I remember the fear in Emma’s voice in the room in the Birth Centre. We’re left alone. We have the justification to do anything, but we don’t know what to do. She has a shower. I go to park the car.

I remember the predawn footpaths of Camperdown, the razor topped wall of the Chinese Embassy facing off a childcare centre. Sand spilled across the path from the sandpit. Terrace houses with their arms about each others shoulders, leaning together in sleep. The scarifying gray light.

I remember the deep bath, the french midwife named Emilie ran it but left. It began to overflow. I contemplated flooding the hospital. It sort of felt right. A different midwife came: Heather? Helen? Older, serious. I remember sitting alongside that bath in the dark. The intensely loud ticking of a clock. Dark. Facing me across the bath is Heather/Helen. We don’t make conversation. We sit and occasionally look at each other. Strangers in the most intimate space. Between us is a woman sunk utterly into herself, almost childlike. The pain has drawn down every curtain on her senses. And in a sense she is not there. I am there, the clock reminds me.

Contraction. One Minute. Here we go. You’re going to make it. Breath on my arm, grip my hand. I’ve got you. For one minute she is a fury, an elemental, she rises with the pain, she matches it, she owns it, she drives it before her, she brings the child forward. And then she’s gone again. And I’m sitting alone with strangers in the dark lone waiting clock place.

I remember the hurried ride from the Birth Centre to the Delivery Ward. The baby’s heart rate dropping during contractions. “It’s time to get him out dear.” “You’ve done so well, you just need some help”.
Suddenly there’s a crowded room, bright lights, multiple conversations. A female Asian doctor is at the centre, an Aussie asian, like the kids I work with. Speaking soothingly, explaining. But she’s not the boss, another doctor is hovering at the back somewhere, but she is the silent authority watching. A British anaesthetist. Another midwife, British too. Lots of others, I don’t know what they’re doing. Everyone’s talking at once: soothing, encouraging, explaining, instructing. I exchange a look with Helen/Heather over the row of heads. She’s been shunted to the back of the room. Now we share something: the knowledge that chatter isn’t going to reach into what is happening here.

They decide to suck him out. A Ventouse delivery (I just looked that up… I’ve been calling it a Von Toose. Imagining a crazy German doctor with a plumber’s plunger). The suction cap is attached to the top of his head.

And then he is born.

I remember the weird mushroom cloud on the top of his head from the suction. I thought that mushroom was his head, but then more head kept coming. This child had lived in an imaginary space, only millimetres away from my fingers, pushing back occasionally, but still only potentiality, fiction, of infinite dimensions, impossibly large or small. An unborn child has no dimensions, and then suddenly he does. He is much larger and much smaller than imagined.

I remember realising at that moment that no one else would ever remember this. The doctors don’t remember it, any more than I remember the faces of those I shared a train carriage with this afternoon. Ghostly shadows only hours later, gone irretrievably tomorrow. His coming was background, not event, to their memories. Emma doesn’t remember it, she was it, she couldn’t observe. Nathaniel (he was only named about 10 hrs later, already there are anachronisms) won’t remember, he may imagine it, try to reconstruct it from the stories we tell him. But his birth will be as much imaginary for him as his antenatal existence was for me.

Words matter to me as they didn’t before. When my words fail so, in a small way, does the memory of this beginning.
And as a result… and I’m struggling to express this… I matter to me more than I did before. I am his witness, his story-teller. We have already begun to weave each other out of words (all of us, friends). But I will speak him this beginning.

Is this the progress of life: to know oneself as another… and then Another’s… and another’s father?

He snores unconsciously on my lap while I write to him.

“Throughout my career I’ve been in search of guidance…
… I don’t believe the business of life is obvious…”

- Alain De Botton
Sydney Opera House,
23rd February 2012

Went to see De Botton last night, courtesy of a friend’s spare ticket and too busy wife. I try to cultivate a studied disdain for De Botton’s brand of PopPhil. But honestly, it’s mostly rooted in envy. Who wouldn’t want to swan around the world, basking in the borrowed glory of real philosophers, talking about the Good, the Wise, the Beautiful?

No, that’s unfair and too harsh.
De Botton’s brilliance is one of empathetic understanding. He has an ear for the tragic, for vulnerability, for calling attention to the underpants of life, and he’s an exceptional communicator. He brought all these considerable gifts to bear last night in his lecture, On Religion for Atheists.

For De Botton, the fundamental question, too often overlooked in a culture of free-market consumption, is, “How to Live the Good Life?” The central premise of the lecture (and in his book I imagine), is that world religions have provided remarkable guidance in exploring and answering this question, but that availing ourselves of these religious insights doesn’t require acceptance of all the supernatural mumbo-jumbo that comes along with. He promotes, unashamedly, a ‘pick and mix’ approach. If religions are cultural products (and they are), why don’t we treat them like we do other cultural products? You don’t need to like every song the Beatles recorded to appreciate ‘Hey Jude’. In the same way, you don’t need to accept every tenet of Christianity or Islam to appreciate the beauty of religious art or religious community. There isn’t really much argument beyond this, the rest of the lecture consists of a curator’s tour of the gallery of world religions, highlighting the bits any self-regarding atheist could happily plunder.

The reason that religions have much to teach atheists, according to De Botton, begins with the insight that humans are basically ‘not ok’: the basic human condition is one of vulnerability, fragility, lostness. For De Botton, this is the fundamental truth behind the Christian doctrine of original sin. And it’s a truth that New Atheism, proclaimed from the High Tables of Oxbridge, abjectly fails to reckon with. The modernist humanistic project has been altogether too quick to leave us to our own devices and what is needed is a thoroughgoing reappraisal of our need for an education in the disciplines of living well. Religions understand this, they understand that education is not about skilling people for tasks, but a process of moral formation and guidance to help us navigate the twin uncertainties of our world and our hearts. The rationalist education produces better hairdressers; the religious, better people.

De Botton’s sampling at the bain-marie of religion is guided by his desire to introduce atheists into these effective practices of moral formation. In order to address the human frailties of memory, will, and desire – frailties that ensure that even when we know the good life, we fail to consistently live it – religions apply techniques of habituation, exhortation, organisation, attention to desire, attention to sociality. De Botton spends time glorying in the power of liturgical calendar to ensure we spend time in reflection on virtue (a theme close to my own heart); on the sermon as an art of exhortation (compared with its bloodless alternative, the ‘lecture’); on the power of religions to build genuine community rather than mere voluntary associations; to produce art that moves our hearts toward virtue. All of this was delivered with eloquence, pathos, humour.

At this point, I was fairly sure I’d entered into a bizarre parallel universe. The crowd, composed to a measurable degree of those militant atheists who lay their coats down in the street for Richard Dawkins, were lapping this up. I kid you not, one man a few seats to the right of my own, regularly punctuated De Botton’s points with enthusiastic cheers of agreement: ‘Yes! That’s Right! We need that!’ Possibly the most strange moment was when De Botton started talking up the priesthood, commending the idea of having people devoted to guiding us through the various stages of life, providing counsel, conversation, ritual, consolation. He lamented the fact that all that secular society has been able to provide as an alternative is the psychotherapist, ‘and they’re all sitting around in their bedrooms’. Now, my impression is that for most New Atheists, the word ‘priest’ is synonymous with ‘paedophilic leeches upon the common weal’.  But the crowd swallowed this down with nary a peep.

The lecture ended and I sat there for a while, soaking in the warm glow of a satiated crowd. And I have to admit, I enjoyed it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a ‘non-religious’ person speak so empathetically and insightfully about the value of practices of Christian community. Nothing De Botton said surprised me, after all, he’s describing things that I love. I think the basic ‘philosophical’ anthropology underlying religious practices in a whole variety of traditions is far more sophisticated and true to the human condition than the thin soup offered by atheist alternatives. It’s not hard to see why: most ‘New’ atheism consists in a frenzied yet parasitically dependent denial of religion. New Atheism doesn’t really have a positive philosophical anthropology, just negations. For that reason, it’s usually not worth getting out of bed to slap down.

Ultimately, I’ve decided that I agree with De Botton’s fundamental thesis, I don’t think you need to buy into all the claims of a religion in order to appreciate that it might have some great insights about living well. I’m an evangelical Christian, but that doesn’t stop me appreciating the peacefulness of a Buddhist garden. I differ from De Botton in understanding that what I love about the peacefulness of a Buddhist garden is a reflection of the fundamental goodness with which God created the world. A goodness so abounding that it is refracted through all sorts of human cultural endeavours, including religions that I happen to think are profoundly mistaken; refracted even through De Botton’s ‘tragic’ atheism.

Strangely, I found within De Botton’s praise of religion a rather compelling critique of certain versions of conservative evangelicalism. Too frequently, conservative evangelicalism operates with a truncated theological anthropology. As a product of the rationalist Enlightenment, evangelicalism frequently forgets the power of exactly the kinds of practices that De Botton commends: we jettison liturgical habituation to the truths of the gospel, we fail to engage with the fact that we are creatures of desire, of community, who thrill to beauty, who are inescapably embodied. If the full galleries at the Opera House last night are anything to go by, people are craving the kinds of things that make church ‘churchy’. Ironically, in our passion to make churches as welcoming to outsiders as possible we actively trash our rich heritage of these practices until the church gathering becomes indistinguishable from the philosophical lecture, apart from some vestigial (embarrassed) singing.

Now, I’ve praised Alain De Botton, but the reality is, I do have some questions. Rather serious questions actually…

It begins with my nagging sense that the kinds of practices which De Botton most likes about religions are ‘disciplinary’ practices. Following a liturgy, participating in a community, submitting to the authority of a scripture, are all, in an important sense, ‘non-voluntary’. Religious practices universally involve an element of self-surrender, of submission and sacrifice. We scoff at ‘pick and mix’ versions of religion and call them inauthentic precisely because they miss this basic condition. De Botton is right to identify that religions operate with a sense of the fragility of the human condition, but it is a fragility in the face of something transcendent, something that is in principle not capable of subjugation to human powers. What De Botton views as a set of ‘therapies’ for the fragility of the human condition (practices that ultimately circle back to terminate upon the acting subject), religions view as disciplines whose ultimate aim is to properly orient and prepare the subject for an encounter with something larger.

Now it would be possible on this basis to say to Alain: ‘you haven’t really experienced religion or these religious practices that you affirm until you’ve experienced them as disciplinary practices, that is, until you’ve genuinely submitted yourself to them as a mode of acknowledging your accountability before the divine/transcendent.’ Now, the mode of submission and accountability required to genuinely experience these practices is in principle incompatible with the ‘pick and mix’ mode of appropriation of these practices for a humanistic end, and therefore, it is in principle impossible for an atheist to genuinely experience the full value of these religious practices. He is condemned to watch from outside the window.

To which De Botton would reply (and he did reply to a question along these lines): ‘You’re probably right. However, even if I’m only getting a pale imitation of the full value of the religious practices, what I’m getting is good enough for me and for my purposes of moral formation.’ To which I take my hat off. It’s a very good rejoinder.

However, that’s not really my problem with his programme. I don’t really care whether De Botton has the full-strength or lite-beer experience of religion. What I do worry about is that if these practices are all inherently ‘disciplinary’, if they require a form of submission from the practitioner, then replicating them in atheistic contexts creates the possibility of terrible interpersonal abuses. Let me explain:

Religions are paternalistic, it’s a function of the underlying belief that we are frail and in need of guidance. De Botton acknowledged this out the outset and even remarked on the tendency of religions to address adherents as ‘children’. But in most religions (most of the time) this paternalism is held in check and stopped from becoming a terrifying totalitarianism by the belief that humans have a fundamental accountability to God. Particularly in Christianity, a philosophical anthropology of human frailty is counterpoised with a theology of divine sufficiency, of redemptive grace. This is precisely what atheistic humanism lacks. As long as it refuses to admit human frailty, atheism is merely a weird and implausible intellectual fad. But as soon as atheistic humanism adopts a philosophical anthropology of human frailty that it cannot counterpoise against a transcendent sufficiency (and it can’t in principle because of its humanistic commitments) then it struggles to avoid drifting further and further toward a programme of unrestrained social engineering: a paternalism that becomes totalitarian. Humans are left to becomes their own redeemers. And honestly, nothing is more bloody or more brutal than atheists on a quest to redeem humanity.

History is littered with examples of precisely the sort of programme of atheistic ‘moral formation’ that De Botton romanticises. De Botton is really just rehashing some of the proposals in Plato’s Republic (poets beware). But these programmes, from Plato onwards, have an unnerving tendency to drift until they becomes something more akin to the Communist ‘re-education’ camp. If the only counter to human frailty is a better engineered human rather than a transcendent redemption, then, in principle, there are no lengths to which we should not go to achieve this ‘new’ humanity.

Am I over-reacting? Of course. But it might be worth posing the question.

My final reflection, as I wander out from under the sails, down the stairs, and into the night sky: it seems hard to avoid the sense that perhaps what De Botton is providing is not so much ‘religion for atheists’ as a form of atheism for the incorrigibly religious human soul; an athei-anaesthetic for an uneasy consciousness.

It refused to be relegated to the background, to quietly shuffle to the corner of my consciousness behind the smells, sounds, emails, projects, intentions. It asserted itself like a neglected love: “I demand that you savour me.”
I surrender.

I’m not sure if I gave it my concentration, pouring myself into the cup, or whether the coffee extracted myself out of myself. But for a moment, delicious moment, such rich, salty, complexity. I was the house blend.

There is in fine coffee an innocence of excellence. In the earnest communion of coffee, one enters into a little sphere of freedom. Read Hannah Arendt, she knows what I’m talking about… A field in which necessity does not rule, of action, that redeems the worlds of Labour (generating the necessities of survival from our environment) and Work (producing a durable world capable of historical consciousness).

Our society is marked by a terrible drive toward necessity, to rationalisation and computation. But in the laneways it is still possible to find certain quiet men, usually bearded (after all nothing says ‘Damn Necessity!’ than luxuriant foliage upon the face), who pass earnest conversation hand to hand. Among them ephemerality, particularity, extravagant care, unnecessary beauty, and yes, freedom live on.
Perhaps waiting for the one who put such things in the world?

In our cups we will live.

Long-live the reading-group! Death to examinations!!

From Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, in Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, edited and translated by David Constantine, London: J.M. Dent (1997), 405-9.

If there is something you wish to know and by meditation you cannot find it, my advice to you, my ingenious old friend, is: speak about it with the first acquaintance you encounter. He does not need to be especially perspicacious, nor do I mean that you should ask his opinion, not at all. On the contrary, you should yourself tell him at once what it is you wish to know.
…

[Using his sister as an the example of this practice]

[It is not] by skilful questioning she brings me to the crux of the matter, though that might often be the way to do it, I daresay. But because I do have some dim conception at the outset, one distantly related to what I’m looking for, if I boldly make a start with that, my mind, even as my speech proceeds, under the necessity of finding an end for that beginning, will shape my first confused idea into complete clarity so that, to my amazement, understanding is arrived at as the sentence ends. I put in a few unarticulated sounds, dwell lengthily on the conjunctions, perhaps make use of apposition where it is not necessary, and have recourse to other tricks which will spin out my speech, all to gain time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of the mind. And in this process nothing helps me more that if my sister makes a move suggesting she wishes to interrupt; for such an attempt from outside to wrest speech from its grasp still further excites my already hard-worked mind and, like a general when circumstances press, its powers are raised to a further degree…

It is a strangely inspiring thing to have a human face before us as we speak; and often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression. [Bold is mine]

…

That a certain excitement of the intelligence is necessary even to revivify ideas we have already had is amply demonstrated whenever open-minded and knowledgeable people are being examined and without any preamble are asked such questions as: What is the state? Or: What is property? Things of that kind. If these young people had been in company and for a while the subject of conversation had been the state or property they would by a process of comparison, discrimination and summary perhaps with ease have arrived at the definition. But being wholly deprived of any such preparation they are seen to falter and only an obtuse examiner will conclude from this that they do not know. For it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows.

 

Only very commonplace intellects, people who yesterday learned by heart what the state is and today have forgotten it again, will have their answers pat in an examination. Indeed, there may be no worse opportunity in the world for showing oneself to advantage than a public examination. Besides the fact that it offends and wounds our sense of decency and incites us to recalcitrance to have some learned horsedealer looking into how many things we know who then, depending on whether they are five or six, either buys us or dismisses us: it is so difficult to play upon a human mind and induce it to give forth its peculiar music, it so easily under clumsy hands goes out of tune, that even the most practised connoisseeur of human beings, even he, not being acquainted with the one whose labour he is assisting at, may make mistakes. And if such young people, even the most ignorant among them, do most often achieve good marks this is because the minds of the examiners, if the examination is public, are themselves too embarrassed to deliver a true judgement. For not only do they themselves feel the indecency of the whole procedure: we should be ashamed to ask a person to tip out the contents of his purse before us, let alone his soul: but their own intelligences come under dangerous appraisal and they may count themselves lucky if they manage to leave the examination without having revealed more shameful weaknesses than the young finalist himself has whom they have been examining.

(Have you ever considered that an oyster is really a kind of elastic between two shells?)

… The bright points of stainless steel hooks and barbs prick out of the gray and rust. The brass spinners form seams of precious metals among the base. Ripe for the alchemy of the seas. These little plastic tackle boxes always come filled with compartments and into each one we place precisely the same jumble of hooksleadsinkersandspinners as all the others. Each compartment contains the chaos of the whole. Every tackle box I’ve ever seen is like this. Everything is like this. Set it aside.

I am interested primarily in the lures.
Of course.
After all, this is the Being of Fishing: the temptation of fish, the art of piscine persuasion unto death. “You will not surely die!” says the craftiest of God’s creatures to the innocent fish. “And when the fish saw that the bait was good for food and pleasing to the eye, she took some and ate it.”

The bottom of the box is filled with old lures. Scattered and discarded temptations. Hard wooden lures in lurid colours with bibs for bobbing, soft plastic lures that wriggle arousingly, lures that whir and spin: engines of discombobulation. Each attempts to embody the desires of fish. Each was purchased with hope, and cast into the waters with anticipation. Each is a salt-encrusted moment of ‘Fishing’…

(When did Man become the Tempter?)

… Fishing: an activity whose deepest phenomenological structure consists almost entirely of hoping. Standing on the edge of the world and hoping. Contemplating liminality and sublimity: land/water/sky/death. And hoping. Rising and falling with the movements of the celestial bodies. And hoping. Rhythmic, yet still. Consciousness focussed on receptivity: waiting for the little taps on the line. Morse code from beyond. Weirdly, this little school of fake fish, stranded at the bottom of a box is an archeology of human intentions and desires: formed, enacted, abandoned, mouldering.  Fishing generates a sweet awareness of power and a subconscious uneasiness. Moments, trivial to be sure, of planning, contemplation, exhilaration, frustration. Fishing is love and death, fashioned and handled with uniting desires.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

There is a knot that every fisherman learns to tie. Seven turns, back through the eye-loop, through the loop now formed, slide down and pull tight. The blood-knot. I learned it from my father who claimed he could tie it in the dark. (Which was probably true back then). I have the same fat fingers as him: the same shaped hands that used to fascinate me when I was a child bored in church.
I never learned the blood-knot in a book. I bet hardly any fisherman ever did. We learned it as a tradition. The acts of tying, whether in the dark alone, with cold fingers and the wind peeling the skin from your ears, are enacted tradition. It ties more things together than just hook and line. Teaching it to others might be how we mend the world. Or break it.

(From, Memory, History, Forgiveness: A Dialogue Between Paul Ricoeur and Sorin Antohi, p. 20-21)

From 6pm to 8pm the Ringers would gather – I imagine from curious little offices in narrow stone buildings, places where they can still sell you insurance over a desk and keep your details in a drawer (with a curly metal key). Then the bells would begin to sound, individual drops at first, like rain on tin, dong, dong, ding, dong. Ringing them up. Hauling on them harder and harder, swinging them out of their slumber (they sleep like flying foxes, clinging to the unders of beams in the belfry). Hauling on them until they stand on their heads. Slipping into the stop position. Awake and ready, above the beam. Just poised there. Um, how to describe: upside down? Not moving, waiting. The largest weighs two tonnes. And some maniac 80 year old is right underneath hauling on its tail.

The sound in our flat was deafening. Most friday nights at 6pm found us weebling away down York St toward China-town, which is also deafening but more intimate. Everyone at home in a foreign land. And it come with bonus spring roll!

But not every Friday night:
Once I climbed the twisty stair to the bells and rang with the ringers.
Stepping into the ringing chamber was a little like  finally discovering that cicada in the grass – the one whose chirping you’ve heard every night of your summer life. You hunt him with your ears, and finally your fingers. You part the grasses. And he goes silent. You look each other, embarrassed, a weight of unexpressed intimacy, each having inhabited t’other’s imaginationing. Ringers and Rung for.

“You rung?”
“Well… [glance aside] … yes… I suppose we did? I didn’t realise we were ringing for anyone.”
“I came though, so I think you must have been. Isn’t that what ringing is about?”

The art of change ringing is peculiar to the English, and, like most English peculiarities, unintelligible to the rest of the world. To the musical Belgian, for example, it appears that the proper thing to do with a carefully tuned ring of bells is to play a tune upon it. By the English campanologist, the playing of tunes is considered a childish game, only fit for foreigners; the proper use of bells is to work out mathematical permutations and combinations. When he speaks of the music of his bells, he does not mean musician’s music – still less what the ordinary man calls music. To the ordinary man, in fact, the pealing of bells is a monotonous jangle and a nuisance, tolerable only when mitigated by remote distance and sentimental association. The change-ringer does, indeed, distinguish musical differences between one method of producing his permutations and another; he avers, for instance, that where the hinder bells run 7,5,6, or 5,6,7, or , 5,7,6, the music is always prettier, and can detect and approve, where they occur, the consecutive fifths of Tittums and the cascading thirds of the Queen’s change. But what he really means is, that by the English method of ringing with rope and wheel, each several bell gives forth her fullest and noblest note. His passion – and it gives a passion – find its satisfaction in mathematical completeness and mechanical perfection, and as his bell weaves her way rhythmically up from lead to hinder place and down again, he is filled with the solemn intoxication that comes of intricate ritual faultlessly performed.

(Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors, 25).

The Ringers showed me something they were working on: a special peal to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. [The bridge lives just up the road; its on-ramps, like arms, embrace the Bell tower.] Weeks later I was at home while they rung it. It went for hours, maybe 5? There was nothing even remotely resembling a melody. But I knew its genius: the written notation for the changes. The bell ‘music’, as manifested on the page, was shaped like a coat-hanger, or a Harbour Bridge…
Are you marvelling?
And maybe 9 people in the world knew this?
Everyone else just had to put up with the insane racket.

The bells were worshipping the Bridge.
It’s just that the language of bells is inscrutable.
As is the language of cicadas.
Except to lady cicadas
(I assume).

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the work of His hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they communicate knowledge. There is no speech; there are no words; their voice is not heard. Their message has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.

(Psalms 19:1–4 HCSB)

Plays the strange music of the world:
in the plenitude of its intelligibility, found inscrutable.
Heard and not heard. Seen and unseen.
Or rather, heard and not understood, seen and unrecognised.
Hence, the slow-shaking incomprehension of the Universe
when addressed with that fundamental human question:

Why?

Image by DeusXFlorida

And the hand that did it rises trembling.
And the eyes rise trembling to behold it
To meet their accuser’s eyes wide. And trembling.

It was a rough deed, done with razorrrs
Watched with glass, that razor-sharpt eye
Done in a cold light, boding unforgiveness

We reach, each for the others face,
To sand the rough lines.
But stand, unfeeling him, and naked.

And ashamed, pupils pinpricks like conscience
Wide, whites-wide, shock of eyes
Track the reach for grace.

But there is none.
For them that slayed the Highwayman.

I. The Highwayman was the name for my beard. It was a good beard, about 3 months old, but bushy and red: the kind of beard that makes a man feel like he’s in the middle of something. The Highwayman was intended to be a grand project; a once-in-a-life-time snatch at hirsute glory. I was waiting ’til I could square cut him across my neckline, like a Victorian Bushranger. I’m grieving. I cut him off in front of the mirror on the weekend.

II. An Anglican Divine of Moore Theological College once called the Highwayman, “One of the World’s Great Beards”. I kid you not. Verbatim. He whispered it to me last week in the middle of a lecture on Emotions. I was moved. Although, on reflection I think it is deeply unfair to the present Archbishop of Canterbury. But, seriously, what did you expect at Moore College?

III. There is a lot of masculine identity bundled up with facial hair. I hadn’t realised this so intensely until the past few days. The Highwayman was a matter of comment for most of his life, his absence also was not without its pontificators. Blokes give other blokes a hard time about their lack of beard-growing prowess; and the beardless die a little inside. I once watched a piece of performance art in a gallery in Queensland where a bloke videoed himself drawing all over his face in texta. Again, I’m not kidding. It was strangely enthralling. Making a point about hair and manliness.

V. It was painful to look at myself in the mirror after the Highwayman went down. Hair shapes the face. I needed to get to know myself again. I should have expected this, I’ve been wearing glasses since I was a little kid. Glasses become a part of your identity. I don’t think I could stop wearing them now, even if my eyes were suddenly 20/20. It would be too much like a unilateral re-legislation of my identity. These things require negotiation. The swipe of a razor blade is too sudden.
But sometimes things just end suddenly; with a jerk. Such is life.

VI. It’s hard work growing a beard:
Firstly, it’s just basically uncomfortable.
Secondly, one must cultivate the moral fortitude to bear up under the comments and glances of the full gamut of society: from mates to random blokes. And women always have opinions, which they are willing to share…
But ultimately, one must persuade the Mrs.
It was the Mrs what done for the Highwayman.
My Delilah.

THE PREACHER’S PRAYER

LORD, when my heart is slow to feel,
And when my lips are slow to speak,
And yet my heart still Thee doth seek,
And yet my lips would Thee reveal;

 

Then send Thy gracious Spirit, Lord,
That He may my dull heart inspire,
And touch my lips with heavenly fire,
So shall I hear and speak Thy word.

 

And other hearts with love will glow,
And other lips Thy word proclaim,
So shall we glorify Thy Name,
And Heaven’s light shine on Earth below.

– William Saumarez Smith

I randomly started reading a book of poems today by William Saumarez Smith (1836 – 1909), published and edited 100 years ago (1911) by his sisters. The book has only ever had that one edition. As far as I can tell, Saumarez isn’t a particularly well known figure (even in Sydney), and the poetry isn’t spectacular, but as I read his poems and the short account of his life at the beginning of the book, I got a little teary.

William Saumarez Smith was Bishop (later Archbishop) of Sydney from 1890-1913. He died of a brain haemorrhage in his office – died with his boots on, as they say – the first Archbishop of Sydney to be buried in Australia. His poems are a little window into the world of a man who walked humbly and simply with his God. He loved God.

He also clearly loved the people around him. Most of these poems were written as little notes to friends, family, and acquaintances. There are many about saying ‘farewell’ to family in England; a few for his daughter; two for his grandson. His life wasn’t easy. He spent time as a missionary in India, had eight children, and his wife passed away shortly before they were to leave England for Australia in 1890. He came anyway.

As I said, it isn’t all great poetry, but it is the affective life of a godly man. I was humbled and encouraged. It touched me that his little notes have made their way down the generations and are still quietly glorifying God.

Actually, I was twice blessed today. Reading the poems of William Saumarez Smith was the second time I shared communion with the everyday saints, got to watch – just a little awestruck – at the resurrection life peaking out like the fingernail of a sunrise at Easter.

And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom. Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

William Saumarez Smith, Capernaum and Other Poems, London: Elliot Stock, 1911.

Extract from the ‘Memoir’

As to his private life, “he lived much in his Bible,” said one who knew him, ” no one could go into his study and see the ‘stand up’ desk covered with his Bibles, authorized, revised, Hebrew, etc., without perceiving his life-long devotion to the written word.” Many will recall how beautifully he read the Lessons in the Cathedral and other churches.

In the strenuous life of a Bishop, times of relaxation were rare, but now and then he would take part of a day off to watch some important cricket match, with keen enjoyment.

His love for reading was intense, and it was wonderful how in his crowded life he managed to devour some of the books and writings of the day. How reading tempted him may be gleaned from his joke about himself that he was not to be trusted in a bookshop for fear of ” the indulgence of buying.” Languages also interested him greatly, and he could read eight or nine. On one occasion at the Baptism of some Chinese converts at the Cathedral, having specially learnt the words, he was able to baptize them in their own language.

[This train of thought begins here and it part of a series I've been working on since last year. You can find earlier articles by searching for the theme 'friends']

The different-ness of friends can be seen more subtly when we seek to locate the character of biblical-canonical friendships against a broader background of biblical relations. The drama of the Old Testament takes place among a set of characters who are bound together, not by an act of originative free association, but as a family. Israel was begotten, not made. Early in the story, as the plot thickens, so does the blood. Over time the family becomes greatly extended, internecine conflicts erupt, the extended family becomes the dispersed family. But always with the memory that Israel is a family: with all the pre-structured obligations and responsibilities invoked by kin. When the biblical authors need to characterise the relationship of biblical characters, whether to lament or berate, enjoin or celebrate, they find brothers. The usage flows on into the New Testament, the shared participation in the ‘family of Abraham’ becoming one of the key sources (along with the Fatherhood of God) for the Christian practice of referring to co-religionists as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’.

To characterise a relationship as filial is to immediately imply mutuality, that the relationship has a symmetry. Either party could rightly be called the subject of the predicate ‘is my brother/sister’.¹ The biblical-canonical tradition also has plenty to say about other non-mutual, asymmetric relations like master/slave, father/son, etc. But if we consider the biblical-canonical descriptions of friendship, we find that they don’t map easily onto this taxonomy of mutual/non-mutual relations. Biblical-canonical friendship is capable of being quasi-mutual. Clearly, two men (or women?) are envisaged as being able to mutually address each other as ‘friend’. But in the outstanding narrative descriptions of friendship there is a significant reticence to predicate the relation mutually. Abraham is God’s ‘friend’, but the usage is never reversed: God is never Abraham’s friend. We find the same thing with Jesus and his disciples: we do not hear the words, ‘I am your friend, if you do what I command.’ It’s very safe to assume that in both these cases, this subtle lack of mutuality is due to the maximal ontological difference between the parties. As a result, it would be risky to apply this lack of mutuality straightforwardly to human/human friendships. But if it is fair to characterise these relationships as ‘friendship’, and the biblical authors press us in this direction, then our concept of friendship must expand to include a level of difference, of inequality between the friends, that could even result in friendship being asymmetrical, i.e., not having precisely the same quality as it flows from one party to the other.²

Could it even involve obedience?

Footnotes
1. It’s probably easier to see what I mean if we contrast mutual with asymmetric relations.  A master/servant relation is asymmetric: the master and the servant do not share the same relation to each other. A master and servant cannot change places without changing their relationship. A ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ relationship is one in which the parties are equally/mutually ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ to each other. This point shouldn’t be confused with the fact that in both asymmetric and mutual relations the parties can be mutually constitutive of each other, i.e., one cannot be ‘master’ without a servant, nor ‘brother’ without a brother.

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2. We must be careful not to overstate our claim at this point. Not every friendship must be founded upon the kind of radical difference presupposed by the Creator/creature divide, but the biblical-canonical history pushes us to recognise that equality, which forms the root of the pathological narcissism Derrida detects in the Western canonical concept – cannot be made an essential quality of friendship.↑