I know better now.

Except the wall came down. How bloody amazing was that?

Part of the reason is that I saw some brilliant exhibitions while I was in the UK – the Richard Long exhibition, for example, which was all about knowing where we are and seeing the world we walk through… Part of it is also coming back from the UK and finding myself unexpectedly living somewhere new.

I’m living at the moment in fitzroy, which is an inner-city suburb in melbourne. the city buildings are almost close enough to touch from my balcony. It’s a gorgeous part of town – great architecture and street art, interesting galleries and bookshops, beautiful gardens, every possible permutation of cafe, wine bar, restaurant and pub… It’s five minutes walk from pretty much everywhere you’d ever want to go, and we’ve been taking advantage of that at every opportunity.

Fitzroy’s temporary – my apartment is still being repaired, post flood. Probably three or four times a day I get the question ‘you must be looking forward to going home’. I always fumble with the answer. Truth is, I love where I am at the moment. And the other truth is, i’ve realised I have no idea what home is…

My apartment, the one that was flooded, was the first place I’ve ever lived in which belonged to me. I grew up living in other people’s houses – rental properties, church properties. We moved every few years, into another ’somebody else’s house’. I was 37 before I lived somewhere that I had freedom to hang a picture where I wanted, or to paint a wall red – but I have no idea what to do with that freedom. I used the old picture hooks, and even now that I’m repainting we’re going with the same colour scheme that I moved into. I think that moving often, and never living in our own house has been great on one level – it’s made it much easier to survive a flood. The flip side is that I never quite learnt the skill of living like there might be a piece of the world I’m allowed to make mine. And I think there are a lot of people like me…

I’ve always resonated most strongly with those who have found home isn’t where or what they thought it would be. I think that’s why I spend my life doing this kind of work, and it certainly describes the kind of people who most easily make their way into the things that we do. I was thinking about it all today, as I found a new way to walk into work. I wonder if it comes back to how we use maps. I don’t like a map that’s given to me to tell me where I am; I like making maps of where we might go… i don’t want a map of where I live; I want a map of how people find their life living here…

All of that is a long story to point to this website. i really love that there are so many ways of looking at the world.

The context of this is that i’m basing the article around the stories of Jesus being anointed by women [each of the gospels has one, probably based around two distinct events], and in the Lukan story, the woman cries her tears onto Jesus’ feet. When i write articles on topics not of my choosing i do a lot of cramming, and yesterday, when i did just this, reading commentary after commentary in a short space of time, i got increasingly pissed off with the assumptions that people were making about the woman in this story, and about the motivations and emotions behind her actions and responses… I kept going back to the bible story and thinking ‘where the hell did they get that idea from?’. Mostly the ideas come from ‘tradition’…

I don’t know why i want to put the following paragraphs up here – mostly, i guess, it’s because i cut it from the article but i want to say it somewhere… and this is my blog, after all… I just want to reclaim the story a little, open up the possibility, again, that we don’t know what it means. We’ve lost our capacity just to encounter a story without bringing our framework of interpretation in to make it say just what we want to say. To be honest, though, i suspect christianity is no longer able to do anything else…

Anyway, this is what i cut:

One biblical scholar poses the question about why the woman is crying: it could be either that she is overwhelmed with sorrow at her sin, he says, or joy at being forgiven – as though they would be the only possible reasons for tears. Both interpretations come from a paradigm that sees women only as brought undone by their sinfulness, whereas the things that move women to tears are as complex and rich as every memory of love and grace: just the smell of the ointment could trigger an association. She may be remembering the last time she anointed someone’s feet, in preparation perhaps for their burial. She may be remembering the person she loves whose feet are no longer hers to anoint. She may be tired. She may be at her wits end. She may be exhausted from the day and from yet again needing to do what no-one else remembers to do. She may be overwhelmed with the sense of wonder, awe and fragility that comes when human and divine find a meeting place. There would be reasons we could never imagine, if only because we are not living in that culture, and we will never know her. Tears fall for many reasons, and sometimes even for none.

But the Biblical stories of women in the Christian tradition are most often – and perhaps most crudely – used for lessons in morality and virtue, and interpreted through a lens of sexuality and sinfulness. And, you know, maybe they’re right. If you think about it, there’s a good chance that this woman could only get close to Jesus because of what people have decided is her sin. You have to be comfortable with your body and another’s to be able to touch someone so intimately. Perhaps it was actually her sin, as the world describes it, which made her the only one to be able to offer this gift to jesus; grace in a moment of exhaustion, touch in the dirtiest of space…

My friend Maryanne keeps texting me when she’s on her way home from work, driving past the Retreat in Abbotsford [the Sullivans pub, for those of us who grew up in the 70's]. ‘He’s there again’, she says. So on the first fine night next week we’re going… i might talk to him about doing rooftop astronomy here at the office [we have a great rooftop garden here in the city]… We tossed it around as an idea for part of the solstice… [June 20, exact times to be announced soon, here in the basement].

It’s winter, so the knitting needles have come out again. This is a great thought about the power of social networking… and worth reading, especially by those who mock the potential of knitting needles as a vehicle for social change.

This will get a longer post soon, but we’re doing the UK trip again… travelling to Greenbelt, then moving around to meet with different people who are exploring new forms of worship and community. This is the last time we’ll be doing this particular version of the trip – next year’s is going to be substantially different [and completely brilliant!] – but if you’re interested in this incarnation of the trip, then get in touch. The dates are 22nd August – 9th September. Talk to me about the cost…

The Space Makers Network is primarily a London based network of people creating [not just talking about!] third spaces… I haven’t explored it much, but i’m putting it here so I don’t forget it…

I’ve been recommending this site to a friends over the last few weeks who have been asking ‘how they can help’, so thought I’d throw it up here: Good Company helps 670 community groups in over a dozen social sectors match roles with skilled professional volunteers in NSW and Vic.

I might be disclosing too much here, but what the heck. I have three mantras that I developed and used to death a few years ago, when the job I was in was going through a really dark phase. They were for use in meetings: the first was ‘I do not hold the whole truth’; the second was ‘Let nothing disturb me, all things are passing’ [drawing on the power of the mystics!]; the third was basically a ’screw you’ phrase [though in more cathartic language], and offered me an opt out from having to search for the good in what was happening. The rule was that I had to go through them in order, and that i had to give each a fair chance. And it worked. After a few weeks, I found myself never getting to number 3, I’d come out of meetings sane, and by the time I left that job I was far more gracious, even with really difficult people and situations [and myself!]. I don’t have many meetings in this job [hooray!] and the ones I do have are fun and constructive, so the mantras are getting dusty… Anyway, all that’s to say that I think I’ve found a new one… this post from jonny keeps haunting me on a dozen unsettling levels… and i’ve been finding myself sitting in meetings, and weighing up opportunities and requests this week by muttering under my breath, ‘if it’s not about risk don’t f***ing do it’…

He writes about the intricacies of forgiveness, reconciliation and justice within the context of the Holocaust. The following quote has been rolling around my head for the last few days – in fact, I’ve had three vivid dreams over the last three nights [it's the heat], and each has involved someone saying a version of the last sentence…

He’s writing of judgement towards those who perpetrated the evil of the holocaust: ‘whoever thinks and feels understandingly is giving up the distance needed to make dispassionate assessments and clear decisions; he or she gets caught up in the mire of forgiving indecisiveness and permissiveness and becomes unsuited to the necessary harshness of condemnation… the tension exists especially for the perpetrator’s children and grandchildren; they know that their parents and grandparents should be condemned but they still love them too much, know them too well, not to want to understand them and, in their understanding, they tend towards clemency. Between wanting to understand and having to condemn they can find no really workable course of behaviour. It is as if understanding would contaminate the pure business of forgiving and condemning…‘ [italics mine]

For some reason, the first time I read that my mind jumped to the story in Mark’s Gospel of the Syro-Phoenician woman who talks Jesus into healing her daughter. This is a story that shows Jesus in a pretty nasty light – and most commentaries get quite tangled in trying to defend the actions and words of Jesus. But there’s a simpler reading: the woman teaches Jesus, confronts his biases, challenges his theoretical understandings of mission and faith – and he’s converted from the experience.

I love the idea that God had theories about how humans should relate and about who deserves what, and then in the incarnation, God got up close to humankind and realised that the theories always have to be tempered with understanding; that knowing someone, being in relationship, pre-empts all theology and, especially, all judgement.

And speaking of judgement, the Synod Commission for Mission are hosting a series of Mission Development Forums this year, under the title Mission Now, to explore how all parts of the mission of the church can be explored through the lens of restorative / communal justice. The first of these is on the morning of March 24 [repeated March 31st, in the evening], which will explore the principles of restorative justice and its theological imperative. Rachel Kronberger is moderating the forums, and I’m speaking at this first one. Registration is open to anyone, and information can be found here.

We were talking about the future of this blog yesterday, and came across a wikipedia page that had one of those terms at the top. We joked about how it could be the title of the blog…

Truth is, I used to know a lot of stuff, and i used to be confident enough to write about it here. But now every time i come to express an opinion i get stuck in its nuance and complexity.

i wanted to write about Gaza but couldn’t get beyond terror and heartbreak… i wanted to write about Obama’s election but again it was too big, too filled with something more than itself, more rich than any words could point to.

And more closely to home, i’ve been wanting to write about a terrible tragedy that happened in melbourne yesterday, that’s now filling the newspapers and talk radio – but all I have to write is that this story is much, much more than all we will ever know of it, and i just wish everyone [me included] would stop hypothesising and having opinions, and just stand speechless for a moment in front of a complex tragedy.

I’ve always written, not to say something out loud, but to work out what i think. So it’s a little disconcerting that every time i start to write the sentences fade off into unfinished nothingness. The blog has always been about being an archive, an expression of the moment, nothing more – perhaps the appropriate action in this elongated collection of speechless moments is that I should just title a post ‘Gaza’ or ‘the bridge’ and then leave a blank post, just to remind myself that silence is all i’m sure of just now.

see you next week.

We can be so harsh and ascetic as we fling ourselves against the needs of the world. Art is accused of being bourgeois because much of the creation of art takes time and solitude and staring out the window. And how can we give ourselves permission to do that when people are starving and there is work to be done?

I think of Judas bemoaning the fragrant ointment that could have been sold to feed hundreds of hungry people but instead is poured in that single lavish, revolutionary gesture onto the head of Jesus. He views the profligate gesture as sin, and feeding the poor as the only good.

I know that voice. it comes from my own lips. But if we always see only those who are starving, we will continually wander the desert of the frantically working and overwhelmed. What we need – desperately – is to not be overwhelmed. And the single thing that keeps us from being overwhelmed is imagination…’

- taken from ‘How one justice-seeker was redeemed by beauty’, Dee Dee Risher, in Geez Magazine Spring ‘08 edition.