How was our earth
formed? Perhaps there was a
“Big Bang”, as a lot of scientists aver. Some observers say that this theory
accords remarkably with the biblical story of creation. (Astronomer Sir Fred
Hoyle, commenting on Big Bang, has stated: “An explosion in a junkyard does
not lead to sundry bits of metal being assembled into a useful working
machine.”)
The great continent of Australia was
formed, and the first Aboriginal settlers arrived. The Aborigines had no doubt that the land
was sacred, and that God was present within their midst. They lived their
lives accordingly. But the arrival of Europeans led to many immoral acts,
some of them carried out in God’s own name. Yet still he continued to pour
out his blessings on our land.
He inspired some remarkable people, such
as Caroline Chisholm and Weary Dunlop and others profiled in this book. They
were not monks or mystics, nor were they academics or scholars; they were
practical people. Their loyalties towards the institutional church were not
always strong. But they loved Australia, and they made it a far better
country for everyone.
Today we have more problems. There is a
sense of despair among too many young people. We have allowed a spiritual
vacuum to infiltrate our society, and throughout this book I have called
for a renewed emphasis on character education and for more spirituality in
our culture.
But that is not enough. It is possible to
develop a privatised morality, of ostensibly high character, that ignores
public suffering; or a spirituality that is entirely inward looking and
navel-gazing. I recall World War II. The Germans were big on character
development. The Japanese saw the struggle as between their superior spirit
and American materialism.
Something more is
needed: an attitude of love.
It is not just the
love we hear about in pop songs that is important, but a transcendent love
that unites us with our fellow humans and, ultimately, with God. It is the
love that Jesus means when he tells us to love our enemies, a revolutionary
command in his day, and one which is little obeyed today. According to
Leon
Morris, former principal of Melbourne’s Ridley College: “Love is central
to the whole way of life of the follower of Jesus”.
It is the love that Weary Dunlop felt was
beyond him when he was incarcerated in a barbaric Japanese prisoner of war
camp, and was unable to love his captors (thereby proving that he was human
and not divine). It is the love felt by a Mary MacKillop or a Caroline
Chisholm towards the underprivileged.
Love can take many
forms. One expression is in the act of forgiveness, as Weary Dunlop forgave
his enemies. It shows itself in service, which William Damon touched on in
Greater Expectations:
Even if our children were being raised to
become the best informed, most artistic and healthiest children that the
world has ever seen, it would all come to nothing unless they found some
things beyond themselves, and indeed some people other than themselves, to
devote at least a part of their efforts to.
But Christian love is
even more. It is best illustrated by the words of the apostle John in the
Bible: “God so loved the world that he gave his only son.” In other words,
it is sacrificial love; love which demands that we be prepared to sacrifice
all we have that is precious to us. And still that is not enough.
At the head of Chapter
9, I quoted from Joseph Furphy’s classic Australian work
Such is Life. He
stated that Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is a “practical, workable code of
daily life”.
Don’t believe a word
of it. As I wrote: Jesus demands that his followers not resist evil people,
that they give their property to whomever asks, that if someone slaps them
on one cheek, they should offer the other cheek to that person, that if
someone takes away their shirts, they should give their coats as well. “You
are to be perfect, even as your father in heaven is perfect,” he told them.
That is the kind of
sacrifice ultimately required by Christian love: a self-emptying sacrifice,
an ideal of absolute self-denial and personal purity. One writer said of the
Sermon on the Mount that to read it once is to find it impossible, but read
it a few more times and suddenly nothing else becomes possible. It is an
ethic that involves total surrender to the divine, in a spiritual caress of
pure love that lifts and transforms. Few can achieve it.
Caroline Chisholm knew
what was required when she wrote - in the first-ever publication in
Australia by a woman - that she resolved to “in every way sacrifice my
feelings - surrender all comfort - nor, in fact, consider my own wishes or
feelings”. Mary MacKillop knew it, too, when she wrote that, “In the
discharge of what appeared to be my duty I felt it impossible to consider my
own feelings no matter how much they had to be trampled upon”.
It is sadly ironic
that so many Australians do make genuine sacrifices in order to achieve what
they regard as the good life. Yet when they reach the pinnacle - the plush
house, the beach cottage, the cars, the private schools, the overseas travel
- they are left wondering: Is this it? Too often we become prisoners of this
material world we inhabit. Jesus pointed to this spiritual vacuum in our
lives in his Sermon on the Mount, when he asked rhetorically: “Doesn’t life
consist of more than food and clothing?” It is indeed startling to find so
many successful people with such emptiness in their lives.
Noting a spiritual
revival among many Americans, Harvard University preacher Peter J. Gomes
commented, in
The Good Book: “I think we have reached that point where so many
thousands of able, disappointed, and questing people are prepared to
exchange the good life for the life that is good.”
It is this spiritual
vacuum in our lives that was analysed so astutely by popular young Canadian
post-modern novelist Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X,
Microserfs and Polaroids from the Dead. In
Life after God he made the memorable observation that I cited at the
head of this chapter: “My secret is that I need God - that I am sick and can
no longer make it alone….I need God to help me love, as I seem beyond being
able to love.”
A growing number of
pilgrims know that they cannot make it alone. So they reach out. And in
reaching out they find themselves anointed with love; and as they are
touched with love they feel their souls starting to open. It is a sacred
spiral that ascends right up to God.
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