Sitting with

This evening it seemed like old times in ministry, late visits to the hospital, sitting alongside a person on the threshold between life here and life beyond. I sit and talk and pray, I cry and sing. Each moment marked by a breath, my breath and that of this beloved person. The noise of the hospital ward seems to recede and the world seems to contact to this small space where the sound of breathing and the seemingly intense click of the wall clock mark the passing of moments. Leaving here the world seems different as I walk to my car several streets away, my tears mingled with the slow spitting rain sipping bitter coffee from a cardboard cup from the hospital vending machine as a kind of communion. Laughing young women in pretty dresses and high heels bring two world together. Their voices sound at first discordant and then hopeful as I cross back over the threshold.

The full moon

With autumn coming to the Adelaide hills with mist and rain, the turning of leaves on the vine outside the house I felt called to celebrate the recent full moon. It's the autumn moon and in the northern hemisphere this would be the autumn festival or Samhein. The Church placed All Souls here with All Saints to overlay the ambiguity of bonfire lighting, mask making and dancing. In the south it's still Easter and indeed I feel that the turning of the year lacks significant ritual points which I certainly feel within my own soul.

I'm conscious of the moon since my nightly walk with the dog keeps me in touch with the waxing and the waning, the new moon and the dark moon. So I set my alarm to welcome the rising of the full moon at 0545 with the intent of travelling to a nearby lookout at Windy Point with a view out to sea.

My plan was foiled by heavy mist over the hills so with a large strong coffee and my Bible I drove to Brighton. Here there were gaps in the clouds and the glorious full moon seemed to dance through the sky, 'sister moon' as St Francis might have said. I felt a deep sense of connectedness and at home in this experience and very open in my heart. I recorded the gentle sound of the waves and the wind and photographed the moon on my phone. It was a time to breathe in silence and then walking along the beach to remember and name people who have died who have touched my life and ministry. There were names that seemed to rise from no where, people I had not thought about for years but they all seemed to gather in that walking time.

Soon there were the sounds of birds, other people appeared jogging or walking or cycling and the light changed as the moon visible over the sea in the west gave way to he rising of brother sun.

I drove home ready for more coffee ready for the autumn season, a sense of lightness within to the hills still shrouded deeply in the mist.

Come autumn, come gentle rain, come cold, come plants sprouting anew after the fierce summer sun, come the silence of reflection.

I heard a presenter yesterday on ABC Radio National discussing the anxiety that pervades our culture and the results that has on our health and well-being. He made the point that our over exposure to the media through newspapers, the internet, news feeds to our smart phone, radio and television add to this anxiety.  News is often conveyed and created to distract us and focus our attention and engage us in thought and emotion.  News is conveyed in ways that draw us in and engage us with the provider of that news. This makes sense to me and coheres with my own experience.

I have been a news addict for years and in this I follow in my father's footsteps.  Like him I'm prone to anxiety and I add to this a sense of inadequacy together with a desire to bring a degree of control to life. This is of course to follow a set of illusions and a set of all habits that do not any more fit the sense of who I have become as someone set free from the illusion of a separate autonomous self. In the past I have given up attention to news and the other ideas and articles that fill newspapers printed and online and discussion and opinion programs that present 'trending ideas'. For the past month I have been on a news 'fast' rather like the 'fast' I have been on for some years from alcohol.

This has a spiritual component for me since I do drink alcohol at Mass but not elsewhere, (in the Uniting Church its grape juice for Communion). If I  pick up from conversation information about a significant item that I need to know about from the news I will look that up for prayer and for conversation with others.  Then from 'Arts and Letters' and from back editions of the 'Guardian' online and other source I can learn what might enrich me in relationships.

This is a good form of practicing silence and it brings with it a sense of liberation together with a sense of incomprehension that I was so attached to news and had a belief I needed to know.

I'm re reading 'Pessimism' and the author Joshua Foa Dienstag offers the experiment of reading 3 day old newspapers to see how uninterested we become in the passing excitements of the day.

 http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Pessimism.html?id=zdxYIdhod3wC&redir_esc=y

Listening

Yesterday brought participation in a Board Meeting and today another meeting to discuss research ethics. These meetings are like occasions for dancing.  When is it right to speak and when be silent? When is the silence a profound listening and when is it a disengagement? When is speech expected and how is that thought communicated in words?

I am often overwhelmed by listening and this is because there is so much flooding into my brain requiring thought and internal discussion. I think I need to make more space and listen more deeply and adopt more of a no nothing approach than trying to second guess the intention of the speaker or my own values always present.

Listening is so hard, it is indeed an art as we place ourselves in this space and time seeking to be attuned to the person or the group of people and attuned to oneself.

Talee Railway Station

For me there is a kind of silence that reigns in places that were once full of sound, activity and human presence. Talee railway station is a place that evokes a silence that is profound.

I find a way down to the old station yard soon after entering the town and crossing the level crossing. I imagine it's been some time since the bells and lights announced the arrival of a train collecting grain or even the kind of hybrid utility that inspects the rails with special wheels fore and aft to grip the track. The weeds suggest a forgotten line.

There is a brick built station, several lines that weave through the grass like tired serpents sleeping in the sun and an old covered goods shed. There are distant sounds, cars in the distance, grain trucks sounding their air brakes and a child crying some way off. Here is an oasis of abandonment, a frozen moment as I explore first the old shed with the sound of welcome swallows crying to each other, the coo of feral pigeons and the harsh cry of a passing galah.

Once this was the main line carrying freight and passengers across the continent or during the second war troops up the line to Terowie where they would snatch a meal before boarding the narrow gauge train to the north. This is a well built station with loops to allow trains to pass each other. Once there were tall steam express trains with streamlined bodies pausing here to take water or cross the local passenger rail car from Clare or trucks full of grain for the Adelaide wharfs. I explore through an open door the stationmasters office full of rubbish and then the porters office and the ladies waiting room. Who waited here for the train to take her into town to college or for shopping in Gawler? Did the stationmaster live in the large house nearby which is still occupied with a beautiful garden full of flowers? The canopy over the platform has intricate ironwork now misted with rust.

The railway lines rest on old wooden sleepers and all is grass gown lit by late afternoon sun as I contemplate what I might do next. I wonder if I should take some photographs but decide against the idea since this might take away some of the experience.

Over this once busy station, the pride of the town silence hold the place as it sinks into decay, moving from the solidity and permanence of its Victorian founding to waiting on the decisions of others. With grass grown tracks stretching into the distance it also holds a promise. Could a train traverse this line still on the broad gauge and travel north to Burra the extent of the track work? Listening to the singing of the birds at their work I strain to hear long departed sounds of people and activity, of trucks being loaded under the covered roof of the goods shed.

Wind blowing through

I feel the sound of the wind. That is I am unsure if the wind has this sound or if the sound I hear is shaped by my experience of it on my head. I turn to face the other way and now the sound is different. Standing still I breathe mindfully to let go of thoughts and then bring my attention to his skull battering wind. Now it is more a harmony of sounds, textures and touches. Do I hear things as they are? I am not so sure given that our body shapes and interacts with sound of all kinds. Wind I invariably find brings me to a certain stillness. On a rare occasion it evokes a deep memory but for that to happen the wind must be shaped to call forth the experience, usually waves of sound reminding me of a childhood on the English coast where wind was almost always a feature alongside the cry of gulls and often the music of pebbles dragged across the beach by waves alternating with the smaller finer voice of shingle. Yet the wind is the canopy for this experience of mind so many years later. Wind against skull, wind seemingly blowing through me, wind an invitation to contemplate interdependence.

An anniversary that should invite a moment of silence

Let us my friends stop and stand in silence for a moment on the Eve of St Bartholomew.

Let us name the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer a source of love and devotion one of the great gifts of the English Church not only to the Christian world but to the English language in bequeathing many resonant words and phrases to the language.

Let us remember those who were ejected because they objected to the Catholic wording and ritual allowed by the Book of Common Prayer and the way in which it excluded any spontaneity from worship. It was a book also about control, politics and national strength and Roman Catholics, Dissenters and Quakers were for nearly 200 years excluded from public influence and forced to pay the tithe to a Church they had rejected.

What I think is particularly difficult is using the reception of the sacrament of the Eucharist as an indication of conformity with Church and State. One then communicated as a form of conformity a kind of oath of allegiance.

Let us name the persecutions and religious bloodbath in France, Italy and elsewhere against Protestants in an act of treachery and fear on the Eve of St Batholomew.

A moment or two of silence suggests that we do not take our past for granted and take a long, cool and careful look how words and silence can forge mystical doorways into the divine and how they can forge swords.