Tyrants seek to expand their power. While I don’t live in the United States, the actions of its President over the past 100-plus days have implications for us worldwide.
Mr. Trump’s power comes in large part from his wealthy tech. friends, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and others. Together they form an oligarchy whose talons reach right into our Facebook accounts and grab hold of our book buying on Amazon. We send a message on Messenger, we read a tweet on X and we are forced to see ads which further enrich these billionaires.
Can any one of us individuals change these abuses of power? No, but we can act together, and we can resist the coming tyranny.
Here are 8 acts of resistance that I have been taking. I invite you to join me.
Delete your account with X if you still have one. X is the most destructive platform. It allows bullies and ideologues to channel us into submission to their viewpoint.
Don’t scroll on Facebook. Post what you want to, use ‘Notifications’ to read the posts of friends, but refuse to roll down the screen. Each click puts an ad before your eyes and ears and each ad seen adds to their wealth. The oligarchs are viciously clever. They earn money from us and without our consent.
Stop calling your smart speaker, ‘Hey Google!’ I call, ‘Hey Dougal’, or ‘Hey Bugle’ when I want it to respond. The tech company is happy when you repeat its name a dozen times a day. So don’t say ‘Hey Google’ and don’t say ‘I googled it.’ Avoid the commercial name and say, I searched on the internet.
Avoid buying on Amazon if you can. I find where most books are for sale on the Australian site www.booko.com.au. I usually don’t need Amazon either to find books or to buy them.
Don’t buy a Tesla car. The boycott on Teslas is already hurting Elon Musk’s business. If you are buying electric, WA’s Royal Automobile Club is comfortable recommending a range of electric cars, like the Chinese-made MG or the European-built Jeep Avenger. You don’t need a Tesla.
Think about deleting your Instagram account. Like X, Instagram allows bullies on its platform. It also encourages viewers to have unreal expectations of themselves because it rewards performance over integrity.
Never tick ‘Accept All Cookies’. Cookies are designed to deliver your name to the advertisers. If you can reject all, do so. Otherwise, choose to manage your preferences by unchecking as many choices as the site permits you.
Choose ‘Ask App Not to Follow Across Sites’. When it pops up, this option reduces the ability of the algorithm to create a web of connections and so multiply the points of contact for advertising targeted to you.
God gives us death; the gift is nature kind. Death puts to an end the pains of old age, making space for those in the queue behind. God writes each chapter and the final page.
Species yield to species, each man to a new, Deep time sweeps all away to stubborn death. Death’s truth’s not sad, it’s merely stark worldview: Each allotted our finite store of breath.
So death spreads from past until the very end. But wait! There’s a surprise: God….! A new thing surpasses all we can know: Fresh universe of power and love to grow.
God rips death‘s fabric the curtain to transform, The new-made mystery; pristine creatures swarm. Alleluia!
- Genesis 1:20-23, & 2:7-8, John 1:1-18, Mark 15:38 - Ted Witham tssf, Easter A.D. 2025
The world is in a bad way, and sometimes it’s hard to look at it.
I see a child in Gaza, his eyes filled with horror and a question: ‘How could someone do this to us?’ So, it’s not surprising that people are turning away from the horror of the news. The Reuters Institute at Oxford University showed that fewer young people are looking at the news online; down from 89% to 76% in 2024. That’s a huge drop. The proportion of older people, those over 55, are also turning off, but at not such a fast rate, 73 to 68% in 2024.
2024 was the first time ever I’ve turned away from the news because it’s too hard to bear.
My father instilled in me the habit of news. At 7 p.m. every evening in our farmhouse everything stopped. ‘Shhh!’ my mum would say, ‘It’s time for Dad’s news.’
Reflecting on those years – the 1950s – I take a guess at why Dad insisted on listening to the news every day. On our farm our family could go days and weeks without seeing anybody; a stranger’s car was quite an event. Yet Dad wanted to know how the war in Korea was going; what the price of wool was in Albany and Fremantle; what international role Australia was playing when Labor politician Bert Evatt was President of the United Nations; and, most important of course, the cricket!
Dad reminded himself and us, every day at 7 p.m., that we were part of a much bigger world.
It’s been my habit since childhood to stop at 7 p.m. and listen to the ABC news. These days I can see the news as well as hear them read. My TV takes me straight to the Oval Office, or straight to the front in the battle for Ukraine, so the news has possibly more impact than 60 years ago.
And the news is bad. Once upon a time, an Opposition advanced opposing policies to sharpen the Government’s ideas. It was more a contest of ideas than attacking those on the other side. There is little civility now as they demean their opponents and not their policies.
The United States have become the Divided States, and the President, whether you approve of his policies or not, is a convicted criminal, a proven misogynist, a loudmouth and a bully.
Israel is carpet-bombing Gaza. It’s still happening.
Put a pin just about anywhere in the world, and the news is bad.
So I have three words to save the world.
Gratitude,
Awe, and
Kindness.
So many good things are buried under the rubbish of our contemporary life together. Most of us are loved. Most of us have food for today and the confidence that we will have food tomorrow. I live in a new house. I have more clothes than I need. I have a new car with all the latest tech. It’s a van actually, with a hoist for my wheelchair, and both the hoist and the chair are gifts from the Government, my fellow citizens caring for me.
Things work. Trains run, roads are smooth, ships bring all kinds of goods to us. We can visit friends in London or Sydney, and the trip will be safe and the aeroplane seats comfortable; well, not that comfortable.
And gratitude Is a spiritual discipline well worth cultivating. To be thankful, we need to look beneath the world’s garbage and find the good that has been provided for us. We can resolve to be thankful regularly, daily, more often.
I say a short grace before meals. ‘Bless, O Lord, this food to our use, and ourselves to your service. Help us remember those who are hungry and homeless.’ The very word, ‘grace’ means ‘thank you’; gratias in Latin, grazie in Italian. It also means ‘grace’: giving thanks is an act of grace, giving thanks embellishes, it gives style to our way of living.
Gratitude is not just a once-off thank you. It is saying thank you regularly.
Gratitude changes the world. It re-affirms our worth, both the person thanked and the person thanking.
I’m in awe of the beauty in the world. Awe is my second word to save the world.
I have stood in awe of the tingle trees and the karri forest of our southwest. They are awesome.
When we lived in Warnbro, my wife and I often made a point of driving five minutes to Warnbro Beach and watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, in awe of the change of day to night, in awe of the golds and reds and purples and greys. In awe.
I have been stunned by the astonishing beauty of the impressionist paintings in a museum in France.
With 2,000 other music-lovers, I have stood in the Perth Concert Hall clapping the West Australian Symphony Orchestra after it played extraordinary and beautiful music.
The craft of popular artists like Taylor Swifts and TV dramas also lift morale and bring us to awe.
There is so much beauty in the world, created by our God and created by humans, which brings us to awe. That awe can lift our spirits and change the world. Awe and wonder increase the beauty in the world as they prompt us to see the beauty in other people, other scenery, other art.
Awe changes the world.
Kindness, too, will change the world.
I call them angels. I was driving my van in the Busselton Coles carpark and I turned too sharply over a high kerb, and hooked a rear wheel. I couldn’t move forwards or backwards. While I stood there scratching my head, six burly guys in hi-vis shirts and big boots came walking towards me. These tradies surrounded the car. One said, ‘One …, two …, three …, LIFT,’ and the van was free. The tradies waited while I drove off. They were making sure that I didn’t repeat my bad driving. I watched them in my rear-vision mirrors as they walked off in different directions. These kind tradies did not even know each other! They all just banded together in an act of kindness.
I remember this 10 years later. Whether we are the beneficiary, as I was, or one of the angels, or one of those watching in the carpark, when we see kindness like that, the world changes. We all feel more confident that we live in a community where people help each other out.
We see reports of people rescuing their neighbours from their flooded houses: kindness changing the world. We see people taking next door’s bin to the verge when the owner of the bin can’t manage: kindness changing the world. We see it in the smile of the teenager helping someone lift their shopping into their car: kindness changing the world.
Gratitude; awe; kindness. These three words have power. I used to worry that people might find them too touchy-feely, and of little value. But I know now that kindness, gratitude and awe are far more powerful than the demonic hatred, violence and ugliness that dominates the seven o’clock news. We still need to watch the news; we still need to know where the world is at. But when it seems that evildoing will never end, we remind ourselves that hatred, brutality and greed will come to an end as they are overcome by the more powerful forces of love. Gratitude, awe and kindness will save the world.
The badge has arrived in the mail. Although the package was quite small it may provoke savage reactions and will certainly be misunderstood.
Years ago, I was much more politically active and wore badges to signal my involvement in different causes. I have kept a cloth bag of badges made with those old, primitive badge-makers. I shake them out onto the table, and I see now I supported the Campaign Against Racial Exploitation, Amnesty International, the Wilderness Society and all the predictable leftist crusades.
But this new badge is partly to protest the media who have so manipulated our sympathy that we lose our wider view and demonise a whole group of society.
The badge is a blue star of David on a white background. I will be wearing Israel’s colours, Israel’s symbol.
But why?
It may seem perverse, then, to wear a badge proclaiming. עם ישראל חי” (om Israel chai – let Israel live): how could I show support for a nation set on the annihilation of another?
The media encourage us to make a moral calculation: on October 7th in 2023, 1,200 Israeli citizens were killed and 240 were abducted by Hamas. In defending their country, Israelis killed 1,500 Palestinian terrorists. We want to cry out, ‘Isn’t that enough killing? Isn’t an additional 40,000 Palestinian deaths and flattening of homes overkill?’
Possibly like you, I also wonder whether razing Gaza is a precursor, as President Trump advocates, for wholesale dispossession. ‘Take them somewhere nice,’ he says with a blasé smile, their fate evidently irrelevant to him.
Like you, I have long been aghast at Israel’s harassing Palestinians and clearing them from the West Bank, and the current intensification of the IDF’s activity in the refugee camps where, apparently, terrorists peek out from under every Palestinian bed.
But consider Israel. I see a nation lashing out in fear. Many Israelis are children and grandchildren of the Holocaust. They are terrified that they will again be wiped out. They feel abandoned by the Western nations that created the State of Israel 76 years ago. Their only friend seems to be the US, and that friendship under President Trump now seems brittle too.
For me, that cannot justify Israel’s behaviour in Gaza. But it goes a long way to explain it. And we have rarely seen that mortal dread expressed in the media. So I support Israel as it recoils from violence done to it. It is scared for its life.
Secondly, there is the agony of the hostages; their own agony, but also the agony of their loved ones and fellow citizens. They’ve ached for them to be returned. They’ve raged against their Government for continually prioritising the military response over bringing the hostages home. I stand with all the hostage families. They’re Israelis.
Thirdly, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts over 2 million Arab citizens. One Israeli citizen in every five is Arab or Palestinian. At least one Arab is a member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. These Israelis are harassed, interrogated and imprisoned if they speak a word against Israel’s actions in Gaza. But they’re Israelis.
Lastly, not all Israelis approve of their Prime Minister. They see his political calculus. He wants to cling to power. He needs to stay in power to forestall criminal proceedings against him. Ordinary Israelis feel the whole gamut of reactions to Netanyahu, from approval to active support, but also from disappointment to feeling betrayed by him. I stand with the critics of the Israeli government.
I like Jewish culture. At its best Judaism is a powerful moral and intellectual force in the world. I like the whole gamut of Jewish ritual from the blast of the shofar to Sabbath meals. It’s no accident that Jews are over-represented in fields as diverse as medicine and music. Judaism was the cradle of Christianity.
Judaism produced the extraordinary collection of books we call the Old Testament. The Jewish Scriptures contain amazing poetry, stunning philosophy and intriguing theology. I have invested years learning Hebrew and studying the pages of these fascinating books from Genesis to Malachi.
I stand with the Jews’ legacy as builders of an ethical and aesthetic civilisation.
I look into my heart. In the end, I cannot but wear the blue and white badge even it offends random observers. I cannot but stand with Israel.
In the name of the living God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Fifty years a deacon. The Church 50 years ago was a very different church. Churches around Perth were generally full on Sundays – many churches filled two times over with two services. Men still wore suits to church, and women wore Sunday best dresses. Some women wore hats, but hats were beginning to stay away. The declining attendance of hats was a sure sign that the Church was about to change.
We were still ‘The Church of England in Australia’ – our name didn’t change until 1981, and I think our English culture is only now beginning to change.
Sunday Schools around the city were huge. 70 or 80 kids and a dozen teachers turned out every Sunday at Christ Church Claremont and parishes like it. The General Board of Religious Education, set up by the Australian General Synod, produced the course book used by most Anglican Churches. Children were completely segregated from adults, and, many children were dropped off by their parents. These parents may have seen benefit in Christian education for their kids but not for themselves.
There were arguments that you might remember about whether children were really ‘people’ for the purpose of attendance numbers and statistical returns!
By 1975, the once-flourishing Y.A.F. – the Young Anglican Fellowship – had pretty much shrunk and died.
I grew up in a country church in the 1950s. You could definitely see the decline in little churches all over the southwest corner of the state. Our little church, St Mary’s in Tambellup, might cram 70 people in for Christmas services. They even put out little folding stools with canvas seats down the aisle to accommodate everyone. But the Sunday after Christmas, and for most Sundays of the subsequent year, the congregation was fewer than 15 or so. There was a little Sunday School, taught by Mrs Lorna Taylor, who also played the organ, ducking in and out of the church and the church house next door during the service. That Sunday School had less than five kids.
This was the Church five of us were called to be deacons in 1975. The church appeared to be flourishing, but there were clear signs that we were about to be pruned – enormously.
Although accurate statistics were hard to find, 8,000 or more people turned up to Anglican services across this Diocese each Sunday: more, we were reminded, than attended WAFL football matches each weekend.
The Diocese tried some big things to stop the runaway numbers. 1975 was the year of Celebration 75, a huge mission of the Diocese, culminating in 10,000 Anglicans gathering at Perry Lakes stadium for the Eucharist on Palm Sunday.
Celebration 75 was memorable because of the murder of Archbishop Janani Luwum from Idi Amin’s Uganda. Luwum was one of the bishops visiting Perth for Celebration 75. Some months after he returned to Uganda he was found in a crashed car just outside Kampala – his body riddled with bullets. ‘The blood of the martyrs,’ Tertullian said 1800 years ago, ‘are the seed of the Church.’ Maybe a little of Luwum’s blood would impact Perth Diocese!
Goals were set for our diocese – 24 new parishes to be planted in 24 months. When we young clergy spent time with Archbishop Sambell, his parlour game was to get us to state as many new suburbs as possible (Kallaroo, Mullaloo, Heathridge, Connolly, Joondalup, Currambine, Iluka, Ocean Reef). Then the Archbishop would comment: ‘And that is our mission field.’
Luke’s telling of the calling of the first disciples reminds us of three things about the ‘mission field’ – the situation which they were called into. The painting by the 14th– Century Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna is a sermon in itself. Buoninsegna means ‘teaches well’, and that’s what this beautiful picture does.
Duccio’s painting tells the story of the Miraculous Draft of Fish all in one image. He starts with Jesus meeting Simon and Andrew. Notice the sky is golden. When Simon and Andrew meet Jesus, we are not in the normal everyday world. Duccio paints them in heaven with its gold sky. Jesus is on the rock; Jesus is the rock. Jesus invites Simon and Andrew to step on to the rock, onto the solid ground of a new relationship with Jesus and to turn the everyday world into the glory of heaven.
I must admit that the two disciples don’t appear to be straining to haul in the heavy net of fish. With Jesus by their side, the effort is shared with Jesus and their burden becomes light. There are fish everywhere in Duccio’s picture, both in the net and outside the net. In this vision of heaven, you don’t need to be inside the net. Everyone is included in God’s love.
Duccio the painter is teaching that what is true for Simon and Andrew then is true for us now. Jesus continues to invite us into a life-giving relationship with God. Jesus calls us to the work of mission with him. We are to be encouraged that in the end, God makes sure that there is a good haul of fish – of people.
Simon’s encounter with Jesus sees him coming to terms with the way Jesus, a carpenter, told him where the fish were. Jesus told Simon to put out into the deep and put his drag net out the other side of the boat. Just imagine how Simon must have swallowed his disbelief: he may be Jesus the preacher, but really, what does he know about finding fish?
Simon puts the cumbersome net into the boat, I imagine with some reluctance, gets the oars organized, rows out to deeper water, puts the net in the water and then drags it in a half-circle from the boat; all the while expecting nothing. What difference can Jesus possibly make?
And then surprise! ‘So many fish that their nets were going to break!’ They filled two boats to the point of sinking. (Luke 5:6)
Simon is shaken. Shocked to the core. This man Jesus is like no other human being Simon has met. ‘Get away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ (Luke 5:8) Seeing Jesus in this moment makes Simon squinch and shudder. This encounter with the power of Jesus strikes Simon (and Andrew and James and John) as so massive and so stupendous that they left everything – everything! and followed him.
I assume Simon used to go to synagogue and had heard the scrolls read. He knew about the prophet Isaiah, who, like Simon, was overpowered when he was encountered by the Lord God in the Temple, and, like Simon, Isaiah’s first reaction was with dramatic words: ‘Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell among a people of unclean lips.’ (Isaiah 6:5)
In this squeal of pain, Isaiah recognises that he could not stand before the living God unless God reached out and made him stand. And for Simon, the catch of fish had the same effect.
The second part of Simon being called to the ‘mission field’ was calling others to help him. To haul in so many fish Simon needed to call on his brother Andrew and their partners James and John. You need others. Jesus rarely invites single heroes to do the work of ministry. It’s too hard. It’s too big.
Jesus himself is on a fishing expedition to catch people. Luke implies that his catch, consisting of Simon and Andrew, James and John, is also a good haul. These four will make a significant difference to the ministry of Jesus.
All ministry requires hauling in people. Maybe ‘hauling in’ people is not the best image. The church is not the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Baileys, hauling suckers into the Big Tent! Rather the church’s business is inviting people respectfully and gathering them in. Even so, the church of God is a Big Tent.
Our parish’s ministry to the homeless always needs volunteers. Morning tea after church needs volunteers. Children’s ministry needs volunteers. Even the work of worship – our liturgy – needs all of us and not just the priest out front.
The third idea is to underline that ministry is always about people. Simon is called to catch people; not so much catching fish.
This was really underlined 50 years ago during our year as deacons. Five of us deacons and one presbyter from the Church of South India spent 1975 in the Deacon’s Training Program. This program was designed for us to experience the practicalities of every ministry in the Diocese.
We spent 10 weeks in an established parish: I was assigned to Kelmscott Parish, and then to Balga Parish north of the river. Balga was a more catholic parish, and Kelmscott an evangelical parish, so all of us participated in leading different styles of worship.
We spent 4 weeks in hospital chaplaincy, visiting patients and taking them communion.
We spent a fascinating 5 weeks in mental health. We saw the way the behaviour of acutely mentally ill people challenges the staff to care appropriately for them. We visited residential homes and wondered whether those big institutions were the right place for the severely developmentally challenged.
We spent just a few days in Industrial Chaplaincy – basically a visit to the Alcoa Refinery in Kwinana to meet John Bowyer the then chaplain!
For this Deacon’s Year, we resided at Wollaston College We each shared leadership in music and worship in that wonderful big tent Chapel. Following the Benedictine Rule, we had to do some manual work around the College, cleaning windows and pruning and sweeping paths and roads.
I’ve never been one for manual work, so I offered to restore the old harmonium which provided our music in Chapel, and I enjoyed cleaning reeds and fixing wires and bellows. It took me the whole year to complete – conveniently!
The Deacon’s Year was fast-paced. Two weeks in a country parish, where I watched with amazement Henry Tassell, a country pastor who had the rare knack of turning up on a farm at the right time, say, morning teatime during shearing. He kept overalls and work boots in the boot of the car to pitch in and help the farmer.
Two weeks in a church school.
I was anxious to be a school chaplain.
When I was about ten, I had a dream one night. After this dream, I remember rushing to my Mum and blurting out, ‘When I grow up, I’m gonna be a teacher and a priest!’ Mum advised me not to say anything about the dream.
But I did think of it every now and then. I interpreted it to mean that I would be a school chaplain. So, the Headmaster of my school Peter Moyes, even when I was still at school, had also encouraged me to be a school chaplain and before going to theological college in Melbourne, I had taught in the country for two years and enjoyed it.
So I learned a lot in those two weeks at Perth College. Teaching girls only in a classroom opened my eyes. When girls behave badly, they behave badly in big groups. Suddenly the whole class, it seems, turns on one person and bullies them, one of the girls, or the teacher. Unlike boys, you can’t just pick out the perpetrator and punish him. I had to learn strategies to deal with feminine mob rule!
But that didn’t dampen my determination to be a chaplain. I saw how the chaplain Terry Curtis conducted the Chapel services, what opportunities he had for pastoral care for the girls and for the staff – and a scary Headmistress!
Later, I had nine satisfying years as a school chaplain, one year at Hale School, and eight years at Christ Church Grammar. After those years, I discovered even more ways of being a teacher and a priest.
But back in the Deacons’ Year, we had a tough 36-hour Urban Training course We had to survive in the city without money. We pretended to be homeless, living on the streets, under stress to experience how our society looks after the needy.
A four-day Human Relations course back in Wollaston College turned out to be a deep dive into our inner psychological lives. Some of the deacons found this group work too threatening, so it was abandoned in subsequent years.
Anglicare, Anglican Homes, how to conduct weddings: at the time some of it was a blur. But the basic point was made: ministry is about people – worshippers in a parish, patients in hospitals, kids in schools, brides and grooms, people on the street, certainly neighbours and friends and families. And ministry meant making connections with hospital chaplains, diverse parish clergy, school chaplains, Government agencies, and a whole host of carers who gave us insight into other caring people in our society.
This practical year 1975 followed three years of theology study. None of my fellow deacons complained that the academics were not relevant to ‘real ministry’. I felt, and I think the others agreed, that we can only understand the purpose of practical ministry if we understand a bit about God. In our Deacons’ Year, we experienced God in the marginalised. We made sense of it with Bible study and through Church History.
Luke doesn’t tell us that Jesus ordained deacons. Jesus calls all the baptised to ministry. Jesus invites each one of us to be a deacon and serve the needy. Matthew writes a parable, you remember, about sheep and goats. When we minister to the least of these, we are loving Jesus. The ministry of service is for all of us.
Deacons, ordained deacons, some permanent deacons and all priests and bishops, we are deacons before we are priests; as ordained deacons, we are the church’s sign to itself of helping the needy. Our life of service shows that all of us rely on God to empower ministries of service. Deacons’ service in the community emphasises that the church doesn’t exist for its own sake. The church exists always for others. The great wartime Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple, is often quoted that ‘The Church is the only society that exists for the benefit of those who are not its members.’ The church is a diaconal church, a serving church, a church of deacons, and our holy task is to love God by serving people.
Fifty years on. 2075. I won’t be around to see it, but some of you will. And I hope you experience how God keeps loving you, and you will keep loving your neighbour. Because whatever changes 2075 will bring, we will still be a deacon-shaped church – and that’s worth celebrating.
It was a cold Melbourne night in the year 2000, but we had left our coats at the door to the warm rooftop restaurant with its stunning view of city lights and the shimmering dark shape of Port Phillip Bay beyond.
Women in their best evening dresses outshone the men in suits and ties, or clergy collars. In the meetings during the day, I had been elected as Secretary of the Australian Association for Religious Education (AARE).
‘You are to sit here now that you are our Secretary,’ the Association President pointed to a seat at the top table.
A man about my age (early fifties) with a smart brown leather jacket, an open-necked shirt and a mop of grey hair was already seated.
‘Ted, meet Michael,’ the President said and rushed away to welcome other members.
In the restaurant, buzzing with the enthusiastic voices of members with a common passion, Michael was an oasis of peace. I greeted him and we shook hands.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘Perth. I work for the Churches’ Commission on Education there. Like Victoria’s CCES.’
‘Yes, I know CCES.’
‘Have you been to Perth?’ I asked.
‘I was in residence at the Chapel at Christ Church Grammar a couple of years ago,’ he replied.
I told him I had been chaplain there in the 1980s, and we chatted about people he had met, especially the then chaplain, Frank Sheehan.
Michael chuckled, ‘Frank put me up with the Wilsons in Peppy Grove.’ He invested the local name for the exclusive suburb with an ironic smile.
The Wilson family owned multilevel car parks in Perth and most other CBDs. I knew the Wilsons. Picking up on Michael’s irony, I asked,
‘The hospitality adequate?’ I asked.
‘Very,’ Michael smiled again. ‘Very comfortable, very friendly, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable.’ He looked down at his dishevelled appearance, which I suspected was a conscious costume. He liked to dress down.
I probed more.
‘Peppy Grove is our wealthiest suburb,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Michael replied, ‘and I felt sorry for the Christ Church kids. They had drunk the cordial. They believed they merited their privileges. Whether they were from Peppy Grove or Mossie Park or any of the suburbs round about.’
I was intrigued by Michael. Many of the AARE members taught at schools like Christ Church, and if they felt uncomfortable at the privileges of their students, it was impolitic to say so.
I remembered Christ Church kids reporting me to their parents because my views were so left-wing. I think the parents rather expected it of me, so no one criticised me (at least to my face).
I tried to think who this Michael might be. Frank Sheehan invited well-known thinkers to be in his residency program.
‘So I guess you don’t live in central Melbourne,’ I said.
‘I have a studio on my little farm.’ He must have realised he had given me a clue with the word ‘studio’, so he hurried on. ‘Only a few chooks, mind you. And a house. Just enough for me. All pretty rustic.’
I sensed Michael was belittling himself. Meanwhile, the President and other Executive members joined the table. The two of us continued our conversation. We were so deep in talk that others didn’t want to interrupt us.
We talked on about reforming our capitalist society and honouring the poor as Pacific oysters followed by vegetarian linguini and organic boneless chicken were served, paired by Victorian fine wines. Seppelts Riesling or 21 Coldstream Pinot Noir were offered.
‘Revolutions are out,’ he said, ‘but we need a revolution in the way we think about wealth.’ He held up his glass of white ruefully. ‘A gentle revolution,’ he chuckled, ‘just to whittle away at the rotten foundations of capitalism.’
After the main course, the President interrupted us.
‘I need you now, Michael. Ready?’
Michael nodded.
The President called for quiet.
‘Our guest speaker tonight is well known across Australia. Most of us have seen his cartoons and how he insists we think spiritually about our society. This has piqued our interest. He is the inventor of Mr Curly and Vasco Pyjama. Please welcome … Michael Leunig.’
I was dumbfounded. Or plain dumb. Because I was new to the AARE Executive, I had not been party to the planning for the AARE Dinner and I had no idea that I had chatted so earnestly to the celebrity cartoonist for twenty minutes while he had not revealed his identity. That took deep humility on his part.
The outsized machete in the street vendor’s hand came down with sharp force on the leafy top of the pineapple. The fruit gleamed yellow in his brown hand. With two sharp blows he decapitated the fruit and sliced it open down the middle.
‘Ananas,[i]’ he said with quiet pride. As he smiled, I could see the dark gaps in his mouth where teeth should have been, and the lopsided way the gaps made him smile. But his pride in the pineapple was palpable. He wanted us to enjoy the fruit. He passed each of us, my lover, my son and daughter, a pineapple and swiftly pocketed the notes I gave him.
I contemplated my pineapple. Where do you start eating it when standing in the noisy streets of Port-Louis in Mauritius? I took my pineapple gingerly in my right hand. The prickles on the outside stung momentarily as I examined its surface. The skin was a browny-grey colour, speckled with sharp prickles. Each prickle grew from its own prominent pore. The glossy flesh inside the skin, crosshatched with veins, was dripping golden beads of moisture.
With my left hand, I broke off the top ring of fruit. My fingers tingled with sticky moisture. I raised the circle to my lips. The first caress of pineapple juice on my lips brought me a thrill of refreshment. Standing in the muggy streets of humid Mauritius, I felt clean and cool. The pedestrians rumbling by along the busy street simply rushed past me. In my zone of silence, I barely noticed their presence.
My teeth met resistance as I bit into the pineapple, as if to tell me, take your time, relish the experience, ravish me slowly. As my teeth pushed through to the sweetness between, I felt juice spatter the palace of my mouth and squeak along my teeth. The juice was so powerful that it partly anæsthetised my lips.[ii] It felt sticky on my chin.
Then the taste of the pineapple. It was sweet and tart in my mouth, the flavours doing a ballet of balance on my tongue, the effect so exquisite I was aware only of this ropy mess of fruit in my mouth and the sticky substance spilling from my chin onto my hands and shirt.
I swallowed and started to say something to my beloved and my two smaller beloveds. But each was equally submerged in pineapple that words would have spoiled the moment. I did know that for just a few rupees we had become the wealthiest people in the world[iii].
‘Ananas!’ shouted the pineapple seller hoping to catch more people with his sticky fruit.
[i] Columbus brought pineapples to Spain under the name piña de Indes, pine of the Indians. It is known in Latin and French and most other languages as ananas, perhaps after a village in South America called ‘Añanas.’
[ii] Pineapples contain a substance which ‘eats flesh’, so their juice feels tingly on the lips. This substance bromain is used as a meat tenderiser.
[iii] When they were introduced to England, pineapples were such a rarity that they were worth thousands of pounds, and were displayed at the dinner tables of the nobility. Persons of a more middling rank could hire a pineapple to show off under your arm as you walked around the town.
Candida Moss, God’s Ghostwriters: Enslaved Christians and the Making of the Bible. London, William Collins, 2024. Paperback 267 pages + back matter In Public Library System. From $52 online.
Reviewed by Ted Witham
The healing of the paralytic is a favourite story in the New Testament. We’ve heard the story. Four friends bring a paralysed man on a stretcher. Unable to carry the man through the crowd to Jesus, they lift the stretcher onto the roof and dig their way down to Jesus.
Except that the story nowhere calls the stretcher-bearers ‘friends’. In the Greek text, they are just called ‘they’ with no indication of their relationship with the man on the stretcher. Some details, however, point to the man’s identity. It took four men to carry him, and the stretcher itself was solid enough to be lowered through the roof. It was a substantial litter. This man is likely an enslaver, and his four bearers are enslaved.
If this is true, it twists the meaning of the story.
Enslaved people were not seen as people. And yet, when the stretcher touches down, Jesus addresses the four slaves. Courtesy demanded that he address the man being carried about, not his slaves. Jesus, however, chooses first to praise these slaves. He praises their loyalty, their faith. The Greek word pistis means both. In the story as we have it, these slaves come off well.
Only then does Jesus turn to the man on the mattress. He forgives his sin. Jesus faces down the scribes who accuse him of blasphemy. ‘No one can forgive sins but God alone.’ And then he tells the man, ‘Stand up, take up your mat and walk!’ It’s almost as though the man could do that all along. His ‘sin’ may have been ordering others to carry him about when there was no need. He was making that demand on them because, as a slave owner, he could.
In God’s Ghostwriters, Candida Moss argues that enslaved people did much of the writing of the New Testament. Named authors like Paul depended on slaves well-trained in literacy to write down his words, edit them, and make copies of them. Messengers, who were usually slaves, would carry these words and read them, often as an after-dinner performance.
Professor Moss is Edward Cadbury Chair of Theology at the University of Birmingham. She is well-equipped to write about the ancient world and how the Christian scriptures fit into the Roman culture. She writes with verve and clarity.
Dr Moss argues that it is almost certain that these scribal tasks involved changing the words they were given.
Firstly, the slaves had to knead the master’s words into shape. This editing enabled those hearing the words to make sense of them.
Secondly, these slaves would have been tempted to make substantive changes to the text – and probably did. These tweaks would inevitably have introduced changes from the point of view of the enslaved, like the four stretcher-bearers digging through Peter’s roof being obedient slaves and not simply good-hearted friends.
Some parables, as Moss points out, make sense only from the enslaved point of view. Slaves, for example, would have been accustomed to absentee owners of vineyards who appointed their son as master of the vineyard. The slaves would see that one was the same as the other. So God and Jesus could be simultaneously distinct entities and one person.
Thirdly, as part of their task, messengers would be required to perform these stories or letters. It was the custom for these readings to use voice, gestures, props and other devices to hold the audience. At times when audience attention failed, they would tell the story in other more interesting words, even inventing new passages.
Candida Moss suggests that the ‘long ending’ of Mark’s Gospel may have come into existence in this way. The slave reading the text would come to the words at the end, ‘They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid!’ In the atmosphere of a dinner at which wine had been consumed, diners would hear this as an anti-climax and the reader would be blamed. Why not add some stories of the appearances of Jesus, wild stories of handling snakes and drinking poison?
Professor Moss concludes that we cannot know the individual changes that enslaved people made in the development of the received texts of the Gospels and letters. But we can know for certain that slaves did do the writing and did make changes as they went.
After reading Professor Moss’s attractive book, I, for one, will not read the New Testament in the same spirit. I will now try to really see these enslaved writers,bring them out of the shadows where they have been taken for granted for 2,000 years, and see what new and fascinating truths God is teaching me through their work.
Mum was born in 1914, while her Dad was away fighting in France. She became a teacher at South Newdegate School, and met and married Dad in 1938. She had five children.
Mum chose the life of a farmer’s wife. She worked hard all her life, raising us with love and practicality. She and Dad had a strong moral core which she transmitted to us. She encouraged our ambitions, ‘Aim for the stars and you’ll hit the moon,’ was one of her sayings.
I think of Mum often and I am thankful for her life.
Ted Witham, Skerricks: from farm boy to poet-priest and world traveller. 2024
Reviewed by Shirley Claughton
for the Anglican Messenger, September 2024
An impressionable memory in Ted’s teenage years comes from a shearing shed encounter, “Normally one or the other was away at boarding school, or at a Junior Farmer’s State conference or visiting girlfriends in Perth” But at this party, Ted at 15, was chaperoned by brothers Barry, 18, Len 20 and Jim 24…not only ordered in years but also in height” – from 6 foot to over 6 foot five. When the guttural rumble of motorbikes made their presence felt – spoiling for a fight: Katanning versus Tambellup“ we formed up shoulder to shoulder…making a slow synchronized progress towards the door” and the bikes slowly turned around, revved their bikes with a sneer and drove off…”
But Ted’s life has been punctuated by life-threatening calamities. He ponders that had he been born just a few months earlier, no treatment for his condition (pyloric stenosis) he would simply have died. A surprising number of close calls with death throughout his early life might have started as a “sense of being lucky” but “gradually matured in being grateful.
A wonderful tribute to Sir George Bedbrook OBE who performed experimental surgery, never attempted in Australia before, “which mammoth operation kept me out of a wheelchair and allowed me to walk, run and play sport for many years.” Nevertheless, in his characteristic humbleness, he treats the reader to an image of a theatre crowded with assistants and he “uncomfortably naked”.
He had nurtured his ability for language, from childhood, discovering French “between the pages of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia” and nurtured this secret interest, eventually becoming bilingual, but also studying and excelling in Hebrew and Greek. Ted ponders over the inability of the farming community to recognize the Noongar presence, “they simply weren’t there, and nor were the Noongar words that seeped into our talk…it was as if English had a stubborn claim on the landscape”, and felt subversive when he was discovering the love of language. In a heartening story, this came together when, at twenty-nine years, he met Rae. As curate in the parish, he was writing pastoral notes in French as a measure of confidentiality. “Rae was looking over my shoulder and asked ‘why are you writing in French? ‘Well, I struggled for a reply. it can be private to me.’ Rae grinned. Not if I can read it’”
As a 14-year-old, the experience of attending the Commonwealth Games made a huge impact, “I saw so much, experienced so much…my eyes bulged..I had never seen so many folk in one place. Anticipation swung through the crowd, sweeping me up as it passed…” “In nine days I had seen the whole world, and the world really could never be the same again.”
Theatre was important – in his 20’s he was involved at all levels and even briefly considered it as a career, but explains his sincere reasons for “not wanting my psyche to be constantly shoved around by one character and then another…” and also seeing incompatibility with his vocation as a priest. “Now in my eighth decade, I have returned to writing short plays and nudging them onto the stage” And as an addendum, he wonders “if I was wrong to fear the psychological and value downsides of the theatre. People know that plays are storytelling ..”
Ted was a leader of reforms in the institutions he was part of. Whilst he does sometimes suggest he was really in the right place at that time, Ted was a crucial part of the movement of change in recognizing the value of individuals in schools and institutions.
He credits Rae as “his anchor and a magnificent companion, who makes me the best person I can be.”
Some years ago, two delegates to a conference in Sydney, happened to be seated next to each other for the long plane ride from Perth. “Great,” said one, “we can have a good chat to pass the time”. “Sorry ,mate,” said Ted, I have to take a sleeping tablet to get me through the journey” and proceeded to sleep soundly for the next four hours.
For Ted, a huge part of life was survival – in this memoir, he always sees the good in everyone he meets – when they get ripped off by a taxi driver, he nevertheless reflects that “for the rest of our week in Rome, we learned how generous Italians are”. This charitableness permeates all his encounters. It also helps to recognize the steps toward the journey to the Third Order of St Francis, undertaken by both Ted and Rae.
We are treated to the skerricks of his journey, every little bit revealing more of his humanity, his humbleness, his self-awareness, and his willingness to admit to mistakes. Skerricks is a tell-tale memoir and is a very good read.
Ted acknowledges how lucky he is that his four siblings are alive at the time of writing this memoir: Jim, Len, Barry and Marion, and how blessed he is with Rae, children Brendan and Clare, and grandchildren Sienna, Zoe, Asher and Immie and Aurora.
This book is self-published and available from the author and St Johns Books.
Copies can be made available at Synod for purchase if requested beforehand.
Mind Journeys 