I wrote this piece for the Age today. Apparently it’s online, but I can’t find it… 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 –…
a bastardisation of a recurring theological conversation about forgiveness… 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…
[for E, with love] 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…
i still silent 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…
in honour of those who draw me home… 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…
all the good words are taken so i will use them anyway and mean something else: 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.…
i’ve been writing, writing, writing… everywhere but here. 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…
I suspect I’ll regret posting this, but i’ll throw it up anyway. It’s time for a confession. I have this unhealthy obsession with uber-fundamentalist christian blogs. It began a few years ago when i realised that i didn’t get what people in the emerging church were emerging from, and where the fights about theology were…
just thought i’d throw this out there to see what anyone thinks… it’s a draft of a paragraph in the book i’m writing for the prison. 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…
[The same, but very different.] We will not be remembered. In all the world’s history, perhaps 100 billion people have breathed, loved, lived, died and we could name only a hundred? a thousand? We will not be remembered. There have been as many people as grains of salt or sand, they say, and hard as…
