After all, faith and power rarely mix well. Jesus did not come to Earth and tell church leaders to amass large followings, obtain corporate sponsorship and political influence; instead he called those who parroted laws without practising love vipers and hypocrites. He condemned leaders who were hypocritical and power-hungry. He dined with sex workers, not CEOs. As American author Rachel Held Evans put it so well, ‘The kingdom, Jesus taught . . . belongs to the poor, the meek, the peacemakers, the merciful, and those who hunger and thirst for God. It advances not through power and might, but through missions of mercy, kindness, and humility . . . The rich don’t usually get it, Jesus said, but children always do. This is a kingdom whose saviour arrives not on a warhorse, but a donkey.’
If I could advise church leaders, I would tell them to stop lecturing about sin, relax their defensive crouch and just listen for a decade, or a century. Then once they have actually heard and understood, roll up their sleeves and get on with loving people. Then, just listen. The damage of the child sexual abuse scandals and revelations of hidden domestic violence in faith communities has caused a deep and rational cynicism about the church, as have the intolerance of and ignorance about the LGBTQI community and complicity in the colonisation and exclusion of Indigenous people. Leaders have been, at best, slow to understand that the church must be a sanctuary for the abused, not a refuge for abusers. At worst, they have perpetrated, condoned and ignored abuse (both systemic and individual), further traumatising victims whose lives have been burnt to a cinder by rapists and paedophiles. As written in John 3:20: ‘Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.’
According to the Bible, God is light, the ultimate source of phosphorescence, the light we can absorb to later emit:
God said ‘Let there be light, and there was light’. (Genesis 1:3)
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. (Psalm 119:105)
The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. (Matthew 4:16)
I am the light of the world. (John 8:12)
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5)
Light is sweet, and it pleases the eye to see the sun. (Ecclesiastes 11:7)
So, how do we find this light when public debates about belief — and freedom of religion — often contain demeaning, often hateful remarks about the marginalised? It is not easy, especially for women, or members of the LGBTQI community, to maintain something resembling faith in the midst of ugly politicking and hateful sentiments. It makes belief seem bleak and oppressive, neither liberating nor a source of quiet strength and joy. So many Christians are judgmental or incoherent, so many leaders unbendingly uncomprehending or hostile to views different to their own and unwilling to recognise the ways in which the institutional power of the church can be destructive. And yet so many people of faith, like my mother, just quietly shine and care for those around them. A national study of religion published in 2017 found that two in three Australians identify as spiritual or religious. Those who don’t identify as such say, ‘The greatest attraction to investigating spirituality and religion is observing people who live out a genuine faith.’ One of the times this is most obvious, oddly enough, is at a funeral.
MY GREAT AUNT’S FUNERAL was a quiet affair, with just a handful of people scattered across several pews. The priest whose church she attended for decades struggled to do her justice, and seemed to barely know her.
‘She was,’ he said, clearing his throat and looking around, ‘very good at folding napkins.’
This was followed by a long pause.
We don’t mark death very well in the West. We so often wrestle the most wretched events into neat formulaic moments: a homily, a hymn, a tearful speech, sometimes not even that. And yet a funeral can be a glorious occasion, properly done. It should be at exactly these moments that we assess what matters, and what we want our lives to mean, and see, in sharp relief, everything that is puff or nonsense.
One fine example was the funeral held in Redfern for a dear friend of mine, John McIntyre, the rector of the Anglican parish of St Saviour’s. His service was crammed with red-eyed mourners: mothers with babies, collared priests, gay couples, Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders, and archbishops squashed next to men in rags. Outside, we were asked to donate money to the Indigenous ministry. Inside, the glass windows were stained yellow, red and black.
John led a remarkable life. Not just because he was on the fringes of the arch-conservative Sydney diocese due to his progressive views, but also because he ended up a bishop in Gippsland, Victoria, where he was celebrated for the same views. He was remarkable also because he was a priest who fought for the disadvantaged, the marginalised and the spurned. He devoted his bishop’s stipend to hiring Indigenous ministers. He argued bluntly for the ordination of women in the conservative Sydney synod and laughed off his ensuing pariah status. He instinctively stood with people who were alienated and spat on.
When the church hierarchy condemned him for appointing an openly gay priest to a local parish, he became an ‘accidental activist’, as he said, for the LGBTQI community. He went on to argue for equality and inclusion in his address to the Gippsland synod in 2012. ‘We now all know that same-sex attracted people are not heterosexual people who have made a perverse choice about how they express their sexuality,’ he said. ‘They simply are what they are.’
We don’t hear about people like McIntyre much, those who, as his friend the Reverend Bill Lawton, put it, ‘live the art of gentle persuasion.’ We hear about those who joust with politicians, who use religion for conservative causes, particularly to do with sex and morality instead of poverty, kindness and justice.
Challenging disadvantage was not a marginal issue for McIntyre, but core to belief. Pastor Ray Minniecon, who spoke at the funeral on behalf of Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, said: ‘He didn’t patronise my people or me. He treated me as an equal . . . He took a special interest in the needs and concerns of the marginalised, the outcasts, the unwanted and the shut-ins as he walked in and among the community he was called to serve.’
Christianity is at its most powerful when it is at the margins, or periphery, not the centre of power, and when it is identified with outsiders, not exclusive clubs, and with action, not finger-wagging. As Minniecon said, McIntyre ‘knew how to put his faith into overalls’.
MY OWN FAITH IS stubbornly cheerful and enduring. I can’t quite explain why, but it’s untroubled by dogma. I love the mystery, the poetry, even the uncertainty of religion. Stag fights between atheists and religious scholars bore me: they’re usually abstract, riddled with clichés and run by men. My faith is rooted in joy, and confirmed by love and lived experience. It’s like the bluebird that Charles Bukowski harbours in his heart, which he writes of in the poem ‘Bluebird’; though he stifles it and refuses to let it out, he makes a ‘secret pact’ with it that it can sing a little, just ‘enough to make a man weep’.
My faith has endured despite all the rubbish I’ve heard about women and my queer friends, despite all of the hate mail and insulting messages I have received from conservative Christians who despise my feminism. My faith continues to exist because I have an understanding of humanity as screwed up, of male-led institutions as narrow — blinded by misogyny and sometimes very dangerous for the vulnerable — and a sense of God as large, expansive, forgiving, infinite, and both incomprehensible and intimate.