A bit over a month ago, the editor of Eureka Street, an e-journal published by the Australian Jesuits, asked me to write an article about the union movement and the forthcoming election. The timing of the request wasn't exactly great, given I was struggling to get assignments submitted on time and still recovering from eye surgery, but since Eureka Street pay for articles and I really need the money, I agreed to the request. Also, my vanity in seeing my name attached to a published piece played its part!
So here is the link. Hope you enjoy!
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Authors are people who are easy enough to get along with - if you're fond of children. (Michael Joseph)
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Saturday, October 27, 2007
A Taste of Things to Come
Yesterday, my Dearly Beloved and I (along with Sue, our fellow newby candidate) went along to the Uniting Church Theological Hall in Melbourne for a "New Candidates Day" to get a taste of what life will be like once we commence our candidates' study and formation in 2008. It was also the last day of the teaching year for the existing candidates, so we were also able to get an insight into a day in the life of the Hall.
In a sense, we had already been welcomed to the Hall by the Uniting Church Candidates Association (which glories in the acronym UCCA). All the new candidates had been sent a lovely card welcoming us to the community of candidates and faculty, and each card featured a beautiful photograph taken by one of the existing candidates (another Sue) during her travels in the Holy Land.
It was nice to receive the warm and generous welcomes of the existing candidates. But it was also instructive to read the exhortations that we enjoy our last summer of freedom - a reminder that next summer we will be on our first field placement in another congregation, quite possibly in a rural area. So that was both exciting in the sense of having something to look forward to, but also slightly intimidating, in that the weight and seriousness of the vocation we are undertaking started to manifest itself.
So, feeling a little like children on their first day at school, my Dearly Beloved and I turned up at Hall - and were immediately greeted and made welcome by all. I was especially touched and humbled to see my friend Caro, whose father recently passed away, there to greet us and share the day. It was a powerful indicator of the grace and spirit that is required to undertake and sustain ordained ministry.
After a brief but moving morning prayer service, the new candidates spent the morning going through various items of "housework" - an introduction to the hall, the ordination requirements, the formation process, etc. Then we broke for morning tea, during which time we discovered how strong the sense of community is at the Hall, as candidates and faculty mingled and talked and shared a cuppa and some food. After morning tea, the new candidates joined the existing candidates and observed presentations that were being made as part of their assessment for a subject entitled "Mission and Evangelism". I don't know about my Dearly Beloved or Sue, but I was impressed with - and a little intimidated by! -the quality of the presentations, and the obvious amount of work that had gone into them. It was an indicator of the standards we will need to achieve as candidates in the future!
Lunch was again a communal affair, consisting of a delicious soup and savoury bread, followed by fresh fruit. During lunch, the new candidates were also given a briefing by the Candidates Association about life at Hall from the candidates' perspective, as well as some of the relevant issues which form the basis of ongoing dialogue with the faculty. We were also informed that there are a number of committees on which students sit that are integral to the life of the Hall and its relations with the United Faculty of Theology, of which it is a constituent member - and, later that afternoon, I was approached and asked if I would like to be a member of one such committee; UCCA works fast!
After lunch, an interesting forum on being an ordained minister and relating to the media was conducted by the Synod's media officer. This was followed by a wonderful Eucharist service, featuring sung responses and a powerful sermon delivered by a guest Lutheran pastor. Then the day concluded with drinks and nibbles, again involving the whole faculty and candidates.
So - an informative, intense, encouraging, uplifting, intimidating, compelling, engaging day. As my Dearly Beloved said later, it was a day that made you realise for the first time the fact that our vocation to ordained ministry is no longer somewhere in the future - it's now a present reality. And that reality is both filled with expectation and hope - and is also a little scary. But what impressed me most about the day was the intense atmosphere of community: the love and support and encouragement were almost palpable. Whatever the difficulties and struggles of the journey ahead, I know my Dearly Beloved and I won't be walking the road alone; we are part of a community now, and that precious gift is valuable beyond estimation.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Virtue shuns ease as a companion - it demands a rough and thorny road. (Michel de Montaigne)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
How Do I Follow THAT?!?
I have something of a dilemma.
I have now received back all my assignments for this semester, and although the mark for one was a little disappointing (high Credit), by some miracle of cosmic proportions I have managed to score High Distinctions for the other two.
Now, I know that HD's are every students dream and aspiration - the Everest, as it were, of the academic scale of achievement. And, believe me, it's not that I'm not grateful, it's just that...well, how do I follow a result like this?
Let me put it this way: over the course of a three year degree, one assumes one will gradually acquire more skills and knowledge, and, through the rigour of the academic process, lift one's work from a first year to a third year level of competence. Which means you expect to start with relatively modest scores and gradually build your way up to something more impressive.
I know, I know - there are always the favoured few who through talent and/or dedication, achieve top marks right from the off. But as Bruce Springsteen would say: get it straight now, mister - hey, buddy, that ain't me. I'm not an academic genius. My results are what you would call solid, not spectacular. So where in the heck do I come off achieving not one, but two HD results for my assignments?
Of course, this outcome doesn't mean that my final mark for the semester will be a HD in the two subjects concerned. I still have to get past the exams, and perform in said exams at a sufficient level to sustain the HD rating. And, in an ironic kind of way, that's the dilemma - because I can only go downhill from here!
Have I peaked too soon? Is the universe playing one of its cruel jokes, raising my hopes only to dash them on the rocks of the mediocrity I know are lurking beneath?
I know what you're thinking: I should be grateful and take the mark for what it is. And I do. It's just that...well, it's just that I now run the risk of every assignment I do being an anti-climax at best, a disappointment at worst! And, no, I'm not being paranoid or hypersensitive. I'm just feeling a little bit confronted at present...
It could be worse - I know it could be worse. But, gee, you know: two HDs...
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Failure is anyone seen on a bus after the age of thirty. (Nicholas Ray)
I have now received back all my assignments for this semester, and although the mark for one was a little disappointing (high Credit), by some miracle of cosmic proportions I have managed to score High Distinctions for the other two.
Now, I know that HD's are every students dream and aspiration - the Everest, as it were, of the academic scale of achievement. And, believe me, it's not that I'm not grateful, it's just that...well, how do I follow a result like this?
Let me put it this way: over the course of a three year degree, one assumes one will gradually acquire more skills and knowledge, and, through the rigour of the academic process, lift one's work from a first year to a third year level of competence. Which means you expect to start with relatively modest scores and gradually build your way up to something more impressive.
I know, I know - there are always the favoured few who through talent and/or dedication, achieve top marks right from the off. But as Bruce Springsteen would say: get it straight now, mister - hey, buddy, that ain't me. I'm not an academic genius. My results are what you would call solid, not spectacular. So where in the heck do I come off achieving not one, but two HD results for my assignments?
Of course, this outcome doesn't mean that my final mark for the semester will be a HD in the two subjects concerned. I still have to get past the exams, and perform in said exams at a sufficient level to sustain the HD rating. And, in an ironic kind of way, that's the dilemma - because I can only go downhill from here!
Have I peaked too soon? Is the universe playing one of its cruel jokes, raising my hopes only to dash them on the rocks of the mediocrity I know are lurking beneath?
I know what you're thinking: I should be grateful and take the mark for what it is. And I do. It's just that...well, it's just that I now run the risk of every assignment I do being an anti-climax at best, a disappointment at worst! And, no, I'm not being paranoid or hypersensitive. I'm just feeling a little bit confronted at present...
It could be worse - I know it could be worse. But, gee, you know: two HDs...
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Failure is anyone seen on a bus after the age of thirty. (Nicholas Ray)
Sunday, October 14, 2007
The Reason Why
On the weekend, a friend asked me: "This ministry thing - it's a bit of a turnaround for you, isn't it? I mean, when I first met you, you were kinda anti the whole God thing."
I knew what she was saying - and I knew why she was saying it. It's the same question that many people have asked me - that I have asked myself. Why do I want to enter the ordained ministry? What's it about, this sense of vocation? Is it a sudden thing - or if not, why haven't we known about it? Why have you been keeping it a secret?
Well, let me state two things right at the beginning: one, I haven't been keeping anything a secret; and, two, I didn't receive a visitation: no lights in the sky, no heavenly choirs, no commands from above. What has been happening to me is a process, and for a long part of that process, I didn't know I had a call to ordained ministry; didn't know, or didn't want to know. A call from God is something you can suppress just as easily as an unpleasant memory; but part of the process of response, just as part of the process of confronting our inner demons, involves facing that which we would prefer to deny.
I'm not going to give you my life history: how I grew up in the Catholic church; how I became alienated from Catholicism in my late teens; how I spent my twenties convinced that there was no place inside a faith community for me, that I was, in effect, an exile; how I began the healing process firstly through my discovery of Stoic philosophy, and secondly through my work in the union movement; how I gradually came to realise the possibilities for faith and faith community and how this was realised through my relationship with my Dearly Beloved. All of that would take far too long, and quite a bit of it's not for public consumption, anyway. Suffice to say, it's the background.
The bottom line is that God has always been a presence in my life. When I say "presence", I don't mean physically - although I do mean it literally. I have always felt God particularly strongly in silence, in the still darkness of the night, and in the astonishing grandeur and complexity of the cosmos; perhaps that's why I've always felt drawn most strongly to the meditative and contemplative aspects of faith. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is that God has always stood at my left shoulder: not looking over my shoulder, checking up on what I was doing, or whispering in my ear; just there, sometimes a comfort, but more often than not a burden. Something I tried to shrug off, but it just wouldn't let me go.
And the key to understanding what I'm talking about lies in that word burden. Faith for me is not a release, it's not something that makes my life easier; but that's the point. Faith is not meant to be some glib, smug assurance of our rightness or our righteousness; it's not meant to confirm our prejudices or pander to our ego. It's meant to be something that challenges us, that we wrestle with and struggle for, that forces us to walk paths clouded by uncertainty and doubt and fear. Faith is something that's meant to take us out of our comfort zones, that drags us into the world and forces us to live, to have the wholeness and fullness of life in all its abundance: the good, the bad, the indifferent.
And it was all that struggling that I did in my teens and twenties and early thirties that has lead me to this place; because I think I was wrestling with God, with the presence of God that I didn't want to acknowledge, that I tried to buck or ignore, that I wanted so much to be gone so I could maintain my anger and hurt and disappointment at the church. And what pissed me off more than anything was God's sheer persistence, the fact that God wouldn't go away; not demanding, not cajoling, not judging - just standing there at my left shoulder, reminding me of God's presence. No matter how I rationalised or justified, or tried to have a bet either way, God just stayed put.
Way back when I started this blog, I wrote about C S Lewis and his book The Problem of Pain. What I didn't say at the time was that, powerful though this book was for me, even more striking was his "spiritual autobiography" Surprised By Joy. In it, Lewis describes his own difficult, conflicted, wrenching journey of faith; how he tried to be an atheist and couldn't convince himself; how he tried to equivocate and theoretically agree that while there might be a God, that God really didn't have much to do with being or existence; and how, having tried to avoid the issue and construct his own reality, he was left with no choice except to conclude that God not only existed, but as was an actually presence - a reality - in his life.
I know that some sections of the Christian community have tried to turn Lewis into some kind of evangelical hero: the atheist turned convert who became one of the most powerful apologists for Christianity. But the truth, it seems to me, is much simpler: Lewis was an intensely human person who struggled for much of his life with faith, and with the possibility of God, and whose faith was not a "road to Damascus" experience but a process in which the continual presence of God acted like a kind of slow wearing away, grinding down all his evasions and avoidances until he was unable to do anything other than face that truth by which he was confronted.
I don't want to put myself in the same class as C S Lewis, but the story he tells in Surprised By Joy is one that resonates to the core of my being. I was never an atheist, but I did go through the hurtful, damaging process of alienation; and for years afterwards, I did try to console myself with intellectualising my anger with God and the church. Until, ultimately, one day, I could no longer defend my prevarications, not even to myself. Much though I didn't want to, I had to submit; that is, I had to be honest with myself and face that calling I had tried to hide from for most of my life, but which had eventually uncovered my hiding place and exposed me to the light of day.
In the motion picture Shadowlands, C S Lewis (played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins) asks the question: does God want us to suffer? And then he asks a second question: what if the answer to the first question is "yes"? Then he concludes by saying:
You see, I don't think God wants us to be happy. It's not that God wants us to be unhappy - it's just that our happiness has nothing to do with it. We imagine that our childish toys will bring us all the happiness there is, and that the walls of our nursery circumscribe the limits of the world. But something must drive us out of our nursery, and into the world of others - and that something is suffering. What God wants is for us to grow up, to leave the nursery, to love and to be loved. We are like blocks of stone, and the blosws from the sculptor's chisel that strikes us so hard that we can scarcely bear the pain, are nonetheless what make us perfect.
I don't think God wants me to be happy; I think God wants me to be fully human, to be what I truly am. I think God wants to take me out of my comfort zone of complacency and familiarity, so that I can grow up, and love, and be loved. And in order to do that, I need to heed the call of vocation which God has been issuing to me my whole life long.
When I first started telling people I knew about the fact that I would be following my vocation, someone jokingly asked me, "Does that mean we can't swear or tell dirty jokes around you?", to which I flippantly replied, "Shit, no!". Another person said: "Does this mean you've "found God"?", to which I again flippantly replied, "Hardly; if God's got any brains, I'll be the last person who finds him." And I was keen to tell people - only half jokingly - that I hadn't suddenly acquired a saintliness or a sanctity that I hadn't previously possessed. But beneath the flippancy was a desire to assure people that I hadn't changed; I was still me, it was just that I was going to be more fully me - more properly me - than I had been up until that time.
So there you have it: that's the reason why. Does God talk to me (ie: do I hear voices in my head?). No, I don't. And I don't have visions, either. Because when it comes to communication, God's dialogue with me has been one of proximity, not conversation. And at last - at long last - I've finally started to listen.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. (C S Lewis)
I knew what she was saying - and I knew why she was saying it. It's the same question that many people have asked me - that I have asked myself. Why do I want to enter the ordained ministry? What's it about, this sense of vocation? Is it a sudden thing - or if not, why haven't we known about it? Why have you been keeping it a secret?
Well, let me state two things right at the beginning: one, I haven't been keeping anything a secret; and, two, I didn't receive a visitation: no lights in the sky, no heavenly choirs, no commands from above. What has been happening to me is a process, and for a long part of that process, I didn't know I had a call to ordained ministry; didn't know, or didn't want to know. A call from God is something you can suppress just as easily as an unpleasant memory; but part of the process of response, just as part of the process of confronting our inner demons, involves facing that which we would prefer to deny.
I'm not going to give you my life history: how I grew up in the Catholic church; how I became alienated from Catholicism in my late teens; how I spent my twenties convinced that there was no place inside a faith community for me, that I was, in effect, an exile; how I began the healing process firstly through my discovery of Stoic philosophy, and secondly through my work in the union movement; how I gradually came to realise the possibilities for faith and faith community and how this was realised through my relationship with my Dearly Beloved. All of that would take far too long, and quite a bit of it's not for public consumption, anyway. Suffice to say, it's the background.
The bottom line is that God has always been a presence in my life. When I say "presence", I don't mean physically - although I do mean it literally. I have always felt God particularly strongly in silence, in the still darkness of the night, and in the astonishing grandeur and complexity of the cosmos; perhaps that's why I've always felt drawn most strongly to the meditative and contemplative aspects of faith. Perhaps the best way I can describe it is that God has always stood at my left shoulder: not looking over my shoulder, checking up on what I was doing, or whispering in my ear; just there, sometimes a comfort, but more often than not a burden. Something I tried to shrug off, but it just wouldn't let me go.
And the key to understanding what I'm talking about lies in that word burden. Faith for me is not a release, it's not something that makes my life easier; but that's the point. Faith is not meant to be some glib, smug assurance of our rightness or our righteousness; it's not meant to confirm our prejudices or pander to our ego. It's meant to be something that challenges us, that we wrestle with and struggle for, that forces us to walk paths clouded by uncertainty and doubt and fear. Faith is something that's meant to take us out of our comfort zones, that drags us into the world and forces us to live, to have the wholeness and fullness of life in all its abundance: the good, the bad, the indifferent.
And it was all that struggling that I did in my teens and twenties and early thirties that has lead me to this place; because I think I was wrestling with God, with the presence of God that I didn't want to acknowledge, that I tried to buck or ignore, that I wanted so much to be gone so I could maintain my anger and hurt and disappointment at the church. And what pissed me off more than anything was God's sheer persistence, the fact that God wouldn't go away; not demanding, not cajoling, not judging - just standing there at my left shoulder, reminding me of God's presence. No matter how I rationalised or justified, or tried to have a bet either way, God just stayed put.
Way back when I started this blog, I wrote about C S Lewis and his book The Problem of Pain. What I didn't say at the time was that, powerful though this book was for me, even more striking was his "spiritual autobiography" Surprised By Joy. In it, Lewis describes his own difficult, conflicted, wrenching journey of faith; how he tried to be an atheist and couldn't convince himself; how he tried to equivocate and theoretically agree that while there might be a God, that God really didn't have much to do with being or existence; and how, having tried to avoid the issue and construct his own reality, he was left with no choice except to conclude that God not only existed, but as was an actually presence - a reality - in his life.
I know that some sections of the Christian community have tried to turn Lewis into some kind of evangelical hero: the atheist turned convert who became one of the most powerful apologists for Christianity. But the truth, it seems to me, is much simpler: Lewis was an intensely human person who struggled for much of his life with faith, and with the possibility of God, and whose faith was not a "road to Damascus" experience but a process in which the continual presence of God acted like a kind of slow wearing away, grinding down all his evasions and avoidances until he was unable to do anything other than face that truth by which he was confronted.
I don't want to put myself in the same class as C S Lewis, but the story he tells in Surprised By Joy is one that resonates to the core of my being. I was never an atheist, but I did go through the hurtful, damaging process of alienation; and for years afterwards, I did try to console myself with intellectualising my anger with God and the church. Until, ultimately, one day, I could no longer defend my prevarications, not even to myself. Much though I didn't want to, I had to submit; that is, I had to be honest with myself and face that calling I had tried to hide from for most of my life, but which had eventually uncovered my hiding place and exposed me to the light of day.
In the motion picture Shadowlands, C S Lewis (played brilliantly by Anthony Hopkins) asks the question: does God want us to suffer? And then he asks a second question: what if the answer to the first question is "yes"? Then he concludes by saying:
You see, I don't think God wants us to be happy. It's not that God wants us to be unhappy - it's just that our happiness has nothing to do with it. We imagine that our childish toys will bring us all the happiness there is, and that the walls of our nursery circumscribe the limits of the world. But something must drive us out of our nursery, and into the world of others - and that something is suffering. What God wants is for us to grow up, to leave the nursery, to love and to be loved. We are like blocks of stone, and the blosws from the sculptor's chisel that strikes us so hard that we can scarcely bear the pain, are nonetheless what make us perfect.
I don't think God wants me to be happy; I think God wants me to be fully human, to be what I truly am. I think God wants to take me out of my comfort zone of complacency and familiarity, so that I can grow up, and love, and be loved. And in order to do that, I need to heed the call of vocation which God has been issuing to me my whole life long.
When I first started telling people I knew about the fact that I would be following my vocation, someone jokingly asked me, "Does that mean we can't swear or tell dirty jokes around you?", to which I flippantly replied, "Shit, no!". Another person said: "Does this mean you've "found God"?", to which I again flippantly replied, "Hardly; if God's got any brains, I'll be the last person who finds him." And I was keen to tell people - only half jokingly - that I hadn't suddenly acquired a saintliness or a sanctity that I hadn't previously possessed. But beneath the flippancy was a desire to assure people that I hadn't changed; I was still me, it was just that I was going to be more fully me - more properly me - than I had been up until that time.
So there you have it: that's the reason why. Does God talk to me (ie: do I hear voices in my head?). No, I don't. And I don't have visions, either. Because when it comes to communication, God's dialogue with me has been one of proximity, not conversation. And at last - at long last - I've finally started to listen.
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. (C S Lewis)
I Suppose It Had To Happen...
Well, after a protracted "phoney campaign", the PM finally visited the Governor-General to inform His Excellency that he should dissolve the Parliament and call an election for November 24th.
Forgive me if I sound cynical, but once again we're going to be launched into a contest between a Liberal Party that's about as "liberal" as a Southern Baptist Convention, and a Labor Party that wouldn't recognise the expression "working class" if it bit them on their collective arse!
At least the media will be happy, gleefully press-ganging the political main-players every day for the next six weeks in their never-ending quest for the gaff-of-the-day. Meanwhile, Messrs Howard and Rudd will be insisting that they're as different from one another as chalk and cheese, while at the same time maintaining that the other lot are copying their ideas!
Lord preserve us, but this next little while is going to be a joy to live through. Don't get me wrong, I'm gagging for a change of government: as far as I'm concerned, John Howard will go down in history as the most mediocre person to have ever been Prime Minister of this country. Which tells you something about how abysmal the Opposition has been in the last ten years - and how short sighted the voting population of this nation. And, no, it's not because they've been voting conservative, it's the reasons why: fear, ignorance, bigotry, selfishness. I reckon Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah would have been having something to say to us over this last decade or so...
Anyhoo, we might as well settle in for what's undoubtedly going to be a "fun" ride characterised by oodles of pork-barrelling, blithely delivered assurances about the costings on all those election promises, and accusations of bad faith, incompetence, inexperience, shady dealings and general character assassination. Ain't democracy wonderful???
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Of course democracy's no fair. And a good thing, too. Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we'll be back to cavorting Druids, death by stoning, and dung for dinner. (Edmund Blackadder)
Forgive me if I sound cynical, but once again we're going to be launched into a contest between a Liberal Party that's about as "liberal" as a Southern Baptist Convention, and a Labor Party that wouldn't recognise the expression "working class" if it bit them on their collective arse!
At least the media will be happy, gleefully press-ganging the political main-players every day for the next six weeks in their never-ending quest for the gaff-of-the-day. Meanwhile, Messrs Howard and Rudd will be insisting that they're as different from one another as chalk and cheese, while at the same time maintaining that the other lot are copying their ideas!
Lord preserve us, but this next little while is going to be a joy to live through. Don't get me wrong, I'm gagging for a change of government: as far as I'm concerned, John Howard will go down in history as the most mediocre person to have ever been Prime Minister of this country. Which tells you something about how abysmal the Opposition has been in the last ten years - and how short sighted the voting population of this nation. And, no, it's not because they've been voting conservative, it's the reasons why: fear, ignorance, bigotry, selfishness. I reckon Amos, Hosea, and Jeremiah would have been having something to say to us over this last decade or so...
Anyhoo, we might as well settle in for what's undoubtedly going to be a "fun" ride characterised by oodles of pork-barrelling, blithely delivered assurances about the costings on all those election promises, and accusations of bad faith, incompetence, inexperience, shady dealings and general character assassination. Ain't democracy wonderful???
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Of course democracy's no fair. And a good thing, too. Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we'll be back to cavorting Druids, death by stoning, and dung for dinner. (Edmund Blackadder)
Thursday, October 11, 2007
A Tight Squeeze!
It has been a heck of a week here at Comfy Couch Central!
The cause of all this excitement has been the dreaded malaise known as assignment deadlineitis!
Every semester, I begin by saying that this time I'll be organised: I'll study properly, I'll get stuck into the research for the assignments early, I won't leave anything until the last moment.
And this semester, I did - I actually did! I had two of my three assignments properly researched, with oodles of notes. And I was on the verge of getting stuck into the third - when the retina in my left eye decided it was a great time to detach again. Which in turn necessitated surgery, which also necessitated a week lying immobilised on my left side, which finally necessitated getting used to reading and writing with one eye. And then, just as a semblance of normality was returning, I came down with a chest infection - the result of which was another three weeks out of action!
Which, of course, meant all my planning - and good intentions! - went down the drain. I had to swallow my pride and ask my lecturers for extensions - which they all gladly provided with ready grace and concern for my welfare. They even asked if I needed longer than I asked for! Stupidly, I decided not to take advantage of their generosity, confident that I could get the work done in time.
WRONG! Well, almost. The deadline was this week - Friday, to be precise. And I had two of the three assignments unfinished. Well, I managed to knock over one by Tuesday, and today I've (miracle!) managed to complete the second.
Phew! It was a stretch! But I can also tell you this much: I sure appreciate the generosity and understanding of my lecturers, and their readiness to give me every possible assistance. It makes one hell of a difference to your confidence!
So here's a vote of thanks to my lecturers - I hope what I've produced justifies their generosity!
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Teachers open the door; you must enter by yourself. (Chinese proverb)
The cause of all this excitement has been the dreaded malaise known as assignment deadlineitis!
Every semester, I begin by saying that this time I'll be organised: I'll study properly, I'll get stuck into the research for the assignments early, I won't leave anything until the last moment.
And this semester, I did - I actually did! I had two of my three assignments properly researched, with oodles of notes. And I was on the verge of getting stuck into the third - when the retina in my left eye decided it was a great time to detach again. Which in turn necessitated surgery, which also necessitated a week lying immobilised on my left side, which finally necessitated getting used to reading and writing with one eye. And then, just as a semblance of normality was returning, I came down with a chest infection - the result of which was another three weeks out of action!
Which, of course, meant all my planning - and good intentions! - went down the drain. I had to swallow my pride and ask my lecturers for extensions - which they all gladly provided with ready grace and concern for my welfare. They even asked if I needed longer than I asked for! Stupidly, I decided not to take advantage of their generosity, confident that I could get the work done in time.
WRONG! Well, almost. The deadline was this week - Friday, to be precise. And I had two of the three assignments unfinished. Well, I managed to knock over one by Tuesday, and today I've (miracle!) managed to complete the second.
Phew! It was a stretch! But I can also tell you this much: I sure appreciate the generosity and understanding of my lecturers, and their readiness to give me every possible assistance. It makes one hell of a difference to your confidence!
So here's a vote of thanks to my lecturers - I hope what I've produced justifies their generosity!
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Teachers open the door; you must enter by yourself. (Chinese proverb)
Saturday, October 06, 2007
The True Power of Magic
In the last few weeks, I have been reading Ursula Le Guin's wonderful Earthsea Trilogy (it's now a sextet, but that's another story). This has partly been as a result of my improving eye sight after my surgery, and partly as a means of taking my mind off assignments and deadlines. But mostly it was prompted by the fact that, as part of the Selection Conference weekend when my Dearly Beloved and I had to convince the Uniting Church's Victorian-Tasmanian Synod Committee of our call to ordained ministry, we had to give a presentation of something about which we were passionate (outside church and faith).
I gave a presentation on my passion for literature and reading, and in particular, my love of writing. I did this by tracing my earliest experience with books at the local library, through my expanding repertoire of fiction and non-fiction - until I read a novel that awoke in me my talent for writing. And that book was The Tombs of Atuan, second in the Earthsea trilogy.
So it was in a mood of sentimental reminiscence that I started reading the original trilogy all over again. And once more I recalled the characters whose stories had touched me when I first read them all those many years ago, and on every occasion since. Ged, the main character, powerful and willful, possessed of great talent and deep power; his master Ogion the Silent, grave and silent, compassionate and without anger; Estarriol, Ged's wise and humble friend; Tenar, once Priestess of the Old Powers of Atuan, bringer of the Rune of Peace; and Lebannen, Prince of Enlad, the long-lost King whose destiny it is to travel with Ged across the dark lands of death in order to heal the broken Kingdom of Earthsea.
And I also read again the many passages by which I had been moved and remembered across the years: Ged taking leave from his master Ogion; Ged learning harsh lessons about power and its limitations when he tames the dragon Yevaud but cannot save a dying child; Ged receiving his faithful boat Lookfar from a poor fisherman, and in return healing the fisherman of the cataracts that were blinding him; the companionship of Ged and Estarriol as they face what they believe is certain death; Tenar being taken from her parents to serve in the Tombs of Atuan; Tenar and Ged escaping from the Tombs; Ged and Lebannen as they journey together to stop a great evil that is consuming the earth.
As I said, it was The Tombs of Atuan that woke in me my talent of writing. But it was the first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, that I always treasured as a young adult; partly because I identified strongly with the main character, Ged, but also because I loved the character Ogion. He seemed to me to be the model of what it was to be wise: grave, silent, compassionate, without anger or vanity, possessed of a wry sense of humour, someone who acted only out of necessity, never in haste, never for reasons of self-aggrandisement or promotion, but because it was needful and just. These are not characteristics which I possess: but they remain a goal toward which I strive.
Now, however, its is the final book in the trilogy, The Farthest Shore, which has captured my allegiance. That's because it's the most philosophical of the three, the most contemplative; it is a meditation in life and living, of the joys and sorrows of being, of the pleasures and consequences of existence. And in particular, it's an exposition on power, on the use and abuse of power; and on how power is rarely what we imagine it to be. And there are some truly amazing passages, thoughtful and powerful in their insight:
Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. (Ursula Le Guin)
I gave a presentation on my passion for literature and reading, and in particular, my love of writing. I did this by tracing my earliest experience with books at the local library, through my expanding repertoire of fiction and non-fiction - until I read a novel that awoke in me my talent for writing. And that book was The Tombs of Atuan, second in the Earthsea trilogy.
So it was in a mood of sentimental reminiscence that I started reading the original trilogy all over again. And once more I recalled the characters whose stories had touched me when I first read them all those many years ago, and on every occasion since. Ged, the main character, powerful and willful, possessed of great talent and deep power; his master Ogion the Silent, grave and silent, compassionate and without anger; Estarriol, Ged's wise and humble friend; Tenar, once Priestess of the Old Powers of Atuan, bringer of the Rune of Peace; and Lebannen, Prince of Enlad, the long-lost King whose destiny it is to travel with Ged across the dark lands of death in order to heal the broken Kingdom of Earthsea.
And I also read again the many passages by which I had been moved and remembered across the years: Ged taking leave from his master Ogion; Ged learning harsh lessons about power and its limitations when he tames the dragon Yevaud but cannot save a dying child; Ged receiving his faithful boat Lookfar from a poor fisherman, and in return healing the fisherman of the cataracts that were blinding him; the companionship of Ged and Estarriol as they face what they believe is certain death; Tenar being taken from her parents to serve in the Tombs of Atuan; Tenar and Ged escaping from the Tombs; Ged and Lebannen as they journey together to stop a great evil that is consuming the earth.
As I said, it was The Tombs of Atuan that woke in me my talent of writing. But it was the first novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, that I always treasured as a young adult; partly because I identified strongly with the main character, Ged, but also because I loved the character Ogion. He seemed to me to be the model of what it was to be wise: grave, silent, compassionate, without anger or vanity, possessed of a wry sense of humour, someone who acted only out of necessity, never in haste, never for reasons of self-aggrandisement or promotion, but because it was needful and just. These are not characteristics which I possess: but they remain a goal toward which I strive.
Now, however, its is the final book in the trilogy, The Farthest Shore, which has captured my allegiance. That's because it's the most philosophical of the three, the most contemplative; it is a meditation in life and living, of the joys and sorrows of being, of the pleasures and consequences of existence. And in particular, it's an exposition on power, on the use and abuse of power; and on how power is rarely what we imagine it to be. And there are some truly amazing passages, thoughtful and powerful in their insight:
"When I was young I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are." (Chapter Three)
There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty. (Chapter Three)
"Only one thing can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it." (Chapter Three)
"Do you see...how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that's the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter, the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown the circuit of the stars responds, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the balance of the whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done...But we, in so far as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility." (Chapter Four)
"This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence, There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss." (Chapter Eight)
"To refuse death is to refuse life." (Chapter Eight)
"The traitor, the self, the self that cries I want to live, let the world rot so long as I can live! The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the spider in the box. He talks to all of us. But only some understand him." (Chapter Nine)
"Only what is mortal bears life...Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. It is a movement - an eternal becoming." (Chapter Nine)
"What is a good man? Is a good man one who would not do evil, who would not open a door to darkness, who has no darkness in him? Look again...Look a little farther." (Chapter Nine)
"You stand on the borders of possibility, in the shadowland, in the realm of dream, and you hear the voice saying Come. As I once did. But I am old. I have made my choices. I have done what I must do. I stand in daylight facing my own death. And I know that there is only one power worth having. And that is the power, not to take, but to accept. Not to have, but to give." (Chapter Nine)
"You fear them because you fear death, and rightly: for death is terrible, and must be feared...And life is also a terrible thing...and must be feared and praised." (Chapter Eleven)
"Look at the land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams with water running...In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..." (Chapter Eleven)
"I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom, and the unperishing spring?" (Chapter Eleven)
"A living body suffers pain...a living body grows old; it dies. Death is the price we pay for our life, and for all life." (Chapter Twelve)
As one critic wrote of Le Guin's work: "If you've had enough of Harry Potter-style kid wizardry, Le Guin offers a powerful tonic. These tales are intense, moving, engaging, and best of all, character driven. Le Guin knows people, wizards or not."
I couldn't put it better myself. And that's why I'll always love this trilogy.Talk to you soon,
BB.
Quote for the Day: Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk's flight on the empty sky. (Ursula Le Guin)
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