Easter Reflection - "The way life is supposed to be"

I regard Michael Leunig as a modern-day prophet, and for a few years I had the cartoon above displayed on the door of my office. I still often pull it out of my filing cabinet to show to students who are struggling with the gap between “the way life is supposed to be” and “the way life actually is”.

Essentially our primary task as human beings is to live as authentically as we can in the midst of reality as we experience it. One of my favourite quotes is from the famous psychiatrist M. Scott Peck (author of ‘The Road Less Travelled’); “mental health is an on-going process of dedication to reality at all costs”. Yet many of the young people I speak to are bound by the thoughts that plague them, or vision of the way things “should” be. When a crisis or challenge occurs, as much emotional energy can be spent managing the gap between reality and the way things “should” be as is spent facing the challenge itself!

In a sense, almost all human unhappiness and anger arises from the sense that reality is somehow different from what we’d like it to be. The word “is” seems very small and insignificant. Yet one of the key challenges we face in life is coming to terms with what is. Life is full of struggle and hardship as well as deep joy and happiness. The two are intimately linked together. As Kahlil Gibran once wrote in his famous book ‘The Prophet’; “When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight”. A key challenge is to find ways of “surrendering” to what is and allowing ourselves to experience Life fully, rather than succumbing to the human tendency to make a judgement about what is before responding emotionally to that judgement.

One of the powerful aspects of the Easter story is that it captures two of the universal themes of life – the grief and darkness of death, and the enduring re-emergence and resilience of life in the midst of this darkness. Deep sadness and unbelievable joy are acknowledged and celebrated side-by-side. The events that gave rise to these traditions are shrouded in mystery as deep as Life itself. Nevertheless, whatever our beliefs, we can still respond with an affirmation of the enduring and interconnected realities of life and death, joy and sorrow, love and grief.

Dogs, dust and digging deep

Coober Pedy is a fascinating place. A dirty dusty town of wandering dogs and disenfranchised aborigines; where the tough prospectors of yesteryear dug through the sandstone for incredible distances in the hope of striking a colourful stream of opal. The white stuff is useless. They call it potch and give bits of it to children at the many opal stores in town. The view over town is spectacular, not in its beauty, but in its desolation. The ochre-coloured hills are dotted with vents – a sign that a dwelling place lies beneath.

It acts as a metaphor for aspects of life itself. The real beauty of Coober Pedy – like many of its inhabitants – is hidden beneath the dry dusty earth. There are those who only look at the surface, who judge by appearance, who have little inclination to do the hard work of digging to discover the hidden gems that lie beneath every living person and experience.

In his classic song, “Anthem”, Leonard Cohen sings “There’s a crack, a crack in everything. That’s where the light gets in”. Opals are a bit like that. As the ancient oceans that covered this area gradually receded, silica solutions were deposited in the fractures and faults in the ground. Over 150 million years, the solutions in these faults have formed into that precious gem we call opal.

Over the past 14 years I have journeyed with many people through periods of tremendous struggle and suffering – children who have lost a parent, parents who have lost a child, some who have experienced every manner of abuse, and others who have been left unloved by those whose responsibility it was to love. Life is full of struggle and grief. Our only way of avoiding this is to avoid living – and loving – altogether.

I have also discovered the colourful gems that arise from the raw suffering and deep fractures of such experiences – which strip away much of the pretence of Western culture. I have learned that laughter and tears are close companions; that engaging in suffering is the path to healing and growth, whilst denying suffering leads to bitterness and resentment; that the greatest drives in our humanness are love and fear (in this I differ markedly from Freud).

Most importantly, I have learned that beneath the surface of each being, amidst the dust and the dogs, the fractures and faults, lay streams of precious colour and life just waiting for those who are prepared to dig deep.

Easter Sunday in Paradise

Marilyn and I went to an Easter Sunday service yesterday at a little Anglican church between Whitfield and Cheshunt in the King Valley. Our presence swelled the congregation’s numbers by a quarter. We were the youngest by at least 20 years. The service was conducted by a retired minister who lives in Beechworth. The hymns were unaccompanied. The readings imperfect to my demanding teacher’s ears. A fly buzzed throughout the sermon, the contents of which were not memorable enough to recall.

This is church. It is imperfect. It does not capture the attention of those whose demand is to be entertained.

On Good Friday a sick little girl called Bek went into surgery. She was gaunt and yellow, and her long wait for a liver transplant seemed destined to end in a slow demise. But someone else died, and Bek – whom I have never met, but who goes to my sons’ school – was given the opportunity to live again.

These are the themes of life. Birth, struggle, death and life-beyond-life. The themes are universal, and they are captured within every religious tradition. Today we celebrate an event in history that we call Resurrection. Despite the beliefs of many fundamentalists, this event was never called Resuscitation – it was always more than about a person coming back to life. Whatever mysterious historical event inspired this celebration, its message is one of hope beyond hopelessness.

I’ll never forget the first time we travelled through the Black Spur to Marysville after Black Saturday 2009. It was Good Friday – months after the fires, but still long before the devastated ruins from the fires were finally cleared. The entire landscape was a blackened, charred ruin. Yet even in the midst of this devastation, bursts of bright green fronds emanated from the charred black stumps of tree-ferns. Death and life. Life and death. Hope that lies beyond hopelessness.

These are the themes of Easter. They are themes that lie at the core of what it means to exist. Yet they point to the age-old idea that our existence belongs to a deeper sense of existence itself.

And so we gathered with a small, elderly group of faithful folk in an insignificant valley of an insignificant country. Later we were to venture to a stunning natural feature appropriately known as Paradise Falls. But, for then, it was enough to acknowledge by our presence the proclamation of a young Jewish man who was executed at 33, but whose death was the start of something new that changed the course of human history.

Article on school chaplaincy

As a chaplain who has worked for a significant number of years in the governement school system, I followed the so-called "Chaplaincy debate" in 2011 with interest. After speaking to a gathering of ministers in my local area I was asked to write an article for "Church Connect" - an ecumenical newsletter of the covenant churches of Brighton. This is what I wrote:

Perhaps the most profound moment in my 13 years of chaplaincy thus far was spent with a small group of 16-year-olds gathered around the open casket of a friend who had died suddenly and tragically. The conversation that emerged was one in which these young people wrestled – perhaps for the first time – with some of the biggest questions of life. Where had the vibrant spirit of their friend gone? Was the body that lay before them all that remained, or did the life within her continue to exist in some way? How could someone who had been one of their closest companions simply cease to exist? This was not a time for simple answers or religious platitudes (if ever such times exist), but a profoundly important moment when the yearning and questioning of those heartbroken young people needed to be listened to and honoured.

It is my conviction that human beings are “meaning-making” creatures. Whenever we are faced with a struggle or crisis, whether personal or global, our initial human response is to “make sense” of this experience. The ability to do this in a way that integrates the event into our belief system (or for our beliefs to be moulded and changed by the experience) is essential for healthy growth and recovery. Furthermore, the formation of a coherent belief system is essential to the adolescent task of identity development.

Journeying with students through the infinite variations of this meaning-making process is the domain of chaplaincy. In my experience, there seems to be something implicit in the religiosity of chaplaincy that enables such pastoral and therapeutic journeying to take place. As a registered psychologist, I’m qualified to recognise and treat a wide variety of mood, personality and other disorders. However the role of chaplaincy adds a dimension of breadth and depth that both transcends and enhances the therapeutic process.

It has been an interesting year to have been a chaplain. I have followed with genuine interest the so-called “Chaplaincy Debate”. Essentially this has comprised elements of the media acting as a mouthpiece for opponents of any religious involvement in schools. There has been very little published that is grounded in the actual experience of chaplaincy, and even less that has sought to genuinely portray the distinctive contributions that chaplains make to school communities and the lives of thousands of young people in the state. I refer particularly to the Victorian context because ACCESS Ministries – in spite of the poor press it has received – maintains the highest standards of professional qualifications and accountability for its chaplains that I am aware of in Australia.

In spite of the lure of more dollars working as a consulting psychologist, I remain passionate about the role of chaplaincy and the uniqueness of what it can contribute (in partnership with other health professionals) to the lives of adolescents. In a society where young people are less likely than ever before to belong to “meaning-making communities” such as religious or cultural institutions, the opportunity to engage with and articulate meaning in their own lives is perhaps more essential than ever before.

There is an important caveat here. I regard any conversation that engages with the deepest part of a person – their belief system – as a “religious” conversation. However it is never my intention to cheapen these profound moments by viewing them as an opportunity to impart my own beliefs. Similarly, young people rarely find themselves in positions of presence and trust where they engage with the big questions of life. It may seem ironic to some, but I believe that we dishonour this questioning when we seek to provide simplistic answers in the midst of such sacred moments.

Finally, there is one immeasurable gift that chaplaincy seeks to provide to young people on behalf of the Christian church. At the heart of the Christian faith is the command of Jesus; “As I have loved you, so you must love one another”. The most powerful thing we can ever do for another human being is to love them, and to love them as they are. Jesus was intentionally portrayed as reaching out to those on the margins of society – those who were loved by few and most likely filled with self-loathing – and to demonstrate a love that challenged the very foundation of their self-perception.

Student well-being in schools tends to focus on remedying problems as they arise, whether through psychology, speech therapy or other educational/therapeutic assistance. When the problem is fixed, the support is then transferred to others perceived as more needy. Chaplaincy augments this essential work, but also seeks to gently and creatively build a supportive mentoring presence in the school community, available to and accepting of all. It seeks to embody the belief that all people are deserving and worthy of love – a belief that counters directly the self-perception of many young people. This is the work of primary prevention; of building strong and resilient adolescents who will grow into maturity with the capacity to love others as they have been loved.