In Chaos, Love is confrontation

You must be reading what I’m reading, more or less. Seeing what I’m seeing in various media from international newspapers, platforms like Substack and BlueSky, TV news if you can bear to see it. Years ago, there was a QAnon hoax that the Democrats were running an international paedophile cabal led by wealthy elites.  Now, almost ten years later than the start of that hoax, we know that whatever the right wing accuses Democrats of doing is a confession for the elite right wing leaders including many (and not all!) Republicans.  It seems too impossible to be true. But the truth is oozing out. The damage to so many women has been a lifetime of trauma. The damage to so many men who disabled their morality is a life sentence.  The damage to governance in country after country is incalculable.  Add to that the trauma for military and neighbours in torn country after torn country and we have to stop, breathe, and focus.

What can we do?  Love. That’s all and that’s a lot. We can see it being acted out in march after protest after blogpost after podcast after Newspaper Opinion Editorials after late night talk show hosts after Grammy award winners.  As we watch love in action, it turns out to be far more radical than any sermon or poem could have said. Love in action has been what selfish leaders could never have guessed, assuming that if we were all frightened enough, we’d submit to terror. Oh, Love can face anything.  We have to love harder now than at anytime ever. It may be only to our near ones and dear ones and stops there. But they’re seeing what we’re seeing; we all can fly off the handle because of the stress. We have to Love near and far.

I did this image almost ten years ago now, around the time the QAnon-ers were confessing for the right wing. I was artist in residence for a rural Christianity conference. This section of a much larger piece shows a rising Jesus Love being the largest agent amidst community groups working for good and ill alike. Please take energy from this to revive your Love as much as your own body and soul can accept.

Martin Luther King Day – a few days after

I give you this picture, inspired as I was listening to stories of the abuse of power when I was Artist in Residence for a Free to Believe conference many years ago. It speaks to the Martin Luther King narrative, celebrated on January 19th in the USA. He was, at the simplest, pointing out that power was being abused and most often to suppress those without white male skin. See on the bottom right corner the brown people struggling under the weight of the ‘laws’ and laws which excluded them from full humanity. At this time in all of our lives, I can’t begin to write all I know, feel and think about the horrendous track record and present behavior of my birth country.  Right now, new atrocities are rising from the depth of what has always been seething through the pores of what kind of nation the USA has been struggling to be. Such oppression is a critical function for a society building its identity out of the massacres of indigenous peoples and the transportation of stolen African citizens who were converted to wealth for owners. To cover such crimes, myths of puritan patriotism are the mortar between the bricks of the wall against truth. People like Martin Luther King bloodied themselves to knock those walls down. And often succeeded.  People like Martin Luther King inspire us now to see that not all is gone; not all is evil. Justice is being fought for, legislated for, revived where it has been trod to dust. Hope isn’t the retreat of wimps. Hope is the scary radical stuff of keeping truth alive and shouting it to those who think they’re in power. May you have much outlandish tangible hope as you fly courageously into 2026.

Searching Knowing .... faith...

This last Sunday, I had the privilege and delight to lead worship at St Michael’s Uniting Church, Collins Street, Melbourne.  The set readings included the beginning of the Gospel of John, the narrative of Jesus being around since before time itself. I used the reading, seeped in Greek philosophy and including the germs of antisemitism (“his own did not accept him”) to affirm to us that the writers of John were simply searching for an origin story which made sense of the changes they could see in the Jesus followers they knew in their personal experience. Somehow, those who followed Jesus and gathered with each other to celebrate, also had the courage to face the Roman occupiers. They also had the mettle to help as they could, to share wealth, to share food and resource, to bring hope and healing to others. The changes for the good around them said to John’s writers that there had to be more to Jesus than the classic Nativity culled from the other Gospels.

The writers were searching; as are we. They had occasional knowing; as do we. A number of years ago, I did this painting, its own narrative here. It was a gift I didn’t expect to help me, and others I hope, understand that faith is no more complicated than a search, a knowing, that knowing leading to more search, then new knowing. It’s a flow of searching for only one criteria – that of Love.  The more we come to new knowing of new ways of Love, the more we know how powerful Love is. We search again, and find it fresh again. That’s all faith is.  I apologise for making it seem so simple. There we are.

Breathing in Christmas

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Christmas in this new home, well down under my birth land. Christmas is not the same Nordic/Germanic/Victorian routine and after a year here, I’ve come to be delighted to have such a chance to see it new.  Suddenly, the reality of incarnation has pounded me on the head. Christmas is God not just with us, but God inside us. At the birth, it didn’t make sense. As Jesus grew, it made some kind of sense if we could wrap our heads around Jesus being God and human at the same time. Lots of theologians are still not sure about that one. But when Jesus’ human life ended and Pentecost arrived, it made sense. Now, for the first time in my short life on earth, I can put together incarnation and this moment. Divine Mystery. Inside. Us. By the reality of Holy Spirit. 

Jesus was the human model for who we are called to be, not in behaviours, but a model for ways of seeing and challenging. We need to change from “what would Jesus do?” to “what would Jesus ask?” And instead of processing that question in our heads, we process that question in our hearts and our guts (where a good half of our neurons are anyway). We let Spirit inside of us, God with/inside, gives us the courage to challenge. Christmas is not just all the baby stories. Christmas is about connecting in real time. Eternity and humanity in the same place. No wonder that what we most want this time of year is to be together with people. (Duh). Connecting is what the whole thing is about. Connecting and connecting with purpose.

Before I knew how to describe any of this stuff, I was experiencing it.  I give you a pen & ink drawing I did when I was learning art at Uni back in the 1970s and then a poem I did when I’d had my spiritual awakening in the 1980s. I still feel the same.

Breathe with me.

See with me.

(through your other eyes)

(through those other lungs)

Feel the musty mystery cool

move

through,

untouchable

(having touched much).

Know with me the

mystery place deep,

eternity cooled,

calm,

now warm

(having been touched).

Birth and Burden

As we’re coming into the Christmas period, a time of year when we celebrate religious festivals across many faiths, I bring you this, created when I was commissioned as the visual theologian in a book. I was one of three theologians in a book working out the origens of the New Testament. Sadly, the book never came to fruition, as one of the well known progressive theologians passed away suddenly. This image was one telling the truth that we really don’t know when Jesus was born, or indeed, when he died and showed himself again. There are many guesses based on many different interpretations of existing scriptures and secular history. What we know is that he was, as so many children are now, born into the burden of his times. The power of Empire shaped his world, the power of the scriptures shaped perceptions about who he was. In this image, the reeds which are said to have hid Moses sit alongside the architecture of power which sits alongside the commandment stones. The light shines on a manger and from a cave. People come and go, perhaps trying to make sense. Various dates hang about, unable to settle.

For any of us who say the old days were better, they simply weren’t. What history tells us is that whatever burdens we carry in our times, they will pass. Not easily, not without violence and atrocity, but they will pass. I hope, this season as we’re bombarded by capitalistic and sentimental temptations, we can stretch out our hope and grasp the power we need to love, to care, and to nurture radical hope. These times will pass. Heaven will connect with earth as shatteringly as before. There will be new and better times.

Treaty!!

It is very exciting to announce that last week, the Government of Victoria passed the law to formalise an agreement the state's First Peoples, with more treaties planned with distinct nations within the state. This is an exciting time and for many, a relief and frustration.

The ABC says, “Australia was the only developed country colonised by the British to have never signed a formal treaty or treaties with First Nations people. When the First Fleet raised the flag in 1788, there were no individual agreements — or treaties — with the hundreds of First Nations groups across the continent. The British claimed the land using the legal doctrine of terra nullius, meaning land belonging to no-one, which was overturned in the landmark 1992 Mabo case.” You can read their full report here.

First Nations peoples in Victoria have been working hard, in collaboration, for years. Their words are here.

As the First Nations site says, the beginning of what it means now is Truth Telling. And if you read no more from this post, please read about the importance of this truth.

I’ve been listening to the book, Warra Warra Wai by Darren Rix and Craig Cormick. ‘Warra Warra Wai’ was the expression called to Cook and his crew when they tried to make landfall in Botany Bay. It has long been interpreted as ‘Go away’, but is more accurately translated as ‘You are all dead spirits’. Rix and Cormick remind us that the first colonisers were considered ghost people, the dead ancestors (white, having lost their colour), come back on the wings of white birds (ship sails). Rather than there being nothing in Australia, there were 60,000 years plus of thriving habitation. When Cook wrote in his ship’s log that there was smoke near the shore almost all the way he sailed up the southeast cost, he had no idea that the smoke was alarm messaging from one nation to another.

Truth telling will allow the ancestors of the First Peoples to manage, if not, heal, their generational trauma. We pray that this is so.

Presence

This image is called Presence. It’s a digitally altered section of my painting Witness. I often start my blogs by searching my artwork to see what speaks to me. Here we are today. Presence. A day after the amazing flip from right to left politics across the USA inside states where real differences can be made. Here we are today, when the truth of Gaza is more obvious than it has ever been and suddenly (why so late???) people are calling for the world to pay attention as it did during Apartheid. Here we are today, when Ukraine disables one more infrastructure of logistics in Russia to slow down the damage to Ukraine’s sovereignty. And here we are when Sudan, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Cameroon and more experience war daily. Here we are today when Jamaica searches for what can be saved and seeks healing. Here we are today. When there is tragedy and joy, worry and hope. Today is like every day. And it isn’t. Because Presence - hope, lightness of mind, hearts warming, knowledge brought to the open, courage, patience - Presence grabs us and makes us choose to live.  Presence inside us helps us choose to see the turmoil whipped up in this artwork and it reminds us of light pushing those clouds into new shapes, reminding us that clouds are only vapour. If you need it, sit with this image, let the Light work its Presence into your soul.