Lots of issues about bushfires down south and floods up north. What it all boils down to eventually, however, is how are we to live together?

One survivor has already alerted us to the danger of bureaucrats (office workers) providing solutions for local problems resulting from the fires.

He says the locals need to be entrusted with solving their own social problems with resources and logistic support channelled through the bureaucrats.

I say no more because I’m not there in any of those devastated areas. All I know is from experience of a local slow burning “fire” which devastates neighbourhoods and generations.

I claim we local volunteers know what is needed, locally, to control the flames of raging social dislocation.

The top end of town, whether civil or religious naturally feels entitled to take over in a crisis.

The bad habits acquired during more peaceful times grow exponentially in crisis times. Dictators, civil and religious, are outnumbered by civil and religious public servants when all goes well in either market place, civil or religious.

In crisis times, when volunteerism is most needed because most effective and most visibly morale boosting, dictatorship looks good in the short term but just won’t do more good than harm in the long term. Devolution of power is the answer, just like the victim mentioned earlier calls for. 

“We locals”, he said, “know what needs doing both urgently and in the long run.”

Or, as Winston Churchill begged the USA during World War 2, while England stood alone in the face of “wildfire” Nazism, “Give us the tools and we will finish the job”.

Trust the locals. Empower them. Bureaucrats can help locals identify what went wrong, advise them, but they won’t be hanging around for long. The locals, alone, do that.

Naturally, while all attention, here and overseas, goes to the victims of bushfire down south, and flood, up north, it’s hard for us long term volunteers to maintain the supply of goods and services to our own “clients”.

There’s no substitute for locals caring for locals.

Boring as it may be, attending local meetings, real or virtual, volunteering for local caring positions. Probably never highlighted by the national press or recognised by the reward of a medal, locals caring for locals is the blessed next stage in evolution humanity needs right now.

Economic rationalism isn’t relevant at this time – i.e. we have only enough money to do so and so.

Economic “relationalism” needs a chance to show its relevance – i.e. what needs to be done? Let’s find the money

Prayers are good, but remember the warning “faith without works is dead”.

St. Vincent de Paul was even more provocative: “Money is love” What the world needs now is that kind of $ove. 

R.J.M.

MEDIA RELEASE

South Melbourne priest, Father Bob Maguire, has developed a fresh approach to helping his local community in the wake of the global financial downturn by opening up his parish grounds as a community market.

Commencing soon, Father Bob’s Community Market will provide an all day market, every Saturday and Sunday, offering a diverse range of produce and products, including arts, crafts, jewellery and clothing.

Potential stallholders are being invited to express their interest by visiting
www.fatherbobscommunitymarket.com.

Proceeds generated from stallholder rental fees will support Fr Bob’s various charitable activities that assist the impoverished and the homeless.

Explaining his new venture, Father Bob said:

“Poverty is a major problem that is only worsening in the current economic climate.  At the same time, neighbourhoods are coming back into fashion and favour.  What we want to achieve is to form neighbourhood networks of pooled assets and present these local stockpiles of goods and services in a stunning expression.”

 “Interestingly, our very street, Dorcas, is named for a Christian biblical woman of the 1st century who was an entrepreneur who wove and dyed cloth to sell to make money to help the poor.”

Father Bob’s Community Market is located on the corner of Montague and Dorcas Streets in South Melbourne, in close proximity to the well-established South Melbourne Market and within walking distance of both the South Melbourne and Albert Park shopping precincts.

Media Enquiries: Fr Bob Maguire, phone: 9696 0644

I posted on the noticeboard outside our church: “RIP Darcy Freeman. Not what was he thinking but what was he feeling.”

I meant to connect what we do inside church to what happens outside church.

This has always been a source of inspiration or irritation for me.

Years ago I coined the phrase “www.www -- worldwide web of wisdom, worship and work”.

I was inspired by the growing feeling of human connectedness generated by the evolution of the internet.

It raised that hope that we did, indeed inhabit a global village or, if you “prefer”, we were, collectively, the crew of spaceship earth.

The darkside of the discussion of global/local, the collateral irritation, is the pervasive atmosphere of helplessness around the world and the neighbourhood.

That’s why Darcy Freeman has become a focus for so many peoples’ helplessness (other than Melbourne readers may like to Google “Darcy Freeman” for helpful details of the story).

Here, at least, is an issue capable of igniting both real and virtual sympathy.

Some will lay tributes at the spot on the river nearest where Tracey entered the water and death.

Others will express themselves in cyberspace. 

Some who read my church noticeboard may take a step further into the building and light a candle. Others will watch in grief a brief coverage of Darcey’s funeral on TV.

It’s important to connect one way or another. It’s important to experience “catharsis”, a purging of the toxic emotions associated with a tragic experience.

Therefore, we need to include Darcy’s father, allegedly the person who dropped her from the Westgate bridge.

Maybe we need to invite some of the U.S. religious group, the Amish, to Melbourne to help us purge ourselves of toxic emotions inevitably associated with such a riveting event.

Their example of forgiveness and reconciliation, of restorative justice, in the wake of a local gunman killing several Amish school children, is a healthy reminder of the existence of “angels of our better nature”.

Communities need to learn (relearn for some older societies) how to handle tragedies, maybe natural, maybe of our own making.

If revenge is all I’m after, I need to dig two graves – one for the offender and one for myself. Because, as sure as night follows day, revenge may be sweet in the short term but deadly bitter in the longer term.

In Melbourne, recently, we jailed half a dozen convicted terrorists. That was retributive justice at work. Rightly so.

Now, let restorative justice go to work to heal the family and community rifts opened up by those sentences

R.J.M.

Obama left out the Buddhists and mucked up the oath.  Guess what!  He’s human!

Tony Coady picked out the gold bits and guess what again! They work for Australia Day! Especially “Pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, start all over again.”

Here’s Coady’s article:

A questioning mind and a willingness to learn from opponents form the gospel of the new incumbent, writes Tony Coady

“We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.”

Barack Obama’s inauguration speech

“This inauguration is a transition of immense political power from one man of faith to another. For those who fear the influence of religion upon democratic politics, this prospect may cause anxiety, whatever one’s initial reaction, it is worth examining the nature of Barack Obama’s faith.

Of course, all modern American presidents profess religious commitment and engage in pietistic rhetoric; that is one of the most unusual features of American political culture.

Often enough, however, those professions and invocations are merely ritualistic concessions to the grip religion has on large sections if the US population or attempts to gain electoral advantage. 

It is hardly believable that Richard Nixon (nominally a Quaker, though hardly any kind of pacifist) was moved by genuine religious impulses. Nor did religion go more than skin deep in the elder George Bush, or even Bill Clinton. But Mr Obama seems different, and it is worth reflecting on what this difference might mean.

President Obama’s religious outlook is well presented in the chapter on faith in his book The Audacity of Hope. The first thing to say is that it is remote from the simplistic fundamentalism that moved George W. Bush. 

Mr Obama seems to be a serious Christian in whom sophisticated and highly intelligent liberal instincts hold considerable sway. He is aware of the complexity of the Gospel message and the need for subtlety in interpreting it and employing its values in the messy world of politics.

Instead the overweening arrogance and self-certainty that tends to mark fundamentalist evangelicalism, he takes from scripture a humility and tolerance that has him listening to others and ready to learn from opponents and critics.

Consider the contrast in the following stories. The first is from George Bush justifying to a group of American farmers his decision to invade Iraq. He said: “God speaks through me.” It is hard to imagine a politician saying anything more presumptuous and self-important.

But Mr Obama’s religion leads in quite different directions. One is indicated by his response to a supporter who had been hurt by his citing his religious traditions to support his opposition to gay marriage. Herself a lesbian, she thought he was suggesting she and others like her were bad people.

Mr Obama who has consistently opposed discrimination against gays, rang her to apologise for any such slight, and in the book goes on to say that, as a Christian he must “remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided” and that he “may have been infected with society’s prejudices and predilections and attributed them to God”.

This indicates respect for the lesbian objector and a willingness to test his religious instincts against reason and experience, something that seems to have been entirely foreign to Mr Bush.

The different ways that Mr Bus and Mr Obama arrived at their religious commitment are also instructive.

Mr Bush experienced a conversation moment when talking with the evangelist Billy Graham during a walk along a beach, realising, apparently for the first time, that “God had sent his Son to die for a sinner like me”. He then committed himself to Christ and began reading the Bible. His religious life thereafter was one of easy certainties that informed the “moral clarity” he was fond of invoking (and recently commended John Howard for embodying).

By contrast, Mr Obama had absorbed progressive social values from his atheistic mother and refined them during his community work with the poor in Chicago, his law degree at Harvard and his academic appointment in the law School at the University of Chicago.

His faith is untainted by the worship of unregulated capitalism that marked Mr Bush. It was while working with predominantly black church groups in Chicago that he came to believe the tradition of African-American Christianity gave impetus and hope for the implementation of the values he cherished.

He came to see those values as deeply (if not exclusively) Christian, and to view Christ as a support: “an ally in your difficult journey, to make the peaks and valleys smooth and render all those crooked paths straight”.

Mr Obama’s faith did not preclude doubts and “did not require (him) to suspend critical thinking, (or) disengage from the battle for economic and social justice”.

For Mr Obama, moral clarity comes hand-in-hand with humane sympathy and hard thinking about the complexities of public policy. He is aware of the problematic relation of religious faith and conviction to the realities of pluralistic, democratic society. His chapter on faith explores these problems in a sophisticated manner and his is clearly familiar with the work of liberal political philosophers such as John Rawls.

Hopes are so high for Mr Obama that there are bound to be disappointments, and so it may prove with his attitude to religion and politics, but some confidence can be put in his subtle and questioning mind. He has a religious and political curiosity that distinguishes him from his predecessor, who was described by one American commentator as possibly “the least curious person on earth”.

Melbourne Age 22^nd January 2009

R.J.M.

Barak Obama’s inauguration starts a new era in our world’s chequered history.

Many people look to him as if to a messiah. I don’t flinch at that having been attracted myself to the slogan sighted somewhere outside a church  “We are the one we’ve been waiting for.”

Collectively and individually, I believe, we ourselves are the necessary answer to our own problems, collective and individual.

Church police can’t press charges of blasphemy over my use of this slogan. Both Jewish and Christian sacred writings include these words, threatening to some religious people, in one literary formula or another.

Be that as it may, Obama’s take over of the world’s most powerful nation may well enthrone a divine way of life, back to the basics, as the fashionable thing, the “cool” thing, if you’re young.

The Obama choice of dog, of clothes, of walking and talking may well initiate a revolution in lifestyle after generations of keeping up with the family next door or in the parents and friends’ association.

And not a moment too soon. Not that I’m gloating over the possible/probable penitential exercise about to be imposed on us, - the recession we needed to have – but we’ve all needed to treat our “affluenza” virus with a self-discipline vaccine, or failing that, an invasive, painful surgical procedure

No need for catholics to look around this Lent for “sins” to examine and confess. The list of self indulgences is inexhaustible. Not for me to list them here. Lent for catholics is like Ramadan for Muslims – a time to make war (Jihad!) on self-centredness for the sake of building a better community, the kingdom of Humanity/God on earth.

Talking about communities, I’ve just read Jason Hill in “The Age” green pages “Viva Virtual Playground”.

He says, when they have time to play, millions of teenagers around the world enter an online world called Habbo.

Habbo now enjoys 100 million registered users, with the average play session lasting more than an hour.

Habbos can explore public hangouts, play a variety of games, connect with friends, decorate their own rooms and have fun through creativity and self-expression. Each user can walk around and chat.

Online worlds, like Habbos, are proving to be just as important and powerful as real life communities.

In the next 10 years, 1 billion people will have visited a virtual world and as many as 80 percent of regular internet users will have a virtual self in less time than that. 

Virtual communities and worlds are here to stay and will continue to evolve.

Lent or no Lent, let’s embark on a journey together – to be oneself in the real world before playing in an online world or playing in the real world with a chance of finding oneself in an online world. 

R.J.M.

Richard  Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion”, has just spent $300,000 on adverts posted on London’s buses and trains.  “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

Coming out of Christmas as we are (Epiphany, if, you’re Orthodox), if I had a lazy $300,000 I’d commission ads like “Probably, we ourselves are God. Now start worrying and share your life.”

That’s what I believe Christmas to be all about. Guess what folks! (?) There’s no longer us and them, just we.

Channel 9’s “A Current Affair”, is ringing the doorbell. They want us to do a segment on homelessness. They want me to point them to a spot in Melbourne where the reporter, camouflaged as a homeless person, can sit and experience whatever, good or bad, the passersby choose to direct towards him.

Just say this TV bit goes to air. What will it do? Maybe reinforce a national grassroots surge to support Kevin Rudd’s political campaign to solve homelessness once and for all.

That would be good.

What would be better is grassroots support for local communities and their elected local government to tackle homelessness and its companion, hopelessness, not by 2020, but right here and now.

NIMBY just has to be replaced by IMBY (“not in my back yard” by “in my backyard”).

Christmas, as a religious festival, brings at least 2 millennia of spiritual endorsements of my slogan: “Probably we ourselves, are God. Now start worrying and share your life.”

Neighbourhoods are coming back into fashion and favour. Two local business people have approached me, this week, to explain what they will do within a couple of months to raise money for our house of hospitality and our project of rental and scholarship support.

That’s Obama’s battle cry “Yes, we can” translated into Australian “Yes, we will”.

If only a leading personality with overwhelming community approval/ support, would volunteer to do for my “There’s no longer them and us just we” what Ron Barassi has done for “let’s clean up, win back our streets”.

For every extra policeperson generated for duty on our streets by Ron’s bashing driven appeal, I need a street/community worker to interpret “them” to “us” and “us” to “them”.

Every neighbourhood in Australia is laced with churches, be they ever so humble, just as every neighbourhood has an old fashioned memorial to those who died overseas at Anzac or in Europe. 

Let the churches, mosques, temples, ashrams and synagogues form neighbourhoods networks of pooled assets and present these local stockpiles of goods and services in a stunning expression of glory to God in the highest AND the lowest.<?XML:NAMESPACE PREFIX = O />....

R.J.M.

31.12.08

Time flies ….. time and tide wait for no man/woman ….. seize the day ….. take your time ….. time is the measurement of before and after.

There are probably endless combinations and permutations involving the word “time”.

New Year is all about time – time spent, gainfully or not, during the past 12 months - time available to be spent, please God and the “gods” over the coming 12 months.

Christmas suits me better because it’s bigger than time. It’s before, during and after time. That’s big.

Christmas is all about the never ending story of humanity’s place in the evolution of Wisdom.

Christmas reminds me of the possibility of the annual rebirth of commonsense for the common good.

Hard on the heels of Christmas comes a much more primitive festival of inevitability, the memorial of “auld lang syne … should old acquaintance be forgot.”

At the end of the Edinburgh Tattoo, that well known annual showing of Scotland’s memories, hopes and aspirations, a lone piper mounts the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and plays a “lament” for hopes dashed and equally importantly, great expectations for the future.

Before that poignant solo performance the  massed bands of pipes and drums march off the magnificent parade ground playing a bitter sweet anthem “Black Bear” to accompany the military contingent back to barracks, back home, in fact, for soldiers everywhere.

To me, New Year is like that return to barracks, between midnight ’08 and sunrise ’09.

We battled through ’08. No need to regurgitate that 12 months. Let the media do that. Soldiers don’t have to leave the battlefield, retire to the safety and hospitality of the barracks and start, immediately discussing the previous days, weeks or months in the desert, jungle or trenches.

They need time to lick their wounds. So do we. We’ve got from midnight ’08 til sunrise ’09.

My dog, Franklin, knows these things by instinct. As soon as the bagpipes start the return to the barracks “Black Bear”, Franklin, the black dog, will growl quietly for a while, then burst into full howl!

What does Franklin feel that you and I don’t? Maybe that’s why so many of us drink so much on New Year’s Eve.

Maybe we’ve lost, with so many other instincts, the sixth sense of loss and great expectation that only a primitive, subliminal growl and howl can adequately express.

I am going to change the lettering on the magnetic board outside our church from “one star inn – vacancy” (Christmas) to “invest here ’09 – stocks are up”. (New Year and beyond: to where no one has gone before.)

R.J.M.

With a big thanks to Tina Aitken and thatworks:

Four days a week locals congregate at the South Melbourne market to purchase gourmet delicacies. Four days a week another group of locals gather just down the road, at the Emerald Hill Mission House, where the Father Bob Maguire Foundation provides them with a meal, maybe some cordial, and company. For others, the Hopemobile takes the meals to the streets.

There is a huge disparity in living standards for residents of the City of Port Phillip – poverty is a major problem that is only worsening in the current economic climate. While Father Bob, the charismatic namesake of the Foundation, and his team of volunteers work tirelessly to support the impoverished and homeless, they do need the support of their community.

Local advertising agency thatworks saw an opportunity to raise awareness for this cause by utilising their building site adjacent to the market. The team created a thought-provoking billboard for the foundation and gathered together sponsors to make it a reality. Project builders Built provided support by erecting a new hoarding and display experts Visual Solutions and Slipstream Signs produced
and installed the skins at the site. A fictitious streetscape opposite the market at 143 Cecil Street now draws attention to the important issue of poverty and homelessness in our community.

The Father Bob Maguire Foundation aims to provide basic support to everyone who needs it, but needs your help. Businesses and residents are encouraged to support this important initiative by offering financial support. Donations can be made at fatherbob.com.au or businesses can call 9696 0644.

Please help us take away hunger.

Spare a thought this Christmas for those who, like the families and friends of Chris and Tyler, will this year have one empty chair at the table.

Chris was 20 and Tyler 15. Chris died in a car accident. Tyler died in a confrontation with police.

Their deaths were public events and felt by untold numbers of people through, not only so called mainstream media, but, especially for younger people, via IT media.

That’s how close we all are these days. We cry and laugh together. We watch each others antics, for better or worse.

We alert each other to imminent danger and swap funny stories to brighten up our lives of quiet desperation.

The downside is we’re swamped with negative information making sadness contagious.

The upside is we’re deluged also with positive clues to improvement making contagious feelings of well being.

Christmas is well marketed as a “pudding”, all bits and pieces – for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and in health.

The proof of the pudding is not in the eating but how you feel four hours afterwards!

Get yourself into the right frame of mind before Christmas so there’ll be long and lasting after effects leading up to Easter for us churchgoers and, the start of the footy season for “sportualists”.

I’ve put up a trite sign on our street level message board: The best gifts come wrapped in people. The next one will be deep and meaningful:  We are the message we have been waiting for.

Before Tyler confronted police in his local park he stopped to pat a dog walked by a young couple.

They said later: “If only…..” More of us have to work at rendering redundant “If only…..” and seize the moment.

We need to move beyond the random act of kindness to the collective ready response.

A civil society is needed to run parallel to our preferred model of democratic public service departments.

Neighbourhoods need local elders who can deploy empathetic locals, the equivalent of a public service crisis assessment team, in the case of a local predicament like Tyler v Police.

It’s the only mature and fair go each party deserves.

Happy Christmas and New Year!

R.J.M.