religions and languages

Michael is back on his blog!

and writing some lovely bits that I am happy to pass on. His latest blog is about Samaritans. http://michaelcardensjottings.blogspot.com/2010/05/samaritans.html

It brings back memories of the trip to Palestine and Israel last year. 

near the end he writes:

Like languages, religions express something about what it means to be human. The death of a religion, like the death of a language is an irreparable loss. Religious diversity must be fostered, encouraged, sustained and celebrated; respected.

An important point that I hadn't really seen before. That Language and Religion can be the cradles, the containers in which we hold our culture and our humanity.

Languages I see as dying out too fast. And I was watching SBS tonight about the teaching of ethics being available to students who do not take SRE (special religious education). It is a philosophy based programme, not about morality. Seems very good to me. But where does that leave "religion"?  Is there any place for it in our society? I certainly think so, and think that the University chaplaincy is one place to ask the question.  I am getting closer to making up a uni blog there.

Where has all the passion gone?

Where has all the passion gone? asks Pat Brennan in an address to Sydney MOW (Movement for the Ordination of Women)                                                   

"If you occupy the place of prophesy but do not prophesy, you are stifling passion."

An important word to all of us.

Lizards facing extinction with warming

http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2010/s2899483.htm

I heard part of this on Friday as Andrew was doing some more electrical work that had been made necessary by our recent additions to our photovoltaic array.

The study in Mexico that is published in Science this week might have an explanation for the diminished skink population here. I had blamed the snake. I might have been wrong!

The skinks obviously do not like the heat on very hot days. I have had a papier mache cover on the wire over their birthing spot for some years now. But this year they didn't even get over to the mud bricks which had been a normal cool spot for them over the years. (ten or more?)

The study suggests that lizards need more than four hours in a day when they don't have to work at keeping cool, but can spend their energy getting food and doing all the social things that are needed to keep the population going. I doubt if our lizards would have that these days. They don't start to move without the sun being on their rocks (even if the morning is warm enough); then the sun is too hot on many summer days. (even in spring time we had a heat wave in 2009!)

When they come out of hibernation, perhaps I will feed them some more.

and on another note. The front verandah has been draped in gold for a few months. A "golden orb" spider took up residence near the clothes line that Mike put in. I have been surprised that she survived so long. She was there for some months and we have had some frosts. But 'Shelob' lost her life in Thursday's frost. On Wednesday Fred had seen the Wattle Bird having a go at the huge spider as she sat in the middle of her web. What a honey eater was doing looking at her I don't understand! I looked out at 5am on Thursday and she was still there. But by 7am the frost had come down (-1 I think) and she had gone.

The New Yorker on Anglicanism in the UK

A good comment on fundamentalism... "a very modern thing"

From The NewYorker

by Jane Kramer
The New Yorker, April 26, 2010

found on the St Matthews Westminster site:
http://www.stmw.org/4/post/2010/04/a-canterbury-tale-the-battle-within-the-church-of-england-to-allow-women-to-be-bishops.html

[Archbishop of Canterbury] Williams admits that the lessons of fourth-century Christian conflicts are cold comfort to women fighting for equality in their church in 2010.  Most of the conflicts dividing the Anglican world today have settled directly on them and, if not on them, on the openly gay priests who are waiting in line behind them - the result, in part, of an epidemic of literalism that is hardly confined to Anglicans.  ‘One of the odd things about fundamentalism in its American form, but not exclusively, is that it’s paradoxically a very modern thing,’ he told me.  ‘A crude nineteenth-century reaction to a crude nineteenth-century scientism - a kind of mirror image of that positivist yes-or-no knowledge that you can pin down.’  He described it, in England, as a wholesale rejection of intellectual engagement and intellectual depth in Scripture and compared it to what was happening in Islam.  "I’ve sometimes argued with people on the other side of the river here, in Parliament, saying, Don’t talk about fundamentalist and modern Muslims, talk about primitivist and traditionalist Muslims - ones who only know the Koran and ones who actually know what it is like to have a thickly textured cultural and intellectual Islamic life."

notes for Anzac Day (remembering the Armenians)

Anzac Day, listening to the evening news after having a fairly normal Sunday, it is still my experience of Anzac Day. very difficult... In the Canberra Times a young mother takes her children to the War Memorial to find out what war really is like. "I'm to precious to be killed aren't I Mum?" 
But I remember Poppy T in Queanbeyan. Angry about what he had been forced to do in the Gallipoli trenches as they bayonetted the enemy. That is the agony of war; the offence; the unspeakable horror; what people do to one another. Is it any wonder that we who grew up in the shadow of war were not told? How do you tell your children that you had done such things?

reading Brian's blog I discover ekklesia. and this article

http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/essay_ArmenianGenocide
 
what is needed is a link to The Monthly magazine article about the connections between the Armenian Genocide and Gallipoli. April 24th and 25th 1915

http://www.themonthly.com.au/february-2007-brief

"During the exact time Australian troops spent in hell on Gallipoli, another event of world-historical importance was taking place on contiguous ground: the Armenian Genocide. Some contemporary scholars think that one million people were murdered during this catastrophe. The crime was committed by the leadership of the Ottoman Turkish Empire: the empire which Australian troops, as part of the Anglo-French force, invaded."
In "A Turkish Tale", Robert Manne tackles the awful episode that, for Australia, hides in the shadow of Gallipoli: the genocide which bears directly on the major Australian involvement in World War I but which forms no part of the Anzac story.
"In the scores of books written about Australia and Gallipoli, why has no Australian historian ever asked the question that should have occurred most naturally to a member of the profession: namely, did the Anglo-French Dardanelles campaign play any role in the Ottoman regime's decision for genocide?"
.
My memory of the article is first, that the genocide started with the hanging of four Armenian intellectuals in Istanbul on the 24th April 1915. But that the main massacres occurred in the East of the country closer to Armenia itself. The problem was that the Armenians were christian. Some at least were possibly assisting the western powers (that is us). Then Turkey was invaded by Christians. and the terror was unleashed.


I first heard about the massacres on a beautiful winter's day in 1971 on the Mediterranean coast at Izmir. A young man told me that the beach here was a place where the Armenians had been pushed into the sea. Izmir is not a recognised site of a massacre, but the memory of what had been done there remains.

A Eulogy for Rose

This blog has been rather silent lately. There have been other things to attend to. Sitting with Rose as she was dying while difficult was still very much a privilege.

I put here the eulogy I read at her funeral on Tuesday.

The world (and especially George Forbes House) will miss Rose.

We forgot one important event in her life. Mum kissed the Blarney Stone! (in her late seventies or eighties).

She would definitely have slid down banisters. I was not definite enough about that in the following eulogy!

Linda


Rose Anchell 8-2-1916 - 6-4-2010

Rose was born at an early age within the sound of Bow Bells, in Homerton, in London's East End.

It was the eighth of the second, 1916; a fact that she remembered  to her dying day. The youngest of a family of five children, it was probably her father who called her "the last rose of summer". (and, Mum used to add: "and still blooming!"
Her mother, very sternly, told the other children who called her "fatty" that "Her Name is Rose!".

A childhood with Salvation Army Sunday School, jumping over balustrades, and, if it wasn't just an older imagination, sliding down banisters, set her up to be the wonderful cockney that she was.

But life was not to be a straight forward, simple, affair.

A Londoner born in 1916 had much to contend with. Poverty and war were facts of life. Rose managed a hair perm twice a year and swimming too! (Swimming lessons did get you out of school!) She won a medal in a works swimming carnival in 1932 at the Oglethorpe Bowl. (but neglected to teach her son to swim!)

In 1939 Rose East married Fred Anchell, of the Rifle Brigade at the Hackney Registry office. The photos were taken in front of the protective sandbags.

Rose went into the Land Army.  The  London factory worker was, it would seem, rather unwilling. But driving a tractor into a ditch meant returning to London (and the bombs).

Fred returned after gallant service in Calais (and a dunking in the channel); then left for North Africa where he became a prisoner of war for the remainder of the hostilities.

Rose was evacuated to Hertfordshire to give birth to her first son, Fred (or Freddie) and again, quickly returned to London.

In 1946 Rodney was born, but after many medical problems he died in 1948. A grief shared with few.

Rose worked in factories; stitching cheque books; Berger's Paints, The Metal Box factory. many and various places.

A move from Walthamstow (London) to Kent; -Davis Estate in Chatham meant work at Rochester airport industrial area and Foster Clark's canning factory and the Sharps Toffee Factory in Maidstone, Kent.

But Fred (senior) was struggling with bronchitis stirred up by the war. In 1961 the family set sail on the Arcadia to Australia. (Rose was over forty.)

Adelaide was the destination. Young Fred found his feet in Melbourne. But Rose and Fred were unsettled and returned to England. To find work they went to Rose's eldest brother in South Africa. That was a difficult time.

One thing that should be said about Rose is that she noticed people. She loved company and did not recognise social boundaries, especially not racial ones. Apartheid era South Africa was not an easy place to be.

Anyway, young Fred had now become Australian. So they returned and found work in Victoria as gardener (Fred) and Cook/Housekeeper at various western district farming properties; cooking for jackaroos and neighbours.

One dinner party guest asked who had cooked the meal, then went in to the kitchen to thank the cook. It was the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

As Fred's emphysema worsened, they took work in Melbourne, at the Walter and Eliza Hall institute. Here Rose was "bottle washer" for Sir Gustav Nossel.

Retirement came in Geelong with Rose nursing Fred until his death in 1986.

She was then in the RSL Village and a good neighbour to all. In the late 1990's Rose  realised that she needed to move closer to Fred and Linda near Queanbeyan. She found the Legacy Village units and arranged to move.

So Rose came to Queanbeyan. She continued to enjoy cruising, including cruises on the QEII (Q E 2) amongst others;  She visited relatives in Ireland and travelled the world on her own or with (young) Fred. She joined in the  social life of Legacy village; walked into town to the Chinese bakery and the icecreamery and connected with St Philip's in O'Connor.

But on her last cruise to New Zealand, things were not right. Mum came back with flu, saw a gerontologist and was diagnosed with dementia. It had come on late in life and she was independent for a few more years. Eventually there was the need for assisted living at George Forbes House.

Here Rose's cockney humour came to the fore. To enquiries about her health. How are you? "All right", is the answer. "all down one side" (with right hand swinging downwards).
"What do you want on your sandwich today?" asks Chris.
"A man!" is the reply.

Rose, you never did find that millionaire at the club! sorry

Our Arrogance

A sound byte from Ken Henry in the Canberra Times today:
http://www.canberratimes.com.au/news/local/news/general/henry-hits-out-at-water-management/1788433.aspx?src=enews

Our interaction with the environment should have brought us humility. Instead we are arrogant.

He said:

"All my life I have heard people talking about our big brains, our capacity to learn from our mistakes and the creativity we bring to fixing them,'' he said.
"Every day, at some point, this is what I hear. But I have to say that it's not what I see.
"Frankly, it's time we stopped kidding ourselves.
"'If the history of our engagement with this environment has taught us anything at all, it should be that we have been blind-sided by our arrogance. It should have taught us humility."