It's nice to be here,putting text to page. These still-warm days of autumn are settling softly over us, Waring-Wombat season in the Kulin calendar. Cool misty mornings inviting us to slow down, to do less.
Over the past few months we have shared a contemplative exercise with CALD youth workers, and a poem at the visioning day of an NGO who advocate for dialogue around critical issues of our times. We have hosted a Proost poetry podcast, Taonga Tākaro coworking sacred spaces and have a book club running on Ched Myers:Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy.
We are preparing: content, minds, hearts and practicalities - for 5 folks (now 3, and two to NZ instead) to attend conferences in the USA in May and June this year.
...Cool misty mornings inviting us to slow down, to do less.
Personally, I have found the northern hemisphere Easter traditions a confronting juxtaposition to navigate this year: the imagery of winter turning to spring when I in Naarm | Melbourne am in Summers shift into Autumn. We don't have light emerging out of darkness but rather are in full sun moving towards shorter days and longer nights. And, perhaps this has been most disheartening, the language of lack and scarcity that is a lean winter when we are in the full harvest of autumn's abundance here.
When our ceremonies and rituals - with their language, symbols and imagery - aren't aligned to our context do they still feel relevant for you? When our faith practice doesn't seem in touch with Country and Creation do they feel meaningful?
It is ANZAC Day today, and the choral chant of 'lest we forget' is followed by a moments silence... and then the bugle call of The Last Post.
Lest we forget Ukraine, lest we forget Gaza, lest we forget our own history of massacre and violence on Country. Did you know that's a line: "lest we forget" is from a Rudyard Kipling poem called "Recessional"? Is this a reversing of the Church and Empire's "Processional"? It seems to invoke a sense of humbling and contrition.
In these global times it doesn't make sense that the northern and southern hemisphere churches should run on different calendars to align seasonally. It may be heretical to suggest it when in some traditions there is comfort and creed in following the same readings and liturgical calendar all around the world and "at the same time". But what if we could be deepening in our theological understandings and knowings of Creator and Creation by exploring what the stories have to tell in new places? in new hands? under new constellations? What if we are missing out on facets of the story?
We are in autumn, what do you have to harvest in this season? What did you plant, prune and tend that it would bear fruit now? The manna gum has revealed its sugar - come and turn over a leaf... what sweetness is there for you?