Wendell Berry speaks at a time of grief

On the day of the funeral service for my mother, after I had led the service, I came across the following poem from Wendell Berry's collection A Timbered Choir": The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997 that spoke to me.

A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood
Who gave our rest a haven.
Now fallen, they are given
To labor and distress.
These times we know much evil, little good
To steady us in faith
And comfort when our losses press
Hard on us, and when we choose,
In panic or despair or both,
To keep what we will lose.


For we are fallen like the trees, our peace
Broken, and so we must
Love where we cannot trust,
Trust where we cannot know,
And must await the wayward-coming grace
That joins living and dead,
Taking us where we would not go - 
Into the boundless dark.
When what was made has been unmade
The Maker comes to his work.
(A Timbered Choir": The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, II 1985)

Gay marriage?

I have long been promising myself, and anyone else interested in my views to attempt to think through my confusion on the "debate" over "gay marriage". Two deaths in the family in the past month, my mother and my father-in-law, have meant that I haven't had the time or energy to deliver on that promise.

By way of a place marker for my thinking that opens up the public policy questions is the following observation by Symon Hill in a recent column on the Ekklesia website.

At the Ekklesia thinktank, we have long argued that celebrating marriage and making commitments should be separated from the (arguably less important) process of gaining legal recognition. This would mean that people could carry out ceremonies with personal, social and – if important to them – religious significance, with legal registration being a separate process. This would allow supporters and opponents of same-sex marriage to act on their beliefs, to promote them, to publicise them and to seek to persuade others, without being able to use the law to enforce their views on those who disagree. 

Producing outrage

Reading an essay by the sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow on Producing the Sacred: An Essay on Public Religion I was struck by the following comments:

In an otherwise secular society the church must in fact be different. It must do strange things to provide a place where the voice of God can at least be imagined if not actually heard. Clergy do well when they make outrageous statements and love and forgiveness, and congregations do well when they make the even more outrageous attempt to put these statements into practice. (p.58)

Update on High Court decision

Interesting commentary on the High Court decision - from the legal and policy perspective George Williams discussion in the Age highlights the potential shift in commonwealth/state relationships. An interesting discussion from an atheist perspective is provided in New Matilda which concludes with the following comments:

 Australia’s proud history of having a commonsense attitude towards church and state relations remains untarnished. While law nerds scramble to come to terms with a tweaked understanding of Executive Power, the New Atheist crowd can pat themselves on the back for their almost completely pointless legal victory.

High Court Decision and the National School Chaplaincy Program

The High Court has named down its judgement on the constitutional validity of the National School Chaplaincy Program (NCSP). For news reports see: the Age and the ABC. The full judgement is available here. Summary here.

The first thing to note is that the High Court was unanimous in rejecting the appeal to Section 116 of the Constitution as grounds for ruling the program to be invalid. The Court by implication upheld the previous lines of interpretation of Section 116. This would seem to close down any possibility of moving towards the United States jurisprudence on this issue.

The Court found the program is unconstitutional because it exceeds the Commonwealth's funding powers. According to the report in the Age ...

One of Australia's leading constitutional lawyers George Williams said the implications of the case were massive and could potentially affect any program directly funded by the federal government.
This would include the local government Roads Recovery program and even direct funding of private schools.
''This sets down very significant limits on the ability of the Commonwealth to spend money,'' Professor Williams said.
''I suspect this decision will embolden people to challenge Commonwealth expenditure in other areas.''
Professor Williams said that, while the Commonwealth could still provide funding, it may have to be through the states, rather than funding programs directly, which had been its preference.
''This may lead the Commonwealth to engage in a major rethink of its budgetary processes - what it spends money on and how it does that,'' he said.
"This is very likely to be the biggest High Court case of the year." Age

I have not yet read the judgement, and may change my mind after I have done so, but I would have thought that an alternative way of providing a basis for expenditure on such activities would be for grants programs in future to be authorised by legislation. This judgement has profound implications for public policy development and implementation that extend way beyond the specific program that was the subject of the High Court appeal. No longer can Government simply make a decision in Cabinet, make an announcement and have the public service prepare program documentation for a quick roll out.

Whether it be a matter of developing a legislative framework, or of negotiation with the states and territories the time frame for the roll out of new grant programs is likely to be substantially extended. This decision is a real "game changer" in the field of public policy and public administration.

As for the chaplaincy program, my guess at this early stage is that both possible routes to further funding have attractions and problems. Transfer of funding to the states and territories, under for example a National Partnership Program would put the program beyond the reach of further constitutional appeal but would open the program to possibilities of cost shifting and reduce Commonwealth control over the structure of the program, plus possible delays while the transfer is negotiated with the states and territories. Legislation to authorise the program could be fast tracked and would be likely to have support from the Opposition.

Watching the decision making on how the Government handles this decision and how quickly it makes changes to grant programs will be interesting to watch. In the meantime the comments by the interested parties on both sides of the chaplaincy case display a degree of naivety as to what the case really establishes. Mr Williams might quickly find that the Chaplaincy program is re-established on a basis that makes it highly likely that it will be entrenched even more firmly than it was. Comments by Jim Wallace from the ACL that the decision is merely a technical one, shows a blithe disregard for the complexities that may result for groups seeking funding under this program in future as a result of this decision.

Remembering Anzac Day

There has been much discussion across all forms of the media about "remembering Anzac Day", or was it "remembering" the soldiers who died and were wounded, firstly at Gallipoli and then World War 1 of who died for their nation, or who paid "the ultimate sacrifice". Note the theologically loaded language here. Christians should have problems with this term. It brings us back within whispering distance of attempts to explain the significance of Jesus' death as political victim of non-resistant messianic encounter with the Roman imperial power.

But I digress. All in all last week while there was a great deal about "remembering", much of it fairly vague until the consensus about who and what we were "remembering" was brought under question. First Nations peoples wanted to "remember"  those of their nations who were killed in the occupation of this country and in the frontier wars. They were firmly ruled out of the official process.  Previously women's attempts to" remember" those who were victims of rape in war were also excluded from participation in the official public ceremonies of "remembering". So who gets "remembered" was contested, though the apparent official guardians of the scope of our "remembering", the RSL, ensured that the boundaries were suitably policed.

But what are we doing in our "remembering"? There was, to judge from letters to the editor of the Canberra Times, very little clarity, or community agreement about the significance and meaning of the public ceremonies of "remembering". And this is interesting because it makes clear that the whole controversy relates to a public process, or ritual. Individuals after all can stop on any occasion of significance to them and "remember" those of their family and friends who were killed or suffered in war without official sanction. This "remembering"at an individual or family level involves a bringing someone to mind, and grieving for their suffering, that they did not go on to live life to its full extent, in some way or another, and that for those who were known personally to us, that we have been deprived of their presence.

But controversy there was about meaning. For some it was a moment to affirm the horrors of war and say "never again". For others it was about affirming the significance of the "sacrifice" of those who were killed and acknowledging how much we "owed" them, how we should be prepared to offer ourselves to our country in gratitude. The language used was religious to its core. It made very clear that as William Cavanaugh has argued that "the holy" has migrated from the church to the nation/state.

Christians should take note of this migration and be prepared to assess the claims of the state when they come clothed with the aura of "the holy" and the language of sacrifice. After all according to the earliest Christians, Christ's death meant the end of sacrifice and its claims on human life. The primary "remembering" to which Christians are called is to the meal shared which celebrates Christ's life, death and resurrection and the end of sacrifice, a meal in which the barriers that would divide those who are "holy" from the "profane" are broken down as we recognise Jesus in the sharing of bread with the stranger.

Reflections on Anzac Day

...A few useful reflections on a variety of perspectives that dug through to varying degrees the prevailing largely unself-critical accounts of Anzac Day.

Stanley Hauerwas in The Sacrifices of War though not directly about Anzac Day provided a good many insights into the character and language of Anzac Day. He makes the important observation that... it is a mistake to focus - as we most often do - only on the sacrifice of life that war requires. War also requires that we sacrifice our normal unwillingness to kill. It may seem odd to call the sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill "a sacrifice," but I will argue that this sacrifice often renders the lives of those who make it unintelligible. The sacrifice of our unwillingness to kill is but the dark side of the willingness in war to be killed.


We are, Hauerwas acknowledges ... fated to kill and be killed because we know no other way to live. But through the forgiveness made possible by the cross of Jesus we are no longer condemned to kill. A people have been created who refuse to resort to the sword that they and those they love might survive. They seek not to survive, but to live in the light of Christ's resurrection.

Bruce Skates in a comment piece in the Age, Gallipoli is a global calamity, argues that The futility of war is best acknowledged by mourning the suffering of all nations, not just our own and draws attention to some of the silences in our celebration.

As we approach the centenary of the Great War, we should remember that Gallipoli was a global calamity, one that claimed the lives of soldiers across the British Empire and the world. And we should go further than that. As the Anzac Correspondent knew all too well, battles don't end when the guns stop firing. In the 1920s, and for decades later, Australia and a dozen other combatant nations lived in the shadow of war. It was not just that war visited grief on countless thousands of communities. The trauma of war was not confined to the battlefield or the casualty lists.

Now is the time to broaden our focus and examine the plight of families and communities who cared for the legion of crippled, blind and insane. ''War-wrecked men'' they were called, and they carried the conflict home to their communities. Sadly, (as Marina Larsson's haunting study of repatriation shows) domestic violence, poverty and alcoholism were as much the legacy of war as the legends many celebrate today. Finally, what of the broken promise of Gallipoli? The men and women who served were told the Great War would be the war to end all wars. What a Great Lie that has been.

It is time to see Gallipoli for what it was: pointless and obscene. It is time to look beyond that narrow beachhead at Anzac Cove, acknowledge the futility of war and mourn the suffering of nations other than our own. The Anzac centenary offers the opportunity for new forms of remembrance that are balanced and inclusive: ''bigger'' and ''more historical'', as our veteran put it. 

Jeff Sparrow doubts that the new forms of remembrance that Skates suggests is not likely. In Memory and the Anti-Politics of Anzac Day. Sparrow explains why. 

Conservatives, and most liberals, tell us that Anzac Day stands above politics. That’s true, in a fashion. But the event’s not apolitical so much as anti-political.

Where Carl von Clausewitz defined war as the continuation of politics by other means, Anzac celebrates the battlefield as a realm entirely removed from political life. The Great War spurred an unprecedented degree of social polarisation in Australia, and yet the obsessive retelling of the Gallipoli landing never corresponds to any equivalent interest in, say, the populace’s remarkable rejection of conscription in two ballots in 1916 and 1917. The Bush/Blair/Howard War on Terror rendered that period more relevant than ever, since obvious parallels can be drawn between the hysterical patriotism of the ‘Freedom Fries’ days and the jingoism during which most Australian cities renamed their streets (if you live in Victoria Street, there’s a pretty good chance it was once called Wilhelm Road), while the state-sanctioned suspicion of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11 corresponds to the widespread persecution of Irish and Catholics in the wake of the Easter Uprising, and the unparalleled freedom granted to security agencies echoes Billy Hughes’ promulgation of the open-ended War Precautions Act.

Yet Anzac Day functions not to celebrate but to prevent that kind of history. It lauds bravery yet allows no room for what Bismarck called ‘civil courage’, a trait that many non-combatants showed in abundance when, against all the newspapers, politicians and mainstream political parties, they opposed the slaughter in Europe.