I’ve learnt, over the last few months, that the expected never happens. I’m used to the significant moment in the worship being when we light the candles, or when we’ve finally finished all the words, and after the blessing there’s a long period of silence. That’s the point at which peace seems to descend. But this time it was in the a’capella renditions of ‘Away in the manger’ and ‘Silent night’ – songs chosen in the hope that the men who can’t read would at least know the first verses, and could simply repeat them as often as the carols required. They did. And we stumbled through the verses with infinitely more enthusiasm than ability, stopping between them to listen to the loudspeaker announcements about medication, breakfast, and the morning program… Forget any cathedral children’s choir, in spite of it being hopelessly out of tune and out of time, I have a hunch this was as close to angels singing as you could ever hope to hear.

I still don’t think we could sing on any other day but christmas – but there’s something about christmas in the prison that makes everyone who’s at the service determined to make it work. And perhaps there’s something about being used to having no dignity that lets you sing as though no one is listening. In most of the events that I’m part of, I assume that my ‘audience’ is cynical – that i will have to break through that cynicism in order for people to engage. I think the cynicism is justified [though perhaps i'm justifying my own by saying that!] – we’ve been offered cheap cliches and hackneyed promises too often – but i’ve also realised it’s a luxury of those for whom faith is an option. In the prison, the men are on side from the moment we walk in the door. They want – need? – it to work much more than i do, which makes, as i’ve said before, an overwhelming responsibility. They’ll search out the moment of transcendence in the most awkward of liturgies. Just the fact that we’ve turned up means it’s christmas… People kept insinuating that i was doing something noble by going into the prison on christmas day, but in reality it’s hard to imagine anything more humbling, or any role more privileged. How very lucky i am.

The pdf offers some quick and easy actions that each of us can participate in. You can download it here: Mental Health and Victorian Prisons

Don’t put your faith in the breaking of day,
although that will come,
but let your faith be that peace can be found, even in darkness
and that love can survive in the longest of nights…

- the blessing from tonight’s midwinter service

Tonight’s most surreal moment was before the service when a couple of the men saw that i had candles with me. I found myself having a conversation with them – these two quite large men, with prison tatts and shaved, scarred heads – about whether we like our candles scented with rose or lavender.

It was a lovely service, with its predictable share of unpredictable moments. We had a couple of psalms in the service – one from the bible, the other written by one of the men from Exeter prison and adapted by Nathan from Port Phillip. I asked whether any of the men wanted to read the first psalm and David, sitting next to me, volunteered. He would have had the reading age of a 6 year old, i guess, and stumbled over every second word. One of the other men, across the room, predicted the stumbling and chimed in with the words that he knew David wouldn’t get, so it became this sing-song reading of the psalm – it was really quite moving and lovely.

And part way through the service Ross switched off the lights, and the service continued just with candlelight. It was really beautiful.

When i was writing the service yesterday i remembered a conversation that the basement space crew had in the booth at the back of the Wesley Anne about what gets us through the longest nights – about how it wasn’t the idea of dawn, it was food and wine and company. I was thinking yesterday how these men don’t choose to be together – they tolerate each other, mostly, and their relationships are more alliances for survival. It would take a miracle to make them company for each other, the kind of community that brings you life – a much more difficult miracle than one that turns bread and wine into body and blood… but you know, as i listened to David stumbling through his reading, and i watched the men lighting candles, and holding the moment for each other as they did, and as we sat in silence and darkness for a long, long moment at the end, i wonder if we didn’t actually get close to that. i’m under no illusions it will have lasted more than 30 seconds after we finished, but maybe we need to honour the tiny moments as being remarkable just in themselves…

This was the communion. it probably won’t win awards with the orthodox police, but it did the job here. The rest of the liturgy from the service is at the end as a pdf:

In communion, we remember the story of the night
before Jesus’ death.

That must have been a long night.

With all the fear and confusion and loneliness
that Jesus and his friends must have felt,
together they found at the table
the food and the company
that would help them survive the night to come.

As the story tells us
On the night before Jesus died,
he had supper with his friends.
He took bread,
thanked God,
broke the bread,
and gave it to his friends, saying:
this is my body, given for you.
Each time you do this, remember me.

After supper he took the wine,
thanked God for it,
and passed it to his friends, saying:
This cup is the new promise God has made with you
in my blood.
Each time you do this, remember me.

We thankyou, God,
that we can remember you in this meal
that this bread and wine
are ways that we can put back together
and make whole
the promise of hope
and peace
that your life offered to us.

We pray, God, that your Spirit will make this bread and wine
signs of life
that we can carry with us
into the night time:

promises that we are not alone,
promises we will not be left empty.

Amen.

The whole liturgy as pdf: ppw_midwinter

I had a meeting near Kinglake today. As i was driving up the hill they were saying on the radio that the bushfire cleanup had finally been completed. It was weird hearing that and driving past this…

It was even weirder that just around that bend was the council sign saying ‘check your fire alarms and clean your chimneys now’.

The new green is garish, and clashes with the memory of the dusty colour of eucalypts… but it’s beautiful, and surreal in a Dr Seuss kind of way.

All the media reports from the royal commission into the fires are about how to never let it happen again. It still feels like we’re side-stepping the real conversation – how we learn to live with the realisation that we are human and fragile and all too mortal… but maybe that’s something we can’t focus on, at least not for too long, because it’s too blinding in its intensity.

I’m in Port Philip Prison on Thursday, for a midwinter service. I wrote this prayer for that today, while in a cafe in kinglake:

We gather today in search of the hope
that is tenacious and resilient enough
to be our company through the longest nights
and the darkest hours.

You have your work cut out for you, God.
We are not easy to convince.
We are not content with clichés
about light at the end of the tunnel
or glib promises of the dawn that will break.

We need to know how to survive this darkness,
how to find love in this most barren and desolate place,
how to live in this long night
and not simply wait,
holding on,
for its end.

Because it might not end,
and we need to live.

So we wait in the darkness
and pray for peace

we wait in the fear
and pray for wisdom

we wait in the loneliness
and pray for grace

we wait in the confusion
and pray for company

we wait in the emptiness
and pray for imagination

and we wait in this horror
and pray we will live.

It didn’t quite work like that, but as with all things in the prison, it worked in its own way.

It was a very different group to last time I was doing writing in there. We read a couple of psalms, we talked about the solstice and the longest night, we handed out the templates… and then there was silence, and blank looks. We offered the option of people taking them away and doing it themselves, later in their cell, and there was enthusiastic nodding… so we’ll see what comes out of that! Quite a few men who didn’t come to worship came up afterwards and wanted copies of the templates to write their own as well, so we’ll see whether they come back too… It’s always unexpected. I have a backup plan for the worship, if we don’t get anything – and either way it’s going to involve lots of candles and communion at the end…

Last night worship was planned for 5pm, but dinner was late, and then medication… so it was about 6 before we started. And then two minutes in, the dessert message came across the loud speaker, so the men traipsed outside, got their icecream and brought it back in… By the end of worship, those who had had their medication for depression were completely zoned out and nearly falling over.

I haven’t been back there since christmas day, so in the hour or so that we were waiting around for dinner and medication and whatever else, they were asking questions about what i’d been doing and where else i’d been. I mentioned i’d been in the women’s prison over Easter. I was sitting next to Craig, who shivered and said ‘I’ve heard they’re scary in there’. It was like i had instant [undeserved] street cred for daring to go in there. It was somewhat ironic coming from someone as big and threatening as him, who has spent his life in and out of prison, is decorated with prison ink and battle scars – the kind of person i would instinctively cross the street to avoid outside [in fact, the kind of person who makes me catch taxis home so i won't even be walking on the same street]. The truth is indeed contextual…

I’ve been reading Marilyn Robinson’s book Home for the last few days. I was talking about it yesterday to someone, saying that it’s everything she doesn’t say that makes the story so beautiful – that the space she leaves between words and sentences is filled with this kind of fragility that leaves us aching. As we were leaving the unit last night, Alf appeared. He’d waved at us from his cell door earlier in the night, and then he came down and sat outside the room where we were holding worship, i think to wait for us to come out. He told me that he’s decided to give up his medication, to try to manage things on his own. It felt like there was such importance behind those words. I don’t know what it was – that he was taking responsibility for himself in a new way? that he’d decided that he wanted some kind of different future? I don’t even know what the medication was for… But in the silence between his sentences, i felt that same kind of aching i’ve been feeling as i’ve been reading Home. That sense of the other that’s found in the meeting point of resilience, fragility and longing. Maybe it’s that sense of holiness that comes only in the encounter with that which is most broken and is trying to be human.

So we go back in a couple of weeks to think about the longest nights again. And i feel so lucky that i get to encounter human existence at its most raw and most fragile. Who would ever want to be anywhere else?

It confirmed for me that the way we work with hope – the language we use to invoke it, and the role we believe we play in offering it – is absolutely central to our understanding of faith. And how we understand hope isn’t determined by our alignment with a particular religion. The gift for me this morning was finding so much in common, in the struggle with these questions, with the Muslim and Buddhist chaplains. Not that our answers are the same – actually, perhaps it was the realisation that we had a lack of answers in common; that we liked each others’ determination to keep asking the questions.

But the blank faces from those who are in a different place – who are confused and bewildered by the fact that we haven’t worked this out yet, like they have, or sorted through the doubt – makes for a pretty exhausting time. I think they would say that doubt is good, but really only the kind of doubt that has faith at its core. I think I’m talking about something different. I have absolutely no concept of the being of God at all. None. But I’m absolutely, completely committed to the things that have always been attributed to God – the event of God, as John Caputo would say. Does make me faithful, or doubting? Who knows [and it was a rhetorical question anyway].

But I had a moment of insight at the end as to why talking about hell was so confronting for many of the women. One of the Muslim chaplains said ‘you’d think that if you were a Christian, being told that Jesus has broken the chains of hell would be something you’d like to hear’… and I realised that part of it is that the women don’t want all that is Good to be sullied by all that is Bad – that God will be made dirty by descending into our hell, and they need God to be pure; the place to escape to beyond our hell. Greg, one of the christian chaplains at the juvie said that he can’t play Nirvana in worship – the lads only want Hillsongs. Not because they believe Hillsongs theology, but because it’s so removed from their reality.

Not everyone has that reaction, of course. For every 10 people you get in prison, you’ll get 35 different theologies… which is about the same number as you do outside prison. And, in the end, when i wonder what the hell we were thinking trying this, I’m reminded of the woman who sat down next to me on Holy Saturday and started a conversation by saying ‘If God’s in my hell, then I guess it’s ok for me to tell you this…’

We’re going to talk about the easter stuff we did at the DPFC, and about the connection between art and spirituality – and in particular, the use of art and imagination to take us into transformative spaces.

We’re also going to look at the effect of doing that – what creating spaces that invite people into doubt, faith, hope and fear leads to.

[This is stream of consciousness, so it's not edited or wrapped up nicely at the end! It's also very, very long.]

The ‘When hope goes to hell’ space on Saturday was really interesting… The idea that God went to hell is most clearly stated in the Apostles Creed [especially its traditional versions], and it was a belief inherited from very early traditions, and from some interpretation of biblical passages. Psalm 139 gives a poetic version of the same concept. I guess the responses of the women was a microcosm of the community / church: some of the women got the idea instantly, and were right there with it. Some were horrified that we could say such a thing – that we could dare to mention the words God and hell in the same sentence, let alone put them in the same place. One woman was outright angry with me… then she came in the next day with her prayer book open to the Apostles Creed. ‘You were right’, she said. ‘Maybe’, I thought.

The women wrote prayers onto black card at the easter saturday vigil. The funny thing about the prayers was that we had the women writing with black on black so that no-one else would be able to read them. But they wanted them to be read… as I’d move around the room, they’d squint into the black card to find the outlines of their words and read out their prayer to me; by the end they were reading them out to each other. We sort of got this group prayer thing happening entirely by accident.

I feel my journey at times has meant nothing to anybody. That nobody hears my cries of anguish. That I am alone in this dreaded place called hell on earth. If God is in hell with me then he understands. Amen.

The Saturday afternoon was perhaps the most intensely theologically demanding that i can remember. Some of the women lost themselves in the art / meditations… for others there was too much prior stuff that needed to be sorted out before they could trust the process – too many questions that arose. Normally we have the luxury of talking about faith theoretically, and our questions have a buffer zone around them. They’re not life-threatening. But here, choices were being made about relationships, lifestyles and pleas in courtcases based on the conversations we were having. And none of these are simple moral choices – they are infinitely more nuanced and complex than that. I have to say, I don’t think I have the faith to do this. I think what we did only worked because it was framed in doubt – i can’t, with any honesty, write anything but out of doubt / disbelief – but it’s when people assume that there’s faith on the other side of it that I get overwhelmed with the responsibility.

Anyway, there were a lot of questions that came up – some of them asked into thin air, some of them that turned into conversations. We’re going to use them at tomorrow’s workshop – to discuss how we reframe the expression of our beliefs so that they actually contribute to a conversation about the questions that are asked; so that we create a shared conversation about faith rather than a forum with a religious expert offering the answers. For example, if we don’t believe in a physical manifestation of hell after death, how do we respond to the question ‘what actually happens in hell?’ in a way that provokes thought and interaction, rather than shutting down conversation. The real skill is in being comfortable enough with our own world view to be able to refocus a question…

These were the questions that arose on the Saturday. They weren’t just asking me, they were asking each other:

‘Who do you think is in hell?’
‘What did God do in hell?’
‘If we all go to heaven, will I need to be with the people who hate me after I die?’
‘If I can’t believe, will I go to hell?’

[learning number 1: belief in heaven and hell is entirely independent to belief in god... and the idea that there might not be a hell or heaven is inconceivable. there's no prior question in this...
learning number 2: prison gives you too much time to ponder the existential questions of life
learning number 3: invoking the fear of hell is an evil motivator for faith]

‘what if it’s not true?’
[indeed. the great unanswerable question]

‘When i died, i just saw a white light. I reckon that means I’m going to heaven.’
[quite a few of the women have had NDE's]

‘how do i know who i should trust to tell me what to believe?’
[too right.]

I think we imagined that the vigil would be the meditative part of the weekend – and it was in Protection where we controlled the space and time much more – but the transformative moment actually happened on the Sunday morning. This links back to the use of art and imagination. I think it was only possible because of the Saturday – that gave it an authenticity, perhaps, that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

On the Sunday, we started with Libera’s ‘Jubilate’, which is astonishingly beautiful, tear inducing… and it was like we all found ourselves in Rumi’s field beyond knowing… there was a moment where the questions were irrelevant, where belief itself didn’t matter. We just knew there was beauty somewhere; there was no desire to analyse or interpret it, we just wanted to lose ourselves in it… and after the service was over, when we were having a cup of tea, the women kept going back to the cd player to re-play that song…

I know I keep saying that being in the prison is surreal, but, you know, it really is. Last night when i left the prison I went to meet a friend for a drink, and when he asked what i’d been doing on the weekend i listed the shopping, the garden, the other friend i’d had breakfast with… it took me five minutes to remember that i’d been in the prison, even though it had filled most of that day, and the one before; even though i’d driven straight to the bar from the prison. It’s that disconnected from everything else, that incongruous.

I was reminded this weekend, though, that when you’re in prison, it’s impossible to forget that you’re there. It’s not just the physical reminders [the razor wire, the incessant loud speaker announcements, the bloody musters]; it’s that every story comes back to being inside. Every relationship is defined by separation, loss, grief. Every conversation about the future is clouded with ‘what if’s’ and ‘perhaps’.

We sank into the easter story this weekend – i kept holding my breath, wondering whether we were pushing it all too far and expecting too much, but the women kept coming back for more, and participating above and beyond our expectations. Doing the three days was a great idea, although absolutely exhausting. The attendance was amazing, and the women just kept coming back for the whole weekend. Last year there were 6 at the good friday service – this year there were 45. For some reason this was the right moment to do what we were doing, and they come from nowhere to be there. and they hung around for hours afterwards… we couldn’t get rid of them.

We offered each service in mainstream and then again in one of the protection units [the protection units house those who would be in danger in mainstream]. In protection we had the same four women come to worship all weekend. It was very intimate, and quite terrifying in a sense – i was so aware of the responsibility behind what we were doing. I kept thinking yesterday, as we were talking about Jesus’ presence in hell, ‘i hope we’re right… i hope we’re right…’. What we’re offering is so dangerous if we’re not.

You can always tell when worship has ‘worked’ – it becomes more than what you took into it, more than the sum of its parts. I know that what we prepared was good, but it means absolutely nothing if it doesn’t go beyond that. Each day, though, the worship became a thin space, very raw, really quite beautiful.

The three handouts from the weekend are here:
dpfc_gdfriday
holysaturday1
[i added in the artist credits, where i had them, to put up here - that's changed the formatting slightly, but you'll get the idea]
eastersunday1
[I wasn't able to get permission to put Sunday's image up here, so i stripped it from the pdf -but trust me, it was gorgeous...!]

Thanks so much to the artists whose images we used, especially on saturday – Fr Michael O’Brien, Jan Richardson and Jonny Baker. It’s the first time we’ve relied on images to tell much of the story, and it worked, largely due to the quality of the images themselves. For the vigil we had a number of images printed up largescale and laid on the floor on pieces of black card and the different reflections… the women wrote their prayers onto the card. My favourite: ‘Dear God, we are all in this together. Amen.’… One of the women asked to keep the large copy of Jonny’s photo – she said she wanted it as a reminder that razorwire could be beautiful.

You never forget you’re in prison. As I mentioned in a previous post, we invited women to sign letters to the Nepalese Government and to Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister as part of the Amnesty Stop Violence Against Women campaign. There were a few letters left unsigned at the end. One of the women who’s in for fraud amongst other things, gathered them up in a pile and brought them over to me. ‘I could sign the rest with made up names if you’d like’, she said…

Call to worship
And so love is unstoppable
even by death,
life is not destroyed
by having been through hell,
and light does not stay smothered
by the darkest of nights.

We are not people of fear anymore.
We know now how this story ends.

Jesus is risen
He is risen indeed

Welcome to worship.

hymn

Bible reading:
[probably Mark's version of the resurrection, though that's not confirmed...]

Reflection on the story

Prayer
We don’t know what really happened
or if we have the faith to believe whatever did
but the resurrection doesn’t depend on our faith

so come anyway.

We are too cynical for this:
We have trusted, and then lost, too often,
and we may need to sit this one out

but come anyway.

And, heaven knows,
we are probably waiting for it in the wrong place entirely
because life hasn’t come in the ways we thought it would before
and you have never done what we expected.

Come anyway,
right to where we are.

Prove us wrong
we pray

today.

amen.

Prayers for the world
We’ll invite the women to pray for the places in the world that are waiting for resurrection – to light tealights and place them onto the image on the floor.
- play Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’

[I'm not sure we'll use the following prayer - if so we'll rework the above slightly to include it]

It’s easier to believe in a miracle that happened 2000 years ago
than to believe another could happen today
but your resurrection gives us the courage
to pray for the impossible,

so we do:

from systems of oppression, resurrect freedom
in acts of racism, resurrect love
where there is violence against women, resurrect justice
in places of destruction, resurrect a future

from the war in Iraq, resurrect peace
from the corruption in Zimbabwe, resurrect hope
from the bushfires and earthquakes, resurrect healing
out of financial collapse, resurrect liberation

out of our despair, resurrect promise
out of our fear, resurrect courage
out of our loneliness, resurrect compassion
out of our grief, resurrect life

we pray to believe the impossible can happen
we pray to live as though it will be so.

amen.

hymn

blessing:
Send us into the world, God
ready to encounter resurrection:
to point to love’s presence
to light another’s darkness
to speak your peace into the world’s pain.

and may we go as people who know there is another end to the story
and who will not live with fear anymore.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ…

We don’t know what really happened
or if we have the faith to believe whatever did
but the resurrection doesn’t depend on our faith

so come anyway.

We are too cynical for this:
We have trusted, and then lost, too often,
and we may need to sit this one out

but come anyway.

And, heaven knows,
we are probably waiting for it in the wrong place entirely
because life hasn’t come in the ways we thought it would before
and you have never done what we expected.

Come anyway,
right to where we are.

Prove us wrong
we pray

today.

amen.