Dear Inner Circle,

Growing up in Australia in the 1980s as a kid with dark skin wasn’t a lot of fun. The distance between the gate and the classroom was a long journey if the school bully was in a bad mood. I soon developed a lens set for rejection, which is a lonely place from which to view the world. It’s also an unreliable filter as it sometimes leads one to mistake moves made in love for rejection. As I walk into Wayside I see a lot of people with the same lenses on, all with plenty of good reasons not to trust anyone. Yet sometimes we see gambles being taken, and that’s where the real journey towards life can begin.

Yesterday, in our newly renovated café, I searched for a place to sit while delicately balancing my overloaded plate of lunch. A kind face beckoned me over. This man is usually eager to tell me a terrible joke but today he just looked terrible and frightened. As I sat down he shared how his body is slowly succumbing to a long term degenerative disorder. The process has quickened in recent months and now even simple tasks are burdensome and painful. We sat for a moment in silence. Then he looked at me and smiled, “It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I really love caramel cake, did you know that?” I got the hint. We hastily planned a party together – luckily everyone on his invite list is at Wayside most days. This guy shares a birthday with my mum and I love that he will be spoiled and lavishly celebrated here, just as much as my mum will be down in Melbourne. Where there is high risk, there can also be high reward.

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Dear Inner Circle,

One evening this week, I waited back to meet a young couple to sign forms prior to their wedding. Before they arrived, I did a quick walk around our building. The ground floor was busy, with a steady stream of people coming through the door in various states of crisis. One of our volunteers said, “There must be something odd in the air today”. The showers were busy with a queue of people waiting. The chapel had been turned into a pop-up café, while the much anticipated renovations are taking place in our regular café. It was rush hour for our volunteers, who were doing their best to serve quality food to an impatient crowd. To top off a busy floor, a game of bingo was being conducted by our Twilight Team. Diana, the team leader of our Twilight Team is nothing short of a miracle worker. The evening hours used to be our toughest time of day and thanks to Diana and her team, these same hours are often the highlight of our day.

On the first floor was a team from Credit Suisse holding a Community Dinner. These bankers really know how to engage with people. Under the guidance of the one-in-a-million Rob Holt, this team don’t just serve food, they share a meal with homeless people. If my memory is right, Credit Suisse have been sending a team here once a month for well over ten years! The dinner was noisy, but it also was buzzing with life.

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Dear Inner Circle,

After much consideration and with the sincerest belief that the next ten years should be our strongest, I have informed the Board of Wayside and the Uniting Church that now is the right time to start looking for the new person to lead Wayside. This is not a sudden decision, but the result of consultation and careful planning. Uniting Ministers negotiate their placements every five years. Currently, I have served for 14 years and my term is due to cease at the end of 2018. Succession is a most important matter and given the history and trajectory of Wayside, it is vital that we achieve a smooth generational handover. Making the decision now allows us to conduct an appropriate transition.

I have made the decision knowing in my head and heart that this is the right time.

When I was first employed at Wayside our building was rubble, our finances were difficult at best, and we had a tiny team of staff. We have come so far. With the help of volunteers, staff and our supporters, the next generation of Wayside’s leaders can take our mission further and deeper into the community. This is important, not just for the sake of Wayside as an organisation, but for the sake of the people we serve and for the people whose humanity flourishes when they get involved with us to create a community of no ‘us and them’.

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Dear Inner Circle,

A relationship exists between humour and suffering. It’s not that suffering is funny, but that there is something awesome about the human spirit that learns through suffering to recognise the humour. It’s the joy of declaring that the “emperor has no clothes,” or the joy that comes from just the sheer presence of others. At Wayside, it is among Aboriginal people that you will most often find sharp cries of pain but also the resounding sound of laughter. This week I was invited to our ‘Mob Lunch’, run by our Aboriginal Program Manager, Mon. This weekly event is so much more than just an opportunity to eat a meal, it’s a marvellous exercise in community development and brings together rich diversity of stories and people sitting side by side. I ended up next to a fellow with a dry sense of humour who began to tell me how to cook an emu. I’m wasn’t sure how seriously to take the cooking advice but I asked questions like, “How do you catch an emu?” A detailed explanation was given about how you entice an emu to come to you. He then described how to leave the animals above the fire, so that when smoke emerged from its mouth, you’d know it was cooked. Still unsure if any of this was serious, I asked how the cooked emu tasted. My mate said, “Oh, it tastes just like wombat!” I think when I left the room, I might have been the joke.

Minutes ago, I was in our café. I began a conversation with a lovely bloke who started to share how deeply he’d been in the grip of depression. We were joined by another lovely old fellow who jumped into the conversation. His voice is rather loud and so it was not a contribution that could be ignored. The new fellow to the table was not in any way psychotic and yet his contribution bore no connection to the conversation into which he jumped. I asked several probing questions in the hope that there might have been a connection that I couldn’t quite make out. There wasn’t. We were then...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

Grandchildren give away family secrets without knowing it. One of my babies asked as we got into the car, “Can we go speedy of one hundred?” My reply was something like, “It’s my job to keep you safe sweetheart, so we won’t be going too fast”. She answered that with, “Well, Mummy does!” Another time, our four-year-old hopped into her seat and said, “Shall we keep our windows up so that people don’t hear us yell, ‘IDIOT!’”

Just ten minutes ago, a tall fellow in a large cowboy hat approached me out the front of Wayside. I expected him to bellow at me but instead a soft voice said, “I need a blessing. Can you do that?” We walked to the Chapel and sat awkwardly looking at one another. In these situations, I’m always shy about leading people to believe in magic. Any blessing is just a feature of a relationship. With some trepidation I asked, “Why are you needing a blessing?” I expected to hear a story of a looming court date or some health crisis or even just a naive hope that good can be conjured, like a rabbit out of a hat. To my surprise the softly-spoken man said, “I just want to know there is something outside of me; something bigger than me”. We held hands while I recited some ancient words. The big bloke seemed relieved and thanked me. We’d never met before today, but we both walked away changed and lifted.

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Dear Inner Circle,

A young man could see that I was trying to leave last night even though there were plenty of people who were determined to have a few minutes with me before I took off. The fellow made a loud announcement about how I was being called away to something urgent (he had no idea where I was going) and put his arm around me to assist my exit onto Hughes Street. He decided to walk with me to the corner, to fill me in on some news he was keen to share. We turned the corner and began the walk up towards the fountain and he kept walking with me. I said, “I thought you were just coming to the corner”. “Yeah,” he said, “Didn’t you see those coppers?” There were two policemen walking on the other side of the road. My mate said to me, “If you change direction in the sight of cops, they just think something is wrong and they follow you wherever you go.” You can have this tip for free - don’t change direction when in the sight of cops.

Twenty years ago, I helped a woman find a spot in a refuge. She was fleeing from a history of domestic violence. I remember this so well because the woman, who was softly spoken and seemed to exude kindness, only spoke Polish. She had a four-year-old son who spoke fluent English and Polish. All our communication happened through this little boy. Speaking to the distraught mother through the skill of her little boy caused me to be in awe of the child before me. At just four years old, you could see the goodness in this little kid. I’ve lost touch with the family but have heard indirectly that the mother had settled well, that she was a good manager of money and had found a comfortable house and made friends with many neighbours. I had heard that the boy had grown into a fine man who continued to show the same care for his mum. This was a fine young man, who had developed an addiction. It meant he never had money, even though he was always in work. He never stole from anyone and endlessly supported...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,
A gorgeous Aboriginal lady stopped me in the street this morning. “You know I’m a spiritual woman, don’t you?” “Yes. I know it and I love it,” I replied. “Well,” she said, “Lately I’ve been dreaming about you. I saw some long grass and you were laying down in it. As I was looking at you, you turned into a butterfly, a white butterfly, and then you flew off into a rainbow”. After a bit of a pause she said, “I don’t think you’re going to be with us for long”. We both paused for a bit while her kindly eyes penetrated deeply into my soul. “That day will be a bit like falling in love,” I said. “How do you mean?” “Well, when you fall in love, you never really know what you’re getting into but you know every cell of your being is being called and you just trust that it is being called to something good”. She started to smile. “I don’t know if I’ve got a long time or a short time but I think the day I fly off into a rainbow will be a good day”. Her face broke into the broadest smile and she said, “For me too”.

After the lovely moment shared with this Aboriginal woman, I turned to walk on to Wayside, and she called out, “Can you help me?” She rarely misses an opportunity to ask me for money. I opened my wallet, quite confident that it was empty and was shocked to find I had ten dollars. “Ten dollars would be good,” she said. “Gosh,” I said, “How much might this have cost me if you had good news?”

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Dear Inner Circle,

Our politicians well know that if they issued a postal vote on the question of ‘capital punishment’, many of the people would prefer we return to the dark ages. Thankfully, this issue doesn’t dominate us and divide us because a prior generation of politicians exercised leadership. No matter the result of our current exercise on marriage equality, I suspect we’ll pay a high price and suffer divisions and hurt that will linger for years.

At best, this exercise will tell our leaders how we feel, as if that were a sure guide to the right decision. Remember it was democracy that killed Socrates. A jury of 500 citizens found by clear majority that Socrates was worthy of death. A win for the democratic process deprived the world of its finest and clearest voice.

Not all who oppose this change are bigots, homophobes or even remotely religious. Not all who want the change are anti-religious or take any joy from merely overturning age old traditions. This is not a contest between lovers and haters but a cultural shift whose origins lie in a web of unnoticed or forgotten drifts in this highly fluid world of ours. People of good will are on both sides of the fence we are building.

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Dear Inner Circle,

A flash-looking bicycle circled around me and came to a skilful stop at the fence of our front garden. Only when the fellow got off the bike did I recognise a face that has been absent at Wayside for some time. The young man threw his arms around me and then moved to our deck in a gesture that showed he was exhausted. In just a second I made up several stories in my head about where this fellow had been. I looked at his sophisticated bike and began to wonder how he’d obtained such an expensive thing. In two seconds, I’d constructed a story of prison and a bike that had been “borrowed”. Thankfully I didn’t ask any questions before he started to tell me how he’d been working delivering furniture. He told me that it was the heaviest work that he could have ever imagined. He told me of lumping insanely heavy lounges up flights of skinny stairs. Eventually I said, looking at his bike, “Well at least you’ve got something to show for all that hard work.” “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve got jelly legs and a heart attack.”

If I were a rich man, I would have been at the Menin Gate in Belgium this week to remember the hundred-year anniversary of the battle known by most as “Passchendaele” or what some books call, “The Third Battle of Ypres”. In 1917, more rain fell on this battlefield than had fallen for seventy years, creating a version of hell unimagined before this time. Men and horses that fell into the mud could not be pulled out and a slow drowning followed, often as the soldier begged his mates to put a bullet in his head to speed up the process. The rain was so heavy that General Haig noted that it spoiled a tea party he held for his highest-ranking officers. Half a million people died in a fight to take a site of no strategic value, which was abandoned just weeks after it was taken. I stood at the Menin Gate a few years ago and thankfully no one tried to be wise. No one in uniform tried to say that something...[read more]

Dear Inner Circle,

Botanic names have always hit my ears as unintelligible noise. My admiration for gardening guru Costa Georgiadis is profound and yet my brain seems to anticipate any utterance of botanic names with an attitude of, “Caution: this is going to be unintelligible.” To my horror last week at our Sunday gathering, our text likened life to a garden in which there were both fine plants and vigorous weeds. In the metaphor, the weeds aren’t necessarily other people but patterns of behaviour that threaten the health of good plants, stealing the nutrients from the soil.

Finally, the hour had come for me to learn and use some botanic names. I discovered that the weeds referred to in our text have names. “Now see what you made me do” is a common weed. In the years when I was a prison chaplain, I think I saw evidence of this weed every day. This weed thrives when a good plant fears it is destined to fail but cannot and will not face its fear. Instead it looks for an opportunity to fail when there is a lesser plant around that can be blamed for the failure. Another common weed is, “Ah ha! I got you!” This pattern of behaviour causes healthy plants to be fixated on the wrong doing of others. Imagine being short changed by five dollars and then working this wrong doing into every conversation for years to come. This plant can irritate an otherwise healthy plant or it can grow strong and eventually choke a good plant to death. Another common weed is named, “I was only trying to help”. This weed does its work when someone really tries to impose their will on another but never admits their bald desire to impose their will. When there is push back or rebellion, the act of power is confused and camouflaged because, “I was only trying to help”. Another weed we see a lot is called, “Courthouse”. This weed is evidenced when in relationships we have a “judge” an “accused” and a “prosecutor”. I was called once to a home where a man...[read more]