be cut further. An emergency pipeline is to be constructed which will help a little. Some other towns in our region have similar problems.

The Cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of Canberra and Goulburn is in Goulburn. At one of the far-too-many meetings I attended this week, our Bishop mentioned in passing that despite the drought and the water shortages, the Mayor of Goulburn is encouraging the Synod to meet in Goulburn on 9-11 September, as planned.

Meanwhile, farmers in most of New South Wales are facing their fifth year of drought. The consequences for the land and the people are terrible. In this region, the church is just one of many institutions trying to meet an every increasing demand for assistance at the same time as the drought reduces its incomes.



God our heavenly Father
through your Son you promised
to those seeking first your kingdom and your righteousness
all things necessary for bodily welfare:
send us, we pray, in this time of need,
rain to water the earth,
that we may receive its produce to strengthen and sustain us
and always praise you for your bounty;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (AAPB, p. 205)

As I am still convalescent from shingles [herpes zoster], I am interested in some widely-reported work of the Shingles Prevention Study Group, published in an article with no less than 49 (!) authors, "A Vaccine to Prevent Herpes Zoster and Postherpetic Neuralgia in Older Adults", New England Journal of Medicine, 352(22):2271-2284, 2 June 2005.

The researchers tested whether vaccination against the virus would decrease the incidence, severity, or both of herpes zoster and postherpetic neuralgia (PHN, which I still have) among older adults. The incidence and severity of shingles and PHN increase with age. In a large trial, 38,546 adults 60 years of age or older were enrolled in a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of a live attenuated vaccine"

After a median of 3.12 years of surveillance of the 95% of participants who remained in the trial, a total of 957 confirmed cases of herpes zoster (315 among vaccine recipients and 642 among placebo recipients) and 107 cases of postherpetic neuralgia (27 among vaccine recipients and 80 among placebo recipients) were recorded for analysis.

In each of these trial participants diagnosed with herpes zoster and PHN, the pain and discomfort associated with herpes zoster were measured repeatedly for six months. The use of the zoster vaccine was found to reduce the burden of illness due to herpes zoster by 61.1%, the incidence of PHN by 66.5%, and the incidence of herpes zoster by 51.3%. But the vaccine may have little value for those who have already had a bout of shingles.

The Book Industry Study Group predicts "robust growth in the religious books market. On 16 May 2005, it cited its publication Book Industry TRENDS 2005 in estimating that over the next five years total book industry revenues are expected to increase 18.3%, with revenues from religious books rising 50%.

Religious books have emerged as the most impressive growth category in the [US] book publishing industry over the past four years and according to TRENDS 2005, the category -- including hardcover and paperback Bibles, biblical studies, testaments, histories, spiritual titles, hymnals, and prayer books, along with other titles pertaining to religion, inspirational titles, and religious fiction - recorded the biggest gains in 2004; with an 11% increase reaching US$1.9 billion in sales.

"The growth of religious-book sales at mainstream retailers is the key factor behind the dollar growth of 11% in the sector in 2004 and behind BISG's projections for steady growth over the next several years," stated Jim Milliot, Senior Editor for Business and News at Publishers Weekly and author of the TRENDS 2005 introductory essays. "While price increases played a part, units were up 8.5% in 2004, and BISG projects that they will increase at a better than 6% through 2007."

Now I need to be careful in what I say here, because I buy a lot of (fairly serious) religious⁄theological books myself. But I am reminded of an article by Michael G. Einstein, "The American dream? Capitalism, literalism, and their role in evangelical apocalypticism." ARC: the Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, 31:27-44, 2004. Einstein employs the ideas of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to deconstruct the negative influence of capitalism upon contemporary evangelical Christianity. He asks why pre-millennialist apocalypticism, such as the "Left Behind", series of novels, is popular. Einstein argues that commodification of religion supports alienation of evangelicals into imitation of popular culture and equates spirituality with consumption of 'Christian' products. Capitalism encourages a desire for consumption of such products, supposedly to enhance knowledge of God, but creates a disjunction between transcendent meaning as value and profit as value. An apocalyptic response fails as a means of transcendence and serves only to further the boundaries of capitalism, he concludes.

So it would be really interesting to know just what kinds of religious books are being bought in such quantities. I have no idea whether other Western countries are following the U.S. trend here. (Certainly in Australia and elsewhere, contemporary Christian music, about which I know almost nothing, achieves huge sales.) It would be wonderful if all these books are enhancing the personal formation and spiritual formation of their readers, increasing their knowledge and wisdom in theology and Christian life. But I fear that all too often we buy more and more books that simply reinforce our existing opinions and biases -- something I have to be careful of myself.

Following last year's election, the Howard Government will have a majority in the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, from 1 July 2005. It has signaled its intention it harder for workers to protect and improve our wages and conditions. I am critical of the abject failure of the Australian Labor Party and the Democrats to hold sufficient Senate seats to enable them to protect Australia's working people, though at least the Greens made gains. The Howard Government will:

• use individual contracts to undercut existing rights and conditions, especially in the public sector, where union-negotiated agreements cover 80% of workers and deliver better pay and conditions than non-union agreements;
• reduce the role of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission to resolve disputes and set fair minimum standards;
• give employers more control over bargaining;
• make it harder to get union support; and
• abolish redundancy pay and protection from unfair dismissals for employees of small businesses.

There are more facts here.

I'm not sure that big business wants the chaos this might cause. The Government's motivation here seems to be (a) de-unionisation and greater politicisation of the public sector and (b) votes in the small business/farm sectors.

(Mostly) Notable and quotable:

• "It's a huge free kick for business and a massive kick in the guts for working people. Any pretence that the Government is a friend of the battlers has been dropped altogether. " - Greg Combet, Secretary Australian Council of Trade Unions

• "The Prime Minister is dead wrong when he claims that his proposed workplace reforms will raise productivity. The major source of rising productivity is innovation, not workplace reform. " - John Legge, innovation specialist, Swinburne University

• "An emphasis on fairness only leads to regulatory excess and inefficiency. " - Kevin Andrews MP, Minister for Workplace Relations, 25 February 2005

• "A fundamental flaw is that [in the past] people tried to use industrial relations policy as a tool to achieve not only productivity and growth in the economy, but fairness. " Michael Chaney, Business Council of Australia, 1 April 2005

• "If we have achieved economic growth like we have, low inflation, the lowest rate of disputation for decades, moderate wages growth and low interest rates, why is there such a need for radical workplace reform which has the potential to divide the nation and possibly drive wages down?" - Senator Andrew Murray, Australian Democrats workplace spokesman

• "The Government is attacking the very basis of people's living standards ... Attack wages and you attack families. " Kim Beazley MP, Australian Labor Party leader

(Source: Community and Public Sector Union newsletter delegates@work June/July 2005.)

Whew! What a week.
Saturday: attend seminar on ARCIC Mary document, 10am-4pm
Sunday: preach and assist minister at 10am Eucharist
Monday: Chair (bi-monthly) St. Mark's Library Advisory Committee, 5.30-7.15pm
Tuesday: (weekly) singing lesson 6.15pm (cancelled, teacher indisposed)
Tuesday: attend public lecture by Nicholas Sagovsky, 7.30pm
Wednesday: take minutes at my (monthly) local parish council, 7.30-9.30pm
Thursday: attend (quarterly) St. Mark's Council, 5pm to 9pm (yes, a meal was provided!)
Friday: lunch time briefing on Diocesan Social Action plan
and ... oh yes, full time work for my employer including two meetings of a Tender Evaluation Committee, with extra work because my assistant was away ill.

OK, so I volunteer for most of this stuff, but the divine calendar is awry somehow, when it all happens in one week.

So, I'm very grateful that today begins a classic Aussie 'long-weekend' as Monday is a public holiday in honour of the official birthday (not the actual birthday, 21 April 1926) of Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, as she is formally 'styled and titled' in Australia. Concerning the Queen herself, I very much agree with Helen Pringle's reasons which the Queen is a person worthy of respect by monarchist and republican alike.

Private faces in public places, according to the poet W.H. Auden, are wiser and nicer than public faces in private places. Queen Elizabeth never shows her private face in a public place, it is often claimed. [. . .]

Queen Elizabeth is someone who is immersed in duty and tradition, and someone who takes them very seriously indeed. She suffers, if that is the word, from an almost Roman sense of duty in public service. That is, she conveys a sense that public service requires a person to subordinate her own songs and desires to something a little greater. For that I admire her.

My admiration is not for the Queen as the monarch of Australia. I am a republican. Rather I admire the Queen as one of the few upholders of the value of reticence in public life. Far too often, this reticence is read as the outward sign of a stunted emotional life, lived by a woman who has been taught from birth to repress or to silence her emotional self. [. . .]

[B]ecause Queen Elizabeth does not usually put her emotions on public view, it does not follow that she has none. On the contrary, she is to me a more interesting person for being restrained in public. When Diana died, the Queen in her message to the nation said, "We have all been trying, in our different ways, to cope".

There is something very touching and respectful in this sensibility. The implication seems to be that our intimate lives have a delicate fragility that needs some shelter of privacy in order to flourish. A further implication is that our emotions are easily corrupted by the full glare of public scrutiny, fed by those who have a passionate desire to publicise anything that comes to their mind. [. . .]

[W]e have come to gauge the emotional temperature of people like the Queen by how readily they emote in public. This seems to me to be a case of sheer emotional bullying. Public faces in private places may not be very nice, but I don't think that private faces in public places are necessarily very wise at all.

Our weekend began with dinner at the Bollywood Marsala restaurant. With such a name, one need not say what style of food was enjoyed!

Saturday: collapse? No, better catch up with a few posts, and write some notes on . . . then read . . .

On 7 June Pope Benedict XVI made a speech to a Diocese of Rome conference on the family [Italian text] in which, among other things, he criticised "pseudo-marriage between persons of the same sex" as an expression of "anarchic freedom". English language press reports of the speech were repetitious and sketchy, but there are now longer extracts available in English from Zenit, here.

It had already been clear for some time that on at least one issue, Benedict XVI would not be an agent of change. In one of the first actions of his papacy, he condemned a Spanish government bill allowing marriage between homosexuals. On his behalf, a senior Vatican official described the bill as profoundly iniquitous. Cardinal Lopez Trujillo said Roman Catholic officials should be prepared to lose their jobs rather than co-operate with the law.

There are things in the Pope's speech that a gay Christian might readily accept. The Bible presents man as "created in the image of God, and God himself is love. For this reason, the vocation to love is what makes man (sic) the authentic image of God: He becomes like God in the measure that he becomes someone who loves," Benedict XVI stated. The expression of love through sexuality is explained, he said, in "the indissoluble bond between spirit and body: Man is, in fact, soul that expresses itself in the body and body that is vivified by an immortal spirit."

He continued: "The body of man and of woman also has, therefore, so to speak, a theological character, it is not simply body, and what is biological in man is not only biological, but an expression and fulfillment of our humanity. Human sexuality is not next to our being person, but belongs to it. Only when sexuality is integrated in the person does it succeed in giving itself meaning."

I am comfortable enough with all of this (apart from the non-inclusive language), but then we get into difficult waters.

"None of us belongs exclusively to ourselves," Benedict said. "Therefore, each one is called to assume in our deepest selves our public responsibility." [So far, so good.] "Marriage, as an institution, is not therefore an undue interference of society or of the authorities, an imposition from outside in the most private reality of life; it is, on the contrary, an intrinsic exigency of the pact of conjugal love and of the depth of the human person." [No comment, though in some societies, marriage is indeed imposed.]

"The different present forms of the dissolution of marriage, as well as free unions and 'trial marriage,' including the pseudo-marriage between persons of the same sex", the Pope said, "are on the contrary expressions of an anarchic freedom that appears erroneously as man's authentic liberation." The Pope said this pseudo-freedom is based on "a trivialization of the body, which inevitably includes the trivialization of man. Its assumption is that man can make of himself what he likes. Thus his body becomes something secondary, which can be manipulated from the human point of view, which can be used as one pleases." He added, "Libertinism, which appears as discovery of the body and its value, is in reality a dualism that makes the body contemptible, leaving it, so to speak, outside the authentic being and dignity of the person."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anarchy is a denial of the existence of cohesive social, political, legal and religious principles, of common standard or purpose. It is nonsense for the Pope to say that civil unions and same-sex marriage are of such a character, unless, of course, anarchy is seen as anything that denies the specific set of principles held by the Roman Catholic church. There's the rub.

The term libertin was first used by Calvin against religious dissenters who wanted freedom of conscience in matters of faith and morals. 'Libertinism' has come to mean, among other things, the rejection of theology and metaphysics based in the self-revelation of God; pluralist religion and ethics; skepticism in philosophy and religion; and a view that religious creeds and dogmas are merely artifacts of human history. Once again, the Pope's argument holds only if divergence from the Roman point of view is necessarily rejection of the self-revelation of God and all that flows from it, and thus libertinism.

Benedict is a scholar of substance. He must know what he is doing when he says these things. He is reasserting the Roman perspective as universally normative, to the exclusion of all else. This is not a surprise. But it is a disappointment. Some people in same-sex relationships would be delighted to be described as anarchic and libertine! But the Pope's generalised characterisation of all people in commited who commit themselves to same-sex relationships, whether people of faith or not, as anarchic and libertine thereby expressing anarchism and libertinism , is simply mud-slinging and a disgrace.

Postscript: There is a rather better press account of the Pope's speech in The Tablet, here. I like The Tablet. Whether one agrees with the views expressed or not, it is intelligent and well written and gives an excellent window on affairs catholic and Catholic.

On 8 June, the Bishops of the Episcopal Church of Scotland made a further Statement . . . concerning future discussion of issues raised by the Windsor Report. Once again, the Scots provide us with a model of clarity, pastoral concern and openness to all. Particularly encoraging is the Bishops' willingness to take into account the "Experience of the presence and the ministry of people of homosexual orientation within the life of the church".

Statement by the College of Bishops [of the Scottish Episcopal Church] concerning future discussion of issues raised by the Windsor Report in the Province

Discussion up to the Present

Like all provinces in the Anglican Communion, we are at present sharing in two processes of discussion. In the Scottish Episcopal Church, we recently considered the Study Guide issued by the Working Party on Sexuality. Responses were collated and made available in the Province. The College of Bishops then made and circulated its own response to that material in February 2004. Similarly, the Windsor Report was considered in the Province. When responses to it were collated, the College made and circulated its own response both to it, and to the Primates' Communiqué in March 2005.

Between now and Lambeth 2008, we are committed, as a Province, to sharing in the wider debate taking place across the Anglican Communion. We must, therefore, seek in a spirit of generosity to engage with and appreciate the full range of views that have been expressed and continue to be expressed both within our Province and elsewhere in our worldwide Communion.

The Issues Now Before Us

The Anglican Communion is at present attempting to deal with three major issues on this subject:

1. Its attitude to people of homosexual orientation, including those who are in long term same-sex relationships;
2. Whether acceptance extends to ministry in general and, in particular, to ordination to priesthood and episcopacy;
3. How the church can hold within a single communion those who differ in their response to this issue and believe that this is, for various and differing reasons, an issue of fundamental importance.

Material for Further Consideration

The members of the College of Bishops recognise that they have a teaching and pastoral responsibility. They, therefore, wish to create an environment in which passionately held views can be expressed and heard in an atmosphere of charity, acceptance and honesty.

They are aware that there is a danger that even to encourage debate on this subject is to raise concern that 'traditional' positions may be modified, that an open attitude may become more closed or that what has been an informal acceptance of difference may be made more difficult just by the process of debate. However, such a debate must take place in every province of the Anglican Communion, as we move to the Lambeth Conference in 2008.

Everyone who engages in this debate must consider a number of factors:

1. The interpretation and the authority of scripture -- what it says and how it is to be read;
2. An examination of the tradition of faith and the documents which have been produced as part of the Anglican Communion's own examination of this issue. These most recently include the Resolutions of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the Windsor Report and the Primates' Communiqué. Further material will arise between now and 2008, possibly as a result of the coming meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council;
3. Experience of the presence and the ministry of people of homosexual orientation within the life of the church;
4. Ways in which our understanding of gender and sexuality has developed and continues to develop in our society.

In all this, we must seek to be open to learning the truth of God from one another under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

The College's Commitment and Invitation

The College of Bishops, therefore, affirms its commitment to the task set before the whole Communion -- to engage openly and prayerfully with the full range of issues and material which are now part of this debate. The College invites the Province to share in this process, listening to each other and to voices from other Provinces with that same spirit of generosity as has characterised our own debate so far.

Harley in this post draws attention to a Sydney Daily Telegraph front page report about an anti-discrimination program in New South Wales public schools and second story about how it had forced the Education Minister to withdraw the course.

I join Harley in reproducing this open letter from the NSW Teachers Federation to the Minister for Education and Training. May be the course needs some modification. I don't kow. But a knee jerk response to a tabloid newspaper is not the way to make educational policy in a sensitive area.

6 June 2005

The Hon. Carmel Tebbutt, MLC
Minister for Education and Training
GPO Box 5070
SYDNEY NSW 2000

Dear Ms Tebbutt

Re: Anti discrimination and anti homophobia programs in schools


The Federation is appalled by your decision to allow the Daily Telegraph to drive education policy in this state.

The report in the Daily Telegraph today, despite its rampant homophobia and sensationalism, actually described a program about teaching students empathy and compassion amongst other matters. The program clearly fits properly within Board of Studies syllabuses and Department of Education and Training guidelines.

Regardless of this you chose, out of fear of a right-wing media backlash, to take a "knee jerk" decision and direct that the unit be withdrawn.

I am sure that as the Minister you are aware of the number of suicides of young people who are homosexual or perceived to be homosexual. Furthermore, the bullying of young people in those circumstances is horrific.

The awful irony of your position is that, driven by the Daily Telegraph, you supported the Stand Up and Speak Out against Bullying Day. You now allow this same organisation to stamp out programs that would help alleviate bullying in our schools.

Federation asks for you to clarify your position on this matter as a matter or urgency. The Federation intends to put this letter on our website.

Maree O'Halloran, President can be contacted about this matter.

Yours sincerely

Barry Johnson
General Secretary

Graham Kennedy, radio and TV comedian and accomplished film actor (They're a Weird Mob 1968, The Odd, Angry Shot 1978, The Club 1980, The Return of Captain Invincible 1982, The Killing Fields 1983, Stanley 1983, Travelling North 1987) died yesterday aged only 71. These are some extracts from Peter Gavin's perceptive review of Graeme Blundel's biography of Graham Kennedy, King: the life and comedy of Graham Kennedy (Macmillan, 2003, 500pp).

[Kennedy's] career spanned 40 years. But the sad part is that he never seemed to find love or happiness. He was the ultimate showbiz trouper: there seemed no life beyond the next script or deal. Towards the end there was little left for the king to conquer. The story finishes with him ailing: sick and secluded. Loved by his friends and missed by his fans, he read the early chapters of this book and liked it, but decided he didn't want to read any more because, as he says, "I know how it ends."

This Graham Kennedy is the one we know. Fast on his feet but remote, cranky, impatient with stardom, his constant quips revealing a hankering for applause. The man who wouldn't swear in company yet built an individual comedy style around innuendo of the crudest kind, who alarmed the censors and amused the nation when he made a crow call that sounded like "Faaaarrrrrkkk!" on his national Tonight Show.

Blundell adds several extra dimensions to this tabloid feature image. Until now Kennedy never really seemed a figure of pathos, perhaps because Australia's pop culture icons have eluded the kind of elaborate scrutiny on offer here. King is a sustained celebration of Kennedy's gifts, but Blundell works in a motif of loss and regret and yearning so that every triumph is counterpointed with complex emotions. [...]

Particularly deft is the way [Blundell] handles Kennedy's sexuality. Blundell mirrors the comedian's own elusiveness by never baldly advancing a thesis on the subject. Instead Blundell lets friends speak for Kennedy, a technique that is both subtle and compassionate. There's a lovely moment when a friend tells how Kennedy would often call distraught after a relationship had failed. That the romance was homosexual is clear. (Read Queer Penguin's post on 'Gra-Gra's' sexuality.) But that revelation is secondary to the central dilemma of Kennedy's life: his celebrity didn't open up opportunities for sex or, as it happens, power or money. Instead, in Blundell's chronicle, Kennedy seemed cowed by his fame. And, what is worse, there seemed little else in his life but fame.

Kennedy was just 23 when he moved to from radio to television, still new and untried in Australia, and launched In Melbourne Tonight. It was a take-off of the American 'Tonight Show' format, with the host presiding over sketches, introducing star turns and reading advertisements live. Kennedy transformed the live reads into a comedic art form, slagging off the sponsor's products and extending the ads to the point of absurdity (one 20-second spot ran for over 20 minutes). The sponsors lapped it up and so did the audiences.

The shows were live-to-air and mostly chaotic and funny but sometimes self indulgent. Graeme Blundell writes,

He understood that it was the telling that was funny. There was no punch line as such, he would digress, he didn't know where he was going, but it was just hysterical. It has to do with notions of reality and identity: who you are when you tell jokes, who are you telling them to, where does it come from, how do you summon it up? Comedians always think about those things, which is why the language of comedy is the language of death; they say things like 'I died out there', 'We slayed them in the aisles'. Anyone who's been funny for a living, and I have, can tell you that. It's a terrible strain.

Television was introduced to Australia for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. In the country, where I lived as a child, there was no reception and in any case TV sets were very expensive. I remember visiting my uncle in the city and staying up late to watch In Melbourne Tonight (in black and white). It continued until 1967. I remember it fondly and am sorry Graham Kennedy is gone.

In my last post, I mentioned the inestimable Kel Richards' book Word watch. I could mine this book for many posts, but must allow Mr Richards his copyright and his royalties! However, I do want to discuss his entry on homophobia

Homophobia
The prefix 'homo' comes from the Greek homos and means 'the same kind'. You can see this meaning at work in the word 'homogenous'. Thus homophobia literally means 'fear of the same kind'. Used correctly, homophobia would describe the fear of one homosexual for other homosexuals, or a heterosexual for other heterosexuals. Homophobia has a second failure as a word: it implies that failure to fully endorse the gay lifestyle is inspired by fear. Such a charge reduces intelligent discussion to a schoolyard sneer of 'scaredy cat'. Clearly, a new word is needed: homophobia just won't do the job.

I agree, but which new word? This is quite difficult, because we are trying to cram several concepts into one word -- 'against' or 'anti' ⁄ 'people' or 'behaviour' ⁄ 'associated with' ⁄ 'attraction to', or 'love of' ⁄ 'other people of the same sex'.

Two possibilities in use already are anti-homosexual and heterosexist -- both strictly an improvement on 'homophobia'. But they are don't have quite the same ring as 'homophobe!' when yelled out at a protest or political meeting!

'Miso', besides from being a kind of Japanese soup, helps make words like 'misogynist' (woman-hater) and 'misandrist' (man-hater). The trouble is that 'mishomosexual' sounds like the name of a drag queen, 'Miss Homosexual'. 'Mishomophile' is likewise, or 'mis' anything for that matter, unless the 'anything' can't work as a name.

In this discussion, Paul Niquette proposes use of the prefix/suffix 'taxis' to coin two new words:

1. gynotaxis n. The responsive movement of an organism toward a female; attraction of either gender to a woman.
2. androtaxis n. The responsive movement of an organism toward a male; attraction of either gender to a man. [Paul Niquette, excerpt from Sophistication: How to get it...then what! © 1996 by Resource Books, 1996.]

[Derivation -- taxis- combining form [Gk, lit., arrangement, order, fr. tassein to arrange] (1758) 1: reflex translational or orientational movement by a freely motile and usually simple organism in relation to a source of stimulation (as a light or a temperature or chemical gradient) 2: a reflex reaction involving a taxis source: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary]

"These terms", Paul Niquette says, "relocate the distinction in sexual orientation from the attractee to the attractor. They dare to suppose that awareness of 'self' does not influence sexual orientation."

So . . . 'misotaxis' could be used to mean 'hatred of the attraction of one person to another' including same-sex attraction. 'Misohomotaxis' is more precise, but the shorter word will do. And hence 'misotaxic', 'misotaxia', etc.

That's the best I can offer. But, all in all, (sorry Mr Richards), I think we're stuck with homophobia as a word, if not as a reality. All the more so as the 1st annual International Day against Homophobia, IDAHO, was held in more than 40 Countries as recently as 17 May. It marks the day, 15 years ago, when homosexuality was removed from an official World Health Organisation's list of mental disorders. "Following this historic decision," says Louis-Georges Tin, Founder of IDAHO, "the goal of IDAHO, ILGA, and other supporting organizations is to have the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Commission for Human Rights to condemn homophobia in its political, social, and cultural dimensions by recognizing this International Day Against Homophobia."

In a recent post about the writing of sonnets, I ignorantly described myself as "not a literary person." Only two days later, I find the following extract in Kel Richards' informative and amusing book, compiled from his short "Word Watch" pieces on ABC News Radio.

BFZ
American social commentator Charles Colson has coined the expression BFZ. This stands for'Book Free Zone', and he coined the phrase to lament those well-educated Americans -- highly literate people -- who choose to be non-literary. They are college graduates, says Colson, perfectly capable of reading, who choose not to.
Kel Richards' word watch. Sydney: Pan, 2001, p. 20.

The Concise Oxford dictionary says:

literary a. 1. Of, constituting, occupied with, literature or books and written composition esp. of the kind valued for quality of form; . . . "

So, through lack of literacy, I have described myself as a Book Free Zone. Agh! I spend half my life with books, hundreds and hundreds of them.

Hopefully I am literate, but I am not a literary personexpert in literary criticism (explanation of correction!). Yet I admire good writing and enjoy finely crafted short stories and essays. I am enjoying the Collected stories (London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004) of Carol Shields CC, FRSC (1935-2003), which I discovered recently. (The collection seems to have had an odd publishing history. The Fourth Estate edition is defunct and it the collection is now out in a different cover with an introduction by Margaret Atwood.)

"Segue", the first story in the collection, is Shield's last work, not previously published. Its narrator and main character is a 67 year old poet who is married to a novelist, the other main character. She is a 'sonnet maker', whose discipline is to write a new sonnet every two weeks. I enjoyed the story and read it twice before going on to the next one. Though not the main point of "Segue", in passing I learned from it some things about the sonnet. (I also enjoy accessible poetry.)

"Sonnet writing [...] no longer confines itself to the professing and withdrawing of courtly love, although I insisted that a nod to such love is always hovering, or rather nudging. Is this notion true or just part of my fussy exegetic self?"

"A novel is about everything it touches upon, and so is a sonnet."

"[S]onnet means 'little sound.'"

"Sonnets are taken so strenuously, so literally, when taught at school, or at least they used to be, and the definition fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter-hardens and ends up gesturing toward an artifact, an object one might construct from a kit. But if you picture the sonnet, instead, as a little sound, a ping in the great wide silent world, you make visible a sudden fluidity to the form, a splash of noise, but a carefully measured splash that's saved from preciosity by the fact that it comes from within the body's own borders, one voice, one small note extended, and then bent; the bending is everything, the volta, the turn, and also important is where it occurs within the sonnet's "scanty plot of ground," to quote old Wordsworth. From there the "little sound" sparks and then forms itself out of the dramatic contrasts of private light and darkness."

"Forget all that business about fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter, think of Leonard and his sage wisdom: Art breathes from containment and suffers from freedom." Or the problems that accrue from the "weight of too much liberty" (Wordsworth). Down out the noise of rhyme and rhythm. Think only of the small dramatic argument that's being brought into being -- a handball court or a courtroom itself, hard, demanding thick stone walls -- between perseverance and its asymmetrical smash of opposition. [...] Or think of the shape of a human life, which, like it or not, is limited. [...] Every species has a probable life span, and this observation offers me a verification of sorts for my fourteen line creation."

"A sonnet [...] comes with its coat of varnish. As Flaubert says, the words are like hair; they shine with combing. We can do what we want with a sonnet. It is a container ever reusable, ever willing to refurbished, retouched, regilded and reobjectified."

Autumn is the best season in Canberra and the garden in our courtyard is in flower to reward James's efforts. How better to celebrate than lunch in the sunshine? Here James poses self-consciously before cooking the gourmet sausages.

Roses do well in Canberra. Australia's Old Parliament House has had rose gardens since Robert Broinowski began work on them in 1931, using public donations. The National Capital Authority (James's employer) has restored the Old Parliament House gardens with more than five thousand roses, once again sponsored by private donors.

James and I have sponsored a rose in my late mother's name (June McKinlay), and were assigned a Lady Mann rose. It's a hybrid tea rose bred in Australia in 1937, with dark foliage and strongly colored pink blooms. It is a recurrent flowerer with a strong fragrance, growing to about 1.8m. The Lady Mann rose has been planted in the Rex Hazlewood Rose Garden, located on the Senate side of the old building.

As tomorrow is Mothers' Day, after our lunch, James and I went to have look. The Rex Hazlewood Garden was first designed by Hazlewood, a rose specialist, 1931, at the request of the then National Rose Society of New South Wales. The replanted version will tell the history of the rose, displaying many old styles of roses. The very centre of centre of the garden features roses bred by internationally renowned Australian rose breeder Alister Clark. One of these is the Lady Mann.

Post script (October 2008) For a long time I was unsure as to who was the Lady Mann after whom the rose is named. Following a kind note from Trischa Mann, I learn that she was most likely Adeline Mary (neé Raleigh), Lady Mann (d. 1957), the the wife of Sir Frederick Wollaston Mann KCMG (1869-1958), Chief Justice (1935-44) and Lieutenant Governor of Victoria.

The rose was bred by Alister Clark (1864-1949), Australia's most prolific rose breeder, who lived and bred his roses in Bulla, near Melbourne, Victoria. (The Alister Clark Memorial Rose Garden in Bulla contains all 67 of the Alister Clark roses still available.) The Lady Mann rose was released around 1940, during Sir Frederick's term as Chief Justice. So it does seem likely that the Lady Mann rose was indeed named after Adeline!

Recently James and I saw two very different exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia: Grace Cossington Smith: a retrospective and James Gleeson: beyond the screen of sight.

Cossington Smith, with Margaret Preston and Fred Williams, is among my favourite twentieth century Australian painters. She was, perhaps, Australia's pre-eminent post-impressionist. Cossington Smith a paradoxical figure; she lived a quiet, circumscribed life. Yet as an artist she was a brilliant pioneering modernist.

As a full retrospective, the show ranges from 1910 to 1971, the full span of her art career, and includes 135 paintings and drawings. It was simply glorious. Cossington Smith drew and painted many subjects, mainly in bright colors, in a manner that was daring and new for her day. Her drawing and perspective are superb, yet she often saw her subjects from an unconentional perspective. She was particularly interested in cityscapes and structures (she did a large series on the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the 1930's) but also made many fine portraits and some pictures of Australian wildflowers. Later in life, she made an brightly colored series of interiors of her Sydney home, such as this one, Interior with wardrobe mirror, 1955. I recommend the NGA's permanent website of Grace Cossington Smith's works.

James Gleeson, AO, D.Litt, at age 89 is still working and is much esteemed as an elder statesman in Australian art. The exhibition (prepared by the National Gallery of Victoria) was impressive. Much of Gleeson's work is surrealist, which I barely understand and don't like especially. But the quality of the work was obvious even to the unschooled eye. Three paintings that caught my were Crucifixion (1952), National Gallery of Victoria; Italy (1951), Art Gallery of New South Wales; and A cloud of witnesses (1966) Queensland Art Gallery. Italy [at right] evokes, of course, the devastation to Italy's built environment and cultural heritage as a result of WWII. I find it most striking.

A considerable part of Gleeson's work is frankly homoerotic, but it is not in the least pornographic. Many of the works explore the subconscious; their meanings are just beyond conscious understanding. Nude men are seen in strange, colorful landscapes that perhaps suggest the realms of unconscious. They also suggest that despite clothes and buildings, we are very much naked in our environment, which we do not fully understand and which can be turbulent. Yet, there is a sense of serenity in Gleeson's later works.

I am in favour of the Australian War Memorial, here in Canberra, not so much because it is a memorial, but because it is an important museum, archive, gallery and cultural asset relating to Australia's all too frequent participation in warfare.

This year, the memorial is holding a number of events to highlight the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings and the 60th anniversary of VE (Victory in Europe). There will a commemorative service on the anniversary day, 8 May. The program is disappointing as it differs little from the one that has been used at countless ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day ceremonies for years. The hymns are those used over and over and the prayer, which I've left out, uses non-inclusive language. Couldn't someone have been a bit more imaginative? Here's a summary.

Ceremonial arrivals of VIPs Welcome by the Director of the Australian War Memorial Hymn: Amazing grace Addresses by the Minister for Veterans' Affairs and the British High Commissioner Call to worship: prayer by Chaplain Presentation of the Russian Commemorative Medal to three Australians Wreathlaying by seven Australian representatives and diplomatic representatives of seventeen other nations The Ode and Response: "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old . . . " The Last Post / One Minute's Silence /The Rouse Hymn: O God, our help in ages past National Anthem Mustang fly-over salute Thank you and farewell

Yes, we need to remember the sacrifice of those who gave everything. Australians do this on ANZAC Day (25 April) and Remembrance Day (11 November). But on 8 May, we could have used a more lively ceremony to celebrate not Victory in Europe, but Peace for Europe. There are many people of German descent in Australia and over a million of Italian descent. (See Gianfranco Cresciani. The Italians in Australia. Cambridge Univ Pr., 2003). It would have been very fine if they could have joined their fellow Australians to give thanks for peace.

James and I meet weekly with some church friends for 'MSM' -- meal, study and meditation. I find meditation the hardest part; somehow it doesn't suit my temperament. I need to mediate on something such as a familiar psalm or prayer.

Recently I have I discovered prayer beads to be helpful. In the 1980s, Revd. Lynn Bauman of the United States created a pattern for Anglican Prayer Beads which is now widely used. Prayer beads, or 'rosaries', have not been common among Anglicans, who are often uncomfortable with the Marian nature of the Roman Catholic rosary (I am definitely no Marian myself, though I respect that the scripture describes her a " as blessed among women" the mother of Jesus. Maybe we can pray for the 'faithful departed', Mary included, but we certainly cannot pray to them.) However, there is a growing interest in the tradition of contemplative prayer. ('Rosary' derives from the Latin word rosarium, a rose garland or rose garden.) There's no set pattern for use of the prayer beads, but their design and symbolism are well explained here by the Franciscans. The beads are not 'holy', they are simply a tool to aid prayer and keep the mind focused.

While still convalescent from illness, I often lie quietly in bed for a while before falling asleep. So I use the beads to help me fill my mind with pleasant, prayerful reflections. But praying in a darkened bedroom means that I either have to improvise as I go along (which is fine, but difficult when tired at the end of the day) or use some words that I have already memorised. So I devised this text based on a couple of very well known prayers from the Sunday church services, so that I can meditate on the words, without being distracted by the effort of recall.

	In the day	At night
At the cross:	Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God's people on earth. Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.1	The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. Amen.
	In the day and at night: at the invitatory bead:
	Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord. Amen.2
	In the day and at night: at the cruciform bead before each 'week' or group of seven beads, this 'Trisagion':
	Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and imortal, have mercy on us.2
In the day and at night, for the 'weeks' - the seven beads between each cruciform bead:
First bead:	Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known,
Second bead:	and from whom no secrets are hidden:
Third bead:	cleanse the thoughts of my heart
Fourth bead:	by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit
Fifth bead:	that I may perfectly love you,
Sixth bead:	and worthily magnify your holy name
Seventh bead:	through Christ our Lord. Amen.
	In the day	At night
At the last cruciform bead:	Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.1	In your mercy, Lord, dispel the darkness of night. Let this household so sleep in peace that at the dawn of the new day we may with joy waken in your name; through Christ our Lord.4

1. "Gloria in Excelsis", text agreed by the English Language Liturgical Consultation 1988.
2. A Prayer Book for Australia, 1998, p.119.
2. A Prayer Book for Australia, 1998, p.121.
4. An Australian Prayer Book, 1978, p.108.

Today at St. Philip's church, we celebrated the feast of St. Philip and St. James. I wrote a small pamphlet about him. It's not especially original; most of the information can be found here, here, and in Leon Morris's comentary on John.1 When I began to look for a depiction of St. Philip the Apostle, apart from a few icons of varying quality, I found little. Except, that is, this glorious engraving by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528). Made in 1526 (possibly earlier) and just 122mm by 76mm, is the fifth and last sheet of Dürer's unfinished series of Apostles. The handling is very bold and shows the skill due to the absolute command of the graver. The long sweeping lines which marked Dürer's earlier work reappear, especially in the background.

"Despite the brilliance of his paintings, he is the greatest master of woodcut and copper-engraving, achieving a technical mastery and range of expression never seen before or excelled since. [. . .] The influence of his prints was enormous; not only were they immediate and memorably dramatic in their narrative power, so that they astonish by their vivid imagery and layers of iconographic meaning; they were easily transported, cheap, and therefore readily available."2 The great white mantle of the engraving of St Philip so pleased Dürer that he used it again in his painted panels of Four Apostles in 1526.

The Four Holy Men. 1526.

Dürer's accomplishments included some magnificent paintings, portraits, and altarpieces. But his greatest achievement lay in his graphic work, his woodcuts, his engravings, and even some etchings, and in a large number of brilliant drawings. In addition, he wrote some of the earliest works in the German language dealing with human proportions and perspective, with the intention of providing a sound foundation for art.

In his own day, Dürer was a man of great fame. [. . .] For the centuries to come his fame seldom waned; his graphic work was collected, many of his figures imitated, and his books used as textbooks. He became famous almost overnight when he published his Apocalypse in 1498.

Dürer's breadth and depth of subject matter are truly unique. He depicts biblical stories, the lives of saints, historical events, fashion, elements of social life, classical mythology or allegory, animals, plants, heraldry, as well as making portraits, landscapes, fantastic ornamental borders, and even depictions of dreams. No other artist ever treated such a wide variety of subjects while at the same time introducing many innovations. [. . .]

[T]he fifteenth century had seen the introduction of naturalism, an attempt to respect reality as it was seen, and introducing depth and space. In Italy we call this the Renaissance. In the north its center was Flanders, the home of great Flemish artists like van Eyck and van der Weyden and other Flemish masters wrongly called "primitives." Dürer knew both streams, felt their influence, and in many ways even furthered their achievements.³

1. Leon Morris. The Gospel according to John. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971
2. P & L Murray The Oxford companion to Christian art and architecture, OUP, 1998, pp.146-147.
3. Dürer's Apocalypse: an artist's message to his contemporaries" in HR Rookmaaker The creative gift: essays on art and the Christian life. Westchester: Cornerstone, 1981 (A collection of essays published after Rookmaaker's death in 1977.)

The Anglican Church of Canada has a difficult decision on its hands.

The Council of General Synod (CoGS), the governing body of the Anglican Church of Canada between meetings of its General Synod, meets 6 to 8 May, and will decide on last February's request by the primates (national leaders) of the Anglican Communion that the Canadian church withdraw its members from the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) -- this in response to the 'Windsor Report' on current divisions related to homosexuality. If it decides to withdraw its members from the meeting, CoGS must also decide on the primates' invitation to appear at a "hearing" at the ACC "to set out the thinking behind their recent actions" in the Canadian church, and whether it will continue to fund the ACC.

Meeting recently, the bishops of the Anglican Church of Canada unanimously agreed "neither to encourage nor to initiate" the blessing of same-sex couples "until General Synod has made a decision on the matter" -- a statement that expresses the status quo. The statement met with approval from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who sent a message to the bishops.

The bishops also supported the commitment of the Canadian primate to his fellow international leaders to try to convince CoGS to agree to request that Canadian members be withdrawn from the ACC. However, the bishops did not recommend whether or not the Canadian church should withdraw, leaving the decision to the CoGS.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, the Anglican Church of Canada's Faith, Worship and Ministry Committee says that "existing ecclesiological and synodical structures, in dioceses and provinces and within the (Anglican) Communion, are being pre-empted" by the primates' recommendation. "Authority is being extended to bodies that goes beyond that constitutionally allocated to them,". The Committee called the primates' request "inappropriate" citing these reasons.

• The constitution of the ACC "states that questions of membership are initiated" by it.
• If the primates' request were granted "it would set a precedent for dealing with other issues."
• The Windsor Report, issued by the Lambeth Commission on Communion created to find ways of "seeking the highest communion possible" among churches at odds over homosexuality, has recommended that communication lines remain open.
• The Canadian Anglican church "is still in a process of discernment and is not at present of one mind" about matters of sexuality.

Similarly, its Ecojustice Committee, which considers social justice issues, also recommends that the Anglican Church of Canada continue as a full member of the ACC. It based its decision on the baptismal covenant and a "conviction that theological consensus is the fruit of communion, and not its pre-condition." In its report to CoGS, the Ecojustice Comiittee cites the Anglican Communion's Ten Principles of Partnership, which promote inter-dependence, transparency and meeting together. Bishop Michael Bedford-Jones, committee chair, noted that "Of all the bodies to be asked not to go to, (the ACC) is the only one that serves the whole Communion and that is composed of all orders of ministry."

Postscript: On 7 May, the Canadian Council of General Synod decided that the Anglican Church of Canada's members to the Anglican Consultative Council should attend a meeting next month but not participate in the council's deliberations. The text of the resolution it adopted is:

That this General Synod thank our Primate, The Most Reverend Andrew Hutchison, for using his best efforts to explain the reality of the Anglican Church of Canada to the Primates of the Anglican Communion, and to explain the Primates' Communiqué to the Anglican Church of Canada.
That the Council of General Synod affirm the membership of the Anglican Church of Canada in the Anglican Consultative Council with the expectation that the duly elected members attend but not participate in the June 2005 meeting of the Council.
That the Council of General Synod welcome the invitation to the Anglican Consultative Council in order to explain the current situation, the steps that were taken by the Dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada and the General Synod and the underlying theological and biblical rationale with respect to the decision to bless committed same-sex unions.
That this Council ask the Primate, in consultation with the Windsor Report Response Task Group a) to formulate the presentation to be made to the Anglican Consultative Council at its meeting in June, 2005, as contemplated by paragraph 16 of the Communiqué and b) to name participants in the presentation in consultation with this Council.
This Council encourages the Primate to consider attending the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in June 2005, and to participate in the presentation contemplated by paragraph 14 of the Primates' Communiqué.

Sources: Anglican Journal here and here.
Anglican Church of Canada news item

The Pittsburg Post Gazette is marking the fiftieth anniversary of Jonas Salk's anti-polio vaccine with an fine series of articles including historical materials and reports on current progress toward elimination of polio. Polio is now a serious problem in only a few countries, particularly where there is war, poverty or trouble that makes delivery of large scale vaccination difficult. But it is once again on the increase in those places, having been eliminated in the Americas and the Western Pacific, for example. Vaccine will be required for decades, as polio can be dormant for years and regions need to be ready to contain outbreaks that can occur haphazardly. The World Health Organisation and UNICEF have a Polio eradication website with up to date information. Rotary International has also made a huge contribution. This picture was taken of me a few months after I had had a serious fever. It was to be years later, after my legs had failed to grow to the same length as each other and I began to limp, that pioneering polio specialist Dame Jean Macnamarra was able to tell my worried parents that I had had polio.

She became particularly interested in physical methods of treatment, developing them for use in her own practice. Splints and various other strange looking contraptions were used to immobilise limbs and protect muscles from damage. Years of corrective therapy followed with the patient's whole family encouraged to play a part. Macnamara continued her work with polio sufferers for the rest of her life, forming close relationships with many of the families. -- Tim Sherratt in Australasian Science, Summer 1993, p. 64. reproduced by the Australian Science Archive Project

Dr Dame Jean Macnamara, DBE

That's just what happened to me: while I was a child there were splints and calipers, a special chair and a long woolly stocking I wore on my left leg to encourage it to grow faster, while the other leg stuck out in the cold from my shorts! The treatment was helpful, though by the time I was a teenager no more treatment was possible, even though some effects remained. I have been much better off than many who have experienced polio, especially as I can walk normally, but it has caused some problem or other almost every day of my life. Some people experience post-polio syndrome forty or more years after the initial illness, but so far I've had few serious problems.

Hundreds of articles appear on the internet about almost every topic imaginable, but I find this article to be a handy (admittedly simplified) summary of the current debate on homosexuality and the Bible. These are some are some edited extracts from an article by Kelly Hawes in the Galveston County Daily News of 24 April 2005, reporting a talk at Trinity Episcopal Church, Galveston, where Dr L. Michael White spoke on "The Bible and the 'H' Word: What does the Bible really say about homosexuality?"

White calls homosexuality and abortion the two most divisive issues facing the country today. In both discussions, he said, the two sides tend to see the issue in black and white with no shades of gray. "There is much rancor and debate," he said. "If this were an easy topic, we probably wouldn't be here today." The debate on homosexuality is about basic cultural values, he said, but it's important that the two sides agree on the terms.

"The movement to recognize gay and lesbian people in churches has stopped talking about the Bible," he said, "whereas the other side says it's all about the Bible. The two sides are like ships passing in the night." During a recent appearance at Trinity Episcopal Church, White contended that those arguing for inclusion were making an error in strategy. "To not talk about the Bible is to lose automatically in the minds of those on the other side," he said.

White is the director of the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins at the University of Texas at Austin. White received his doctorate in 1982 from Yale University, and he moved to the University of Texas in 1996 from Oberlin College, where he was chair of the Department of Religion. He has also taught at Yale and at Indiana University. He specializes in the religions of the Roman Empire, focusing heavily on the social context of Jews and Christians in the Graeco-Roman period by blending historical, literary and sociological research with traditional biblical studies and archaeological field work.

White said a lot of people might be surprised to learn what the Bible really says about homosexuality. "The words that we often assume are found in the Bible are not even really there," he said. The word 'homosexual' was not coined until 1869 as an effort by the medical profession to arrive at a more neutral term than 'sodomy' or 'sodomite,' White said, and even those words did not come into being until the 11th century, almost 2,000 years after the first portions of the Torah were written. Nonetheless, all appear in some translations of the Bible.

White noted that the only references to same-sex relations in the Old Testament come in two passages in Leviticus, a book scholars believe was written in about the fourth century B.C., almost 500 years after the first version of the Torah emerged. In the original Hebrew, those passages label incest and bestiality as tebel, which means 'improper mixing.' They describe sex between men as toebah, which means 'abhorrent by reason of impurity.' The word applied to incest and bestiality, White said, would clearly indicate a greater transgression. The Bible uses the term it applies to sex among men to describe many other things, including lying, cheating and burning incense. The differentiation is lost, he said, in the translation to Latin, which used the same word to translate both tebel and toebah.

White notes still other problems in translation. The Greek word arsenokoitais, for example, is translated in the King James Version as someone who defiles himself with men. In the New American Bible, circa 1970, the translation became "practicing homosexuals." In the New International Version three years later, it was "perverts."

White was even more emphatic in his analysis of a verse in the New Testament book of Romans that has been interpreted as a condemnation of homosexuality. White says he and many other scholars believe the verse actually refers to a practice called 'pederasty', an ancient Greek tradition in which older men had sex with young boys. "It is to pervert the New Testament to try to make those passages apply to homosexuality in general," White said. Still, he said, it would be wrong to deny that the Bible frowns on homosexual relationships. Of course, it also frowns upon the presence of menstruating women in church, and it celebrates the murder and mutilation of a woman whose only sin was to have been raped."

As well as being Anzac Day, 25 April is the feast of St. Mark, a reminder to pray for St. Mark's National Theological Centre, where I am a graduate student, as well as filling some other roles. God of all truth, teach us to love you with heart and mind. Bless St. Mark's National Theological Centre that it may be a lively centre for sound learning, new discovery, and the pursuit of wisdom. May all who teach and all who learn seek and love the truth, and in humility look to you, the source of all wisdom and understanding, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (APBA, p. 206)

25 April is Anzac Day and each year more and more Australian and New Zealand pilgrims gather at the Anzac site in Turkey, as well as at commemorations throughout Australia and New Zealand. A bond is forming between the Australian, New Zealand and Turkish peoples as we remember together the events of ninety years ago.

Before the First World War most Australians were eager to fight if necessary die for the sake of their country and their British heritage (my grandfather among them). In The broken years, Australian soldiers in the Great War (Penguin Books, 1975), Bill Gammage uses the diaries and letters of a thousand Australian soldiers to reconstruct the valour and the tragedy of their experience. He shows how and why the 1914-18 war was to have profound effects on the attitudes and ideals of Australia as a nation. The horror and tragedy of conflict brought fundamental changes in outlook and initiated the bittersweet Anzac tradition. We have been in several wars, but since the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, it has been impossible for us to be a war-loving nation. The movie Gallipoli (1981) directed by Peter Weir, tells the story of two athletic young Australian men who joined the Australian Light Horse in World War I, only to be sent to Gallipoli as infantry canon fodder in the campaign against the Turks.

I saw the movie in the 1980s, soon after it was released. I remember watching its portrayal of lines of beautiful, proud young men running futilely into the enemy fire, for no cause but poor generalship. And I remember leaving the cinema shaking with shame and anger at the horror and waste. I am still angry.

The final scene in the movie is based on these events described by Gammage (p.74) and in the longer quote below from C.E.W. Bean's history:

At four on the afternoon of 6 August the artillery began a gentle bombardment. It intensified early on the 7th , but a four twenty three am, seven minutes before time, it ceased. The light horsemen stood still in the silence. In the enemy trenches soldiers cautiously emerged from shelter, lined their front two deep, fired short bursts to clear their machine guns, levelled their rifles, and waited.

At four thirty precisely the first line of the 8th Light Horse leapt from their trenches. As their helmets appeared above the parapet, an awful fire broke upon them. Many were shot, but a line started forward. It crumpled and vanished within five yards. One or two men on the flanks dashed to the enemy's parapet before being killed, the rest lay still in the open. ... The second line saw the fate of their friends. Over their heads the Turk fire thundered undiminished, drowning out any verbal order. In front the slope was shot bare of foliage. Beside them lay dead and wounded of the first line, hit before they cleared the trench. But they waited two minutes as ordered, then sprang forward. They were shot down. The 10th Light Horse filed into the vacant places in the trench. They could hardly have doubted their fate. They knew they would die, and they determined to die bravely, by running swiftly at the enemy.

This is the account by C.E.W. Bean, former Australian Official War Historian, in his shortened account of the war, Anzac to Amiens 4th ed. (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1968), pp. 154-157. Simply to take the time read this is a fitting remembrance of those who gallantly gave so much for so little.

As a unionist, I know that 1st May is of course May Day; but it is also the feast of St. Philip and St. James. We are planning a service of celebration for our Parish of St. Philip, on the following Sunday. I'm not sure what I think about saints' days. All believers are saints, it seems to me. But a 'patronal festival' is an opportunity to celebrate our local church family.

So I've done some research on St. Philip; there's not much known about him. There were two James among Jesus' twelve disciples. James 'the Greater' is described as a son of Zebedee and Salome (Matthew 27:56; Mark 15:40; 16:1) and brother of the apostle John. He is called 'the Greater' to distinguish him from apostle James 'the less,' who may have been shorter or younger. It is St. James the Less who is celebrated with St. Philip on May 1st. (One tradition has it that the two are buried side by side in Rome; hence the celebration on the same day.)

And that brings me almost to the nub of my story. I received my primary (elementary) education from my father, John, who was then a young school teacher working in small rural schools in the Western District of Victoria. From 1957 to 1959 he was the only teacher at Pomborneit North, a tiny hamlet on the Princes Highway between Colac and Camperdown. (This is the house we lived in, next to the school. The school building has been moved away, but the house is still there. Drystone walls are very characteristic of the locality.)

On Sundays I attended the St. James the Less Church of England Sunday School, Pomborneit North. The Superintendent was Marguerite McGarvie, who still lives locally. The Sunday school closed 25 years ago for want of pupils. There are still services at the church twice a month, though Marguerite tells me the congregation is just a handful of people. It was a traditional style of Sunday school and quite small, perhaps 10 children? I can't recall exactly. We older children (I was nine when I started there) learnt the Book of Common Prayer Catechism by heart, including the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostle's Creed. Each time someone asks me my name, the response from the Catechism still comes straight to mind:

Question: What is your Name?
Answer. Brian.
Question. Who gave you this name?
Answer. My godfathers and godmothers in my baptism; wherein I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.

During my first year there I was awarded a prize, a small copy of the Book of Common Prayer (1662). The book has long since fallen apart and the print was very small, but I cut out the inscription and stuck it into a new copy (which also has large print!). (In 1993 I saw this painting, The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt, in the North Transcept of St. Paul's Cathedral in London). So on the feast day of St. Philip and St. James, I will give thanks for the my local parish of St Philip's, for St. James the Less Church of England Sunday School at Pomborneit North, and for Marguerite McGarvie, who taught me to remember that, in God's good grace, I have become "a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven."

We have wanted some oriental lillies for some time, and today James bought some. So delightful. Here they are, flourishing in our garden.

USA

In response to the request of the Primates of the Anglican Communion, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church of the USA has decided to withdraw its representatives from official participation in the Anglican Consultative Council at Nottingham this June.

We are mindful that Christ has made us members of one body, and that no part can say to any other "I have no need of you." At the same time we wish to express our openness to the concerns and beliefs of others. In the spirit of the Covenant Statement recently adopted by our House of Bishops, we voluntarily withdraw our members from official participation in the ACC as it meets in Nottingham. As an expression of our desire "to bear one another's burdens" (Galatians 6:2), we are asking our members to be present at the meeting to listen to reports on the life and ministry we share across the Communion and to be available for conversation and consultation.

The Archbishop of Canterbury commended ECUSA's decision:

I have just received the news of the decision about ACC. Thank you all. I can guess how hard it will have been, but you have acted very generously and constructively and I hope this will bear the fruit that it should.

In a personal response, the President of Integrity said that the decision of ECUSA's Executive Council:

offers a creative and grace-filled compromise that gives one hope that the spirit of Anglican comprehensiveness may, after all, prove strong enough to survive the barrage of partisan polemic and polarizing rhetoric that sadly seems to dominate our ecclesial discourse.

The Moderator of the Anglican Communion Network doesn't like the decision:

What the response of the Episcopal Church's Executive Council to the 2005 Primates' Communique gives with one hand, it takes away with the other. While it gives an appearance of complying with the Primates' request, in actuality it does not. The Primates asked the ECUSA delegation to withdraw from the Anglican Consultative Council (AAC) -- the only appropriate response is therefore to stay at home.

Nor does the American Anglican Council like the decision:

The Executive Council's letter to the Anglican Consultative Council is manipulative and deceptive. The Primates were clear and direct in their call to the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada. . . . The Executive Council is setting up an opportunity to lobby and influence the ACC meeting. Given the fact that ECUSA is insisting on such a presence, it seems a matter of justice and fair play that those who are excluded from ECUSA and isolated because they stand against revisionism should also be present and "available for conversation and consultation". We call upon the Anglican Consultative Council to deny the Executive Council's request; however, if the ECUSA delegation attends, we believe it is critical to include voices that offer a very different perspective, one that is consistent with Scripture and the accepted faith and order of the Anglican Communion.

As Thinking Anglicans notes, the critics failed to note this paragraph in the Primates' communiqué:

16. Notwithstanding the request of paragraph 14 of this communiqué, we encourage the Anglican Consultative Council to organize a hearing at its meeting in Nottingham, England, in June 2005 at which representatives of the Episcopal Church (USA) and the Anglican Church of Canada, invited for that specific purpose, may have an opportunity to set out the thinking behind the recent actions of their Provinces, in accordance with paragraph 141 of the Windsor Report.

It's hard to play nicely when everyone is bored witless by the game.

Canada

The Council of General Synod, which governs the Anglican Church of Canada between triennial General Synods, will consider the primates' request at its next meeting 6-8 May.

Scotland

Meanwhile the Glasgow Herald of 14 April reports that the Moderator General-designate of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland has supported an earlier decision by his church's General Assembly not to debate the issue of homosexuality.

Here he is sensibly following the recent example of the much smaller Scottish Episcopal Church whose bishops recently confirmed long-standing policy that being a member of a same-sex couple was not a bar to its ministry. (Though a group claiming to represent mainstream Episcopalians in Scotland has asked the bishops to retract the confirmation.)

The Scots, Presbyterian and Episcopal, are showing sense here. If the war is unwinnable and the only outcome is MAD (mutual assured destruction) why start fighting?

In a few hours will be the funeral of His Serene Highness the late Ranier III, Sovereign Prince of Monaco.

I mention this because I remember a school English class where each student gave a short talk on whatever topic we chose. I had been fascinated by a National Geographic article on Monaco ("Miniature Monaco" by Donna and Gilbert Grosvenor, April 1963, pp. 546-573), so the Principality became the topic of a tale of the swashbuckling Grimaldi family and their fairytale kingdom. Well the truth is a little less romantic, perhaps. The most pressing challenge for the new Prince, Albert II will be to control unsavoury money laundering without emasculating his country's banking system and driving away legitimate profitable investors.

I like well-made maps, such as this example from National Geographic, which I've edited to squeeze into the page.

The world's micro-states are interesting studies in success and failure. Some of the smallest are prospering (Monaco, San Marino), including some that are autonomous territories of large countries (Gibraltar, UK), Norfolk Island, Australia). Nauru, on the other hand, formerly an Australian/UK/NZ Trust territory, has been a lamentable failure. About 13,000 people share a mere 21 sq km of (largely unproductive) land. But at independence there were large cash reserves from phosphate mining royalties. Too much has been frittered away by poor investment, corruption, carpetbaggers and mismanagement.

The Vatican is the fully independent country that has the smallest citizenship, about 960. Almost all were born outside the Vatican. Well, I guess they don't make a lot of babies.

In the battle to get on top of the shingles and assorted uncomfortable side ailments, my doctor and I have worked through a vertiable pharmacopoeia: amoxycillin; atorvastin; betadine (iodine); citalopram; claratyne; codeine, gastrolyte, docusate sodium, diazepam; endone (oxycodone hydrocloride); epilim (sodium valpoate); famciclovir; ibuprofen; immodium, lignocaine gel; paracetemol; penoxymethyl penicillin and xylocaine ointment.

After all that, my doctor, who is SE Asian in background, decided my system needed a rest and prescribed rice porridge.

Rice porridge is about the blandest food on earth --- odourless, colorless, tasteless. It reminds me of Clag, an Australian brand of starchy non-toxic paste that I used in kindergarten to stick pieces of paper together.

The two have about the same result -- they glue you up.

These prayers were included in the service of blessing of the marriage of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall held at Windsor Castle yesterday.

Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things, Judge of all men: We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, Which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, By thought, word, and deed, Against thy Divine Majesty, Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do earnestly repent, And are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; The remembrance of them is grievous unto us; The burden of them is intolerable. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, Forgive us all that is past; And grant that we may ever hereafter Serve and please thee in newness of life, To the honour and glory of thy name; Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of his great mercy hath promised forgiveness of sins to all them that with hearty repentance and true faith turn unto him: Have mercy upon you; pardon and deliver you from all your sins; confirm and strengthen you in all goodness; and bring you to everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

These are the general confession and the absolution from the "Order for the Administration of the Lord's Supper or Holy Communion" in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. If they have been used genuinely then, at least in the sight of God, the sins and errors of the past are forgiven and forgotten. Let them be so.

Camilla is now Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Cornwall and Rothesay, Countess of Chester and Carrick, and Baroness Renfrew, and wife of the Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland. While the UK and Australia remain monarchies, she should be respected as such, if the tabloids can be persuaded to lay off long enough.

After thinking and writing about healing recently, perhaps its encouraging that according to this at Quizilla, the archangel I most resemble is Raphael.

"You're most like the Archangel of Healing. You want people to shape up, and you nag. But you mean well, and you're well loved despite it. Or because of it. You bring the donuts, even as you tell people to eat more veggies." (!)

Raphael is not well known to Protestants. (He is the main character in the Book of Tobit, from the apocrypha. Only Gabriel and Michael are mentioned in the New Testament, as well as Satan.) Raphael is a Hebrew word that means "God is healing". (More here.) There's no saint's day on 28 February, my birthday. Maybe Raphael could fill in?

ABC TV's weekly half-hour dancesport competiton Strictly Dancing is good fun. Winners of last Friday's show, Adam Francis and Alexander Bryan, from Melbourne, wowed the audience and achieved a high score from the judges. They are exciting to watch. Adam (on the right in this picture) is gay, but his dance partner Adam (on the left) is not, and dances with a woman as partner in other competition.

Adam and Alexander saw that in Europe same sex couples are becoming accepted within dance sport competition and decided to try it here. "The Australian scene is a little bit behind, and we're trying to show that it's also acceptable for any two guys to dance together, or any two girls." They recently won the Midsumma same sex dancesport championships 2005 in the Latin and New Vogue styles.Adam is a professional dancer and dance teacher. "If I have any spare time it would actually be practicing dance, so basically if I'm not sleeping or eating I will be dancing." "I used to be a swimmer and a bit of a computer geek" says Alex, until one day when he went along to a dance class with a girl that he liked, and he's been there ever since. Alex says he and Adam are quite similar, "a bit cheeky, a bit crazy, very caring, very kind and considerate." He feels the connection that they have gives them a competitive edge, "we try and portray the whole sexual thing as just two guys dancing together, and however people interpret that then that's fine, but we try and play our part as men." (source: www.abc.net.au/strictlydancing/txt/s1335512.htm)

P.S.Adam and Alexander won convincingly their 'Block A' semi final on 22 April and will next appear in a Group Final on of 21 October and hopefully the Grand Final on 11 November!

CXWeb gives an insight into the astonishing amount of people, equipment and work needed to set up a show like this.

Heavenly Father, into whose hands Jesus Christ commended his spirit at the last hour; into those same hands we commend your servant John Paul, that death may be for him the gate to life and eternal fellowship with you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Office of Commendation, Celebrating Common Prayer, © SSF, 1992.)

In The Independent (2 April), Catherine Pepinster, editor of The Tablet asks Do we really need this spectacle of the dying? "Some have found the sight of the Pope inspiring. I would have preferred him to have a less public end," she says. She contrasts the final days of Cardinal Hume with those of Terri Schiavo and of John Paul II.

. . . the late Cardinal Basil Hume, who was a much respected and loved leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales . . . had the kind of death most of us would wish to have. After being told that he was seriously ill with cancer, and that he had months to live, he had time to prepare for his death, and make his peace with the world and with God. Cardinal Hume, announcing that he was dying, stressed: "Above all, no fuss." He then retreated from public life, finally dying surrounded by family and his closest associates. If only it had been the case for the American Terri Schiavo, and for Pope John Paul II in these, his final days. The agony of these two people has been a spectacle, a media circus at times bordering on the unseemly, with every gasp, every agonised movement, every moment of struggle monitored by the cameras. . . .

Some have found the sight of him [the Pope] struggling to breathe -- to speak one final time -- inspiring. I, for one, would have preferred him to have a less public end. Just as respect for human dignity does not require life to be continued at any cost, so solidarity with the dying does not need them to be put on public view. Prayer alone is enough.

I agree, though I have admired John Paul's example of endurance and benefited from it (for I have physical hassles myself). Jesus endured a public death, the horrific detail of which was open to all to see. Is it the gift of God that our deaths, whenever possible, should be surrounded by intimacy and peace?

As the daily office of Compline (prayer at the end of the day) says, "The Lord almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end."

Let us now praise famous men (book title) - James Agee.

I honour John Paul II for his courage and faith, his dedication to the ways of peace and life, and his work for economic and political justice and freedom. But, under him, on questions of sex, gender and sexuality the Vatican has lacked compassion and competence -- on women in the church, priestly celibacy, contraception, sexual abuse scandals (badly mishandled) and homosexuality. (Vatican demands that Catholic parliamentarians vote against civil rights for homosexuals have been as appalling as they have been laughable.)

Much of this relates to thorough going ignorance (yes ignorance, at least as expressed in the Vatican's official documents) of women and their place in God's scheme of things, and poor science (non-science) relating to human sexuality. The damage to the Gospel witness of the churches (especially in the West) because of these errors has been considerable.

P.S. The National Catholic Reporter (25 Feb 2005) lists here Catholic theologians and others disciplined by the Vatican during the papacy of John Paul II. "Though not an exhaustive list, it is a substantial representation of the range of people subject to papal discipline during the past 26 years."

As the health fails of HSH Prince Ranier III of Monaco, his son Prince Albert has been appointed Regent, to govern in his stead. Not far from Monaco, in another tiny, secretive, monarchy, the Vatican, Pope John Paul II is gravely ill. We pray that he will end his days in comfort and peace. But if he were to remain ill, who would make decisions in his place? I cannot comment on the death of Terri Schiavo, though I pray for the peace of all concerned. But her story again shows how important it is to authorise a trusted someone to make important decisions should one become incapacitated, possibly decisions of life and death.

James and I are fortunate that the relevant laws in the Australian Capital Territory make it simple to create an enduring power of attorney. Each of us has given the other written authority to consent on his behalf "to medicial tratment generally being witheld or withdrawn, notwithstanding that this may have the effect of shortening or terminating life."

I love James. I trust him. If necessary, he will decide concerning my life. End of story.

This picture was taken when James and I visited Kimhae about two years ago, at dinner hosted by the man in the centre (wearing a tie), who is James' brother-in-law and senior member of the Kimhae part of James's family. I was deeply honoured when he told James that he respected me as his peer and a member of the family. Some of the family is Seoul and some in the family home town of Kimhae, in the far south. At the left is James's younger brother, Kyu Seong, who is also a wonderful friend and generous host. James is next to him.

Thanks to Rebel Prince for mentioning a piece by Jonathan Ruach on Caring for your introvert. It's interesting and helpful. I've never quite been able to figure out the Introvert/Extrovert thing. Best as I can tell, I'm balanced between INTJ and INFJ. I'm very strong on the N and the J and balanced on T/F, but the E/I criterion has varied quite a bit through my life. I usually like my own company (though I just love having James with me). I loathe big parties and compulsory socialising and I sometimes get a bit gloomy. Yet I'm an instinctive organiser (ENTJ), love learning and teaching (ENFJ), enjoy good conversation and tend to talk far too much. Maybe it's to do with the difference between personality and behaviour. There are some things we we train ourselves to do well, even though they don't come naturally.

In the BBC's Thought for the Day, 29 March 2005, Rev Dr Alan Billings observed that "In the past, and until relatively recently, the faith of non-attending, or not attending very often, Christians was supported by the general culture."

If you went into an art gallery and immersed yourself in painting and sculpture, you would inevitably be influenced by biblical religion, since the history of art in western Europe has in large measure also been the history of Christian art. [. . .] But religious themes are rarer in contemporary art and those who prepare catalogues for exhibitions now find themselves having to explain religious references in more detail.

The same goes for music, Billings says, and even for eating.

Seeing salvation, singing salvation -- even eating salvation. Until recently, the story of Christ was called to mind with seasonal food -- mince pies, simnel cake, hot cross buns and Easter eggs. But my local supermarket now stocks mince pies and hot cross buns out of season and Easter eggs have transformed into a generally available cream egg. What this means is that those whose Christianity has been sustained and nourished culturally -- the cultural Christians -- need to wake up to what is happening.

I think this is important. Whatever our faith, our life and testimony are richer and more fun if we express them culturally, in every day life as well as so-called 'high-culture'. A book I have loved for years is Hidden art by Edith Schaeffer (1972). It has been much recommended to 'Christian homemakers': well, yes, but only if that includes singles and couples, men and women of all ages, living anywhere and with anyone. Schaeffer argues for simple artistry in everyday things, discovering the God-given creativity that is part of our being. She gives ideas and advice on music, writing, interior decoration, gardening, food, clothes and more. In all of these, we can bring joy to ourselves and each other. Don't buy Easter eggs, or greeting cards, make them!

In the fine arts, a superb, though sometimes controversial, Australian example of faith expressed in culture is the Blake prize for religious art. The 2004 prize was given for this work, Pieta (Darfur) by © AñA Wojak. "The men depicted," she says, " are mourning a child that has died of malnutrition in the refugee camps of Dafur. It was inspired by press coverage of the ongoing war in Western Sudan. Amidst the horror and despair, this is a moment of dignity and prayer."

Of course the religious music scene is enormous, especially on the rock/pop side. Interesting to me is the growing use of jazz in Christian worship in Australia. The ABC's Encounter program recently did a fascinating feature on this. There is a transcript and a web page God, Church and All That Jazz: a brief history from an Australian perspective, by Bill Haesler.

When we moved house last year, I threw away a pile of old greeting cards I'd received, but I kept three. My workmates signed this and gave it to me when I left a directorship in the public service to go to theology college. Maybe they thought theology college was like an outhouse at the end of the known universe?

My Mum sent me this. I'm sure she had in mind for me the quiet life of a scholar; cups of tea and books in the drawing room. I wish. Sigh.

This card goes back to 1976. My family gave me it just before I boarded a plane to fly to Malaysia where I worked as a volunteer librarian for two years; my first time overseas and I was going for two years. This was just the message I needed.

This has been the first Easter since James and I joined St Philip's and I have been looking forward to it. So it's been frustrating to be too ill to participate, though I did totter along to choral Eucharist on Easter Day -- and splendid it was too.

So it's not surprising that I have had healing on my mind this week. It is interesting and encouraging that Dr Rowan Williams emphasised the ministry of healing in his Easter message this year.

It should not need saying, but it must be said: our Christian faith is a faith in the rising of Jesus Christ from the tomb in his glorified body; and so it is about leading lives that take the life of the body seriously. The words for 'salvation' and 'health' cannot be distinguished in most languages, and this should remind us that faith in Christ has to be bound up with care for suffering bodies as well as suffering souls.

Only Christ can make us whole in every aspect of our lives. But we can show the world something of the nature of that comprehensive hope in Christ as we put our energies to work for healing. First we have to begin to learn what it is for each one of us to receive healing: quietly and thankfully, we must let our wounds be exposed to the physician and allow his life to 'sink into' our lives. And then we must act as if we believed we had truly received authority to heal -- in all sorts of different ways.

One of the least known features of the life of the Anglican Church over the last twenty years has been the dramatic revival of the ministry of healing as a routine part of the life of thousands of congregations. But it is the same hope for healing that is shown when we also look at how we can put our resources at the disposal of programmes to combat disease and poverty.

This is not an additional extra -- the boring bit of a message in which all the excitement is generated by church politics. [. . .] This Easter, let us, as Paul tells us in Colossians 3, try to live as if we had truly been raised with Christ -- clothed 'with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience' and showing all these things in our priorities for action to heal suffering bodies. -- Rowan Williams

Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord. The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up; and anyone who has committed sins will be forgiven. (James 5.14-15) I was much encouraged when our parish priest came to our home, annointed me with oil, laid his hands on me and prayed, with James joining in as well. (And yes, I am almost recovered.)

The Easter message is one of new life, resurrection life. But this is not only spiritual but physical and mental. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53.5) I've long believed in, ministered and benefited from healing prayer, but have been a bit lazy on it lately. I need to check out the Order of St Luke the Physician, which teaches and encourages Christian healing ministry. Must do this!

Meanwhile, an article in the recent issue of the Brotherhood of St. Gregory's newsletter, The Servant, encourages the Brothers (and others) in healing ministry:

[W]e speak about the ministry of reconciliation, about charity, and about many aspects of expressing the love of Christ to others, but hardly at all do we actually speak about healing. My brothers, I suggest that we fill that gap and add someplace that the "Brother Is a Healer." I believe each of us is called to a personal ministry as a healer in this world. [. . .] This healing is not about miracles, at least not the kind that have people alternately fainting or leaping in the aisles! Yet it is open to the whole canvas of life.

I believe in miracles. But there are many kinds of healing, and of restoration, too. The article starts with this prayer:

Sanctify, O Lord, those whom you have called to the study and practice of the arts of healing. Strengthen them by your life-giving Spirit, that by their ministries the community may delight in your will and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen.

On 4 March, the College of Bishops of the Episcopal Church of Scotland published its response to the Windsor report and the Primates' Communiqué. Some extracts:

Unlike many branches of the Anglican Communion the Scottish Episcopal Church, through its history, does not owe its existence to the development of the British Empire, and the spread of worship from the Church of England into those parts. We are conscious that this means that within Scotland there is perhaps a greater "scepticism" about the importance of the Anglican Communion than may exist elsewhere and provincial autonomy is highly rated. However, as a College we would wish to affirm that we value our place within the Communion and will certainly be seeking to work to preserve the unity of that Communion.

[. . . ] On the matters of sexuality which occasioned the Report we are conscious that, like any province within the Anglican Communion, there is in our life significant diversity of view on both the matter of the consecration of Gene Robinson and the authorisation of liturgies for the blessing of same sex unions.

The Scottish Episcopal Church has never regarded the fact that someone was in a close relationship with a member of the same sex as in itself constituting a bar to the exercise of an ordained ministry. Indeed, the Windsor Report itself in suggesting that a moratorium be placed on such persons being consecrated bishops, itself acknowledges the existence of many such relationships within the Church.

[. . . ] The College of Bishops is conscious that the pressures within the debate on matters of sexuality vary from one province to another. Within our Province the debate tends to focus on matters to do with scriptural authority and human rights and justice. We sense that we are privileged in that we are a small province, and discussion across differences may be more easily achieved in our life than in other parts of the Communion. We hope that as a result of the publication of the report discussion across difference will take place, rather than a consolidation of opinion among the like minded.

[. . .] We are conscious that as a Church we are much indebted in our life both to a significant presence of persons of homosexual (lesbian and gay) orientation, and also to those whose theology and stance would be critical of attitudes to sexuality other than abstinence outside marriage. We rejoice in both . . .

The Most Reverend Bruce Cameron, Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church and Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney, told BBC Scotland that the church was simply encouraging debate by stating the beliefs on which the Scottish Anglican tradition already operates. He said: "We do not have a synodical decision like the Church of England has, which it made a number of years ago, and therefore if someone who was of a homosexual orientation felt a sense of call to the ordained ministry then we would begin the process of testing that vocation. We wouldn't bar him or her simply because they were homosexual."

In a further statement on 24 March, the Bishops said:

In referring to the fact that there is no current bar to ordination for someone who might be in a close relationship with a member of the same sex, the Bishops were simply stating the present position as it applies in Scotland where, unlike some other provinces, no motion discouraging such ordinations has ever been passed by our General Synod. Consequently, the statement earlier this month does not represent any change in policy on the part of the Bishops.

Shingles had always seemed to me one of those half understood diseases from Grandpa's generation. I'm painfully learning that that is far from the case. The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has information, though this page from the UK is more helpful for patients. There is no prevention or cure for shingles, but I shall be OK after much rest, TLC, pain killers, antibiotics and famciclovir to prevent post herpetic neuralgia, a potentially nasty after-effect. The moral, ladies and gentlemen, is to make sure that your children receive the excellent chicken pox vaccine that is now available!

One of the odd things about shingles is that it attacks only one side of the body or one side of the head. This is because the virus travels through the nervous system which is largely divided left-right. It reminds me of an ancient Star Trek I first saw on black and white TV, "Let that be your last battlefield" (ep. 70, Jan. 1969), in which the Entreprise encounters two warring half-black, half-white human-like beings, Lokai (Lou Antonio) and Bele (Frank Gorshin). Lokai's people, black on their left sides, are opposite to Bele's people, and therefore seen as inferior. Bele, a lawman, has been pursuing Lokai, an escapee from oppression, for thousands of hatred-filled years. This was powerful stuff just a couple of years after massive 'race riots' in the US in 1967.

For its concert last night the Australian Chamber Orchestra's usual seventeen or so string players were doubled in number by various players of historical instruments for a 'Classical feast': Mozart's Symphony no. 31 Paris, Mendelssohn's E minor Violin Concerto and Beethoven's Symphony no. 7. As Peter McCallum said in the SMH, there were

rich, well-pitched and glowing woodwinds with a tangibly distinctive grain, brass (trumpet and horn) which blended, blared and buzzed on cue with the peremptorily firm sound of hard sticks on hide from the timpani. . . . [The symphony] was exciting, vivid and richly coloured, and even in the overcrowded category of Beethoven symphony recordings, the ACO would have something to offer by releasing their own Beethoven cycle.

The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto is oft described as sweet, and indeed it was -- too sweet for my taste, though I enjoyed the performance. The Canberra crowd went wild (well, wild for a Canberra crowd, at least). But the Beethoven symphony touched deeply. I was feeling a bit wobbly to begin with, having just gotten out of bed from a fever, and I sat in the theatre in tears again. Sigh. Nice to know Mr McCallum and I agree, though.

P.S.Vincent Plush in The Australian (10 March) is interesting. "Whose music is it anyway?", he asks, noting that the ACO does not reveal the perfoming editions its uses. Does it matter whether the performance, despite the presence of traditional instruments, is not really Beethoven as we know him? How much of the performance bears the personal mark of Director Richard Tognetti is left to the audience to surmise. And fair enough, too. Of the performance of the Beethoven Seventh that I much admired, Plush writes:

For all this bristle and brilliance, there comes a point when one pleads to be let off the roller-coaster, to cool the temperature and let the music sing. Is this some kind of personal thesis or exorcism being played out, some kind of Australian spin on the riches of our inherited European tradition? We need to debate style and substance, the role of truly informed historical practice and what, if anything, we have to contribute to it. In the final analysis, does it matter if the music itself is secondary? The ACO's music-making is always challenging and stimulating, never dull. Adoring capacity audiences, nationwide, reward the players with ovations and laurels. They have become peerless icons. The ACO is so consistently excellent that it now invites the kind of microscopic critical attention accorded to top-echelon international ensembles. Don't miss this concert: go make up your own mind.

Well, I did both. I'm no purist and found the performance, as performance, to be stimulating, yes, even thrilling. Better that than dry purism. But, yes again, it was rather relentless and the decibels were well up there.

Gunns Limited, the large logger and woodchip exporter, is suing twenty defendants, including The Wilderness Society, five of its staff and fourteen other groups and people, one of whom is Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown. It alleges that the Society and the other defendants engaged in campaign that was a conspiracy to injure it by unlawful means, and that the defendants illegally interfered with its trade and business. Gunns is claiming a total of $6.4 million in damages. This suit is the biggest of its kind against an Australian environmental organisation or group of individuals. It threatens freedom of speech and political action in Australia, particularly in camapigns for environmental protection. In this piece in The Age of 27 December, Dr Steven Curry of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne argues that, although Gunns may not like protests against it, the writ should be dropped. "It is important for all Australian citizens to stand up in defence of greater democratic principles which are at stake in this case. [. . .] Everyone who cares about the protection of the right to protest should stand up against this use of civil courts to undermine basic democratic values."

The 55,000 member Nippon Sei Ko Kai (Anglican Church in Japan) is an example of the mission and witness that can be achieved a by smaller church organisation. Its Statement on war responsibility was a moving example of Godly humility that was deeply appreciated by many Australians.

The Comments on the Windsor Report by the House of Bishops of Nippon Sei Ko Kai (February, 2005) offer simply worded sanity and openess. The English isn't perfect, but it's worth reading the whole statement, especially from paragraph 6 onwards.

1. The House of Bishops of ( The Anglican Church in Japan) has received and studied the Windsor Report very seriously as a part of the wider Anglican communion.
2. We assume that; the Commission has dealt extensively and deeply the nature of the Communion and possible expressions of its unity, and also some practical steps which each of the concerned parties ought to take toward a fuller reconciliation and unity. The process must have been not easy. We highly appreciate this piece of work of the Commission.
3. Nippon Sei Ko Kai had already expressed regret at the occasion of the Primates' Meeting in 2003 on the fact that the Episcopal Church, USA and the Anglican Church of Canada (Diocese of New Westminster) proceeded to a series of resolutions and actions in spite of preceding statements of the Lambeth Conference and Primates' Meeting. Accordingly we understand the principal position of the Windsor Report.
4. However, we believe that; what the Anglican Communion collectively, or the Archbishop of Canterbury should urge to those concerned province and diocese may well be simply a conscientious reflection, trusting their likely reconciliatory initiatives, rather than listing up the recommendations as indicated in Section D. Similarly, the same should be addressed to those who seemingly interfered the due actions of the autonomous provinces of the Communion. (The subject matter may depend on how the mandate (2) of the Commission can be interpreted.)
5. It should be noted that the l998 Lambeth Conference of which resolution suggests to refrain from ordination of the persons involved in the same gender unions, at the same time is urging to commit ourselves to listen to the experience of the homosexual persons. We wish strongly that every province and diocese of the Communion take this statement seriously.
6. Nippon Sei Ko Kai sees the extra-importance of our common Anglican tradition that the Anglicans have been accepting a real diversity which has inevitably been arising in the process of the inculturation/indigenization of Gospel.
7. While we firmly believe the authority of the Scriptures, we understand that the biblical texts themselves were born out of particular historical and faith contexts. Therefore, the Scriptures themselves allow de facto diversity of their interpretations in a different historical and faith context.
8. Based on the above assumptions (6 and 7), it can hardly be said that there is only one legitimate Christian view on the human sexuality. It is possible that the Christian understanding of human sexuality and its expression in the actual Church life could be more than one. We wish to see a series of recent decisions and actions of American or Canadian Churches in this perspective.
9. The Windsor Report certainly enlightens us greatly about the nature and unity of the Anglican Communion. However, we believe that the unity of Communion may not necessarily be resting upon one common position of the biblical interpretation and theological understanding of the human sexuality.
10. Regarding the proposed 'Anglican Covenant'. Nippon Sei Ko Kai believes that one of the best and foremost traditions and legacies of Anglicanism is trusting communion of believers without stated covenant like this. The Anglican Church is not a confessional Church. We are not convinced by, for example, the statement spelled out in the proposed Article 10. Even if the Communion needed a certain set of principal and stated agreements among the Churches, it should be much more concise and simple, allowing much room for autonomy, diversity and mutual trust. The Communion should spend more years for study and debate before we come to propose such a Covenant.

(Text kindly made available by the Revd Laurence Minabe, General Secretary of the Nippon Sei Ko Kai.)

In Online Opinion Australian Democrats Senator Brian Greig highlights the latest incident in the Australian (federal) Government's dismal record concerning gay and lesbian people. An extract:

In the brochure for this year's Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras festival Federal Attorney General, Philip Ruddock, gushes with support in his letter of endorsement for the month long celebration. He writes:

"The Government supports tolerance and freedom from discrimination against individuals on the ground of sexual preference. The Coalition condemns discrimination in all its forms and believes each of us should have the opportunity to participate in the life of our community and to experience the benefits and accept the responsibilities that flow from such participation without fear of discrimination. The Government is committed to maintaining the Australian traditions of tolerance and respect for diversity, which are the foundations of one of the world's successful multicultural societies."

Sadly, this professed government support for tolerance, freedom, diversity and non-discrimination does not extend to our Prime Minister, who once again pointedly refused to send a message.

To the casual observer or international visitor however, this uncompromising statement of equality and tolerance from Australia's top law officer would be reassuring. But for those of us all too familiar with the Howard Government's anti-gay agenda, this pro-gay rhetoric is an outrageous political lie of Orwellian proportions.

Only last December, Ruddock and his department oversaw the removal of 'sexuality,' as a recognised status from within Australia's National Framework for Human Rights - National Action Plan. The Framework, now lodged with the UN Human Rights Committee, in Geneva, conveniently ignores the inequality and discrimination which still impacts on sexual minorities and same-sex relationships.

This was despite the [Australian] Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission advocating the continued inclusion of 'sexuality' as an area for the government to address. For the first time ever, gay and lesbian people have been airbrushed from our nation's human rights portrait. Not just overlooked, but deliberately removed.

This is notable, in that Australia is one of very few western countries that has no national anti-discrimination laws on the grounds of sexual orientation, and no national partnership laws for same-sex couples. Most Western countries and many Eastern European and Latin American countries now outlaw such discrimination with national laws, and to varying degrees legally recognise same-sex relationships. Australia does not.

This is further complicated by the fact while most States and Territories have come a long way in addressing these inequities, the Commonwealth is lagging far behind. As a consequence, the Federal Government is the most frequent discriminator against sexual minorities.

The plethora of words continues, but again I have picked out a couple of things.

So it is that we [The Primates' Meeting] reaffirm the resolutions of our Lambeth Conference on sexuality in its entirety. [. . .] But the resolution also mentions in very strong terms to respect the human dignity of lesbian and gay people and the need to to continue a respectful listening. And the communiqué before you does make it clear that we acknowledge that we haven't been very good at this. - Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the press conference following the Primates' meeting

There must come a time when the churches talk WITH gay and lesbian people rather than ABOUT them.

Muriel Porter writes in The Age of 1 March 2006:

Unless the Americans and Canadians decide to abandon the cause of gay clergy and same-sex marriages by 2008 -- and please God they won't --- the threatened split will still happen. [. . .] The real tragedy is the failure of more reasonable and inclusive church leaders. [. . .] The real tragedy in the humiliating dismissal of the North American churches is not the behaviour of the Global South bullies. It is the failure of more reasonable and inclusive church leaders, of whom there are significant numbers in the Western church at least, to stand up to them, to refuse to give way so readily in the name of preserving church unity.

The fragile unity left to the Anglican Communion is no unity at all. It is an unworthy appeasement, bought at the price of the many gay people who are faithful, worshipping Anglicans. Numbers of them are priests, and some are even bishops; Gene Robinson is certainly not alone, though he is the only gay bishop to have declared he is not celibate.

While some traditionalists, such as the primate of Nigeria, may be celebrating, these vulnerable people are in deep dismay. Like all gays, they are in constant danger of being marginalised and even attacked for their sexual preferences. In the Anglican Church, once tolerant and generous, they now fear personal public rejection. But few will hear their pain, because they dare not speak.

So moderate church leaders should speak out on their behalf. They should vehemently reject the Global South's claim that adherence to the authority of the Bible is centred in one particular interpretation of its (limited) references to homosexuality. Since when has sexual practice been the supreme test of Christian orthodoxy?

It is a pity they have not instead publicly named the conservatives' power trip as a form of abuse, and their bullying as a failure of Christian compassion and a form of judgementalism, against which Jesus specifically preached. This is the scriptural teaching to which they should require Anglican allegiance.

As the saying goes, evil things happen only when good people do nothing.

God bless you, Muriel. But if we do 'dare to speak' how we can we find an audience and make ourselves heard?

March 1 is a public holiday in (South) Korea and commemorates the day in 1919 when, in Tapgol Park in the centre of Seoul, independence campaigners proclaimed a Declaration of Independence from Japan. About 2 million Koreans responded in hundreds of demonstrations throughout the country. Thousands were killed. The park is small, roughly 200m by 100m. It has ancient origins, and was home to a temple at least 700 years ago. In 1467, King Sejo ordered the construction of a 10-story pagoda in the temple grounds in repentance for having usurped the throne of his young nephew King Danjong. This pagoda 'Wongaksaji Sipcheung Seoktap' still stands (in an ugly glass protective building) and the park is named after it.

Tapgol was converted into a modern park in 1897 and is now venerated as the birthplace of modern Korean independence, with memorials of the early independence struggle, and a statue of Sun Pyong-hui, leader of the 1919 independence movement. Japan had annexed Korea and abolished the Korean monarchy in 1910, following a long period of Japanese domination in Korean affairs. Independence was not regained until the defeat of Japan at the end of the second world war -- to be soon followed by the Korean war.

All this interests me because James is a Korean and because I visited Seoul with him a couple of years ago. We stayed in a hotel just a short walk from Tapgol Park.

This prayer has been said at Anglican communion services since the Book of Common Prayer was written in the sixteenth century. It seems to me a searching yet simple focus for our thoughts during Lent.

Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from who no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you
and worthily magnify your holy name,
through Christ our Lord. Amen.

These are the flowers bought by James to celebrate my birthday yesterday, 28 February.

Cynthia McFarlane and Brian Reid, the editors of Anglicans Online have written a glorious reminder of the our true priorities in responding to the struggles within the Anglican Communion. I've quoted some extracts, but please read the whole piece.

Although the subject of all this is the proper way for Anglican churches to relate and respond to gay and lesbian Christians, the looming question is the survival of the Anglican Communion -- if one presumes there is actually de jure such a thing and that it is something more than a mood. That may seem casually and even cruelly lighthearted at this time, but it is not meant to be. For the importance that one places on the fellowship of the provinces and the somewhat peculiarly titled 'Instruments of Unity' will determine, to an extent at least, the way that one responds to the Communiqué.
[. . .] We worry that the survival of the Anglican Communion has become, for many, a pharisaical preoccupation, pulling us away from Gospel imperatives and the two great commandments of Our Lord. The Anglican Communion has always been more a web of love and history and not, till now, a juridical gleam in anyone's eye. Whether it will withstand the storm of Windsor and volleys of communiqués (for surely there will be more to come) is an important consideration, but one that ought never cause us to lose sight of What All This Is About: proclaiming the good news of Our Lord Jesus Christ. When 'vociferousness has exhausted itself', the homeless still need shelter. If the Episcopal Church in the USA becomes separated from the Church of Nigeria, if the Anglican Church of Canada finds itself no longer in the same room with the 'Southern Cone', our Lord still asks us 'Lovest thou me? Then feed my sheep.'
We say this not to diminish the sadness that all of us feel at the deep rifts in a Communion that has been precious and life-giving in so many ways. But we're concerned that we're all focussing so intently on the Anglican Communion's survival that the reason why it exists at all may be forgot in the midst of all the sputtering and fissiparous elements.
'No faith with heretics is not an ecclesiastical rule; it is a natural and inevitable human emotion', Charles Williams wrote in The Descent of the Dove. We saw that last week when it was reported that some primates chose not to take communion with others. Of all that our differences can cause, surely that must be one of the most devastating. [. . .]
Dear friends, we must care, but we must be careful not to fall into despair. We must be attentive, but we must not, in our attention, be distracted from loving God with all our heart and mind and soul.[. . .]
'Fear God, serve the King, and be a good fellow to the rest. ' Elizabeth I wrote to Lord Burghley. Fine advice from a queen whose temperament and wisdom allowed that which we call the Anglican Communion to come into existence. If it ceases to exist in its present form, the qualities that created and sustained it will continue and flourish. Of that we are certain.

I'm happy that the primates of the Anglican communion were able maintain conversation with each other -- no walkouts. But it's sad that, according to some reports, some of the primates refused to participate in communion services with their colleagues and boycotted a service led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The communiqué does a fair job of squaring the circle, though it would have been a relief to the weary if they could have settled the matter once and for all. Thinking Anglicans and titusoneneine perform a superb service in keeping abreast of all the statements and comments. Some of the press reportage is very helpful, but much of the commentary, especially in The Times is ill-informed and just plain wrong.

From the blizzard of views and comments, I picked out two quotations in a piece "Punishment is for doing what we are all meant to do" by Owen Bowcott, The Guardian, (26 Feb)

"It's not the worst possible outcome," said the Rev Paul Collier, an openly gay vicar who is chaplain at Goldsmiths College, London. "It's at least a temporary withdrawal. It does leave some time for more conversations to take place. It's an issue that needs to be addressed. Over the next three years there's a chance that we may be closer to the position where we can agree to differ. The Anglican church first said in 1978 that there's a need to listen to lesbian and gay Christians. The US church was prepared to respect that . . . so it's a bit of an irony that one of the few churches that has taken the process seriously is being punished for doing what everyone else was supposed to do."
Richard Kirker, general secretary of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement, said: "It's neither one thing or the other. There has been no motion of censure and no expulsion. The US and Canadians are being given the opportunity to explain their actions. The reasoning that led to their decision is well known. It's a bit wearisome for them to explain themselves [again] . . . we believe their actions are consistent with the Christian faith. It is extraordinary, the protracted difficulties [involved in] facing something as ordinary, dull and normal as being lesbian or gay. We should be able to move on now."

Exactly so.

This press release from Integrity just about sums up my own response:

24 February 2005
INTEGRITY REPLIES TO COMMUNIQUÉ FROM PRIMATES' MEETING
The members of Integrity were in prayer for the primates of the Anglican Communion this week as they met to discuss the Windsor Report. While there are sections of their closing communiqué which we find problematic, we are pleased that it is less stringent than had been rumored. There is much room within the statement for forward movement.
Integrity is heartened that . . .

• The primates acknowledged that the election and consecration of Bishop Gene Robinson and permission for dioceses to authorize same-sex blessing rites "have proceeded entirely in accordance with [the] constitutional processes and requirements" of the Episcopal Church.
• The primates recognized the Episcopal Church needs time to consider the recommendations of the Windsor Report according to our constitutional processes. Integrity looks forward to participating in additional discussions about the Windsor Report before and during General Convention 2006.
• The primates asked the Anglican Consultative Council to initiate a Communion-wide process for studying human sexuality within the Christian context and listening to the stories of lesbian and gay Anglicans as mandated by Lambeth 1998 and earlier conferences. Sadly, much of the current rancor within the Anglican Communion could have been avoided if dialog had not been stonewalled in the past. Representatives of Integrity recently met in London with the Revd. Canon Gregory K. Cameron, Deputy Secretary General of the Anglican Communion Office, on this issue. We again offer whatever assistance we can in this process.
• The primates encouraged the Anglican Consultative Council to organize a hearing at its upcoming meeting to allow representatives of the Episcopal Church the opportunity to share the thinking behind the recent actions of our province. Integrity welcomes this opportunity and will be glad to participate if so invited.

Nevertheless, Integrity is dismayed that . . .

• The primates asked the Episcopal Church to withdraw its members from the Anglican Consultative Council until the next Lambeth Conference; but we are encouraged that this action is cast as voluntary rather than mandatory. It seems counter-intuitive that a Communion-wide dialog process can be crafted without the participation of delegates from one of the provinces with a large number of openly lesbian and gay members. We urge the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church, which we understand has canonical authority in this matter, to carefully consider the justice and wisdom of granting this request.
• The primates called for a moratorium on same-sex blessings and on the consecration of any bishop living in a same-sex relation. However, we are again encouraged that this is presented as voluntary. Seven dioceses with the United States currently have written policies on same-sex blessings and such blessings occur on a regular basis. It is only a matter of time until another diocese is moved by the Holy Spirit to call another gay or lesbian person to be their bishop.

Meanwhile, other than some rushed and ill-considered decisions in its General Synod, the Anglican Church of Australia, divided within itself, says little -- though individuals have spoken out on both sides of the debate. Nor has any group representing gay and lesbian people within the Australian Church been able to sustain itself.

In Has Anglicanism A Future? A Response to the Windsor Report (LGCM, 2005), Andrew Linzey offers 14 reasons why the Windsor report is wrong. One may not agree with these reasons; but that it is possible reasonably to propose them raises the real possibility that embracing the Report's recommendations may risk entirely misunderstanding the purpose of God and the guidance of the Spirit, as well as departing from the traditional foundations of the Anglican family of faith.
(Prof. Andrew Linzey BD (Lond), AKC, DPS, Phd (Lond), is a member of the Theology Faculty, Oxford University, and Bede Jarrett Senior Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall. He is also Honorary Professor in Theology at Birmingham University and Special Professor at Saint Xavier University Chicago.)

The Sydney Morning Herald (19 Feb) reports "Aussie Queer Eye a big turn-off for advertisers." Ratings are half what was expected and Channel Ten stands to loose millions. Ratings dopped heavily btween the first eposide and the second. I watched the first half of the first Australian episode, then turned it off. It was an exact-as-possible clone of the American version (even down to the imported gas-guzzler 4WD). No innovation, nothing Australian except brand names (not sure if half of them weren't imported). Result? Dull, dull, dull. The original version works (maybe) in an American setting, especially New York, is at least a tiny bit exotic to a non-US audience, and is sometimes witty. Australians don't mind American shows that are American. But Australian shows need to be vaguely Australian or at least cosmopolitan. The Australian show could have been set anywhere. There was no attempt to showcase its Aussie setting (was it made in Sydney?). The commercialism was much more obvious when one recognised the brands. The dialogue was low on wit. Boring, boring, boring.

The 'Sydney Confidential' column in the Daily Telegraph (owned by a rival media organisation) ran this bitchy comment on 11 Feb:

Queer Eye flops
Oh dear . . . Queer Eye boys fail to capture the imagination.
Channel Ten's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is gay -- that's gay as in daggy, crap, wrong, a dud. At least so say 'Confidential's' local gay lads. "I can honestly say God was shining on me the day they said I was not right for the show," said one potential Queer Eye. "How absolutely embarrassing. It was like watching a car crash," he said.
So what exactly was it that has the city's queer kids so upset? The fashion tips? The stilted conversations? A touch of jealousy perhaps? "All of it," said 'Confidential' reader Brendan.
"Ah, they had red gerberas on the kitchen bench -- I don't think so," said Matt. "Ty Hencshke is like some sort of children's TV show presenter, Will Fennell I must admit I quite loved, but they just so didn't work together," he said.
It appears Sydney's gay community were laying bets as to how long the series, which rated third in its timeslot in Sydney with 290,000 viewers, will last.

Postscript:: Melbourne's Herald Sun (25 Feb.)(reports that the show has been scrapped.

Wednesday's episode, featuring the make-over of a man dubbed "Haircules" because of thick body air, was a ratings flop. It reached just 229,000 viewers in Melbourne [population 4 million plaus] and was thumped in its timeslot by local drama McLeod's Daughters (427,000). . . . Channel 10 insists remaining episodes will be shown. "We believe Queer Eye did not get the figures it deserved so we will be running the remaining episodes as a series of specials when the American Queer Eye returns," a Ten spokesman said.

Thinking Anglicans is giving superb coverage of the General Synod of the Church of England, which has now accepted a report from its House of Bishops endorsing the recommendations of the Windsor Report. It agreed:

That this Synod
(a) welcome the report from the House (GS 1570) accepting the principles set out in the Windsor Report;
(b) urge the Primates of the Anglican Communion to take action, in the light of the Windsor Report's recommendations, to secure unity within the constraints of truth and charity and to seek reconciliation with the Communion; and
(c) assure the Archbishop of Canterbury of its prayerful support at the forthcoming Primates' Meeting.'

An attempt to insert the following as a new paragraph failed by 209 votes to 140 votes.

in the light of paragraph 3.7.2 of the FOAG response to the Windsor report annexed to GS 1570, which refers to the requirement of Lambeth 1.10 that Anglicans should listen to the experiences of gay and lesbian people, urge the Primates to take practical steps to create a climate of safety within the Churches of the Communion in which lesbian and gay people can speak of their experience and theology without fear of reprisal within those Churches and that will allow voices to be heard across national and provincial boundaries in the Communion, especially in countries where homosexuality is punishable by imprisonment;

In press rports, the Archbishop of Canterbury is quoted as describing split over homosexuality as "agony". "There will be no cost-free outcome from this ... to put it as bluntly as I can, there are no clean breaks in the Body of Christ."

"Part of the cost involved in the repercussions of recent events is that it has weakened, if not destroyed, the sense that we are actually talking the same language within the Anglican Communion. Not having a common language, a common frame of reference, has been one of the casualties of recent events and there is every indication that that is not going to get better in a hurry."

In what The Scotsman describes as "a thinly-veiled reference to the more liberal side of the church", the Archbishop said those who decided to take risks would have to face the consequences. "There are consequences in hurt, misunderstanding, rupture and damage. It does us no good to pretend that the cost is not real."

Despite the overall vote of support, the press reports strong criticism of the Windsor Report. Stuart Emmason, from the Diocese of Manchester, described it as the "ultimate fudge". "It seems to me profoundly un-Anglican," he said. "The whole sorry affair fills me with sadness and, I have to admit, a certain anger." The Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby, said it was flawed by the fact that it had had no input from the homosexual community. "They did not even get a whisper," he said. "If they are not heard, this issue will never, never be resolved."

In Australian General Synod and the US General Convention meet only three-yearly, for them a proper response to the Windsor Report will take years. Meanwhile, it's up to the Primates.

The Labor Party opposition has introduced a bill into Parliament to force ratification by Australia of the Kyoto Protocol, but the Government has blocked debate on it. Here is the full text, as it sums up what Australia ought to be doing immediately.

The leader writer of The Guardian (15 Feb 05) criticises the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Williams, for apparent reluctance to say anything "about about the things that interest the public or divide his church", and speculates that this is because he is likely to be misunderstood no matter what he says.

In his defence it can be argued that there is nothing that he can say about interesting subjects that won't make things worse for his church. Whatever the Church of England says about the royal marriage will sound sycophantic or pharisaiacal, as those clergymen who have already expressed their views make clear. Whatever he says about gay Christians will make the schism worse.

It is hard to imagine him giving an honest or satisfying answer if he is asked why blessing the love of two adulterers in Windsor strengthens the Church of England and lets one of them become the church's supreme governor, while blessing the love of two gay vicars in Southwark would threaten global schism.

Quite.

In The Times Theo Hobson, author of Against Establishment: an Anglican Polemic, is yet more critical. He argues that the Church of England, always anxious to please, too easily falls into line with the wants of royalty, who no longer must "make sure that their private life was seen to conform to the austere teachings of the Church." Rather, he syas, "the love life of royalty has the power to influence Church teaching." This, "does not look good. It would actually do it a lot of good to split over Charles's remarriage. It would mean that at last the awkward subject of establishment would be properly aired."

The Church of England] desperately needs to interest people in its version of Christianity; but establishment is a major turn-off. Before 2002, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, would have agreed with this analysis. Being Welsh, he had never had to pledge allegiance to the Queen, and he looked upon the establishment of the Church of England with scepticism. In 2000 he said: "I think that the notion of the monarch as supreme governor has outlived its usefulness. I believe increasingly that the Church has to earn the right to be heard by the social world. Establishment is just one of those things that make it slightly harder."

[...] Upon his appointment to Canterbury, he shoved his disestablishing sympathies into the closet. Surely he should reach out to those with similar feelings -- young, confused Anglicans especially -- and tell them it's OK. [...] Instead, he seems to have taken fright at the weakness of the Church. Maybe one cannot afford to be too honest, when Christian values are so precarious in this culture. Maybe an honest discussion of establishment would make the institution look muddled, weak and inward-looking. [...] And there is another reason to keep deferring the disestablishment debate. The argument about homosexual ordination has shown the Church to be a very shaky marriage between the poles of liberal Catholics and conservative Evangelicals. This frail coalition might collapse without establishment. So it is a genuinely dangerous topic in the present climate.

In its piece, The Guardian urges Dr Williams to "Speak up!" I agree. Dr Williams is a brilliant and compassionate person. If he is brave enough, he can do much good.

The Kyoto Protocol comes into effect on 16 February. Australia and the United States are the only major industrialised countries that have refused to join. We produce the world's highest per capita greenhouse emissions. Yet our conservative government persists in arguing that Australia will be damaged by the protocol. This would be a small price to pay to avoid the massive consequences of long term global warming.

In a statement today InclusiveChurch urges that there be a "safe space in which gay Christians can speak."

The Windsor Report has repeated the call for the Anglican Church to listen to the experience of gay men and women made at the last three Lambeth Conferences. If the church is to take this call seriously, it must create a safe environment in which people can talk. In particular, this means that clergy must be able to speak out without fear of losing their job or having other sanctions placed on them. InclusiveChurch calls for a clear and unequivocal moratorium on the disciplining of lesbian and gay clergy who wish to speak honestly about their sexuality.

The Rev'd Dr Giles Fraser, one of the founders of the movement said, "For nearly thirty years, the Lambeth Conference has called for the church to listen to gay and lesbian people. Yet, in many parts of the communion, this process has not begun. In many places those who speak out are attacked and persecuted. The church must make practical moves to enable gay and lesbian people to share their experience of Christ in their lives. Without making a safe space for this to happen, the promises made at Lambeth Conferences, and more recently by the Windsor Report itself, will be seen as hollow." [...]

Michael Hopkins writes that the brokeness of the Anglican Communion flows from a failure to keep undertakings to 'listen' to the stories of gay and lesbian people. The Windsor Report makes no mention of this, he says.

Roses do well in Canberra. Australia's Old Parliament House has had rose gardens since Robert Broinowski began work on them in 1931, using donations from ordinary Australians. The National Capital Authority (James's employer) has restored the Old Parliament House gardens with more than five thousand roses, once again sponsored by private donors. James and I sponsored one in honour of my late mother, June, and were assigned a Lady Mann. It's a hybrid tea rose bred in Australia in 1937, with dark foliage and strongly colored pink blooms. It is a recurrent flowerer with a strong fragrance, growing to about 1.8m. I'm yet to find out who Lady Mann was!

The Lady Mann rose is to be planted in the Rex Hazlewood Rose Garden, located on the Senate side of the building. The garden was designed in 1931 by Sydney rose specialist Rex Hazlewood at the request of the then National Rose Society of New South Wales. The garden is to tell the history of the rose, displaying many old roses. The centre of the garden features roses bred by internationally renowned Australian rose breeder Alister Clark. One of these is the Lady Mann.

(sae hae bok manhi badeseyo)
In Korean, this asks you to receive many blessings at new year, my third new year in as many months - Advent Sunday (church 'new year'), 1 January, and now lunar new year.

Pancakes yesterday to mark Shrove Tuesday were a worthy tradition, though dangerous to the waistline.

Some East Asian Christians have a juggling act to perform this year, as lunar New Year and Ash Wednesday fall on the same day! Ash Wednesday is traditionally an important church festival, yet I've never been to an Ash Wednesday service as most of the local ones are in working hours. The idea of imposition of ashes (the priest uses ash to mark a cross on one's forehead) makes me very uneasy. So I ask myself why. As Jane Redmont writes in a piece in The Witness

Many of us are reluctant to lament in public and to do so with the force of religious language. To do so with specificity, naming the causes of our lament - intimate and personal but more often social, economic, local, regional, planetary, political - is especially difficult. Personal inhibition, perhaps - we are not just numb to others' grief but sometimes to our own. Or perhaps we and our religion are too polite. Or we have bad memories of Christians being offensively public (like the hypocrites of Matthew's Gospel) or of Christians calling for repentance in ways that deny the holiness of the body and of sexual desire.

Yet lament we must.

My parish priest suggests that "rather than giving things up" for Lent, we might "take things on" during Lent; perhaps some particular service to others, or special period of study and prayer. I like the idea.

Meanwhile, as James is originally Korean, I suspect that the New Year festival will win out over Ash Wednesday!

I've declared this site to be tobacco free, but not alchohol free. Yet I've long questioned my Scottishness in heritage, as I've never liked whisky, even Scotch. Maybe this was because I only tasted cheap blended stuff. I've seen the light at last, after a dram or two of Glenfiddich single malt. Even though the popular 12-year-old whisky is affordable at about $50 (Aust.) per bottle, the taste was outstanding. I sipped very slowly! The top-of-the-range 30-year old Glenfiddich may be extraordinary, but at well over $200 Aust. a bottle, I'll have to give it a miss.

The regular mid-week gathering which James and I share with a few church friends was visited this week by Mr Brad Chapman. Brad runs a successful home mortgage and finance company ... but his great desire, motivated by his faith, is to use his time and resources to combat oppression and poverty, in Australia and overseas. He is now studying theology as well as managing his business and in 2004, he was a member of the Leadership and Development team of the Australian Government's National Youth Roundtable. Brad has traveled with the Australian Board of Mission to Papua New Guinea, Northern Australia, and the Diocese of Jerusalem and was on his way to speak at an ABM conference about his experiences of the church in the Middle East.

The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem extends over Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine and Israel and is centered on the Cathedral Church of St. George the Martyr in Jerusalem. Thirty-one parishes minister to the needs of their communities and the Diocese supports thirty-four institutions that include hospitals, clinics, kindergartens and schools, vocational training programs, as well as institutions for the deaf, the disabled and the elderly.

This is what Brad wrote in the Australian Board of Missions magazine,Partners (February, 2005). . . .

One of my annual labours is to to prepare Australia's annual Report on the Operation of the Aged Care Act 1997, the latest edition of which was published this week and presented to Parliament.

I'm also much involved with the the aged care chapter (ch 12) of the Report on Government services. The 2005 report was published by its intergovernmental steering committee yesterday. It's dry reading, mostly facts and figures, but this two-page fact sheet would give you a flavour if you were really keen. Just one newspaper produced this patchy article, based on an AAP wire service report.

I also work on the aged care chapter of the Department of Health and Ageing's annual report, but that sadly is yet to appear, delayed by the 2004 elections.

Put together, these three publications are about half the annual workload of my job in the Department of Health and Ageing as the preparation requires a substantial survey, the Survey of Aged Care Homes, other research, various meetings, consultations and so on and on.

Gripping stuff, eh?

P.S. The Canberra Times published this front page article about aged care in the A.C.T., which caused a stir briefly and was followed up on local television news.

I asked my singing teacher friend to be brutal in her first assessment of my voice today. She tested my range, resonance, harmonic perception, etc., and seems to think that I have the makings of a passable choir baritone. My first lesson was good fun and we agreed to three months of lessons as a trial. When asked what I like to sing, it was hard to say. I'd like to sing grand opera (but I can't), and I do sing hymns (badly). I like old time gospel music, so we decided to start with a few 'spirituals' to get the voice going. Let my people go has a range of just an octave, and so is easy for the beginner! A bit of casual research tells me that it was not until the American civil war that texts and music of African American spirituals began to be published. Let my people go was one of the very first spirituals to be published with words and music and is one of the many treasures held by the Library of Congress. The song was collected from the "contrabands" -- fugitives from slavery.

The first class was wonderfully encouraging; I've wanted to do something like this for years, and it's good to start out with a friend.

Our new apartment is wired for access to 24/7 broadband internet, cable TV and telephone, so we joined up; it's much cheaper now in Australia than a few years ago. I'm done with building the new layout.

This afternoon we saw The Motorcycle diaries. A very fine movie; great to look at, well told, entertaining but thought provoking. Actors Gael Garcia Bernal and Rodrigo de la Serna are excellent. Che Guevara's choice of communism would not be my choice but his reasons for revolution, the challenge of injustice and oppression, are powerfully challenging. I need to look at the 'diaries': The motorcycle diaries: a Latin American journey by Ernesto Che Guevara and others (numerous editions) and Travelling with Che Guevara by Alberto Granado (also many editions).

Today is Australia Day. As The Age said this morning, it is "a day but not a date to celebrate."

The importance of having a national day is obvious, but is January 26 the right one? For many, Australia Day is welcomed as the final holiday before the nation puts away its summer wardrobe and prepares for the year ahead. It is often a low-key occasion characterised by picnics at the beach and quiet suburban ceremonies, a far cry from the ostentatious displays of patriotism that mark national days in other countries. Given the nation's history, this is perhaps unsurprising. Australia did not rise from the ashes of revolution or civil war. Aside from Anzac Day [25 April], which carries a solemn significance unsuited to a day of celebration, there is no momentous event that serves to galvanise national pride. Even the date used since 1931 as a focus for festivities is contentious. January 26 commemorates the day Governor Arthur Phillip sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 with a fleet of convict ships and colonised the fifth continent in the name of a British monarch.
Of greater import is the fact that the founding of our first city entailed the subjugation of the indigenous population by a European civilisation. For Aboriginal Australians, January 26 is not, and will never be, a day of celebration.
[...] Until now, the Government has resisted all such suggestions. But it is significant that on Monday Governor-General Michael Jeffery opened this year's celebrations at a dawn service at Uluru. He emphasised the need for Australians to embrace indigenous history and customs and called on schools to teach Aboriginal culture as a means of linking black and white Australia. [...]

The difficulty is to find an alternative date. There is no single day on which Australia became independent. Rather, our separation from Britain has occured in stages, and we still share the same monarch. The centre of our most formal national symbol, the coat of arms, portrays our political orgin in 1901 as a somewhat reluctant union of six fractious British colonies, who still rival each other as states of Australia's 'Commonwealth'.
Advance Australia Fair, the national anthem, adopted in the 1980s to replace God Save the Queen, was written in the nineteenth century and its words had to be changed to remove sexism and jingoism. But most national songs are a bit silly and this one is no worse than most; though, at 50-something, I do find it hard to sing with a straight face "for we are young and free". But every time the song is heard at an Olympics medal ceremony or wherever, it has a little more cred.

Australians all let us rejoice,
For we are young and free;
We've golden soil and wealth for toil;
Our home is girt by sea;
Our land abounds in nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare;
In history's page, let every stage
Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross
We'll toil with hearts and hands;
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands;
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share;
With courage let us all combine
To Advance Australia Fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia Fair.

Ginninderra Press is a valued local Canberra local publisher that includes many volumes of poetry among its offerings. It recently publishedUnfinished journey collected poems 1932-2004 a new anthology of the work of Canberra poet Michael Thwaites. I greatly enjoy his 1989 collection, The Honeyman and I look forward to reading more of his stuff. But I wonder whether the new collection will have many new items?

Now 90 years old, Michael Thwaites was a Rhodes Scholar for 1937. In WWII, he enlisted in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Among his books is Atlantic Odyssey (New Cherwell Press, 1999), a first-person story of the WWII battle of the Atlantic in which he served on convoy escort converted trawler, the Wastwater. During his time at sea he learned that he had been awarded the 1940 King's Medal for Poetry. Throughout his life during and since the war, Michael Thwaites as continued to write and publish poetry.

After the war, Thwaites was a Lecturer in English at the University of Melbourne, but in 1950, he was appointed to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation as Director of Counter-Espionage. In April 1954 he supervised the sensational defection of the KGB officers Vladimir and Eudokia Petrov, which had a lasting impact on Australian political history. Old Parliament House, now a museum, is presently staging an interesting exhibition on the Petrov affair to mark the fiftieth year since it occurred.

Thwaites left ASIO in 1971 and for five years (1971-1976) was Deputy Head of the Parliamentary Library in Canberra (in the same, now "Old", Parliament House), where I was later an employee myself for five years.

On the June 2000 death of Judith Wright (who remains my favourite Australian poet), Michael Thwaites published "A Letter to Judith Wright" in the local newspaper.

Dear Judith, you're my junior by one day but quicker off the mark. Lover of country, unresting traveller, now you share with Hamlet the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.
Where shall we write? You left us no address on the other side. But you may meet with Jack your husband, Oodgeroo, your spirit's friend, others past number whom you stirred and served with warrior's faith in final victory.
Your poet's soul, disciplined, never dead, spoke in that final walk across the bridge, symbol of what lay nearest to your heart -- apartness conquered by the power of love. Carry us with you as you journey on.