I’ve been following the St Mary’s saga with detached interest. Having once been to a mass there I found the service powerful, but I’ve been fascinated that Peter Kennedy thought that he could stay there as a Catholic priest at the same time as he defied and criticised the church.
So when Mark Bahnisch suggested I go with him to the 6:30 Vigil Mass last Saturday, the first under the new dispensation, I was keen to see exactly how the hierarchy would deal with its prodigal parish.
The indications are that while Kennedy obviously had a large following, many of whom have moved with him to the Trades and Labor Council building, the parish will continue as a viable entity, probably retaining much of its character.
One of the parishioners joked with us that the only difference between a “liturgist” and a terrorist was that you could negotiate with a terrorist. He described the new administrator of the parish Ken Howell, who is also the dean of Brisbane’s St Stephen’s Cathedral, as a good liturgist.
So, perhaps St Mary’s wasn’t so far outside the Pale, because it appears to me to have retained many of the practices that it had under the old dispensation. And if Howell is such a stickler for the traditions, then they seem to have been able to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate many of the innovations. The altar is still in the centre of the church, and the pews are grouped around it. Before the service there was an acknowledgement of the prior aboriginal owners of the land. The Aboriginal flag is still flying outside the church as well. Individuals were invited to come up and offer their own prayers during that part of the service.
I think there would have been 100 people there. That compares favourably with the 50 to 60 or so who front to the 9:00 o’clock service at my Anglican church most Sundays, and that is our major service, so you’d have to think the parish should be financially viable. Talking to some of the other members of the congregation after the service it was obvious that a significant number of people had attended out of curiosity or solidarity, as we had, so it is hard to say how many might have been regulars or not.
There was a degree of charming disorganisation. Mark, not a parishioner at this stage, although he used to be and promises to return, was asked to read the prayers of the people just before the service. And Fr Howell admitted at communion that he hadn’t quite thought through the logistics of how the congregation would circulate, and he also had to ask for additional ministers for the wine.
He had also brought some of the resources of the cathedral to bear, with the organist and the cantor both visitors from across the river. It was a simple and elegant service with some sung responses.
Fr Howell dealt with the issues fairly directly, and during the prayers of the faithful one of the parishioners rose to pray about those who had left. It was unclear whether he was in sympathy or not, but it seemed important that he said what he did and that it was allowed to happen.
While Mark spotted someone at the door wearing a St Mary’s in exile T-shirt, the closest we got to a disturbance was just before the reading of the Gospel, when a woman came into the church demanding that someone move their car from across the driveway so she could get home for her dinner!
The Roman Catholic church is the strongest of the Christian denominations in Australia. This is despite them seeming to have a greater shortage of priests and ministers than the rest of us. That suggests that the pull of their organisation is much stronger than it is in the other churches where it is fairly common for worshippers to move between denominations.
In which case it will be interesting to see how Kennedy’s defectors fare over time as St Mary’s continues, demonstrating that it is not the church that is in exile, just some former members of its congregation.
April 26, 2009 | Graham
The caravan moves on
April 17, 2009 | Ronda Jambe
Greedy for Broadband
What is the true value of a national broadband infrastructure? That’s a big ball of string to unravel, or perhaps it’s a tangle of fibre optic cables. At the very least, it is in the eye of the beholder. Are there some who think Australia doesn’t need world’s best practice information infrastructure in today’s world? For those doubters, I can recommend a lengthy reading list. Most of it is dated, because those arguments were being made at least 10 years ago.
Does anyone remember the ‘New Silk Road’ documents the government put out in the late 1990’s? These made the argument about international competitiveness, getting products to market, etc. All still valid, and a similar case has also been made in relation to mobile phones and pigs in African villages. Conclusion: business, development and information technology go together like custard, jelly and fruit salad (if you will excuse the trifling comparison).
But my purpose here is more mundane, more like my own life in fact, which needs broadband just as much as business. In aggregate, people like me, who blog, shop, look things up and communicate form the other side of the broadband equation, and we are hungry for the connectivity. As illustrated by Graham’s blog about using Google Earth and talking history with his son, fast internet extends our sights, sounds and sensitivities in surprising ways. The sheer marvel and utility of Google Earth alone has turned this ‘zoom in’ concept into a commonplace technique on TV.
Being away from all day access has focussed my mind on exactly what I need it for. Then, in Rotorua, a motel with free wireless broadband! I seized upon it, and initially the connection worked fine. Imagine just putting in a network name and password supplied by the front desk, just like in the ads. The next morning, of course, the narrative unfolded, and a nice young Chinese guy had to fix it, twice. Conflict and resolution, with a happy ending. I look forward to the day when free wireless broadband is standard equipment in hotels, and resent hotels that want $10 per hour for access.
Finally I was able to deal with the personal and professional tasks that had been piling up, difficult to complete in half hour chunks at a library or internet cafe: a few messages that required at least response, but can wait until next week, several overseas friends and relatives whose relationships with me are almost exclusively conducted via email, and meeting up arrangements with friends here. For conveying detail, email is better than phone, you have it in pixels if not print.
Because my mother was never interested in using the internet, and can’t easily reach me (or I her) while I’m travelling, I rely on people back in her area to fill me in on the latest. They tell me her companion has been moved into a rehab following a second stroke. That is reasonably important information for me, and my budget for telecoms does not extend to usurous international roaming rates, especially for lengthy family chats. So the internet, specifically email, will have to do.
The social uses of technology are generally undervalued, (lots of research on that) but they are part of the web of communications that maintain countries and societies. They are related to having a knowledgable society, and morph into citizen participation at the edges. Maybe I’m in the minority in using Get Up and (sometimes) the international version, Avaaz. But many people totally depend on the internet for deeper news than the TV can offer. Watching Fox news on cable reminds me just how bad and trivial US mainstream in particular can be. Do they have a team that sits down to deliberately plan segments that will dumb down the population? Most of their segments would make half interesting sidebars. The internet, especially streaming such as You Tube, is now essential for maintaining political and democratic integrity. It is the mainstream.
Coda: It is darkly hilarious to read that the Brits are now nervous about the security implications of the 10 billion pound contract for upgrading the telephone system that they awarded to the Chinese company Huawei, which just happens to be headed up by a former army officer, Ren Zhengfei. With all the whispers and worry about cyberwarfare and Chinese hacking into Rudd’s email, perhaps they should go back to the research from 10 years ago.
Helen Margetts, of the London School of Economics, warned back then about the dangers of placing integrated IT infrastructure and systems in the hands of large outsourced companies. She argued that this transfers too much power to groups that are removed from government scrutiny. She wasn’t thinking about Chinese companies back then, but she probably is now.
April 14, 2009 | Ronda Jambe
Hp, Hp Hooray for FttP!
The Rudd Government seems to have done something appropriate, and we should be getting a top of the line model for broadband. Fibre to the Premises should break the twisted copper grip Telstra has on fast internet. It might also open the door to wider use of microwave and satellite internet.
At the coast we use satellite, happy not to deal with the phone companies on that one. We’re working on getting rid of the electric company as well, as they charge $1 per day access fee, whether or not anyone is using electricity.
At the moment, I am in the middle of the north island of New Zealand, in an expensive internet cafe, because the libraries’ terminals are down. And who knows for how long? Someone wandered into this cafe looking to buy a dial up modem, and the shop keeper looked at her patronizingly. There is a long dashhound wandering around, but I don’t think he is the owner.
Everything in New Zealand is beautiful and quiet and slow, but pleasant. Like Canberra on tranquilisers. For that matter, it’s like Moruya on sedatives. And I love it! I come every year to check out my little cottage on a lake, and this time it means doing some gardening.
Lakes in NZ are like beaches in Australia, and the beach cottage morphs into a ‘bach’ which is like a beach house, only smaller and more humble. Mine has a ‘chippie’ to make hot water in the winter, and a big wood burning fireplace. The sun is shining, and the tiny town (you can google ‘Mangakino’) has about 200 permanent residents. The rest are holiday owners, a slow transition that has been happening since the town was sold to a developer by the Maoris. Now the blocks are slowly being made freehold, and change is afoot. The shops have been redone, the community pool is open, and there are powerboats in summer on the lake. There is even a lakeside cafe for hot chips and burgers.
The garden in my little cottage has been let go since the tenants moved out, but I harvested some big fat green peppers and lots of tomatoes. The Lakeside Village has grapes ripe and dripping from the fence.
For me, New Zealand is a land of milk and honey. And green! Parochial, a bit behind Australia with the technology, but beautiful and full of pleasant people. And at least here in Tokoroa, there is broadband aplenty. Hp Hp Hooray for Kiwi country!
April 13, 2009 | Graham
Madonna and Child in the mind’s eye
I was playing with my son and looking at Google Earth. We went from discussing how Vikings navigated the inland waterways in Russia all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to Mercator projections, and twisting and turning the globe.
So, low and behold, what did I find lurking under the summer Arctic Ocean, but a “birth mark” that looked a lot like a madonna and child, as you can see below.
I’m used to scrunching-up my eyes to see the man in the moon, but it is a novel experience for me to be able to “look” at the world from outer space and impose some imaginative order on it out of my own mind.
The late Fr David Binns was either rector or curate at St Matthew’s, our church, and a painting by him of the madonna and child hangs in the side chapel above the altar. It’s probably not coincidental that it looks like the image I’ve detected in the Arctic Ocean. The marvels of the human mind.
April 04, 2009 | Ronda Jambe
R U Non-Linear?
Of course you are. Nearly everything is non-lnear, including the intricate braiding of water tumbling from a faucet, if you have ever observed that in fascination. If your heart is healthy, this means it displays subtle fluctuations around a stable pattern, rather than machine-like rhythm. Such patterns, like the distribution of leaves on a tree, or the flow of traffic on a freeway, are the ‘strange attractors’ of chaos theory. Today chaos theory is more generally referred to as complex adaptive systems (CAS), but the marvels they unfold apply to all dimensions of life, including the social and economic, as well as the physics of everyday objects and events.
Economics is especially non-linear. This means, among other things, that there is a fundamental unpredictability in the world. Hardly what Descartes had in mind. Mathematically, the liklihood of surprise is unquestioned. The general way forward (which is either a tautology or an oxymoron, take your pick) can be seen in its broad outlines, but the details must remain hazy. Otherwise we would all be rich!
Climate change is subject to the same universal laws of non-linearity: how big our picture is depends on the scale from which we view it. Some have argued that overall temperatures seem to be plateauing, and therefore global warming is a furphy. But a new study, described here: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/cool-spells-in-a-warming-world/?ref=science demonstrates that a period of a decade or two is insufficient for determining longer term patterns in the climate. Minor coolings, consistent with the subtle variations described above as part of CAS, can occur within a bigger pattern of warming.
If we can agree on anything, it has to be that the era of human dominance on this planet, the Anthropocene, has been but a whisker in the Earth’s history. To look at a tiny sliver of our own time is misleading, just as the starts and jerks of the stock market in response to relativly trivial information is silly but typical of our species.
Bifurcation, or sudden break with the past and entry into a new regime, is another feature of CAS. Think 9/11 and the changes that it brought. Or Hurricane Katrina – life has never been the same for those who were affected, as it never will be for Victorians after the recent fires.
Those who have their fortunes on the line are slowly coming to terms with the risks. Thus, the EU has released a white paper about the impacts of climate change. The EU is arguing for adaptation, and has identified the most vulnerable areas.
Another report, from a network of insurers concerned about climate change, looks to both the risks and opportunities for the industry (http://www.eenews.net/public/25/10429/features/documents/2009/04/03/document_cw_01.pdf)
While Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, is laying off about 1000 staff, the industry overall sees that their adaptation to climate change will involve new products and services. Their awakening has been slow, but it is happening.
Unfortunately, the Rudd government is not waking up to the need to encourage adaptation. Proposals to triple the coal export facilities in Newcastle are nothing short of insane. If you were told to stop smoking, would you buy a few cartons duty free? If you were told you need a hip operation, would you then run a marathon?
Last night we saw the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Without giving it all away, it plays on the idea that humans can change, and adapt in response to crisis. Once the alarm is clearly sounded, all can proceed in a direct (and linear) path to salvation.
In ‘Al Qaeda and what it means to be Modern’, pessimistic philosopher John Gray suggests otherwise. He says the believe in progress and redemption that characterised the Enlightenment and all political movements from the Positivists to the Communists is just a secular version of Christianity. I’m not sure, but there is nothing in anything I read these days that leads me to believe the future can be taken for granted, either personally or on the larger scale of Australia, or the world. Creative destruction indeed, who knows? From a certain perspective, we are all peasants, and our garden is huge.
