Dear Inner Circle,

Here is a cracker of a story. We are surrounded by angels. Some of our supporters set aside money so that they can jump in when the circumstances are extraordinary and when the need is way beyond anything Wayside could do. Years ago, one of these angels told me he would be willing to pay the rent on a flat for a year if I knew someone for whom it would make all the difference. A man who had lived on the street and in the grip of alcoholism was showing the early signs of transformation. He’d stopped asking, “What can you give me?” and started to ask, “How can I help?”. It’s always a sure sign of a miracle on its way. Our dear angel paid a year’s rent and that man is free today of his alcoholism and flourishing in a job that he loves. Amazing? Absolutely! This week that same angel did the same thing for another fellow who I judged to be a good bet. This morning I looked into the face of a man whose physical features had changed overnight because he’d slept in his own bed in his own place. He was in today seeking help to enroll in a course that has a good chance of seeing him into employment. The transformation has begun not just because of a physical room to call his own, but because someone believed in him and was prepared to back him in this way. Amazing? Totally!

“My cup runneth over” is a phrase our past Governor used to say to me regularly. If you’ve ever met Dame Marie Bashir, you’ve had a brush with grace. Every time I see Dame Marie, she expresses her gratitude and awe for something or someone. I was in our lift once with Dame Marie and an Aboriginal women got in with us. Dame Marie said, “Every time I meet a woman such as you, I just want to say, ‘thank you, thank you, thank you.’” Well my cup runneth over too. Today I spoke with a high profile person who regularly does a shift on our front desk. He’s the last person in this city you’d expect to see taking people for showers or finding changes of...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

A little card, not much bigger than a postage stamp, which read, “To my darling daughter. Happy first birthday. Love from Dad”, was all that a young woman had from her father. She is 22 years old now and recently discovered that the father she had not seen since she was a little girl had recently died. All she had were lots of questions and an ache for connection. She discovered her father had a connection to Wayside and went to some trouble to make contact with me. In last week’s note I anticipated a meeting which took place last Friday evening. Am I the luckiest man in the world? It was holy ground where I spoke for hours about the Dad she didn’t know. I assured her that her father was a good man who was well loved and who made a wonderful difference to our community. I presented her with a “book” that he had written to her. There were perhaps 20,000 words written by a man who was largely illiterate but who sat with a one of our volunteers for hundreds of hours in order to leave behind a record of his love for his little girl. Our volunteer has since moved out of Sydney and I worried whether I still had a connection to tell her this story. Thankfully, she is still in this inner circle and she made contact with me on Saturday. She said that she barely hoped to believe that one day the daughter would have all this work in her hands and be able to receive this gift of love. Thank you Fran. You are truly an angel from heaven.

A man who has lived in his car with a little dog for a year was allocated housing this week. What a difference a day makes. This is a softly spoken man who actually asks nothing of anyone. He is a proud man whose sense of independence has seen him struggle but survive and even thrive through a life that had few, if any, free kicks. He has the most devoted little dog in the world. He could command his dog to stay and walk away for the day and be certain that the dog would be waiting for him. He looks like he...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

The most adorable three-year-old in the world was playing with my phone yesterday. She asked if I could find some pictures of Grandma. I started flicking through the photos on my phone and we came across one where I was wearing my alb and stole at a wedding. This dear little girl had never seen me dressed this way and it startled her a bit. “Ooh! Are you Captain Feathersword?” she asked.

It’s not hard to resent the phone at times and yet it often ushers me into the most important moments. A man called me this morning from his hospital bed. “This is it Graham, I’ve had enough”. He spends three days of every week undergoing dialysis. While his life is absorbed with this never ending exercise to stay alive, his wife has left him, and his children have been removed from his care. He told me that he can’t fight all of these battles and be chained to a dialysis machine for half of his life. “How long will you live if you stop this treatment?” I asked. I could hear that he must be in the presence of some medical people and they prompted him to give the answer, “days”. I so get it. I don’t judge this bloke. I’m not sure what I’d do in his situation and I offer no judgement. If he goes, I’ll be at his bedside as he passes. I think he’s had enough and I respect his choice.

Keep reading here.

Dear Inner Circle,

A good mate sent me a text this morning to say that he’d found a homeless man near where he lives and offered him a perfectly good doona so that he could be warm at night. The homeless man refused the offer by saying, “Sorry mate. I’m downsizing!”

First thing yesterday I spoke to a hundred or so Year 12 boys at a large Catholic school. I don’t normally do this kind of thing because there are others here at Wayside that would do a much better job. The teacher who invited me could ask me to speak at the South Pole and I’d grab a jumper and be off. I first met her when she was the eldest of five children, homeless because of unthinkable domestic violence. I found refuge accommodation for the family and in due course assisted in finding public housing. This senior teacher was just 13 years old when we first met. The battle she had just to do her homework would have discouraged anyone. On the day she enrolled in university, I was by her side to support her. On her graduation day, I was there taking the part of a proud father. I performed her wedding ceremony and baptised her child. Is there any man on earth who knows such blessing? She’s now around 40 years old and to see this competent, respected, senior teacher yesterday was such a special thing. She introduced me to the school and I hesitated for a minute, waiting for Jesus to enter the room. What a wonderful day.

Keep reading here.

Dear Inner Circle,

Our morning began with tears today. One of our visitors, an intelligent young man, full of promise, met a sudden end. We don’t know the full circumstances around his death, although we knew of a difficult struggle with mental health and substance abuse. On hearing the news this morning, a couple of our senior people stood in our lift quietly, weeping. Our lift was an awesome place this morning. I assured our people that their contribution to Wayside and to life was not just made by what they do but by who they are. These two didn’t just lose a client. The young man wasn’t an interesting “case”. The tears came because they had lost a brother. Precious tears. Precious people.

If you’re in Sydney you might be interested to pop into Wayside tonight. The Gyuto Monks of Tibet will be visiting with us. The monks are world famous and they keep a tradition that is more than 600 years old. They will lead us in a guided meditation and blessing with a chanting ceremony. There will be a session of Q&A that I will lead. Everyone is welcome although we will ask for a donation that will be split between the monks and Wayside. Seating is limited to the number we can safely sit in our hall so I’d appreciate it if you could email maxine.schellhorn@thewaysidechapel.com to let us know you’re coming.

Keep reading here.

Dear Inner Circle,

A lovely man who has a bit of a gift for finding the hard way to do anything, really owes his life to Alcoholics Anonymous. The man was born into alcoholism, literally, on a park bench because his mum couldn’t get herself to hospital. All his life, the foetal alcohol spectrum disorder made everything hard. Schooling was impossible and so now as an adult any reading and writing is a major obstacle. Thanks to AA, this fellow has been dry for at least 10 years and he’s undertaken a lot of coaching to try and gain some of the opportunities lost to him because of an alcoholic daze that lasted from birth until about 30 years of age. I’m a big fan of AA because I’ve known many people, like this bloke, for whom it was just the right answer. People who are immersed in it tend to develop a language all of their own. Often in a conversation, this beautiful man will launch into “Rule 5” or some other aspect of AA. He’s inclined to quote “the big book” quite often. Yesterday he was talking about a situation that is really testing him. “Like the big book says,” he told me, “Patience is a virtue”. We talked about what he might do to help move his situation forward a bit and at one point he reminded me about, “A stitch in time… like it says in the big book”. We talked about how so many things lately had not worked out as planned and I chipped in, “Well, like it says in the big book, ‘shit happens.’” He looked a bit surprised and asked me where such a thing was said in the big book. Having misquoted the bible a half dozen times now he asks me for references! “Well,” I said, “I think the big book says that ‘shit happens’ from cover to cover.’” There was an embarrassing pause before a joke was detected.

Walking into the building this morning I recognised a vaguely familiar face. We stood face to face before I realised that I knew the man quite well. “My Lord,” I said. “I couldn’t recognise you...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

To sit in my office is sometimes an act of significant courage. A big strapping man sat with me this week and struggled to tell me of his childhood. He was brought up in a string of religious children’s institutions where fear and brutality were constantly present. Over the years he’s hated anything that had the mildest sniff of religion because it just wakes up memories of loathing. An ocean of resentful feelings filled the room and yet he was bewildered that he had come to a minister to talk and seek understanding. He told me at one point that in those years, most of the beltings he received were from ministers. He told me how he had come to a church service once with his socks turned down. It was against the rules and the minister thrashed him and sent him to spend the morning in the toilet. My heart broke. I could see the little boy as I was hearing the story.

I once would have tried to explain away the violence against children perpetrated in our culture and especially that of religious institutions. I used to tell myself that those who ran such places meant well or that the world was different then. But brutality is brutality no matter the ideology or theology of the brute. We’ve been shocked in recent years by a Royal Commission exposing our blindness to the sexual abuse of children, but as hard as it might be to contemplate, all of this was a subset of a more brutal history.

Keep reading here.

Dear Inner Circle,

Anzac Day was a special one for me this year. I spent several days moving around the various battlefields on the Western Front where thousands of Australian soldiers lost their lives and where thousands were so traumatised that they spent the rest of their lives suffering from what we would now call, Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. My father used to visit old soldiers at Concord Hospital when I was just a school boy. I saw men in the 1960s still hiding under beds and shaking uncontrollably. That was when Dad first explained "shell shock" to me and it was my first attempt to understand the phenomenon that still today causes me to struggle.

At Fromelles I found the headstone of Private C Myers who enlisted at 15 years. After failing his first attempt to enlist, he applied again as C Morgan, this time successfully. Fromelles was his first taste of battle and at 16 years, the end of his life. There are more than 2,000 cemeteries dotted over France and Belgium as a result of World War I and in one place I visited, there were over 45,000 mostly young men buried.

Keep reading here.

Dear Inner Circle,

Last week I lived for a few days in the old Jewish quarter of Krakow in Poland and spent a day walking through Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is no sense in which you could say this visit was enjoyable even though years of reading came to life for me. It's one thing to learn history and another to walk the ground, to climb the steps, to feel the barbed wire and to stand in the torture chambers of Block 11.

I walked from the Judenramp to the gas chambers. It's a tough thing to learn that children were judged to have no utility so most of them were sent to death without delay. It could be argued that death was a greater mercy than the life suffered by those whose labour was considered to have some value. I went to the building where Dr Mengele did his work. I remembered reading how this man scolded an assistant because he had smudged a record that Mengele, "had constructed with such love". Ponder how a person could murder infant twins without a thought but be concerned about a smudge on his beloved records. I looked into the rooms where Sonderkommandos lived. It was prisoners who did most of the work that made this camp run. A fate much worse than death.

Keep reading here.

Dear Inner Circle,

Have you ever listened to three entirely unrelated conversations, all directed at you, at the same time? This is my occupational hazard. Such moments are most disarmingly absurd when one of the discussions reaches a point where some question is asked and I’m expected to make a response. Although all three men were sitting at the same table and all three were talking at top speed, no one was even vaguely aware that two other conversations were taking place at the same moment and all directed toward the one person, me. It seemed like this stream of disconnect could go on for a long time when suddenly I was shocked to hear one of these men directly address another, “You stole my phone you low life c***”. As the first bit of direct communication to happen at this table in thirty minutes, I was surprised. I wondered what kind of response person A could possibly be expecting from person B to whom he directed his allegation. Perhaps he was expecting, “Golly gosh you’re right. I stole your phone. Here it is.” Perhaps some direct communication that was a little less accusatory may have made a more useful approach. Alas, the response came back, “Don’t you call me a c***, you c***.”

You’ll be surprised to know that the above conversation escalated into a parallel universe of human contradiction. Both young men stood up and the volume rose as the content of the language sunk ever lower. You might not think there was much room for the tenor of the language to go down, but trust me, it did. “You’re accusing me of taking your phone, so let’s take this outside.” One man’s embodied contradiction was so profound that his arms extended backwards as if he was showing restraint while his chest was puffed forwards and used to confront and attack Mr A. In the complete miscommunication that followed, there was one moment revealing a capacity to think and be coherent. Mr A said, “And if we go outside and you beat my head in, it will...[read more]