The Whole World Groaned

[John Howard with Tony Abbott. Photo by Andrew Meares, from the Sydney Morning Herald.]

[Feeling nostalgic about the "Howard Years"? I wrote this political piece just after John Howard's 2004 election win. It was published in Famous Reporter #30, December 2004, with the subtitle "A Lament from the Christian Left". Not exactly nature writing, but ...]

I happened to find myself in Canberra on the night of the 2004 Federal election. It was a short night, but a long morning after. As the day stretched out ahead, some words from 4th century theologian Saint Jerome came to my mind. Strange as it may now seem, what leaders and thinkers believed about Christ once literally determined the shape and colour of kingdoms.

It was in the year 360AD that Jerome, beleaguered champion of orthodox christology, uttered his famous lament: "the whole world groaned to find itself Arian." The details of that theological debate and the nature of what Arius argued needn’t concern us here. But Jerome’s saying was consonant with my own thoughts after the election. It seemed that the whole world – or at least a significant majority of the Australian electorate – had acceded to the Howard view of life and the universe. And that left me deeply unsettled and not a little pessimistic.

Yes the people had spoken; yes I was able to take comfort in having the right to choose our government, and the right to dissent the choice of others. But the source of my discomfit went deeper than an initial desire to emigrate to New Zealand and/or cast suspicious looks at my fellow voters. (Is it the circles I mix in? I didn’t come across a single person who would openly admit to voting for John Howard!) What disturbed me more than anything was the alignment of the Howard view with the Christian faith.

A couple of weeks later a remarkably similar scene was played out in the USA. This time there was an even more explicit alignment of the Bush campaign with certain Christian views. Not only was Bush able to retain the Evangelical vote, but even John Kerry’s own Catholicism benefitted him little, blunted by some Catholic leaders as good as declaring that a vote for Bush was a vote for God. They inundated churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research as "non-negotiable issues."

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, the highest-ranking Catholic leader in Colorado, saw an express link between these ‘evils’ and a vote for Kerry. "If you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" he asked. "And if you know you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes." He may have observed the letter of the law regarding the strict separation of church and state powers in the USA, but he had hardly observed its spirit.

In Australia religion is much more a private matter. It might even be argued that our tradition sees religion as quite marginal to how we run our political system. John Howard himself has been keen to silence the occasional dissent from "meddlesome priests" in the past. But this time around there was a peculiar alignment of conservative thinking, including many in the church and the media, that enabled the Howard government to remain unchallenged on a significant number of moral and ethical issues.

Instead the Liberals, aided by groups such as Family First, openly if unofficially aligned with the Christian denomination the Assemblies of God, were able to tap into the socially conservative religious sentiment of a significant number of Australians. For these Christians the Greens are "extreme"; Labor is risky on economic and sometimes social grounds; and Howard is a fellow believer. For them material prosperity is a sign of God’s goodness, and the Howard government can help deliver this. So Family First gave and received preferences from the Liberals, and as a consequence looks likely to have an influential place in the senate.

In both Australia and the USA this identification of conservative social/moral views with religious faith has gone largely unchallenged. From where I stand this is a major distortion of the Christian faith. How can lies about weapons of mass destruction and children overboard, or the extent of innocent victims of the war on Iraq, not carry the equivalent moral weight of abortion or gay marriage? How is it that the lives of Middle eastern citizens, refugees and asylum-seekers have less value than unborn Australians? And how can a US soldier about to attack the city of Falluja say on prime-time television "the enemy’s got a face … he’s called Satan" and fear no rebuke? Where are the voices from the pulpits and microphones pointing out the slick hypocrisy of these comfortable positions? Is there no truth filter through which such issues can be put?
Surely for those who profess to follow Christ there is at least his teaching. The following examples seem instructive.

"I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. … Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:35-40, abridged)

"Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you." (Matthew 5:44)

"Do not judge and you will not be judged. Do not condemn and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven." (Luke 6:37)

"Blessed are you who are poor … you who hunger now … you who weep now …, (but) woe to you who are rich … you who are well fed … you who laugh now." (Luke 6:20-25, abridged)

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed." (Luke 4:18-19)

"What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose … his very self?" (Luke 9:25)

It is well to remind ourselves that it was precisely the religious who most strongly opposed Jesus during his life. He wrapped some of his most powerful messages to them in story form. For instance one hypocritical religious leader is depicted as loudly praying "God, I thank you that I am not like other men – robbers, evildoers, adulterers – or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get." The same tax collector "stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner." (Luke 18:11-13) Jesus not only tells us that God heard the prayer of the latter, but demonstrates it in his own life by being known as "a friend of tax collectors and sinners" (Luke 7:34).

In one particularly shocking passage Jesus said to the religious of his day: "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." (John 5:39-40) This is a pointed challenge to today’s Evangelicals, those with whom Bush is most identified. As "people of the Book", the test of his teaching is to ask yourself: "Which has my prime allegiance: Christ or the bible?" There may not often be a conflict between the two, but if there is, it is clear that the Christian should choose Christ.

Another major challenge to the comfortable "private" Christianity to which Bush and Howard so readily cosy up, is the issue of prosperity. That God can bless his people economically is only one side of the truth at best. There is far more weight given in Christ’s teaching to the dangers of wealth. For instance "it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Luke 18:25) There are also powerful warning stories such as the parable of the rich fool (Luke 12) and the parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16), in which the rich loose everything including their souls.

Why do I emphasise prosperity here? There seems little doubt that the hip pocket nerve was tickled during the election. Contrary to the opinion of most major banks and economists, the Australian electorate perceived that interest rates were more likely to stay low under a Howard government. That a good proportion of the "Christian" vote – as concerned as anyone to preserve their personal prosperity – was swayed by this thinking, is an indictment of the depth of their theology. Certainly the teachings of Jesus are no political manifesto, and they don’t prescribe economic policy. But to reduce Jesus’ teaching to a code of personal morality, and ignore its social and political implications, is to castrate it. To claim to follow Christ and yet have no critique of "mammon" is to risk ethical amputation.

* * *

And so in Canberra, the day after the election, my thoughts remained gloomy. But they were eventually nudged forward nearly 1200 years from the time of Jerome to the time of Martin Luther. There were Christians in Luther’s day – also one of great turmoil – who were tempted to seek comfort only in the second coming of Christ. The trials and travails of this world would then be over, and God’s kingdom would be forever established. Someone asked Luther what he would do if he knew that Christ were returning the next day. A man well versed in paradox, he is reported to have replied: "If I believed the world were to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today."

My Canberra friends probably had more 21st century thoughts in mind, ones that related to Canberra’s ongoing recovery from the devastating 2003 bushfires. But whatever our thoughts and feelings it was more than therapeutic for us to join over 300 Greening Australia volunteers in planting thousands of trees in the warzone that had once been Deek’s Forest. It was a powerful reminder that there are many good things that will outlast the rulers of this age. And there are still actions we can take that will make a difference whoever our rulers might be.

The Lonesome Touch

[photo: a lonesome pool near Mt Rogoona, Central north-west Tasmania]

[I am fascinated by the interface between music, movement and mood. This is a companion piece to "Dancing on Dolerite" - see November 09 archive]

Fiddler Martin Hayes’ 1997 album, The Lonesome Touch, contains what I consider one of the masterpieces of modern Irish folk music. The third track, a long set of tunes played on fiddle by Martin Hayes with Dennis Cahill on guitar, is simply exquisite: the perfect accompaniment to a reluctant morning walk, and a primer in optimism for melancholics. A few chime-like notes on the guitar lead into a mournfully slow rendition of the fiddle tune Paul Ha'penny. This gentle and somehow irresistible invitation to raise your weary head from the pillow, is followed by a still slow, but lifting jig The Garden Of Butterflies, with Hayes’ fiddle beginning to lilt more, and Cahill’s guitar strokes gaining in complexity.

Then to the reel The Broken Pledge, on which the audibly tapping foot and more up-tempo guitar give fair warning that the pace of life can’t stay slow forever. Like it or not your heart is pumping once again, so if your feet aren’t walking or dancing already, they’ll surely be tapping. Hayes is not a fiddler who tries to play at warp speed, but the friendly lilt of the tune belies the fact that he’s working hard. So too with the next tune, The Mother And Child Reel, where the delightfully syncopated beat continues to banish the cobwebs. If head and heart aren’t yet in sync then the closing reel, the classic Toss The Feathers, will ensure they are. And your feet will surely follow. By the time this amazing eleven minute set concludes you’re ready to fall to the ground exhausted, or climb to the top of the nearest mountain, or cry for joy; perhaps all three. That old scoundrel melancholy has been banished for another day.

Some music can do that for you, and its moods and movements seem so appropriate as an accompaniment for walking. Hayes, something of a philosopher on fiddling, believes that neither great speed nor brilliant technique is enough to make a great fiddler. Rather he seeks for that “lonesome touch” that is the heart and soul of fiddling.

Hayes explains it this way.

The Lonesome Touch is a phrase I have heard in my native County Clare all my life. . . . It is the intangible aspect of music that is both elusive and essential. The word lonesome expresses a sadness, a blue note, a sour note. Even though the music bares the trace of struggle and of pain, it is also the means of uplift, transcendence to joy and celebration.

The lonesome touch is something that is difficult to achieve. One is forced to put the requirements of the music before all personal considerations, to play honestly from the heart with no motive other than the selfless expression of joy and beauty for their own sake.

In the opinion of many Hayes’ ability to find that soul in the music is his particular genius.

So much of that philosophy seems to apply also to walking. Speed, technique, equipment – these aren’t the soul of a good walk. Really seeing what’s around you; dealing with the limitations of your body, your exhaustion, the weather; working with rather than against those you walk with; putting the requirements of the walk ahead of your personal considerations; these are part of the soul of walking. Only then can you find that “lonesome touch” that lifts bushwalking out of being just another activity and into the soul-nourishing realms.

The Apprentice Cuckoo

[a fan-tailed cuckoo - Cacomantis flabelliformis]

[a new piece reflecting on birds, people and life in general]

"Science may have defined life too small" - Rachel Remen

Is the natural world indifferent to humans? Is it merely a blank canvas on which we project our thoughts and feelings: things about which it is both oblivious and unconcerned? Or is there a little more to our place in this world than to be mere passive observers?

Anthropomorphic projection shows up in talk of wallabies “browsing happily” or of march flies “buzzing angrily”, even if such talk has scant basis in science. Those creatures do what they do for their own good reasons, and human emotions like happiness and anger probably have little or nothing to do with it.

Why then do most rational humans NOT resist the tendency to project their thoughts and feelings onto the world around them? Does a mountain really “glower defiantly”? Was Mt Everest actually the “bugger” that Hillary called it?

One spring I was tormented by a particularly fraught decision. It kept me awake – or woke me up – at all sorts of hours of the night. Our local bush was so filled with fan-tailed cuckoos that it became my cuckoo spring. The male cuckoo has a strong whistling trill which carries great distances in the bush, alerting female cuckoos to both his presence and his potential.

The trill has a melancholy downward trend. But there I go again, using a word like “melancholy” where it rationally may not belong. When I consult bird references I find that I am not alone. They variously describe the call as “mournful”, “sad” or “plaintive”.

But does a cuckoo feel sorrow? Surely this usurper of other nests has no such feelings (or so the anthropomorphic argument might go). All I know is that I have always felt a tinge of sadness on hearing the first cuckoo in spring (to follow Frederick Delius). To add to this my own mother died one spring, and I strongly remember hearing cuckoos in the months that followed. Even as a man in my fifties, my own sad reflections included thoughts of being alone in the nest.

During that cuckoo spring, an increase in their population meant there was a great deal of competition. I assume that’s why one young cuckoo – I came to think of him as the apprentice cuckoo – trilled all through the night. Apparently they occasionally do this, but it’s the first time I’ve been fully awake to experience a bird calling right through the night. I found my own melancholy magnified by the L-plate trill of my apprentice cuckoo.

His voice would stumble, miss a few steps of the ladder, then break off half-way – so much like an adolescent boy that I smiled in amusement despite my troubled state. He kept up these faltering efforts all that night and much of the next. I covered my head with a pillow, but still found my amusement turned to grudging admiration. Had I known more at the time, I would have listened for the shorter “chiree” response call from the female birds. That might have signalled that his yearning persistence was paying off, winning him a mate. I will never know whether his departure signalled success, or simply that he had left for a greener tree beyond the reach of my ears.

I realise now that I always feel a frisson of sadness in response to certain bird calls. The tawny frogmouth’s eerie night-time booming; the spotted pardalote’s downward drooping, double-noted “pee-paw”; even the forest raven’s “lascivious” carking has a world-weary downward inflection. Part of the science here may be that downward trending music has – for humans – an inherent sadness, just as human crying and wailing usually have a downward inflection.

But do bird calls, like human accents, also in part reflect the environment in which they develop? Let’s face it, much of the Australian environment is far from the “green and pleasant land” of England, for instance. If this is true, then the equation becomes: a harsh land = harsh accents. If life is no walk in the park, should we expect sweet voices?

All of this may be a partial explanation – even some justification – for anthropomorphism. But I think there is something more going on here. Our major tool as human beings is our use of language. We use words to make sense of each other, to put order on our society and on the world around us. We even invented metaphor to enhance distinctions and draw comparisons. And at our most basic we simply tell stories – and always have.

Some of those stories will project a character on landscapes, birds and beasts. I have heard such stories from the Adnyamathanha people in the Flinders Ranges. Their tales are peopled by the animals they see all around them, and each animal carries a metaphorical as well as a biological cargo. So when an Adnyamathanha child sees a crow, for instance, there are several stories, with in-built moral lessons, that the child can “read” from the crow.

Granted this is not “scientific” knowledge of the corvus genus. But it is knowledge nonetheless, and it carries a truth that works. Because one result of such story-telling is a caring for crows, and an identification of ourselves with them as co-creatures in the world of nature.

Perhaps in my cuckoo spring, I was story-making in my own way: preferentially taking note of cuckoos rather than kookaburras. Hearing and identifying with the yearning and sadness in the call of the apprentice cuckoo. Sometimes you just don’t have ears to hear the kookaburra’s laugh.