The story tells us that this is all it takes for love to be born:

you listen to the voice of improbable angels

you dare to believe you might have a part to play in their story

you say yes to the idea of the impossible

you give up the future you thought was inevitable

you defy the protocols and social mores of the day when they get in the way
of what you know is true

you dare to say to those who would deny your value and your role
that you just might have what’s needed, in this moment

you search for your allies and trust them with your dream

you devour the moments of joy when they come

you demand truth from yourself and those around you

you give up the things you are comfortable with

you travel long journeys in inhospitable conditions

you stand up to be counted

you take whatever shelter you can get

you aren’t afraid of darkness or dirt

you do whatever it takes, even if you’re lonely, scared, a laughing stock, intimidated, overwhelmed, lost, uncomfortable

you accept gifts of wisdom from strangers

you honour those who put their gifts of love, however small, alongside yours

you risk everything, even your life, to give it breath

that’s all it takes for love to be born.

On Christmas day each year I go into one of Victoria’s prisons to spend some time with some of the men in there. The unit I go into houses some of the more vulnerable men in the prison – most have acquired brain injuries or intellectual disabilities. After my first visit a few years ago, I recall thinking it was the most godforsaken environment I’d been in, and Christmas day only makes it more so. The day is as lonely and desolate as you can imagine, and then some.

Their regular chaplain and I offer those inside some meditation and the chance to light some candles. Last year the men requested that we sing carols. Musical accompaniment isn’t possible in this part of the prison, and I doubt that any of us were used to singing in a group, but we handed out the lyrics to some carols and tried our best. The words were of use only to those who could read, but those who didn’t sang the first verse of Away in a Manger three times over, and hummed along to Silent Night, joining in the occasional familiar line when they recognised it. ‘Sleep in heavenly peace’, we sang, discordant and tuneless. I swear it sounded like angels.

‘It’s good of you to go in there’, the woman in the café told me this morning, as she made my coffee and we talked about our Christmas day plans. Without thinking I responded, ‘It’s good for me to go in there’. It’s not that going in makes me appreciate the friends and family who surround me for Christmas  - that would come uncomfortably close to pity or charity; it’s not that I discover the ‘real’ meaning of Christmas in there, because there are many real meanings to Christmas. It’s that in the prison, like no other place, I recognise my own fear and darkness sitting alongside that of the men, and I find it transformed. It seems that in honouring another’s humanity in the most godforsaken places, I’m given the chance to discover my own.

And at Christmas, if the stories of the Christian faith are anything to go by, finding our humanity becomes the most divine task. I love the stories of faith, if only as beautiful mythology, where we are invited to believe in the possibility of love that pulls us into our human-ness – not away from it – and then transforms it into something beautiful. That’s the miracle of Christmas in the prison: it gives the gift of human-ness. It says that the most divine act is to live with the degradation and shame of being somewhere and someone who is abhorrent to all that is glamorous and beautiful. And it’s only when we live with that, in the midst of desolation and desperation, that something of glory is given the chance to be born.

who knew there was more to forgive?

the pain was easiest
the skin doesn’t remember the force of a slap
once its imprint fades
and once the nerves stop sending
their chaotic signals to the brain
the ache eases
and the bruise
leaves just a shadow
proof our bodies are made
to repair

the shame was harder
insidious by nature
its tentacles of secrecy and fear
took a long, agonising prising
- a reliving
and reshaping
of every remembered moment-
to release their hold

but release they did,

and i thought i was done.

but now
only now
i see how much this deep certainty,
this matter-of-fact reality,
colours every moment of my living:
it is beyond all possibility
that i could ever be loved

and suddenly
from nowhere
i am defeated
again

and that
i cannot
quite yet
forgive.

This is the moment that all of faith
and love has
been preparing you for

and we stand here with you
at the edge of the life you would
never choose to live
looking into its unknown darkness
and wondering how to step forward

in awe of the task
and of you.

and we take hold of your hand
and your doubts and questions and pain and fear

we promise to hold them carefully
and gently
alongside our love

and together we will hold faith
not that everything will be alright
in this next moment
but that you are going to survive
whatever it is
that will be.

practising the rare meditation
that i know will do me good.

i breathe
until the peace of my mind
is interrupted by the blood rushing through my head
and i resent its noisy imposition

i am less breath
than blood
today

i finger the cut
on my thumb
the rawness of the fresh skin
reaching too far to join
the split
together
still fragile enough
to rip apart with
just the pressure
of my touch

i am alive

i think about a Christmas to come
and a month of
breathless pace
of blood rushing
of gift
of fear
and pleasure
and love
fragile enough
to rip apart
with just the pressure
of my touch

and i pray
to a god of breath and blood
for the courage
to hold
lightly
to that which i want
given birth to

and to wait
for the gift
i cannot make

i breathe again
my heart speeds

i am alive.

the road rarely ends
at the end of the map.

and if the road ends
there’ll be land
or a sea
or a sky
that spreads into
a future
and from a past
too vast
to ever be known.

my dreams taunt
with imaginary worlds
more real than the real
where freedom
and joy
at the newly discoverable
cast aside the deadening weight
of what’s happening now

but though i would be an adventurer
searching the reaches of the world
drawing maps of new-found spaces
with myself the only changing constant
it’s only here
where you are
that i can search the edges
of myself.

i am blessed.

I will not say it to mean i am lucky to have what i do;
especially bestowed with something
that others lack
due to my good luck
or god’s good nature
or something between the two.

but i will mean
that i choose to live
as though in this next moment
and action
i have been given the chance
to be a person of grace.

i am blessed.

i have 15000 words which are the beginnings of a book about the work we do in prisons. I’m at that quagmired stage. The best editor I’ve worked with said to me once, ‘when you think a sentence you’ve written is clever, you need to go back and write it again’. So I am.

Fortunately there are only one or two clever sentences out of the 1500 or so I’ve written. The rest are just crap. Luckily, this is the stage of writing i love: where you’ve got the right words on a page, they’re just all in the wrong order.

Anyway, if you’re here because you’re looking for inspiration, or simply a way to pass a few minutes, you’ll be left lacking. Go here instead. Beautiful.

Anyway, long story short, and all that. After reading some stuff last night – in the Guardian*, not the Vision Forum website – I realised that it’s time to start using another word instead of ‘God’. It was this comment that tipped me over the edge:

As David Attenborough says, there is a species of parasite in Africa which lives by burrowing into the eyeballs of children and blinding them. If God exists, God made that parasite.

I can re-theologise and explain that away: I don’t believe in an omnipotent being who created the world; I try to have faith in the fragile event. But interrupting a liturgy to include that disclaimer disrupts the all-important poetry. The unpacking and re-interpreting of theological language – of which ‘God’ is the ultimate example, really – is not what i want to spend my time doing. While i’m sure there’s virtue in reclaiming the name, just like there’s virtue in reclaiming the church, I’m happy to leave that to others to do. And I’m really happy to leave behind language that might ever put me in the same camp as the uber-fundamentalists. So I want to find ways to speak of the event of God without ever speaking of God.

The only time i use the language of God is when i’m writing for a Christian audience. And while i’ve been happy to be ambiguous or multivalent with language, i’m increasingly uncomfortable with people thinking i mean something i really don’t. Wish I knew where to start though.

*the whole Guardian article is another blog post in waiting – thanks to Blythe for sending it my way.

Christian witness sometimes confuses hope with optimism, and pastoral care with making people feel better; and the harder a situation is, the more desperately we cling to the belief we can resolve it. Christian hope is not an attitude, but the unexpected, miraculous birthing of a different possibility in the midst of death and desolation. Hope is not another way of looking at things, an attitude readjustment that is transplanted onto our truths; it emerges from within them when we dare to live our truths: to know our deaths, to feel the pain of it, to know the depth of it, as Leunig says. Most heartbreaking of all, our need for hope to come doesn’t mean that it will, which means that we cannot speak hope with the assumption that our words will create it. Our task of faith isn’t to preach hope; it’s to know how to keep living when there’s no hope to be found.