Painting Fakes

I had an epiphany the other day.  I was watching ABC's  7.30 report on Mohammed Ali Baryalei, the Afghani-Australian man who is reputed to be the most senior Australian member of Islamic State.  I had a profound moment of identification. Baryalei is a man with a colourful history.  He arrived in Australia in the early 1980s as an infant after his family fled Afghanistan, and grew up in Sydney in the home of his violent father.  The trauma of his personal abuse was exacerbated by the World Trade Centre bombing (he would have been about 20 at the time) which made him feel like an outsider in Australia, and his young adulthood included bouts of depression, periodic drug abuse and possibly petty crime.  On the brink of suicide, he turned back to Islam and within a short time became a fervent preacher, evangelising young men on the streets of Sydney. The 7.30 story included some Youtube footage (which has been cut from the on-line version) of Baryalei ta...

So, I've written about my own experience of death, about the Genesis account of death's origin, and about the processes of denial, anger and bargaining  that we use to try and deal with our mortality.  How do we get to the point of acceptance, and learn to live with the inevitability of our own death? Of course I'm not going to give you "the answer", and I don't want to try and convince you that I have this one under control.  I'm just as prone to the illusion of immortality as anyone, more than many.  I know I'm going to die but most of the time I live as though I'm not. However, I think the Bible has two answers for us.  The first is the answer I quoted in the last post, from the book of Ecclesiastes. There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? I think part of the reason we often find E...

In our fickle media age we've moved on from the Gaza conflict and are now obsessed with the atrocities in Iraq.  However, peace in Gaza is still fragile and temporary, and there is a long way to go before that situation could be considered truly resolved.  So I've been reading Izzeldin Abuelaish's 2010 memoir, I Shall Not Hate . Abuelaish came to international attention during the 2008-09 Israeli invasion of Gaza when his house was bombed by Israeli tanks, killing three of his daughters and his niece and injuring a number of other family members.  This book tells that story, but puts it in its place in Abuelaish's life and work.  It's a moving, tragic and yet hopeful book. The Abuelaish family originates from a village called Houg in southern Palestine.  They were wealthy farmers, his grandfather the village muktar.   However in 1948 during the first Israeli/Arab war, known to Palestinians as the Nakba or "Catastrophe", they fled their homes and w...

When I was a young social work student we learnt about Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's four stages of grieving - denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance.  I'm sure there are other models that work as well to help us understand the grieving process, but this is the most widely known and it has a kind of elegant simplicity to it.  Not that grief is elegant or simple.  We don't progress smoothly through these stages and pop out the other end calm and accepting.  We bounce around between them like rubber balls. James says we are "a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes" but we're not easy in our minds about that fact.  Most of time, as I said in my last post , we just pretend it's not true and that we will live forever.  However, there comes a time when we can no longer do so.  Someone close to us dies, or comes close to death, or we ourselves feel death's wings brushing us and we can no longer ignore our own mortality.  What are we to do? ...

I recently read a collection of  essays and journalistic pieces by William Gibson.  Unlike Gibson's fiction, which I love, his non-fiction wasn't that great.  However, he referred a number of times to the late Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and I was intrigued enough to check him out.  I sure am glad I did! Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and died there in 1986.  He was a classic "man of letters" a person who, although he held various professorships and other positions, never really made his living as anything other than a writer. I have read other "philosophical" writers of fiction, authors like Camus, Eco, Calvino or Kafka who use fiction as a vehicle for philosophical speculation.  Yet no-one I've read is quite like Borges.  His stories, essays and parables open up fields of speculation, dizzying ways of viewing the world which seem at once plausible and fantastic. Naturally he wrote in Spanish, but he was fluent in a number of...

It's hardly surprising that the Bible introduces death right at the beginning of the story.  I think you'll be familiar with it.  Adam and Eve are placed in the garden, and told they can eat the fruit of any tree except for the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the eating of which will bring about their death.  However, the serpent convinces Eve to doubt the truth of this prohibition. Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good an...

On September 28 I'm delivering a sermon at our evening service on Death.  Death is, of course, a huge subject and I've had a lot of time to think about it.  As a result I have a mental list of short meditations which eventually may come together, if the congregation is lucky, into a coherent message.  I thought that instead of asking everyone to get their heads around it all at once, I would put it out in bite sized chunks for people to chew over as the month progresses. Death is one of the few universal experiences of humanity.  If you live long enough (and it doesn't have to be that long) sooner or later someone close to you will die - a grandparent, a parent, a sibling, a child, a close friend.  It happens to us all. About a decade ago I lost both my parents within a year of each other.  My Dad died of heart failure in 2004 after a slow decline.  Less than a year later, in early 2005, my Mum died of a brain tumour.  Mum's death was a shock ...