The older I have become, the quieter my faith has become. It is a great stretching for silence, a reaching for goodness, a resting in a peace that ‘passes all understanding’. A desire to learn how to love better in the face of my countless flaws and constant stuff-ups. A desire to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly. A desire many atheists, Muslims, agnostics, Hindus, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Buddhists and others share. We’re all on this mad Earth together, bumbling about, trying to figure it out. There is so much we do not know. My problem with many church leaders is that they too often exclude and judge, defend harmful manifestations of patriarchy, complicate God and make the expression of faith more like digging a trench than laying down, or opening, arms.
When I left the fundamentalist churches I grew up in, I immediately gravitated to one in the red-light district of Kings Cross, Sydney, led by the Reverend Bill Lawton. He was a literary-minded man who had been ostracised by his Sydney peers because he saw women as equals of men. Women flocked to his parish, along with others who lived on the streets and on the periphery of the city, vagabonds and creatives, misfits who thirsted for teaching free of prejudice and full of insight, justice and poetry. Everyone was welcomed, without judgment.
To my delight, Helen Garner, the finest writer of her generation, also regularly appeared in the front pews. I was in awe of her. I had bought her first book, Monkey Grip, in a garage sale when I was twenty: I started it when I came home from a party late one night, and finished it as the sky was growing light, teapot cold on my table. I closed the book, stood up, showered and dressed then drove directly to the library, where I borrowed every book she had ever written. The next few days were a blur; I gulped her superb writing down with such greed I lost sense of time.
So when I saw her small figure at the morning service, head bent, scribbling in her journal, I tried not to stare. I understood why she was there, though. Bill was an original and increasingly radical thinker, and a gifted speaker who preached without notes. As he spoke, homeless people would wander in and out of the service; one roguish gent would occasionally line up for communion, take the full goblet of wine then make a run for it, spilling red as he sprinted out the front door.
Garner writes lightly about faith. One of my favourite essays of hers is about her friendship with another laconic, gifted writer, like her a Christian drawn more to decency than dogma, Tim Winton. In it, she writes about an incident in the mid-1980s when her born-again Christian housemate was salivating about the prospect of Winton coming to stay: ‘The saved one was very keen to meet Tim, and had planned a weighty theological discussion: the big black Bible was on the dining room table when we drank our tea and ate our cake. I couldn’t face it, and went for a walk around the big park. When I got home an hour later, Tim and the Bible were still at the table.’ The housemate had gone up for a nap. Winton explained to Garner, ‘We talked. And in the end I said to him, “Why don’t you give the book a rest? Why don’t you let your life be your witness?”’
Let your life be your witness.
In 2017, I emailed Helen when I was in Melbourne for the writers festival to see if she would like to go to a local church. She wrote back excitedly, claiming it was like being invited to a cocktail party. She picked me up at seven sharp outside my hotel, screeching into the curb and apologising profusely: ‘I am not used to driving in the city.’
We crept into the side chapel where an early communion service was being held for a handful of people. A woman with ginger hair walked in after us with a dog in a ginger coat, soon followed by another dog who sat next to the organ, closed his eyes and ignored everyone.
There was a rainbow heart outside the church, and as it was in the heated, often brutal months before the country voted in the marriage equality plebiscite, the minister prayed fervently for those hurt by current political debates. He spoke of Christ modelling both humanity and divinity, of the fact that suffering is built into being human. Next to me a woman with a silver crutch helped a woman with a Zimmer frame into her chair. Pegged onto the frame was a note that read ‘WARNING: I HAVE LOW VISION.’
Afterwards we walked to a coffee shop, where we ate croissants and spoke for three hours without pause. And in between talk of words and books and loves and children and grandchildren and bloody men and the fraught nature of marriage, we spoke of religion, and having a quiet faith. I told her many church leaders had publicly attacked me because of my reporting on domestic violence in the church, and had been sidetracked by a nonsensical debate about statistics that didn’t exist. She shook her head: ‘They think of faith as an argument.’
She fell silent for a little while, staring into air. Then she asked, ‘What is a blessing, do you think?’
‘It is a reminder of the divine, and the divine in you. What do you think?’
She replied, ‘It is about a mother and a child.’ She spoke of the hymn lines where we are told to ‘look full’ in Jesus’ ‘wonderful face’, and said that was how a child must feel looking up at its mother. The light of that.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and that means you are lit up, too.’
‘Yes, I think that’s right’, she said.
FAITH MAY BE A form of living light but it is not neat and ordered. It exists in mess and chaos and doubt and brokenness. Which is something I have learnt from one of my favourite priests and thinkers, Nadia Bolz-Weber. She is six foot something, a heavily tattooed former wrestler who knows how to, as she puts it, find God in all the wrong people. She is an extremely talented Lutheran preacher — perhaps partly because she was a stand-up comedian — who swears by poetry and established a flourishing ‘misfit’ congregation in Denver, Colarado, called the House of All Sinners and Saints. After exchanging tweets and emails for a couple of years, we finally met in Sydney one day. I picked her up at the airport and drove through thick traffic to Bondi Beach, where we walked along the beach as the moon rose, eating gelato. She was then working on her new book about sex, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation. I adored her, and her open warmth and brilliance.
Nadia’s faith is rooted in humility. Her most common prayer, she says, is ‘God, please help me not be an asshole.’ Her starting point is that we are all vulnerable and flawed. We have to learn to trust, she writes, that ‘God makes beautiful things out of even my own shit’. The greatest spiritual practice, she says, is ‘just showing up’, being present and attentive.
She is constantly questioning the association of Christianity with the wealthy, the conventional and the powerfuclass="underline"
I’ve never fully understood how Christianity became quite so tame and respectable, given its origins among drunkards, prostitutes, and tax collectors . . . Jesus could have hung out in the high-end religious scene of his day, but instead he scoffed at all that, choosing instead to laugh at the powerful, befriend whores, kiss sinners, and eat with all the wrong people. He spent his time with people for whom life was not easy. And there, amid those who were suffering, he was the embodiment of perfect love.
Jesus didn’t just hang out with the wrong people, he also sent them out as his messengers. As Nadia writes, ‘Never once did Jesus scan the room for the best example of holy living and send that person out to tell others about him. He always sent stumblers and sinners. I find that comforting.’
THE CHURCH NEEDS TO return to its core business: preaching and practising a gospel of love. When we are absorbed only with morality debates, we forget what a close community a church can be, and what comfort it can provide. My local church runs a soup kitchen, an outreach for victims of domestic violence and the homeless, and circles those in need with food, presence and company. For the ageing, the ailing, the lonely and the young, these communities are crucial. This kind of love is not in any way limited to the church, but it is frequently concentrated there. We lose something important when these communities dwindle and disappear. Many parishioners act as quiet vigilantes of grace, caring for the neglected, the wounded, the lonely and the needy. My mother sits on the end of a pew in a wheelchair these days; communion is brought to her as grape juice in a tiny plastic cup. I watch the face of the minister — with whom I have some strong theological disagreements — as he leans down to whisper the sacraments in her ear, and am often struck by how gentle he is with her.