Song in the Desert

Fr. Samuel Dow in his Trinity sermon today asked a fruitful question: when will we be able to get off the wild merry-go-round of our daily lives and rest in the presence of God? English writer Ronald Blythe, in The Circling Year: Perspectives from a Country Parish, gives as one of the qualities of Wisdom the ability to know when to continue, and when to stop. And Jesuit writer C. G. Valles, in Sketches of God, recalls that in his own experience, when God retreats, there’s no use to hold on, for God, like the waves of the sea, will always return.

            After the Trinity service I had an idea to go to Ikea to buy some linen: bad decision. Standstill traffic queues on Victoria Street; a stuffed and arcane car park; a labyrinthine shopping centre, with loving guidance provided by sparkling arrows on the floor. I found myself with far too much company in the form of families pushing shopping trolleys, children in pushers, and many feet both large and little. Having got what I had come for, I sought the cashier, following an even more serpentine route through (only apparently) acres of clotted departments of far from free-flowing populace. At lengthy length I arrived in the high-ceiling final hall, full of flat packs on warehouse pallets, approaching the cashier lines which proved to display their own delays and dismays. But before I arrived there, I heard singing.

            A man walking nearby, a man in a green turban, was singing in the language of Punjab, the place from which he had come, not loudly, just pleasantly singing to himself as his young son walked beside him. “That’s a good song,” I said. “Where does it come from?” “We?” he said. “We come from India. I was just singing to pass my time: it’s a big place.” His wife, walking ahead of him, turned to me and smiled, and his son, maybe nine or ten years old, skipped along beside him, smiling. “It is: I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. “It’s a good song. I liked it.”

            So here in the desert of the modern industrialised shopping centre was living music, God’s presence in the human voice. A man singing, a man in a green turban, his wife, and his smiling son. A man just singing to pass his time. So when, as Fr. Dow asked, will we be able to get off the wild merry-go-round of our daily lives? God was present today, even in Victoria Gardens.

           

Japanese Garden at the Melbourne Zoo

Someone remarks, “They’re not really zoo animals.” Swans and ducks are grabbing bread and chips from little persons scrabbling among the fallen leaves, trees nearly bare now. Ducks with red-striped faces and meditative expressions in their avian eyes, plump and comfortable on the carefully chosen rocks; gulls — white throats, grey beaks — dipping and washing off the little outcrop of irregularly laid pebbles, with one perched among the azaleas graceful on the slope above. A snow lantern stands in the midst of late leaves floating past. Swans cruising, sipping and drinking. Gulls ever active. Ducks drifting, rotating, following along.

            Everything here is provided for the ease and comfort of ducks, swans, and gulls, whether deliberately or not. It’s a protected setting for animals and birds, and even for plants that frame and feed them. There are also many human children, all with the gestures and responses appropriate to their age: a reminder that mutability and change are the essence of the life of the world. Some unwisely feeding the ducks — who probably need duck food but seem to be surviving the human diet — some sitting on the broad stone steps, some beckoning to others, jumping up and down. Some viewing, with long gazes, as the birds swim and the leaves fall.

            So I think: what is it that gives creatures a wholesome site where they can thrive? A combination of temperature, tranquillity, nourishment and respect. God respects our limitations: why don’t we respect one another's? Birds and animals can sometimes be given sanctuary, but more often are exploited, along with trees, crops, airs and oceans. Imagine becoming sanctuaries for one another, the place where human beings are not for use but for grace.

Matinee Audience: Colonialism, Love and Country

The matinee audience for Aida was all of us: patrons and benefactors in suits, ties, and walking sticks; musical ladies in wheelchairs; fabulous gay men arm in arm; stylish girls in heels; new age women in smocks; little girls in frilly socks. Tourists with overflowing shopping bags; music students with satchels; speeding staff with swipe tags; instrumentalists wheeling shiny black cases; probable chorus singers in stripped leggings; waiters wheeling tables. Also worried women discussing their worrying daughters; backstage guys festooned with keys; clergy without their dog collars; security persons with mobile technology; young men with girlfriends and champagne; foreign speakers speaking languages; elegant souls with circular earrings and upswept hair; and me, with ice cream, sketchbook, and camera (in my pocket). All of us, under the eye of God, here to participate in a colonial epic of country, love and battle: battle with the other, enslavement of the other, love for the other.

            These singers are magnificent: these large singers, these characters larger than life, in their glittering costumes, here to display for us how immense our emotions really are. How convinced they are about the implacability of the gods. How much they are unable to go back, as we, in our smaller worlds, could be able to go back, maybe to keep ourselves from catastrophe, and maybe not. Can anything of the past be changed? Can any of it now be transmuted? The future can, maybe, be changed by holding back.

            Here in the opera the world holds no forgiveness from gods or kings.Jesus Christ embodies for everyone the forgiveness of sins: how can any of us live without this? Music students, fashion dwellers, players and prayers, artists and invalids, all of us the same, here under the eye of God, needing the libation of forgiveness, forgiveness of self, forgiveness of other: the divine gift.      

A Meditation View

I was recently the recipient of a medical mistake: my doctor injected me with double the prescribed dose of a notably toxic drug. Everyone I know is appalled at this error, and the results for my health won’t be known for a few more weeks.  Hopefully, with a lot of luck and prayer, I may escape serious complications, but maybe not.  I will likely live, however.  Between discovering this mistake and reaching the prescribing specialist for consultation I spent four days wondering if I was going to die for such a silly reason. It put me in mind of my mortality, you might say.

            Then I thought: many people die for silly reasons.  They don’t necessarily die for a noble reason, a tragic reason, or even a complicated reason.  Sophie Scholl died for a noble reason, beheaded as a leader of the White Rose, the German university student’s resistance movement to the Nazis. The composer Benjamin Britten died for a complicated reason: endocarditis, complicated by his need to complete his opera Death in Venice instead of having a critical heart operation, and then the failure to thrive of his eventual heart operation, which left the pianist’s right hand damaged due to a stroke under anaesthetic, his heart and body weakening month by month for two years, until he handed over the five pages of his uncompleted final cantata to Rostropovich on his deathbed.  And some people die for no apparent reason at all, yielding up the spirit before they reach the finish line of an enterprise they confidently expect to complete when they begin.

            And I wondered: who would miss me?  And who would I miss?  Among others, I would miss the gardener, Lisa: we’ve been planning a Japanese garden, the ground already levelled where we intend a small meditation view. I’m consulting books, designs, photographs; learning the aesthetic, the space, the natural materials. We mean to visit the plant nursery soon so a drift of azaleas will float cloudlike under the Japanese maples. I would have missed out on all that.  Not for nothing did God create a garden, and so also in the garden Mary Magdalene met her resurrected Lord and Teacher.

            In the history of the world, one person has died for an intelligent reason.

Jesus of Nazareth, being condemned to execution by the Roman Imperial government, offered up his life to God as satisfaction for the sins of the whole world, and witnessed to the eternal value of every human being. Such intelligence is called wisdom, divine wisdom, by the wise.