Dear Inner Circle,

Walking through the café yesterday I saw a man spot me and raise his hand high. His rather lovely face lit up because someone had told him I was too busy to come down and have lunch with him. I was too busy but suddenly my agenda evaporated. It’s funny how an authentic meeting between two people just melts away everything else. In my social work days I was a fanatic for a system of analysis called, “transactional analysis”. For quite some time, every encounter I had with people was analysed according to this system that imposed a framework of meaning onto every act of communication. At the time I didn’t see it, but it caused me to develop a language that was not really human. It caused me to be more interested in finding meaning than finding the person in front of me. I was a problem solver in those days. My naïve religious outlook back then was that Jesus must have been a social worker too. In due course I could see that Jesus was nothing like a social worker and no matter how you analyse his encounter with the woman at the well, he simply broke all the rules. He’d certainly not get a job in any agency I know of. Anyway, this lovely face lit up as he bought me lunch. With great ceremony he handed me $20, telling me that it was a debt he owed me. I had no memory of any debt. He explained that he was robbed at an ATM about a month ago and I lent him $20 to get him through that weekend. I know this man just lives on a small allowance that the public trustee provides and so I said, “But there is no need for you to buy me lunch.” His reply was, “But that’s what friends do”. Lunch was a celebration of many good things.

So our High Court ruled yesterday that our government does not commit an illegal act when it keeps people in detention overseas. I have some understanding of the complexities facing our government when it comes to controlling our borders, I’m just bewildered and wondering what happened to the Australia I...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

It's funny how when a new little person comes into your life, you don’t have to redistribute your reservoir of love but rather your heart enlarges and you discover reserves of love you never dreamed about. This week Liz, who has worked with Wayside in a most effective way as our Partnerships Manager, brought in her new baby, Juliette. There is suddenly more to Liz now. There is more to us now too. My heart has also enlarged to include a little boy named Flynn. He’s only four weeks old but he and I were deep in discussion last week. He began to make a little expression of discomfort and so his three-year-old big sister walked up close to me and said in a confidential manner, “He doesn’t like you!”

When I conduct a wedding, I usually try to evaporate briskly and discretely after the ceremony. Often, however, I get caught by people who want to thank me for the ceremony or simply say, “hi”. I think weddings are beautiful, sacred things but can also be quite fun. After an enjoyable ceremony last week I was soon in a huddle with people. An immaculately groomed elderly man shook my hand and said, “I used to be a devout Christian and now I’m agnostic”. I said, “I bet you’re a nicer man as an agnostic than as a devout believer”. It wasn’t what he expected me to say. “Well,” I said, responding to his shocked expression, “real faith has a large dose of ’not knowing’. If ‘devout believer’ means that you were part of a ‘God franchise’ then God, you, me and the world are better served by your agnosticism.” The pursuit of certainty and especially the illusory possession of certainty works against our humanity. In recent days my social media is full of people spitting chips about religion. Lots of people revert to a kind of ‘my little pony’ type philosophy, leaping to the nearest piano to sing, “Imagine there’s no heaven, it’s easy if you try…” But we’re all being damaged not so much by people...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

A state of blind fear overtook me the first time I had to conduct a funeral with zero information about the deceased person. I’ve had to do it so often now that I’ve learned to take my queues from the people in front of me. Normally at a Wayside funeral, plenty of people are willing to speak about the life of the deceased person – even those who have never met the person are often keen to share with us how they might have felt, should they have met them; it’s an endearing feature of a Wayside funeral. At the funeral I conducted on Monday however, not too many of those gathered knew the woman deceased. They had gathered instead to support her partner, who is a softly spoken, gentle man, grieving deeply for the loss of his loved one. If our dear man couldn’t speak, I was going to be in trouble.

We discovered that the woman and her partner had met at Wayside. They fell in love and ran off to the country where they enjoyed each other’s company until she became terminally ill. The man is a character out of a Henry Lawson short story. He’s a man who for many years has lived out of his car when in the city, but spends most of his time in the countryside, travelling from farm to farm, doing odd jobs until he’s saved enough to travel on to another farm. One look at this rather short man and you know he’d be more at home around a camp fire, smoking and telling stories than living in the city. He has the most faithful little dog in the world. If he commands the dog to ‘stay’, it will wait all day until the man returns. The woman was escaping domestic violence when they met. She brought an entirely unexpected dose of colour and fun into our dear friend's life. He talked of all manner of animals who shared their living space. He spoke of sheep with painted toe nails. He spoke of an adopted goanna that would knock on the door with its nose when it needed attention. We laughed, we cried and we held hands around the altar. We said...[read more]

If ever a cluster of errors combined to make a bad policy, it must be the provision of religious chaplains to Public schools. The mere provision of money only guarantees the creation of vested interest making rational consideration of the issues difficult. There is a real danger that we have witnessed a deal that will go badly for the Federal government in the longer term and also for the church and Christianity.

The key issue in the provision of any service into our schools must be the question of minimum qualifications required. If a person has the appropriate degree and experience to deal with the complexities of a modern school environment, the question of religion or lack thereof, would be of little interest.

What purpose could be served for the funding government by favouring the appointment of people of a religious commitment? Whatever the answer to that question, it seems to be way outside of the concern of education. If no particular purpose can be identified, the exercise looks a like a vote buying exercise, aimed at the fundamentalist end of the Christian church. Religious chaplaincy in Public schools began as an initiative of the Howard Government that in its last term made an art form of vote buying.

The church too has made an error. It has been bought cheaply. The program remunerates the chaplains at about half the rate the church itself would pay for an ordained person and at about half the rate a psychologist would cost the State. Not withstanding that there may be many stories of well intentioned, good people making a worthwhile contribution to particular schools; a policy to pay peanuts is a policy to employ monkeys. If government really believe in this program, they should fund it properly. If the church believed in the program, they should insist that it be funded properly. It looks like a quick fix from every angle.

Even if you believe the State should fund some kind of religious presence in schools, there can be little to justify...[read more]