St George's Anglican Church in Dunsborough

Making the World a Better Place - Charles Dickens

Another birthday … the 200^th birthday of the English novelist Charles Dickens.

Dickens’s reach is amazing: there would be few people alive who have not read a Dickens novel or seen an adaptation for film or stage of one of his stories. The characters of Oliver Twist (‘Please, sir, I want some more’) and A Christmas Carol, Scrooge and Tiny Tim have become part of the language.

Charles Dickens was a social reformer. He believed that he could use his fiction to bring change.  I was surprised when I re-read Oliver Twist recently by the anger Dickens expresses, not so much at the poverty that children (and others) experience, but by the two facts that some middle class people couldn’t care less about poverty and that others actively exploit the poor. Dickens describes the parish system with its beadles and work-houses in the most negative terms.

Dickens did not restrict his social reforming to fiction and journalism. As he became rich, he was generous to individuals, not only giving them money, but also providing ongoing personal support for them. With the fabulously wealthy Miss Coutts he founded a Home for Fallen Women to rehabilitate prostitutes and equip them for a good life in Canada or Australia.

I’m really enjoying Claire Tomalin’s new Charles Dickens: a life, which you can borrow through the public library system.

Dickens had a conventional belief in God. He probably attended church only for weddings and funerals. It would be wrong for us Christians to claim Dickens as some kind of saint: the 19^th Century did produce saints who were inspired by their Christian faith to battle poverty and injustice.  Charles Kingsley and Elizabeth Fry come to mind; as does Florence Nightingale, who though a highly unconventional Christian, was deeply inspired by John’s Gospel.

However, I believe as Christians we are called to work with not only other Christians in the fight against injustice, but also to work alongside others engaged in similar work. In this light, we can celebrate Charles Dickens, social reformer, as one who translated his outrage at the treatment of the vulnerable into real change. Dickens made the world a better place, and if we hear his anger now as we read his novels, his influence can continue.

Happy birthday, Wolfgang!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27 in 1756. There’s an old joke which goes like this: What would Mozart be most famous for if he were alive today? Answer: His longevity!
(He would actually be 266 this year.)

But I celebrate Mozart – of course – for his music. His Alleluja (from Exsultet Domino) lifts me to joyful praise that takes me right out of myself.

Music can do this. Scientists who study these things believe human beings started communicating in music before we invented language. Music takes us to deep places of ourselves, stirring and confirming emotions that enrich us profoundly. Mozart, like other musicians, is credited with the ability not only to make us feel more deeply, but also to think more accurately and effectively.

When human beings sing together, their brains produce the hormone oxytocin, the chemical associated with bonding and love, particularly the love of husbands and wives for each other and for their babies. When we sing together, we trust one another more deeply. We become family – close family.

I cannot imagine our worship without music. We listen to music in church that stirs deep emotions, often deeper than any words. We share in music making in different ways, acknowledging the common language music creates. We sing together, and, especially when we sing enthusiastically, and we feel the togetherness of the people of God.

Music affirms that God has made human beings to feel deeply, to be open to love, to thrive in mutual trust, and to lift up our souls to God in joy.

Thank you Wolfgang and the myriads of musicians through the years and in our parish who inspire us.

Praise God for the gift of music.

The God I Don't Believe In

I have just watched Episode 7 of Channel Four’s Christianity: A History - God And The Scientists, in which neuroscientist Colin Blakemore explores how a new understanding of science in the seventeenth century challenged the church. Professor Blakemore argues that science will explain all the mysteries of the universe and ‘make religion redundant’. You can find out more about the program here.

I agreed with much of the program. Science proceeds by observations and testing theories with observations. Some of the observations (‘facts’) of science appear to contradict the literal meaning of the Bible. Colin Blakemore interviews a scientist working at the Creation Science museum in Kentucky who states that if there is a conflict between science and the Bible, he will go with the Bible.

This horrifies Blakemore. He thinks he smells an intellectual conflict which cannot be resolved. Yet, when Jesuit Brother Guy J. Consolmagno, an astronomer at the Vatican Observatory suggests that there may be more sophisticated ways of reading the Bible, Colin Blakemore flatly disagrees with him.

Yet Christians have never stated that the only way to read the Bible is in a flat literal way. For the medieval Franciscan scholar Bonaventure, for example, the words of the Bible were the ‘skin’, its meaning the ‘real fruit’.  Reducing the Bible to its literal meaning is a strange way of understanding language.

Colin Blakemore talked about God as a person with design intentions. ‘If God wanted to create the world, he would have ….’ Christian children often believe in this God, if their drawings of an old man in the sky with a beard are a true indication of their beliefs. Grownup Christians have more sophisticated understandings of who God is and what God might be like. If Professor Blakemore wants to argue with Christians – I mean, if he really wants to discuss these things in depth – he would do well (a) to examine his own pictures of God and the Bible, and (b) to respect the views of Christians more sophisticated than his.

Professor Blakemore apparently doesn’t believe in the God I don’t believe in.

So I in fact agreed with much in the program, even Blakemore’s throwaway line when summing up his argument that science will make religion redundant. ‘Science,’ he said, ‘has the facts. Religion is left with song, music and some stories.’

I think he is undervaluing ‘song, music and stories’ as ways of knowing the world.

The Rev’d Ted Witham

Have a Messy Christmas

For many of us, the four weeks of Advent are a spiralling cascade of busy-ness.  It seems that each little sub-community we belong to puts on a Christmas party or dinner, and we run from one to the other. In between, we need to shop for presents and food to share when we gather as families or friendship groups.

This breathless bustle seems to smother Christmas. Carols, instead of opening our hearts again to the joy of the Christmas message, irritate us, and we wish the whole thing was over.

It’s true that Christmas has been highly commercialised. It’s true that the wider community hijacks Christmas for its own purposes. It’s true that this happens every year, and somehow we manage to remember the Christ Child and his amazing news of the Incarnation of God.

Garrison Keilor, the American comedian, heard a bishop complain that he had ADD – Advent Distress Disorder. We know instantly what he means.  

Rowan Williams Archbishop of Canterbury this year wishes everyone  ‘a messy Christmas.’ We should stop worrying about a perfect Christmas. Mary and Joseph after all had a messy Christmas. We should remember that God is already ‘there for us’. Even if we struggle to find a way to wait for God in Advent, God waits for us with infinite patience. He knows that joy is to be found in the mess. There’s no other place for it, because God is the “God of ordinary, untidy, surprising things.”

Whatever the mess, the secret to life is that God cannot stop blessing us. God blesses us in the birth of Jesus. God blesses us in the death and ongoing life of Jesus. God blesses us in our messy relationships. God is blessing.

May you know the joy of that blessing this Christmas.

Hope: the God of the Future

Already Advent Sunday is upon is. The beginning of the church’s year always seems to take us by surprise, coming four weeks ahead of secular New Year’s Day and six to eight weeks before Chinese New Year.

Advent points to not only the One who is to come on Christmas Day, but all that is to come. Advent reminds us that we find God reliably in the future.

True, we find God in the present: in the love given and received between people and between human beings and creation. We sing rightly, “Ubi caritas et amor, ibi Deus est.” (Where there is love and people really care; where there is love, God is truly there).

In the present, we seek for God at the heart of our being. As I come to know better who I am in relationship with God, I come to know God now. As St Paul wrote, “It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20).

We listen for God in the present as we study the Scriptures. God’s voice can show us how God’s presence in power with God’s people in the past is still with us today.

But on Advent Sunday, we recall that God also comes looking for us from the future. God promises God’s people a future that is better than the present.

I enjoy my life at present, and I have a duty and a joy to give thanks for it. But every day, I experience severe pain. I rejoice that God – through my faith, through doctors and medication, through psychologists and common sense – helps me to live victoriously, to be on top of it. But what an encouragement to know that a time will come when the pain will no longer be there!

I am grateful to God for the lover who has been my wife for 33 years. I am blessed with fantastic friends and friendly communities around me. But I know I fumble my love. I hold it back. I treat people less kindly than I intend to. I betray people. I am encouraged by God’s promise that there will come a time when I can love freely and fully, intimately and deeply.

Advent reminds us to celebrate all that is coming from God.

We do not know what this future will be like. Will “the new heaven and the new earth” (Revelation 21) be like this world of matter and energy that we know so well … or think we know so well? Or will it be alien, strange and different, just as God is alien and strange when compared to the creatures he has made?

 C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, plays with the idea that heaven is like the earth we know, but challengingly different.

The Jesuit scholar Teilhard de Chardin envisages a future when consciousness, spiritual and evolutionary processes will gather all life together in Christ at an Omega Point.

The future is by definition unimaginable by human beings. But the God of the future can and does imagine a future for us that is even more wonderful and joyous than the present. The good news of Advent is that the God of the future comes looking for us and invites us onwards into God, into God’s future.

Even so, come, Lord Jesus! Take us with you on your journey into a new creation.

The Rev’d Ted Witham

When the Saints Go Marching In...

These days of All Saints (Tuesday 1 November) and All Souls (Wednesday), which we will also mark at St George’s on Sunday, give us an opportunity to reflect on a two-part question: which Christians do we most admire? and what’s a Christian community anyway?

All Saints sets us thinking about the official Saints so designated by the Church, those people who have died and whose title Saint is marked with a capital ‘S’. There are so many, both in the Roman Catholic calendar, and in local Anglican calendars that we are spoiled for choice!

St Francis of Assisi, of course for me as a Franciscan, shows me a radical way of being a disciple of Jesus, by following closely and giving up any pretensions to be anything else but my little self.

But John Wollaston, local saint and hero, also gives me much to admire. As Archdeacon of Western Australia in the 1840s and 50s, he visited Anglicans tirelessly on horse-back, encouraging them in this strange place to live as Christians.

So the question is for you: of all the official Saints, who do you admire, and more importantly, why? What it is about that Saints that excites your admiration?

On All Souls, the same question is asked, but more intimately: who have you known personally who, in their life-time, nurtured you in your Christian walk? I think of my Nan who prayed that I would be a priest and who fanned every little evidence of my interest in godly things with a gentle enthusiasm. But if I think of my Nan, is there someone in your experience who did the same? A parent, perhaps, or a priest, or a friend?

Saints with a capital S, and saints without a capital S, all souls, draw us more closely into the community of Christ. They shed a light on the type of community they were building, and ask us to consider what Christian community is for.

In saints of all sorts, we see a glimmer of the life of God. But God cannot be contained in individuals. God is always community, always Father, Son and Holy Spirit, always Trinity, and God’s life shines forth in the communities we build with the saints.

Let us give thanks to God for those we admire and for the strength to follow their good works

Wall Street and our hip pocket

They are occupying Wall Street.  ABC correspondent Michael Brissenden writes that

“The hipsters and the anarchists are joined by entire Episcopal congregations from across the east river, by middle-aged unemployed suburban dads, by politically-engaged grandmothers…”

Many people, including Episcopalians, our fellow Anglicans in the US, are angry that the financial system has not been fixed. The same symptoms are evident – executives are paid thousands of times more than their employees; people are put at risk by derivatives and futures and other unreal forms of money; and human beings are commoditised, for example, as our information on social media like Facebook is sold by giant corporations to advertisers.

This is an issue for Christians.  Money itself is neutral. We can use it generously as a tool to keep us close to God, or we can use it to exploit and abuse others. Loving money disproportionately is the problem. ‘The love of money,’ St Paul wrote, ‘is the root of all evil.’ While we can give it to feed the starving in the Horn of Africa, we can also invest in the felling of the jungles in Borneo or PNG devastating the environment and impoverishing those who live there.

It’s a complex issue. It involves us at an individual level. How we gain and spend and share our money matters. But money is part of the capitalist system we have built, and those who control markets and banks also need to be held to ethical account.

So I pray that the ‘occupation’ of Wall Street will have a positive effect and be more than the shouting of slogans. I hope it raises ethical standards, encourages generosity to the poor and vulnerable, and challenges those whose sense of entitlement to wealth blinds them to others’ needs.

The Rev’d Ted Witham tssf

Remembering Saint Francis of Assisi

On the night of October 3, 1226, Francis of Assisi was dying. He asked to be laid naked on the bare earth near the little chapel of Portiuncula, down the hill from Assisi, the place he had made his base for his peripatetic ministry.

He was only 44 but nearly blind, in constant pain from an illness in his stomach, worn out from the lack of care he had given his body. It is true that he once apologised to Brother Ass, as he called his body, for the abuse he had inflicted on It, but there is no evidence that he heeded his own health message!

He died singing, and the legend says that at the moment of his death, larks flew singing into the sky.

Why do I find such a man such an attractive model of the Christian faith?

In a nutshell because he was passionate about God. He could be spectacularly wrong, as he was with the treatment of Brother Ass, but even that is a result of his never-ending enthusiasm to spread the message of Christ.

And in St Francis’ life, and on St Francis’ lips, what a message that was.

God, he said, is love. Well, we all know that. But for St Francis, God is love that never comes to an end. You’ve heard of Médecins sans Frontières, Doctors without Borders, well, St Francis proclaimed that God was Amour sans Frontières, love without boundaries. God loves every creature infinitely and equally.

Francis’ energy was spent in going about telling everyone this transforming message. If you really let God’s love take hold of you, you will never experience the end of it: it will always be there, always supporting, holding, delighting in you. Knowing that love, you can then pass it on. And because it is amour sans frontières, as you give love away, the supply never runs out.

That’s the whole message of the Cross, the whole meaning of the life of Jesus, the whole purpose of God. And I thank God for sending Francis of Assisi to refresh that message in me.

Immerse yourself in the infinity of Divine Love – love without boundaries!

The Reverend Ted Witham tssf

Peace Day

In the old Prayer Book at Evening Prayer, we asked God to “Give peace in our time.” The news keeps us hyper-aware of the need for peace, whether the desperate need to end the civil way in Libya, or the peace that will come when Israel and Palestine encourage each other to grow as nations, or peace in a dozen other places around the globe.

Peace. We long for it. We say we want it. It has a cost, however. Real peace, lasting peace requires justice for all. Justice for both the long-oppressed people of Libya and justice for the Gaddafis – what would that look like?

Real peace sometimes requires us to take sides politically. Being committed to one political side or the other takes courage.

A popular prayer/song has a real insight. “Let there be peace on earth, And let it begin with me.” Peace in Libya does depend in part on me being at peace with myself and with God. If I am not at peace within myself, others around me will not be at peace. My disturbance disturbs them. It spreads. In the same way, my inner peace also spreads out in the ripple pattern of water, and makes a difference.

Being in right relationship with God and self and those close to us matters, because it is the starting point for the peace of the world.

Churches are asked to pray for peace particularly today on this International Day of Peace. Our prayer not only asks God to intervene to turn the hearts of those causing conflict, but to turn our hearts to places of greater peace for the sake of the world.

God’s lover

Growing older focuses the mind on love and its importance. The theorist on faith development, James Fowler, and spiritual writer Sam Keen, claimed that we make a choice at around age 40 either to live fully believing in the centrality of love, or live in futility: the Lover or the Fool. This year, our daughter presented us with our first grand-child, and this event has brought my wife Rae and me much joy. Holding Sienna persuades me that the most important thing in the world is family and its continuity. The concerns which turned my head as a young man: my work as a chaplain and my activism on behalf of the poor, are put into perspective. They are still important, but only as expressions of love. Abstract causes are dropped for hands-on care. I still write letters to politicians. I still get involved in Amnesty International and Oxfam, and have no doubt that God is there in the involvement. However, God is most evident to me in the love of my wife and family. My task is to do my part in deepening that love, knowing that God multiplies my feeble efforts at loving. Growing old gracefully is to become more and more God’s lover.

By Rev’d Ted Witham