Grace in the hospital

I have a friend, a faithful sister in Christ. She and her family are currently living in Australia while she studies. She has important research to do that will have a great impact on the welfare of people back home. Her highly capable husband took a job as a cleaner at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital to support the family while they are here. But he was too good at his job – he got promoted into a managerial position!

I share this story because three weeks ago I gave birth to a daughter at his hospital, and even amid all the drama of delivering and caring for a newborn, my friend’s family stayed at the top of my mind. The thing is that our stay in hospital had a few unexpected twists and turns. I spent nearly a week there, I slept in three different wards, and I was cared for by countless midwives as my health – and Sophia’s health – jumped up and down over the course of a week. I spent time in all sorts of unhygienic places. On the floor. In the bathroom. Soaked in blood. Sometimes completely on my own.

It made a big difference to me to know that, behind the scenes, a team of cleaning staff were being managed by a kind and capable brother in Christ. God was keeping me safe in the hospital through the work of my friend’s husband. I prayed so many prayers of thanks for him!

The week I spent in RPA played out like an extended meditation on grace.

I spent days floored by God’s common grace. Hour after hour I saw God intervene and provide for us, not just through this unseen brother in Christ but through every midwife, consultant, doctor, cleaner and caterer that we met. I was tended to with care, I was encouraged and supported, I was nourished and kept clean. In the night my midwives checked in to make sure I was recovering. In the morning we awoke to glorious sunrises over Sydney. God is at work in his world, not just through his church, but through skylines, through hospital systems, even through people who deny his name. I left hospital praising God for the beautiful gifts he gives. What grace! To think he has given such wonderful things, even to a city where many people ridicule the name of his Son.

But the week also played out as a meditation on saving grace. We have welcomed a new child into the world, an immortal soul. “You have to be born again,” I heard Matt whisper the words of John’s gospel to her in the hours after her birth. True life, life to the full, comes through Jesus alone! And this truth was made abundantly clear in the hospital too, on day six. A midwife came to check on me. As she took my blood pressure, she turned and asked me about what I did for work. When I told her I was a pastor at a church, her face lit up! She sat down on the bed and excitedly told me about how she and her husband had been baptised three months ago. She loves Jesus so much! She loves being part of his family! What a wonderful glimpse of joy and new life in the hospital. How wonderful of God to give such a gift to this woman!

I pray that our daughter finds this life and joy too. I pray that she grows up to call these people brothers and sisters. I pray that she becomes a person thankful for beautiful sunrises and good healthcare and the kindness of strangers. I pray that whether she works as an academic, a midwife, a manager or a cleaner, that her work will honour a beloved Father in heaven.

He is incredibly kind to us.

Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows. He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. 

James 1:17-18

Musical Highlights of 2017

Halfway into 2017, here are my two musical highlights of the year so far:

They recorded and released an album version of the Planetarium!!! Thanks Bryce Dessner, Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, James McAlister and your string quartet and seven trombones. Five years ago I saw you perform this live and I cried about hearing something so beautiful and then never getting to hear it again. Now I can hear it again. It’s amazing.

I am quite taken with Saturn. It doesn’t rally feature the strings or the trombones much. But it takes my 2017 prize for ‘best song exploring sin and evil’, which is a legitimate category of song appreciation for me. As you might know, Saturn was a Roman God famous as the god of plenty, who made things awesome for rich people. He was also infamous for eating his own children, so not really a great guy.

This contemporary interpretation of Saturn is fascinating. And the video clip is even more fascinating. Do yourself a favour and watch it, read Sufjan’s lyrics as you do.

And you know, I can’t stop with one song. My other musical highlight is technically from 2016, but this year it has a cool video clip… it’s Immigrants from the Hamilton mixtape!! I love that there are so many different voices in it.

Like Saturn, it’s a great song explaining what is wrong in the world. Well, at least it explains a specific social problem. Which is a drop in the bucket compared to explaining the all-reaching, pervasive, cosmic nature of evil, but still very interesting! 10 points to all the artists who contributed to this one.

(See, I’m not joking about choosing my favourite songs because of their ability to articulate the problems of the world!)

Pregnancy Mythbusting

So it turns out that the ‘pregnancy waddle’ thing is less a hilarious thing that pregnant women do, and more a means of mitigating against agonising back pain.

Lady Preacher

In less than a month I begin maternity leave and hit the pause button on my (paid) ministry career. I am expecting lots of things to be different, so I am taking some time to thank God for what this last season has looked like.

I’m especially thankful that I have been given so many opportunities to teach people from the bible, especially as a preacher. There is a broad spectrum of evangelical opinions on women teaching, but I’m thankful that so far, my story of training as a teacher has been filled with very supportive people – even among the institutions and personalities that I least expected, and even among people who may disagree with what I do.

So, a month and bit out from having a kid, with no more scheduled sermons or SRE classes to give, hardly any kids church lessons left to run and only a handful of bible studies left to lead, here is a collection of thoughts on what it has been like to train as a lady preacher.

Just breathe for a second

There have been lots of highs and lows. Lots of intensity and exhaustion, just few moments to stop and rest.

Here are some of the fleeting moments so far in 2017, when there was peace and I took a photo. I am both excited and anxious about my prospects for peace in the immediate future.

Bushwalking and sketching at Mokoroa Falls.

Friday mornings at Cafe Ella.

That 40 degree day when we jumped in the car, drove to Wombara and spent the whole day on the beach.

Taking time out to read Ali Smith.

Discovering Quarrantine Reserve – just up the road from our home.

Chasing the sunrise on Easter Monday.

Return to suburbia

This afternoon I ran errands around our church building. As I walked across the property towards the main street I heard an excited voice shouting out my name: ‘HEY ALISON!’ A couple of 12 year old boys tumbled out the tree in the front of the church, laughing, then a dozen more started running around up and down the street playing tips, suddenly ignoring me again, wrapped up in their own game.

I got to witness a moment of suburban perfection – young boys, not quite men, still entertained with the place they’ve grown up in, owning the streets and the public places, not anxious or afraid to run around in the open, genuinely enjoying childhood games that they’ll grow out of in about 18 months.

And I only got to witness it because of the perfect timing of three things:

1. A year ago I moved back to the suburbs.
2. I have been volunteering at the local youth drop in where I’ve met all these kids.
3. Our minister’s oldest son is one of these kids – it’s him and his friends running up and down the street and climbing the church trees.

And December is just around the corner, that sweet time for year 6 kids, when school is ending and everything is parties and Christmas is coming and you are on top of the world. This afternoon I was flooded with waves of nostalgia. I am feeling OK about living in suburbia again.

David Malouf: Remembering Babylon

I read this a while ago, but I am still haunted by this fictional journal entry, from a fictional Anglican minister, in a fictional white settlement in 1840s’s Queensland:

We have been wrong to see this continent as hostile and infelicitous, so that only by the fiercest stoicism, a supreme resolution and force of will, and by felling, clearing, sowing with the seeds we have bought with us and by importing sheep, cattle, rabbits, even the very birds of the air, can it be shaped and made habitable. It is habitable already. I think of our early settlers, starving on those shores in the midst of  plenty they did not recognise, in a blessed mature of flesh, fowl, fruit that was all around them and which they could not, with their English eyes, perceive, since the very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls out sensitivity to other forms, even the most obvious.

We must run our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there. Is it not strange, this history of ours, in which explorers, men on the track of the unknown, fall dry mouthed and exhausted in country where natives, moving just ahead of them, or behind, or a mile to one side, are living, as they have done of centuries, off the land? Is there not a kind of refractory pride in it, an insistence that if the land will not present itself to us in terms that we know, we would rather die than take it as it is?

For there is a truth here and it is this: that no continent lies outside God’s bounty and his intention to provide for his children. He is a gardener and everything he makes is a garden. This place too will one day, I believe, yield its fruits to us and to the great banquet at which we are the guests, the common feast; as the Americas brought corn and tomatoes and sweet peppers, and rhubarb and the potato, that bitter root of the high Andes that women, over long years, by experiment and crossbreeding, have leached of its poison and made palatable, to be the food of millions. (There is a lily-root here that the women know how to boil and make edible.)

The children of this land were made for it, as it was for them, and is to them a rich habitation, teeming with milk and honey – even if much of its richness is still hidden; but then so was the milk and honey of the Promised Land, which was neither milk, in fact, nor honey, and the land itself to all appearance parched and without promise. We must humble ourselves and learn from them. The time will come when we too will be sustained not only by wheat and lamb and bottled cucumbers, but by what the land itself produces, tasting at last the earthy sweetness of it, allowing it to feed our flesh with its minerals and underground secrets so that what spreads in us is an intimate understanding of what it truly is, with all that is unknowable in it made familiar within…

…The theodolite offers only one way of moving into the continent and apprehending the scope and contours of it. Did we not, long ago, did not our distant ancestors, bring in out of the great plains where they wandered, out of mere wilderness, the old coarse grasses that lapped the bellies of their horses, and, separating the grains and nursing them to plumpness, learning how to mill and grind and make daily bread, and how to tend the wild vine till its fruit yielded wine, create settled places where men and women sit at tables among neighbours, in a daily sacrament which is the image of the Lord’s greater one? All this can be done again. This is what is intended by our coming here: to make this place too part of the world’s garden, but by changing ourselves rather than it and adding thus to the richness and variety of things.

How I wish that this character were true, and that his hopes for his new home had come true.

 

Jackie French: Nanberry

The sky grew grey, then pink, and a too-bright blue. Yagali had vanished. He struggled to sit up. Why did his body feel like a jellyfish? He peered around frantically, looking for her. Had she run into the bush to find the others, or tried to swim out to cool her body? But even her footprints had been eaten by the waves.

‘Gumna?’ he cried to his grandfather. ‘Wianga?’ he called to his mother. But they only muttered, their eyes blank, their minds lost in the land of fever.

An 8 year old Cadigal boy, Nanberry, is on the brink of death by small pox, when he is discovered by Surgeon White in 1789. In an unprecedented move for his time, Surgeon White adopts Nanberry – not as a servant – but as his son.

Nanberry: Black Brother White is the story of this family during the early years of the colony. After Surgeon White adopts Nanberry he takes a convict mistress, Rachel Turner, who bears him a second son, Andrew White. The two brothers grow up in limbo. Nanberry hovers between his Cadigal and settler families, uncertain whether he will ever be initiated as a Cadigal man. Andrew must be separated from his mother and his convict connections when he is sent to England for a civilised education.

Like many of Jackie French’s other young adult novels, this one is based heavily on historical records: Nanberry, Surgeon White, Rachel, Andrew and (spoilers!) Rachel’s husband Thomas Moore – were all real people. They lived in incredibly difficult times, yet they have all left real and lasting legacies in Australian society. Rachel was one of the earliest women in English legal history to be defended in court against a charge. In Australia, Rachel helped found orphanages, schools and the Bank of NSW (currently Westpac); and her husband helped construct some of the earliest church buildings and founded Moore Theological College(!).

However, despite all these happy outcomes, Nanberry is a tragic read in the light of over 200 years of colonised history. This book is written for young people but Jackie French does not hide the violence of the colony, particularly for indigneous people and for female convicts. Nanberry himself faces terrible trauma and dislocation. And although he negotiates these circumstances with incredible courage and poise, although his story ends nobly, it is hard to take pleasure in it knowing the suffering of countless indigenous people in the generations to follow him. Similarly Rachel’s story turns out for the  better, but it opens up a window into the suffering and abuse of hundreds of other women who were sent to Australia the early days of the colony.

An educational read, a gripping read, but a sobering one. It sounds like it was a sobering book to write for Jackie French too.

Colin Meloy: Wildwood

How five crows managed to lift a twenty-pound baby boy into the air was beyond Prue, but that was certainly the least of her worries. In fact, if she were to list her worries right then and there as she sat spellbound on the park bench and watcher her little brother, Mac, carried aloft in the talons of these five black crows, puzzling out just how this feat was being done would likely come in dead last…

And so opens the adventure of Wildwood: the story of Prue and Curtis on an incredible adventure to the Impassable Wilderness. It’s a kind of Narnian story: two kids stumbling into a magical place, where animals talk and take you flying, where things look quaint at first and then you discover there is an evil queen, and there is a battle to end all battles – will good triumph over evil? – and then (no spoilers) the story ends. It was a great read.

This book was on the Premier’s Reading list for children in years 5-6, so I’m not sure I am the target audience. But I had to read this book because it was written by Colin Meloy, the frontman of the Decemberists, and illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis, who is responsible for all of the Decemberists’ artwork. I love this band. One of the distcint things about them is the way their songs tell epic stories from all times and places. They sing vivid and imaginative songs about star-crossed lovers in fighting gangs, soldiers in Iraq,  David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, guerrilla wars, the arrival of a Spanish princess, the Japanese legend of the Crane Wife. They reached stunning highs with the saga of the Mariner’s Revenge, and then followed that up with The Hazards of Love: an entire album telling a tragic fairy-tale story of two lovers thwarted by an evil queen.

So obvs Colin Meloy has an incredibly vivid imagination, and a creative way with words.

Given the expectations I had, Wildwood did not disappoint. It was like reading a Decemberists‘ song, it was vibrant and exciting and it opened another window into the creative mind of Colin Meloy. And Carson Ellis’ illustrations were simply beautiful. There is no other word for them. They were perfect.

Wildwood is the first of three novels, but, as much as I enjoyed it, I think I will leave it at this one. I loved to have one of my favourite musicians as the guide for this adventure, but I think one adventure with Colin Meloy is enough. Maybe next time I will read something higher up the Premier’s Reading Challenge list!

 

Ali Smith: ‘How to be Both’

Confession: I read this book because I liked the photo on the cover. I’m not even sure how to explain this book, so first up, maybe you’d like to check out this review over at the Guardian.

How to be both is all about confused binaries and there are only two chapters: two chapters one. And Ali Smith printed half her books with one chapter first and the other half with the other. If I had bought this book at Better Read than Dead I would have started the story with George, a grieving (female) teenager from Cambridge. But I decided to borrow it from Five Dock library, so instead I started the story with Francescho , the ghost of an Italian Renaissance painter (and female – it took me 1.5 reads to work that out!). My decision to borrow the same book meant a different story!! What!?

I am a sucker for re-imagined stories about artists, I like the way they open a window to reinterpret real-life art or music in a different way. And I loved the way Ali Smith kept muddling my brain around with the two halves of the story, and the confusion between those binary categories – mostly around male/female, but also past/future, joy/grief, life/death, tangible/imagined.

But then even more, I loved reading about two different people and their worlds. It took me straight into 14th century Italy and suburban Cambridge. Thanks Ali Smith.

Finally, I loved this gem of a quote: about how a close relationship opens up profound communication and new meanings. It’s written about two friends, about love, but I read it and felt like Ali Smith was trying to describe what it meant for me to find and connect with and love fellow Christians.

It is also like H is trying to find a language that will make personal sense to George’s ears. No one has ever done this before for George. She has spent her whole life speaking other people’s languages. It is new to her. The newness of it has a sort of power that can make the old things – as old as these songs, even as old as Latin itself – a kind of new, but a kind that doesn’t dismiss their, what would you call it? … Their classic status? She nods. That’s it. Whatever is happening makes them new but lets them be old both at once.