Quick Asylum Seeker Action

Dear friends

Please drop everything and do two things that could raise $60,000 for asylum seekers in need of our help, and will certainly raise awareness of the harsh conditions they face every day!

1. Go to http://www1.canon.com.au/creativeforacause/Photo/Gallery.aspx?photo=4A4BCAC8E98D7278 and vote for the photo shown there. It is a  photo from the exhibition “Made in Australia: Stranded between two worlds” by Viv Mehes. The photo captures a moment in the life of a Sri Lankan asylum seeker family sheltered by the Hotham Mission Asylum Seeker Project. (N.B. The photo is also below and attached so you can see it large)

Photographer Viv Mehe’s wrote about the photo: “Asylum seekers wait in limbo for years. I was deeply touched to see Ravi’s family finding great inner strength and hope having lost so much”. Sri Lankan news in the foreground, Ravi (not actual name) is teaching two sons (Japanese actually), while his smallest son looks out…

2. Send this email to everyone you know asking them personally to do the same - vote and send, vote and send..!! (Please also post the photo and link on your facebook if you have one, and of course please use any other means you can! Voting closes on Friday July 10. Each person can only vote once for this photo.

(HINT: Write “Dear friends”, then open your address book, select all, put in the BCC field and send)

THANKYOU !!

This photo, “Ravi teaching his children”, is the Viv Mehes’ entry for the Hotham Mission Asylum Seeker Project entry in the first Canon “Creative for a Cause” competition. 24 photos will be short-listed, being the 2 photos in each category that get the most votes, plus one editor’s pick per category. The ones judged best in Australia and New Zealand will win $60,000 and $25,000 respectively for their causes, while the four next best will receive Canon equipment packages.

Hotham Mission Asylum Seekers Project (ASP) helps more than 350 asylum seekers living legally in the community, but in abject poverty. No other group has been so barred from income and so dependent on charity to survive in Australia. ASP provides housing, a basic living allowance, help with utilities and emergencies, a program of one-to-one support by volunteers, men’s and women’s support groups, and advocacy.  ASP bears the particular responsibility of providing accommodation, basic income and casework services for those who are in the second half of the Refugee Determination Process. Most are barred from seeking work and have no entitlement to any government support.

These are the poorest of the poor in Australia in terms of entitlements. Many asylum seekers also suffer mental illness as a result of the cumulative affect of the traumas that they have fled, which has been compounded by the impacts of poverty, isolation, detention and uncertainty, suffered while going through the protection determination process in Australia.

Find out more about the Asylum Seeker project by visiting www.hothammission.org.au.
DONATIONS ARE URGENTLY NEEDED - please go straight to http://www.ourcommunity.com.au/hothammission to make a secure credit card donation or call 03 9326 8243.

mid-winter in the prison

I went back to Port Philip Prison last night to see the men in the Marlborough Unit. Ross, the chaplain, and I decided that we’d like to do some midwinter services, so last night we were planning to write some prayers and psalms with the men, which i’d then take away and use to design worship for two weeks time.

It didn’t quite work like that, but as with all things in the prison, it worked in its own way.

It was a very different group to last time I was doing writing in there. We read a couple of psalms, we talked about the solstice and the longest night, we handed out the templates… and then there was silence, and blank looks. We offered the option of people taking them away and doing it themselves, later in their cell, and there was enthusiastic nodding… so we’ll see what comes out of that! Quite a few men who didn’t come to worship came up afterwards and wanted copies of the templates to write their own as well, so we’ll see whether they come back too… It’s always unexpected. I have a backup plan for the worship, if we don’t get anything – and either way it’s going to involve lots of candles and communion at the end…

Last night worship was planned for 5pm, but dinner was late, and then medication… so it was about 6 before we started. And then two minutes in, the dessert message came across the loud speaker, so the men traipsed outside, got their icecream and brought it back in… By the end of worship, those who had had their medication for depression were completely zoned out and nearly falling over.

I haven’t been back there since christmas day, so in the hour or so that we were waiting around for dinner and medication and whatever else, they were asking questions about what i’d been doing and where else i’d been. I mentioned i’d been in the women’s prison over Easter. I was sitting next to Craig, who shivered and said ‘I’ve heard they’re scary in there’. It was like i had instant [undeserved] street cred for daring to go in there. It was somewhat ironic coming from someone as big and threatening as him, who has spent his life in and out of prison, is decorated with prison ink and battle scars – the kind of person i would instinctively cross the street to avoid outside [in fact, the kind of person who makes me catch taxis home so i won't even be walking on the same street]. The truth is indeed contextual…

I’ve been reading Marilyn Robinson’s book Home for the last few days. I was talking about it yesterday to someone, saying that it’s everything she doesn’t say that makes the story so beautiful – that the space she leaves between words and sentences is filled with this kind of fragility that leaves us aching. As we were leaving the unit last night, Alf appeared. He’d waved at us from his cell door earlier in the night, and then he came down and sat outside the room where we were holding worship, i think to wait for us to come out. He told me that he’s decided to give up his medication, to try to manage things on his own. It felt like there was such importance behind those words. I don’t know what it was – that he was taking responsibility for himself in a new way? that he’d decided that he wanted some kind of different future? I don’t even know what the medication was for… But in the silence between his sentences, i felt that same kind of aching i’ve been feeling as i’ve been reading Home. That sense of the other that’s found in the meeting point of resilience, fragility and longing. Maybe it’s that sense of holiness that comes only in the encounter with that which is most broken and is trying to be human.

So we go back in a couple of weeks to think about the longest nights again. And i feel so lucky that i get to encounter human existence at its most raw and most fragile. Who would ever want to be anywhere else?

culture & context – structural changes and reorientations…

Most conversations about new forms of church or christian community are about rethinking the table at which the disciples sit. True confession: this project doesn’t emerge from any interest in that table, or even really in the disciples. i think the really interesting stuff of the gospels is the other stories – the tables Jesus went to where the disciples weren’t invited, or where they were so absent no-one thought to mention their presence – the afternoons at Mary and Martha’s, the nameless person’s house where Jesus met the syro-phonoecian woman, dinner at Levi’s house, dinner with Peter’s mother, the ‘water into wine’ wedding table. I think they’re the fun tables.

- from a post I wrote last year.

I’ve talked quite a bit on this blog about the fact that many of the assumptions about what shape expressions of faith and community should take are debunked completely when one takes them into another culture and context, especially one where we don’t play host. Our language and patterns of being and behaving are stripped away when we don’t hold the knowledge or the power, when we don’t get to decide what happens, or what meaning it will take; when we are invited guests. It’s a very good place to be.

[This is a bit of an historical paragraph about structural stuff before talking about why i'm bringing this up again no...!] This alt worship project is part of the Commission for Mission [CFM] in the Uniting Church’s Synod of Victoria and Tasmania. Over recent years the Synod has been reconfiguring the way it resources mission in local congregations [the recent restructuring / focus on resourcing of presbyteries is a primary means of this]. What it’s meant is that the CFM no longer needs to take a primary role in consulting with / resourcing congregations. And that’s making possible some new things…

This week, the CFM has announced some structural changes. The old Mission Planning unit [MPRU] is to be reconfigured, and a few other independent streams of work that have been formed over the last couple of years to explore the edges of the church’s thinking about community, mission and presence, have been drawn together to create a new unit, named Culture and Context.

The Culture and Context Unit will have as its broad aim the discovery of new ‘language’ [in its broadest form] for faith that resonates with communities outside the mainstream. In practical ways, various people in the unit will be focussing on different areas: taking lead roles in some inter-faith work [in schools, disability services and chaplaincy]; exploring and extending chaplaincy education and development [in prisons, mental health institutions, hospitals, etc.]; through liaison work with schools [including a great 'schoolies with a cause' project], and the development of a road trauma memorial project with the victorian government. I’ll be continuing to work in alt worship, although we’re going to re-title this project so that it more accurately reflects what it is – the exploration of expressions of spirituality in postmodern contexts. I’ll also be co-directing the unit with Adrian Pyle, who will be focussing on the development of spiritual intelligence in communities and organisations.

At its heart, this new unit won’t be on about working in these areas on behalf of the church… we’re on about a serious exploration of what theology, spirituality and transformative community looks like in places that the church often doesn’t reach, or where it doesn’t know what to do when it’s there. In essence, we’re going out to to be guests at some of those different tables, in order to discover more clearly what hope, love and life look like when we’re there.

the longest night wrap up

Saturday night turned out to be the longest night for quite unexpected reasons, but the solstice space itself was really lovely…

[We projected onto the ground, at the entry, images of the solar system in real time, with the earth at the centre, showing the darkness moving over australia - this photo was taken on my mobile, hence the lack of quality]

We turned the space into an art gallery of sorts, lining the walls with large prints of images of darkness, which were footnoted [an idea inspired by Roni Horn's work]. These are a couple of them:

We had two video spaces – we projected the same loop of dawn over Docklands through black fabric, with the words i posted here the other day [split in the obvious place]… and we turned one wall into a story wall, putting up postcard sized copies of the different images which were hung around the basement wall, inviting people to take one and in its place to write the story of their longest night. Those stories are really beautiful. And in the centre of the basement we laid out tables with food and wine which became the gathering point. Mike and Claire printed out wine labels – black wax print on black labels, with the words

in our darkness
there is [no] darkness

with you

oh god

That was it, really. We had originally intended to keep the space really dark, giving people torches at the entry to see their way around the pictures, and then having downlights over the table – but the space absorbed much more light than we were aware. As someone said on the night, your eyes never adjust to the darkness in there, which was kind of nice… but it did mean that we had to do a last minute dash to the shops to buy more sources of subdued lighting. We also used blacklights in a few places, which was quite nice too.

We learnt a lot: $2 torches are $2 for a reason. We could see their light dimming from the moment we put new batteries in… We got better at signage out the front, so more people walked in off the street. Some stayed for a minute, some stayed much longer – we still need to find better language to explain what we’re doing. Most importantly, we learnt that the settings in the alarm and access system for the building aren’t as infallible as one would hope… but rather than remember the last horrendous two hours of cleanup, it would be nice to remember the rest of the night instead, which was, I think, quite beautiful…

As always, it was such a lovely thing to work with this group of people. I always feel so lucky…

Feature Clip - Laughing with

What do people think of this song by Regina Spektor?

Here are the lyrics for those wordy types.

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one laughs at God
When the doctor calls after some routine tests
No one’s laughing at God
When it’s gotten real late
And their kid’s not back from the party yet

No one laughs at God
When their airplane start to uncontrollably shake
No one’s laughing at God
When they see the one they love, hand in hand with someone else And they hope that they’re mistaken

No one laughs at God
When the cops knock on their door
And they say we got some bad news, sir
No one’s laughing at God
When there’s a famine or fire or flood

*Chorus*
But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny,
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious
Ha ha - Ha ha

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God
When they’ve lost all they’ve got
And they don’t know what for

No one laughs at God on the day they realize
That the last sight they’ll ever see is a pair of hateful eyes
No one’s laughing at God when they’re saying their goodbyes

But God can be funny
At a cocktail party when listening to a good God-themed joke, or
Or when the crazies say He hates us
And they get so red in the head you think they’re ‘bout to choke
God can be funny,
When told he’ll give you money if you just pray the right way
And when presented like a genie who does magic like Houdini
Or grants wishes like Jiminy Cricket and Santa Claus
God can be so hilarious

No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughs at God in a hospital
No one laughs at God in a war
No one laughing at God in hospital
No one’s laughing at God in a war
No one’s laughing at God when they’re starving or freezing or so very poor

No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
No one’s laughing at God
We’re all laughing with God

AI Action - Christmas Island is no place to detain children

Christmas Island is no place to detain children

 

This morning, dozens of children - under the watchful eye of the Australian Government - were escorted to school by guards. This evening the children will return to a fenced facility on a remote island and do their homework in demountable buildings, while they ponder their plight. Sound like fiction?

 Sadly, there are families and children on Christmas Island who experience this heartbreak daily.

 When I visited the new Christmas Island Detention Centre last year I was horrified to see the prison-like conditions that people applying for asylum in Australia must live in. We were told that children would not be detained in the new detention centre. What we have discovered is that the alternative detention arrangements for the 68 children, including 41 unaccompanied minors held on the island are little better, and in many respects worse.

 Tomorrow is World Refugee Day. Please stand with us and call on the Government to end this shameful treatment and remove all detained children from Christmas Island

 The “alternative” detention arrangements are inappropriate for even the briefest period. A fenced-in facility which currently holds the 68 children consists mostly of metal, concrete and gravel, tiny demountable buildings, with small claustrophobic bedrooms. The children are under guard and not free to leave the fenced perimeter of the facilities. This is unacceptable — if children were detained under these conditions on the mainland there would be outrage in the Australian community.

 No child seeking asylum should be detained on Christmas Island. Please take action now

 While the Federal Government committed to no longer keeping children in detention centres – instead they are exiled to an environment where the conditions and the lack of services have similar detrimental psychological impacts. This is a betrayal of the Government’s commitment to a more humane immigration policy — and for the sake of 68 young children we must call for this to end.

 Thank you for standing up for a more humane refugee system.

 Yours sincerely,

 Graham Thom

Refugee Coordinator

Amnesty International Australia

 

 

 

a solstice taster…

open from 8 until midnight tomorrow night, in the basement at 130 Lt Collins Street

And what is the darkness for you?

a refuge?
an escape?
a solace?

where you can no longer tell
where you end and everything else begins?

where you can no longer see the horizon?

The dawn will come
but there will be another night…

And how is the darkness for you?

menacing?
unnerving?
forboding?

where you can no longer tell
where you end and everything else begins?

where you can no longer see the horizon?

The dawn will come
as will another night

but the dawn will always come….

Religious Tourism - “turning my people into beggars”

Hey peeps here is a thought provoking article by Bob Lupton about OS mission trips, work parties and the like. Have read reflect and tell me what you think. (I have put the whole article up as the url points to all FCS articles)

“They’re turning my people into beggars!” It was a painful accusation for Juan Ulloa to make. He was a churchman, after all. An elder. With loyalty to the household of faith. But when asked the question directly, he could not lie. I had pressed him on the relationship of his micro-lending organization to the churches of Nicaragua. Juan was the executive director of a Christian micro-finance ministry that made many thousands of small loans to Nicaraguan peasants. It seemed to me a reasonable inquiry to understand how they worked together with local churches. Hesitantly at first, Juan explained that there were entire sections of the country where his loan officers could not make any loans at all. These were the regions where a concentration of churches from the U.S. conducted their mission trips. “People say ‘Why should we borrow money when the churches give it to us?’”

The people were right, of course. What peasant scratching out a bare existence could refuse suitcases bulging with new clothing for his family? What struggling pastor could resist the temptation to accept a steady salary and generous church income in exchange for hosting visitors, organizing volunteer work, and staffing funded programs? What village would borrow money to dig a well or buy books for their school library or save money to build a church if these things were provided for them free of charge? If all they had to do was make their wish lists, show up for the schedule arranged by the donors, and smile graciously until their benefactors head back home, who would blame them for accepting this easy charity?

No, Juan was not blaming his people for becoming beggars. He was faulting the affluent, well-meaning U.S. church for its unexamined generosity. His accusations, now pouring forth with considerable force, were directed at naïve “vacationaries” who spend millions of dollars traveling to his country, perform work that locals could better do for themselves, and create a welfare economy that deprives a people of the pride of their own accomplishments — all in the name of Christian service. The unintended consequences of such mission work was undoing the very vision Juan had given his life to — helping his people emerge from poverty through training, entrepreneurship, saving and hard work.

For some reason U.S. churches, filled with results-oriented members, seem oblivious to the abysmal outcomes of many if not most mission trips. Perhaps because it feels so good to be giving to those so much worse off, or because unconditional serving seems so Christ-like, the Western church embraces with great pride an unexamined form of charity that our nation as a whole rejected with the passage of the Welfare Reform Act of 1996. We know that welfare creates unhealthy dependency, that it erodes a work ethic, that it does not elevate people out of poverty. Yet, in the name of Christ, we perpetuate this very welfare principle in the way we do missions. And the trend is growing!

A Princeton University study found that in one year (2005) 1.6 million church members took mission trips — an average of eight days — at a cost of $2.4 billion. And the number has grown every year since. “Religious tourism” as some call it has become a growth industry. The web is full of agencies (denominational and para-church) ready to connect churches to a “meaningful mission experience” in an exotic location rife with human need. The Bahamas, for example, receives one short-term missionary for every fifteen residents.

More scornful critics point to the make-work nature of many missions trips. Like the wall built on an orphanage soccer field in Brazil that had to be torn down after the visitors left. And the church in Mexico that was painted six times during one summer by six different missions groups. And the church in Ecuador built by volunteers that was never used because the community said it was not needed.

But in fairness to our U.S. churches, many of our motives are noble. We want to excite our members about missions. We want to expose youth and adults to the needs of a hurting world. We want to engage our people in life-changing experiences. We desire deeply to obey the teachings of Christ to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, show compassion to the oppressed and spread the Good News. But because we view missions through the lens of our church — that is, what will benefit our people the most, what will be most rewarding for us, what will appeal the most to our members — we neglect to consider what is in the best interests of those we would serve.

How we serve is equally important to who we serve. Take the well that my church dug for a rural Honduran village. The remote peasant community needed water. The obvious solution: dig them a well. There was great celebration when the first water was pumped to the surface and villagers filled their jugs with cold, pure water. But when our missioners returned the following year the pump was idle and locals were again carry water from a distant supply. We repaired the pump. But by the time we returned the following year it had broken down again. This happened repeatedly year after year. The village simply waited until their benefactors returned.

Compare this experience to the remote mountain village in Nicaragua where a different strategy was employed. A community developer, recruited from the U.S. and supported by Juan’s micro-lending organization, assisted the residents in creating a plan for a much needed well. She arranged financing conditional upon villagers investing their own money from their meager savings. She then connected them with a reliable Nicaraguan engineer, and helped them organize a water commission to set fees, collect water bills, manage finances and maintain their new utility. Village men provided all the labor, digging trenches, laying water lines and setting 250 meters. When the pump was switched on and water surged to the homes, the village erupted with pride. Their water supply, they soon learned, was abundant — sufficient to allow them to sell water to the adjacent village. They now owned andmanaged a wealth-producing asset. The lesson: never deprive people of the satisfaction of doing for themselves.

“Above all, do no harm.” It’s the bottom line of the Hippocratic Oath that has guided the conduct of physicians for centuries. It is time for the Western church to apply the same principle.

PS: Some believe that short-term missions trips whet the appetite for long-term mission involvement. Research does not support this claim however. In spite of all the moving testimonies of “life-changing experiences” by returning short-termers and the occasional example of full-time missionaries who point to a mission trip as the catalyst for their calling, there is no evidence that missions as a whole has benefitted. As a matter of fact, while short-term mission trips have increased dramatically over the past two decades, support of long-term missionaries has declined. Strangely, the correlation seems to be inverse. Perhaps because we have spent so lavishly on “religious tourism” we feel that our financial responsibility to missions has been discharged. Or is it that long-term missionaries do not serve the immediate self-interest of our church?

Bob Lupton

continue reading more from FCS - urban perspectives

Greenpeace Action - Amazon Rainforest

 

In early June, the Brazilian Congress amended and approved a bill, originally introduced to grant land title rights to 300,000 properties that have been established illegally across approximately 67 million hectares of public land in the Amazon. The rules set by the Provisional Measure (MP) number 458, will add pressure to the Amazon and make it even more vulnerable to deforestation. The bill, which awaits President Lula’s signature, may be perceived as an open invitation for the invasion of public lands in the region.

postscript

We noted its beginning, so it seems appropriate to note its end… the last of the fires that started burning on February 7 is finally out.

The landscape and the psyche of the state is still scarred. It’s all very raw still, and it will be for a very long time.

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