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Saturday
Nov172012

Back in The Age with a faith column Sunday morning

 I still possess one of the advent calendars we had as kids. It’s remarkably well preserved, 50 years on, a testament to the reverence with which we treated such things. Although the same two calendars were recycled every year, I still remember the thrill of opening the little doors and the guilty longing to sneak a peak at the 24th.

There were no chocolates secreted in the calendars; the pictures were of the Christian story of Jesus birth and what led up to it, so we were reminded of the stories every morning. And we learnt to wait.

In the church season of Advent, starting on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, waiting is the operative word.

Older people know by experience that the most important things can’t be hurried. Growing a baby or a garden, knitting a jumper, writing a symphony, nurturing a friendship that will last through anything, developing trust between traditional enemies, starting a grassroots movement, building a healthy marriage.

In Advent, Christians wait with expectation for the birth of the one they believe was somehow God in utterly human form. But this is not all we wait for.

In Advent, part of the deal is waiting for what has historically been known as the second coming of Christ. This has a whole lot of colourful mythology associated with it; what it means to this 21st century Christian and many others is something we call the coming of the Kingdom or the Reign of God.

This is a time when we believe that God will bring all things to some sort of culmination. That injustice will be righted, that, to quote the Bible, ‘God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.’

This might sound real pie in the sky stuff, what Marx called the opiate of the masses. For followers of Jesus, however, believing this is no substitute for acting to try and bring about justice and mercy in the world, to increase the pool of love around them, drawing on the infinite resources of the God of love. Christians are called to pray and to work for the end of warfare and violence and pollution - all the time knowing that we may never fully achieve this - and longing for a time when the big love that is God will bring us all home.

One of the creeds of the earliest Christians was ‘Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again’. In Advent, we prepare to celebrate God becoming human. We wait and pray for the time when all will be set right and that in the meantime, to quote St Francis of Assisi, God might make us instruments of God’s peace.

 

Friday
Nov092012

Anglesea to Addis

I wouldn’t mind a dollar for every time I’ve walked from Anglesea to Point Addis. Or from Point Addis to Anglesea. Or both in one hit.

No doubt I covered the distance in my mother’s arms as a nine-month-old baby, during my first visit to Australia - a visit commemorated for me by a rare baby photo of a chubby tot being held by my smiling Granny outside the door of our beach house which is aptly named ‘The Hut’.

The first time I actually remember doing the Addis walk I was five, at the end of 1964, which was also the year I learned to swim in the deeper pools of the Anglesea River. Mum and my sister and I were accompanied by assorted aunts uncles and cousins, who holidayed there together every year. With us we took all the paraphernalia of what we still then quaintly called a ‘chop picnic’.

The gang of us walked the five miles from home to the Anglesea River and further east along the magnificent beaches to Point Addis with its soft sand that is so hard to wade through and its steeply shelving beach where you’d be crazy to swim, but there's usually a fisherman or two with their long poles stuck in the sand, watching and waiting.

Once we arrived, someone planted a sizeable stick at the water’s edge and we set a little fire and cooked our chops. There may have been sandwiches as well, probably a thermos of tea.

The grown ups kept an eye on that stick to see when the tide was starting to turn. Because there is a trick to the Addis walk; the point closest to Anglesea is the only one that is completely cut off at high tide. You have to be careful with your timing; if you get caught on those beaches with their magnificent but steeply inaccessible cliffs, you’re sunk, no pun intended.

I sometimes wonder if tides are higher almost half a century on, as it’s rarely easy to get there and back these days. When in doubt, we use the path on the top of the cliff, which is gorgeous in a completely different way.

It seems remarkable now that my family would head off, five-year-old in tow, for a sixteen kilometre round trip. Maybe that’s when I developed my passion for walking. I have a clear recollection of the endless beach ahead and my weary little legs. As mum told it, I was dragging my feet, refusing to go any further and skinny Uncle George was looking anxious, wondering if he would have to carry me all the way home, when my sister had the brilliant idea of appealing to my imagination. She recreated a vivid scene from the Mary Grant Bruce Billabong books that she adored, and I happily mustered cattle all the way back to the Hut.

I recall our oldest in a backpack on her dad’s shoulders when we mistimed an Addis Walk and had to backtrack and take a slightly scary cliff scramble. Later, when we had a troop of four, we would coax them all the way with the reward of a minty at each of the three rocky points between Anglesea and Addis. Then their dad would jog home and get the car.

These days, with our all but empty nest, Alistair and I tag team it; he jogs one way and the dog and I meet him the other end with the car and walk back. Occasionally, if I am preoccupied with some anxiety or other, I have to remind myself to look around and be amazed anew at the majesty of the views. Every year some more of the cliff has broken off and crumbled to the beach below; last week I saw there had been a major landslide which had brought with it grass which was growing happily on the wet sand, something I had never seen there before.

Each time I’m there, I marvel that six generations of women in my family have walked that route. Great-grandmother Elizabeth Heyer, an immigrant from Alsace, grand-mother Clara Heyer then Paton, mum Frances Paton then Boyd, my sister and I and our daughters, and the next generation too, as all my cousins have grand-daughters themselves.

Mum is buried at Bellbrae cemetery, not far from Anglesea, even closer to Addis. Maybe when I die, I’ll get my kids to scatter some of my ashes on the bush block that surrounds the Hut and the rest on the beaches between Addis and Anglesea.

Monday
Nov052012

Cup Day - blog anniversary

Melbourne Cup Day is an anniversary of sorts for me:  exactly two years since I started blogging. Which makes me sad and frustrated, because, despite my best efforts, including stooping to facebook, my basic audience has barely increased. 

But it makes me happy and satisfied too. This time a year ago, I wrote:

‘A year on, the best thing my blog has done for me is provide a regular deadline. It has forced me to write something most weeks.’ Amen to that. 

My first ever post was about a visit to the Forum to listen to Clare Bowditch. Clare B appeared in the blog again in August 2011, when I wrote about attending her tribute to Eva Cassidy. And, a bit of a theme happening here, in a couple of weeks my daughters and I will go to hear her yet again.

Another local artist I have long admired had a great quote in the weekend mag I was reading yesterday. Helen Garner, in extracts from her diaries has this to say: ‘Someone has published a biography of Muriel Spark… Apparently her letters make no reference whatever to current events. So?’ 

Thank you Helen. My blog could be accused of the very same thing. I do think about current events a lot. Right now I am sitting on the verandah of my family shack at Anglesea and it’s warm but not too hot and my feet are bare and I’m in my favourite, raggedy soft old dress; my little dog is sitting beside me, quietly panting as she shifts into the shade. I tap away on my dinky little computer that I don’t have to share with anyone else, and I’ve just had a perfectly good cup of tea and I think about the people in America who have lost everything in Hurricane Sandy, and about asylum seekers, and Pacific Islands disappearing under the rising seas and the seeming pure self-interest and short-sightedness of our politicians. 

I seldom write about such things, however, because I have nothing helpful to say. I’m peculiarly dense about politics; anything analytical is completely beyond me. I know what makes me angry (narrow-mindedness, fundamentalism, entitlement) but can no more muster coherent arguments against such things than fly to the moon.

As a writer, mine is a very domestic canvas, because people and relationships and observed, small details are what I know about. So I am relieved to hear someone as august as Helen Garner saying that’s okay.

Cup Day always seems to come as an extra treat, an undeserved blessing. A mini-holiday before the plethora of public holidays around Christmas and New Year that mean you can have a fortnight off simply by taking a few days of annual leave. It’s the warm up, or maybe the cool down, for summer.

This year it feels more underserved than ever in my case, as I’m only recently back from seven weeks of leave, and although work has been busy and our social life slightly nuts, it hardly merits four days off.

I’m at the beach by myself this time; my husband has to work in New Zealand and the kids are elsewhere. I haven’t had so much time by myself in ages, and I fill it doing some of my favourite things – not talking, walking many kilometres along beach and bush tracks and reading detective stories. It’s almost warm enough for a swim – maybe tomorrow. I sleep longer than usual at night and get up after a long lie in. I nap after lunch. I do a bit of tidying up around the house but mostly I am utterly lazy. In the evenings I cook exactly what I want and gaze into the fire. I connect to my kids on the phone and look forward to my husband coming home on Wednesday. 

I read the weekend papers from cover to cover – every trashy bit of them and I send out thoughts to the thousands of people I read about in dire situations. I fail, once again, to write about current events. I think about blogging and if it’s worth the effort and I decide that, for the moment at least, it is.

Sunday
Oct212012

Keeping our children safe

 

I’ve just finished reading The world according to Garp, by John Irving; a crazy, bloated, funny, clever, sometimes tedious novel. I much preferred his later work A prayer for Owen Meaney, but reminding myself that Garp was written in 1978, I am stunned by its originality. Back then, no wonder it caused a stir. 

One of Garp’s main themes is the frantic desire of parents to protect their children. Ironically (plot spoiler alert) it is precisely Garp’s paranoia about his sons’ safety that endangers them. 

It’s a theme most parents are excruciatingly familiar with. Just as well Garp isn’t around now, with the plethora of drugs available and a whole new world of virtual predators out there on the Internet, just waiting to corrupt and devour our offspring.

When my own kids were little and again when they were testing teenage boundaries, I used to say sometimes, ‘My first and most important task as a parent is to keep you alive until you can take responsibility for yourself. That’s why,’ as the teenage eyes rolled to the ceiling, ‘I am ringing your party host’s parents to check that there will be adults at this gathering.’ Or whatever it was I was doing that they felt was unnecessary and embarrassing and of course, something no one else’s parents would be doing.

It’s an enormous relief being a parent of adults and not infants and children because if there’s an accident, it’s unlikely to be my fault. Cold comfort, I know, if something did go badly wrong, but I suspect it would make a difference somehow.

Reams of newspaper columns have been written on the phenomenon of ‘helicopter parents’ who barely let their children out of their sight for fear of dire happenings. The worrying epidemic of childhood obesity is blamed partly on the fact that parents are so fearful of the wicked world they won’t let their kids walk to school or play in the park. 

I think we are so much more fearful than previous generations partly because we know so much more. We know how many priests and scout masters abused young boys, how many drunken uncles pawed their nieces in what appeared to be picture-perfect fifties groups and families.

I suspect a bigger reason for our fear, however is the fact that we have grown up with the idea that we can control the world and what happens in it, or at least in our small part of it. We have antibiotics for the diseases that killed our forbears, and we find it hard to accept that there are still illnesses for which there is no known cure. Risk management is the growth industry of our times, we are insured to the hilt, some of us cannot even accept ageing; it is hard for us to realize that we will never be able to control everything.

Of course we have to teach our children basic safety and common sense. It’s our job to warn them about risk-taking behaviour. But the recent tragic deaths of Jill Meagher and Pat Cullen only underline the fact that accidental and tragic deaths happen to sensible, lovely people and that the best parent in the world can never entirely prevent this. 

Baby boomers are known for our half wondering, half boastful claims that we don’t know how we survived our own childhood and teenager years. It’s true; my own kids and their peers are so much more educated, sensible and responsible than we were about lots of things from sunscreen to designated drivers and letting their parents know where they are (thank you technology).

Garp’s paranoia about his children’s safety maimed and killed them. Our over-protectiveness is unlikely to be so extreme.  But as cosseted westerners who yearn for every risk to be managed out of existence, we need to learn to protect our kids when they are little, teach them the basics and then let them go.

Tuesday
Oct162012

Age faith piece

While I was away, I managed to get a faith piece in The Sunday Age. Here it is:

 

My friend Sheila approached me a little sheepishly after church one day. ‘I’m a bit embarrassed to ask you this, she said, but I wondered if there’s a tartan hanky of mine at your place?’ She’d lent it to us four years ago, she explained, at a friend’s 50th, a barbeque, to shade my hatless husband’s bald head. ‘It’s just that it was given to me by a favourite cousin,’ she went on. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask for ages.’

As it happened, I had been sorting my clothes cupboard that weekend, and had found a hanky that I knew wasn’t mine. Turned out it was the missing one, and Sheila and her sentimental handkerchief were happily reunited the next time I saw her. 

Her care belongs to another era and touched me deeply in an age where everything from cameras to relationships are often seen as disposable. It reminded me of our almost 100-year-old beach shack which has a rickety old cupboard full of wooden coat hangers labelled with my grandmother’s details: ‘C.S. Paton, The Hut’. Yes, even coat hangers were valued and treasured once. 

Sheila and her hanky also remind me of stories that Jesus made up and told to his friends and followers. ‘There was once a woman’, he says, and goes on to tell of this person who had ten coins and lost one, but didn’t give up searching until she had found it. Or the shepherd who had 99 sheep safely tucked up in his fold but left them to seek all over until he had found the one that had wandered off from its fellows.

That’s what God is like, was the point of the parable. God loves us like that woman, like that shepherd. If one of us is adrift, lost, confused, alone, God knows and won’t rest till we are returned to community and love and belonging.

I think of what it’s like being parent with a bunch of kids. Three of them can be getting along with you and each other and life just fine, but if one is unhappy, you work away till you’ve figured out what, if anything, can be done.

In another part of the gospel story, Jesus is quoted as saying that God knows when the smallest sparrow falls to earth. It’s not just the church people God cares about. It’s every last adult and child, every part of creation. I don’t begin to understand how God does this, but the God that Jesus revealed is one who cares about and searches for every last individual. Sheila, with her obvious delight at being reunited with her scrap of tartan material, reminded me of these vivid stories and the unstintingly loving God that Jesus talked about.