Saturday, May 18, 2013

A lone wallaby

Our Swamp Wallaby

Recently Peter Ridgeway, from the Department of Primary Industries, and I set up two infra-red cameras on the property.  Peter is helping us remove the wild African olives from the property and work towards regenerating the native forest.  The idea was that the cameras would photograph any animals.  One of the cameras took many photos while the other took hardly any.  As we guessed there were a good number of photos of butterflies, rabbits and a fox who visited the site morning and evening and sometimes at night.  But there was one photo of a native animal- a swamp wallaby.  There she is in the photo above.  we are pretty sure there are also wallarooos and and eastern grey kangaroos.  Getting photos is a matter of luck as much as anything.  But it is a blessing to have such native animals on our property.

Paul, Shane and I were in Wollongong twice recently.  The first time was for the funeral of Bishop William Murray, second bishop of Wollongong, who ordained both Paul and myself.  The funeral was impressive, solemn but not pompous and in a number of places heartfelt.  Bill's niece, Patricia Murray, gave a wonderful eulogy on behalf of the family.  

Our second visit was to meet Francis Sullivan, the CEO of the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which has been set up to represent the Catholic Church and the different religious communities in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia.  Francis spoke well and summarised for many of us our feelings of shame and demoralisation at the child sexual abuse committed in the Church in this country.  His perspective was to suggest that God is using this time as a time of dark grace in which he are called to pray "Creator God, reshape my heart" Psalm 51.12.  In the Liturgy of the Hours we have this psalm every Friday morning (but using the number Psalm 50.12).  This reshaping of the heart is not an easy process.  Our task is to make things better for victims and the church a safer more trustworthy place.  We were grateful for Francis's honesty.

What Francis Sullivan made clear is that the church is called to a spiritual revolution which will affect us all.  What we are called to is a Church with values which were formed the best spirituality of the Thirteenth Century with St Francis, the Early Carmelites and the Beguines  and Beghards of Northern Europe.  I was sad to read recently of the death of the last Beguine.  This wonderful obituary appeared in The Economist:
Marcella Pattyn, the world’s last Beguine, died on April 14th, 2013, aged 92

AT THE heart of several cities in Belgium lies an unexpected treasure. A gate in a high brick wall creaks open, to reveal a cluster of small, whitewashed, steep-roofed houses round a church. Cobbled alleyways run between them and tiny lawns, thickly planted nbwith flowers, grow in front of them. The cosiness, the neatness and the quiet suggest a hortus conclusus, a medieval metaphor both for virginal women and the walled garden of paradise.

Any veiled women seen there now, however, processing to Mass or tying up hollyhocks in their dark habits and white wimples, are ghosts. Marcella Pattyn was the last of them, ending a way of life that had endured for 800 years.
These places were not convents, but beguinages, and the women in them were not nuns, but Beguines. In these communities, which sprang up spontaneously in and around the cities of the Low Countries from the early 13th century, women led lives of prayer, chastity and service, but were not bound by vows. They could leave; they made their own rules, without male guidance; they were encouraged to study and read, and they were expected to earn their keep by working, especially in the booming cloth trade. They existed somewhere between the world and the cloister, in a state of autonomy which was highly unusual for medieval women and highly disturbing to medieval men.
Nor, to be honest, was it the first thing Juffrouw (Miss) Marcella thought of when, as a girl, she realised that her dearest wish was to serve her Lord. But she was blind, or almost so, and no other community would accept her. She wanted to work, too, and was not sure she could in an ordinary convent. The beguinages had originally been famous for taking the “spare” or “surplus” women who crowded into 13th-century cities in search of jobs. Even so, the first community she tried sent her back after a week, unable to find a use for her. (In old age she still wept at the thought of all the rejections, dabbing with a handkerchief at her blue unseeing eyes.) A rich aunt intervened with a donation to keep her there, and from the age of 21 she was a Beguine.

Contentedly, in the beguinage at Ghent from 1941 and at Courtrai from 1960, she spent her days in tasks unaltered from the Middle Ages. She knitted baby clothes and wove at a hand loom, her basket of wool beside her chair, chatting and laughing with the other women. At lunchtime, like the others, she ate her own food from her own cupboard (identified by the feel of the carvings under her hands), neatly stocked with plates, jugs, coffee and jam. Cooking she was spared, ever since on the first occasion she had failed to see the milk boiling over, but she washed up with a will.
A good part of the time she prayed, all the prayers she could remember, but especially her rosary whose bright white beads she could almost see. Most usefully, since she was musical, she played the organ in chapel; and she cheered up the sick, as she nursed them, by serenading them on banjo and accordion. Almost her only concession to modernity was the motorised wheelchair in which she would career around the alleyways at Courtrai in her later years, wrapped in a thick knitted cape against the cold, her white stick dangerously levelled like a lance.
Love’s light
In her energy and willpower she was typical of Beguines of the past. Their writings—in their own vernacular, Flemish or French, rather than men’s Latin—were free-spirited and breathed defiance. “Men try to dissuade me from everything Love bids me do,” wrote Hadewijch of Antwerp:
They don’t understand it, and I can’t explain it to them. I must live out what I am.

Prous Bonnet saw Christ, the mystical bridegroom of all Beguines, opening his heart to her like rays blazing from a lantern. But a Beguine who was blind could take comfort in knowing, with Marguerite Porète, that Love’s light also lay within her:
O deepest spring and fountain sealed, Where the sun is subtly hidden, You send your rays, says Truth, through divine knowledge; We know it through true Wisdom: Her splendour clothes us in light.

When she was known to be the last, Juffrouw Marcella became famous. The mayor and aldermen of Courtrai visited her, called her a piece of world heritage, and gave her Beguine-shaped chocolates and champagne, which she downed eagerly. A statue of her, looking uncharacteristically uncertain, was cast in bronze for the beguinage.
The story of the Beguines, she confessed, was very sad, one of swift success and long decline. They had caught the medieval longing for apostolic simplicity, lay involvement and mysticism that also fired St Francis; but the male clergy, unable to control them, attacked them as heretics and burned some alive. With the Protestant Reformation the order almost vanished; with the French revolution their property was lost, and they struggled to recover. In the high Middle Ages a city like Ghent could count its Beguines in thousands. At Courtrai in 1960 Sister Marcella was one of only nine scattered among 40 neat white houses, sleeping in snowy linen in their narrow serge-curtained beds. And then there were none.


Friday, April 12, 2013

Pond Life

Today was a perfect autumn day.  It was sunny, warm but not hot.  As I walked the property I was aware how high the grass had grown.  We are blessed to have over 300 acres here in Varroville.  A knowledgeable lady told me the the day Varroville did not exist.  That is understandable given only 150 people live in our locality.  But we do exist.  In fact, there was an article in the Sydney Morning Herald last year claiming we had more graduates per head of population than any other locality in the Sydney metropolitan area.   So, there.
Varro's Pond
The name goes back to 1812 when Robert Townson called the property across the road from us Varroville.  He called it after the Roman writer Marcus Terentius Varro (116BC to 27BC).  This learned man has only one book that has survived intact: De Rusticarum Libri Tres.  No doubt an indispensable guide for the rustic life.  He is a suitable patron for our learned and rustic locality near Sydney, and for this blog.  
So there I was wandering through the high grass this afternoon.  The peace was uninterrupted.  I may have heard the freeway drone or the odd helicopter but I did not notice them.  There was too much beauty immediately in front of me.  

The one word everyone uses to describe this place when they come is "peace".  "This place is so peaceful" people say with wonder.  And so it is.  The truth is, though, that today I was getting away from the chaos in my head which came from the discovery that my email account had just been hacked.  I had lost my address book and all my folders of important mail.

So many concerned people had called that it undermined any work I might have otherwise completed.  Most were pleased I was not stranded at a South Cyprus airport with no passport or money.  Quite a few had scary images of what it all meant for me and them.  And oddly enough, to be honest, I was worried about my passport.  I had applied for a new one and it had not turned up.  Earlier today I had tried to trace its progress through the system but failed.  Another frustration and anxiety.  Then, as it happened, after lunch the postman brought it.  I had to sign for the registered mail.  I will need my passport this year.
So, I went for a walk to clear my head.  It was a chance to calm down and to recall that God was here in this mess.  I took some photos especially near our dams or ponds. These are the ponds of the blog name.  On them were many types of birds and creatures hopping in and out of the water.  Taffy the horse who lives in the paddock by the pond came to be petted. 
Taffy
The thing about ponds is that they are full of life.  Last night a quote from Timothy Radcliffe, OP, inspired me to begin this new blog of life at Varroville besides the pond.  Here it is:

“If we want to build communities in which there is an abundance of life, then we must recognise who and what we are and what it means for us to be alive... Religious communities are like ecological systems. A rare frog will need its own ecosystem if it needs to flourish... If the frog is threatened with extinction, then one must build an environment, with its food and ponds and a climate in which it can grow up.  Carmelite life also requires its own ecosystem, if we are to live fully and preach a word of life, it is not enough to talk about it; we must actively plan and build such Carmelite ecosystems.  A Province will therefore have to develop a plan for the gradual renewal of communities in which the brethren may flourish.  Unless a Province plans the building of such communities, then it dies. A Province with three communities where the brethren flourish in their Carmelite life has a future, with the grace of God.  A Province with twenty communities where we are just surviving may well have none.” (Timothy Radcliffe, Sing a New Song: The Christian Vocation, Dublin 2000, 121-124) [Carmelite meeting of major superiors,Sassone, 2006].


New Priory
I had a good bit to do with the building of the new priory at Varroville.  It was not the first big building project that I saw to completion.  When I was parish priest in Morley we built a new priory, new parish church and parish centre.  I was tired at the end of my term.  But I was privileged to be invited back for another term as parish priest.  I then had the task to make sure that the parish community could grow and come to life in ways that gave life to the buildings.  That is our task now in our new priory.  Buildings are means which enable and support our life.  We need to imagine how we can live as Carmelites here in ways that cause us to flourish and share life with others.