Letter from Australia
Each time I visit New Zealand and Australia I’m struck by the vigour and imagination of the Anglican Church in these parts. That’s not to say that there aren’t things in the older and more traditional communities of Wales which I value. Each culture has its own strengths and weaknesses but it is certainly a feature of the younger countries of the Commonwealth that they are able value tradition without being bound by it, and feel free to be innovative where traditional cultures feel restrained. Both Australians and New Zealanders have an aversion to ‘red tape’, bureaucracy and pumped up authority, which often helps them to avoid arguments and delaying tactics to penetrate the very heart of issues and this is frequently reflected in church life as well as social and political life.
I came to Perth to visit David and Luisa, Isaac and Malachi, and to take part in Malachi’s baptism. David was an undergraduate student at Westminster College Oxford when I was teaching there, and after he had graduated and I had ‘retired’ for the first time, we both ended up working with the same mission agency in Oxford. For several years until David went to St Stephen’s House to commence training for the priesthood we shared a house in the picturesque Oxfordshire village of Horton-cum-Studley ten miles from the city. I was one of the officiants at David and Luisa’s wedding, and I managed to get to both his ordination as deacon, and a year later as priest, in St George’s Cathedral here in Perth. David now has an interesting split job as vicar of the parish of Greenwood, and Ministry Development Officer for the northern region of the Diocese. He also maintains a very interesting website which specialises in current news from the Anglican Communion. Should you want to visit it, the address is: www.davidbattrick.net
Malachi’s baptism was an all-day and most-of-the-night celebration. The ceremony itself was in the course of Sunday’s parish mass, which is as it should be, rather than the privatised hole-in-the-corner christenings that are a feature of parish life back in Wales. And then friends and family came to the house to wine on vintages from the nearby Swan Valley, and dine on a typically lavish Aussie buffet. Despite the fact that this is mid-winter, the temperature in this part of the country was mild enough to enable guests to sit out on the terrace until 10pm.
I’m not quite sure what to make of baptism within our highly secularised cultures. The significance for Malachi was clear – he was being welcomed into both a Christian community and into a supportive web of family and friends. Unusually (compared with Wales) he received communion at the mass and will continue to do so, being formally admitted to communion at seven, and then confirmed when he is of an age to take on Christian commitment for himself. This seems to me to be a far more natural and supportive environment than the older variant which sees the young person having to jump through several hoops to prove themselves sufficiently adult before confirmation and the privilege of receiving communion.
It is the theology of Baptism which taxes me most. The Epistle reading at the mass was from Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome where he is commenting on the absolute corruption of human nature, to the extent that whenever he tries to do good, only evil results. And when that is compounded with the doctrine of original sin – the suggestion that from the moment of our conception we have inherited this sinful human condition – it is alleged that we humans can do nothing good until ‘saved’ by Christ. I’m afraid I have never been able to look upon a child like Malachi and see only a miserable sinner with the capacity for committing even more heinous sins. And I’m terribly conscious that most of the people I know, including those who haven’t the slightest interest in being saved by Christ, manifest loving, generous, forgiving, courageous, compassionate and selfless acts which contribute to the community’s health and to humanity’s splendour.
My heresy is that I have a much more positive view of human nature than traditional theological understandings will allow. That’s one of the reasons that I am politically of an anarchist tendency for classical anarchists view the human person as an immense reservoir of goodness, abounding in latent talents which need to be treasured and developed rather than stifled by authoritarian social, political and economic systems. That’s akin to the way that Jesus seems to have regarded children. It is a child with all its goodness and all its human potential as yet undamaged and uncorrupted by the world that Jesus says we must emulate if we want to enter his Kingdom. Malachi may indeed one day turn out to be a sinner, but at the moment he is something else, one of the gatekeepers of that kingdom from whom we adults have much to learn.
I came to Perth to visit David and Luisa, Isaac and Malachi, and to take part in Malachi’s baptism. David was an undergraduate student at Westminster College Oxford when I was teaching there, and after he had graduated and I had ‘retired’ for the first time, we both ended up working with the same mission agency in Oxford. For several years until David went to St Stephen’s House to commence training for the priesthood we shared a house in the picturesque Oxfordshire village of Horton-cum-Studley ten miles from the city. I was one of the officiants at David and Luisa’s wedding, and I managed to get to both his ordination as deacon, and a year later as priest, in St George’s Cathedral here in Perth. David now has an interesting split job as vicar of the parish of Greenwood, and Ministry Development Officer for the northern region of the Diocese. He also maintains a very interesting website which specialises in current news from the Anglican Communion. Should you want to visit it, the address is: www.davidbattrick.net
Malachi’s baptism was an all-day and most-of-the-night celebration. The ceremony itself was in the course of Sunday’s parish mass, which is as it should be, rather than the privatised hole-in-the-corner christenings that are a feature of parish life back in Wales. And then friends and family came to the house to wine on vintages from the nearby Swan Valley, and dine on a typically lavish Aussie buffet. Despite the fact that this is mid-winter, the temperature in this part of the country was mild enough to enable guests to sit out on the terrace until 10pm.
I’m not quite sure what to make of baptism within our highly secularised cultures. The significance for Malachi was clear – he was being welcomed into both a Christian community and into a supportive web of family and friends. Unusually (compared with Wales) he received communion at the mass and will continue to do so, being formally admitted to communion at seven, and then confirmed when he is of an age to take on Christian commitment for himself. This seems to me to be a far more natural and supportive environment than the older variant which sees the young person having to jump through several hoops to prove themselves sufficiently adult before confirmation and the privilege of receiving communion.
It is the theology of Baptism which taxes me most. The Epistle reading at the mass was from Paul’s letter to the Church in Rome where he is commenting on the absolute corruption of human nature, to the extent that whenever he tries to do good, only evil results. And when that is compounded with the doctrine of original sin – the suggestion that from the moment of our conception we have inherited this sinful human condition – it is alleged that we humans can do nothing good until ‘saved’ by Christ. I’m afraid I have never been able to look upon a child like Malachi and see only a miserable sinner with the capacity for committing even more heinous sins. And I’m terribly conscious that most of the people I know, including those who haven’t the slightest interest in being saved by Christ, manifest loving, generous, forgiving, courageous, compassionate and selfless acts which contribute to the community’s health and to humanity’s splendour.
My heresy is that I have a much more positive view of human nature than traditional theological understandings will allow. That’s one of the reasons that I am politically of an anarchist tendency for classical anarchists view the human person as an immense reservoir of goodness, abounding in latent talents which need to be treasured and developed rather than stifled by authoritarian social, political and economic systems. That’s akin to the way that Jesus seems to have regarded children. It is a child with all its goodness and all its human potential as yet undamaged and uncorrupted by the world that Jesus says we must emulate if we want to enter his Kingdom. Malachi may indeed one day turn out to be a sinner, but at the moment he is something else, one of the gatekeepers of that kingdom from whom we adults have much to learn.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 7:27 PM
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