I was in Lorne today for business. A pristine beach, pristine air and pristine water. Protected by the Cape Otway National Park and Marine Park.

I walked out on the pier to eat my lunch and see if the fishermen were catching anything. A man in a Fluro workman’s jacket was walking along. He had a spray bottle in one hand and a spray wand in the other. An amazingly tough plant that looked like soft grass had sprung up in cracks between the timber and concrete of the pier. The man worked conscientiously up and down the pier spraying every little green tuft with herbicide.

Good Lord deliver us

By the side of the highway where I drive most days is a grain storage depot. Not a huge facility, but big enough, with several large metal silos. In harvest season, and after, there were trucks coming and going and plenty of action. A row of big, old sugar gums stands between the fence and the highway.

A big flock of corellas frequented the area, for good reason. As the trucks were loading the corellas would feed on the spilled grain. In between they would fill the sky, once with their raucous screeching, again with their carefree, acrobatic flying, and then would put my heart in my mouth as they dodged the big trucks running up and down the highway before they flopped up through the sky to perch in the trees and scream at the world in jubilation.

Like other big parrots, some of them would be very old, seventy or eighty years or more. Frequenting their ancestral homeland with an extra built in food supply. Closer to home, another huge flock makes a living through the summer uprooting the tough stems of nut grass and eating the little bulbs at the bottom. Flapping around another small town they make a huge racket.

It’s a long time now since harvest, and the cold wet weather has set in. The corellas have moved on. They might have a wintering patch up north where it’s warmer, or they could have dispersed in smaller flocks. I wonder where they are? I hope they come back to a good grain harvest.

It took half an hour to get out of the Service Station shop. Something had gone wrong with the Electronic Funds Transfer and people were queued up, more or less disgruntled, waiting to pay. The clerk looked harassed and stressed as he held the phone on his shoulder with his chin while someone talked him through the red message that kept appearing on the screen. The long driveway back to the highway filled up with trucks, so at least no more people were using the pumps and joining the queue.

The embattled operator pressed on, his mentor on the phone had him using the old manual card machine with carbon copy receipts, and we started to get moving. ‘It will get better’ I told him as he swiped my card. He was past smiling.

I had plenty of time to consider the fragility of the system. Digital money and refined fossil fuel. So many really complex things to go wrong. So many important things dependent on the reliability of seriously extended supply trains. A real recipe for disaster.

There was a sort of premonition of a future that seems inevitable. Rising fuel prices and unreliability of supply, and the enormous changes which that will make to our lifestyles and even our viability. In my face at the servo, like those moments when the power goes out and you wonder if it will ever come back.

Doubt!

Jupiter has dominated the night sky for the last few weeks. Opposite the sun it is bright and full. The brightest thing in the sky after sister moon, it is bright enough to shine through light clouds, forming it’s own nimbus. I saw it setting strong and red this morning in the western sky. Beautiful.

I was up in town today, the first time for months. Held up, I was very late to lunch. I went down to the fruit market for some bananas and was held up again in the queue. Just as I was leaving the shop, against the odds, a friend I see very rarely, one of the few friends I pray for, walked in. An unexpected moment of love. God is good.

The Pope’s visit to Australia for World Youth Day is over. The media has not let up for a week. Fair enough, I suppose. The grand finale of 400,00 or half a million people at Randwick racecourse, was very impressive. I have no idea what to make of it all, I was not moved or inspired in any particular way. I should be heartened that so many Christians would gather together to affirm their faith in Australia.

The Kingdom series has been posted over the past week so that Kingdom Six could coincide with the big day. The Romans just leave too much unfinished business in their wake.

Big Brother is finally over. Hooray. I have no idea what the attraction of this show has been, but my family have inflicted it on me for what seems like a very long time. After more than 25 years working in public contact, I don’t feel any need to interact with people I don’t know via the television in my leisure time. Some people must be very lonely to enjoy this style of television. In the end there isn’t much competition, who would you find most tolerable if they were paid $250,000 to not piss you off? It was just all too much like being at work.

The beginning. This is the first post I have made without a graphic, and the first that is not about the big issues. There are more of both of those to come, but I have already written about most of the things that were in the blockbuster category. Have a look if you feel inclined.

Revelationally,

The Roman Holiness,

Bans contraception by

Papal decree,

Overpopulation,

in natural consequ-

ence, threatens to prove end

time prophecy.

Thousands of people have told me the part of their story that they thought I needed to hear.

It doesn’t help to apply a label, each has been unique.

Christ described them generally as the poor.

Alcoholics, drug addicts, released prisoners, criminals, refugees, homeless, depressed, mentally ill, dependent people, abusers and their victims. Stoned, sober, drunk, psychotic. Stupid, smart, honest, thieves, cheats, liars and worse. Sick and healthy. Out of work and out of luck.

Pride more or less knocked out of them.

One thing in common: humanity.

All God’s people, every one.

‘Blessed are those who mourn’

It was understandable that the main street had a bit of stench about it. At the tail end of a festival weekend the sullage systems in the old seaport town were stretched to capacity.

But the sadness was palpable. It hung in the low lying part of the street, alongside the stink, near the old hotel.

The weekend crowd cleared and I soaked up the seaside atmosphere during a few days of fishing, lazing and sightseeing.

Curious, I followed the sadness past the old Sisters of Mercy church, which had later been used as a convent. Past the memorial near the boat harbour with names of fishermen and mariners lost at sea. Past the ambulance station and the golf course at the base of the dunes, to the old cemetery.

The old cemetery was enclosed with an old stone wall, a sign said it was built by a bachelor Irish stone mason who had also built many of the old stone houses. Built for penance perhaps, or to reassure the restless spirits?

The sadness was concentrated in one corner with little markers for four Brennan children. The oldest was eleven, they were all struck down within a few days of each other in 1875.

In other parts of the cemetery two children from another family had also died close together later in 1875, and another child’s grave for the same year.

Poor parents, probably survivors or progeny from the Irish potato famine of 1846, their children wiped out by a plague in this remote place. Four buried together in an awful week. The lingering sorrow of the prayer and fear of all the town’s parents, enduring somehow in spirit.

I learned that 1500 children died from a Scarlet Fever epidemic in New South Wales during 1875 and 1876. Hundreds of deaths from outbreaks of Typhoid fever, diptheria, tuberculosis or smallpox were recorded methodically every year, even an epidemic of the plague in Sydney in 1900.

Throughout the country, the indigenous people were dying from the same and other diseases, their death and misery largely unmarked, unrecorded and unpreventable.

Some scientists estimate that of all the people who ever lived, half have died from malaria. Children are particularly susceptible.

Sorrow is our inevitable companion in life. Blessed are those who mourn.

May peace be with you.

We say them over and over in the Great Prayer.

Hallowed be your name! Your Kingdom come!

The Great Commandment of the Gospels to love God and the Great Priority of the Gospels to establish the Kingdom.

“To what can I compare the Kingdom?” Jesus said, using parables to make sure there was no comparison of the Kingdom with the Covenant of Moses, or with the Temple, or with the Priests, the Romans, Greeks, Gnostics, Scriptures or anything else.

The parables emphasize beautifully that the Kingdom is an abstract - requiring a stance, or an attitude – to enable the operation of the spirit. Way, truth and life!

Joppa and Casaerea, the road to Damascus, and Jerusalem. Real places. Two real men, Peter once Simon, Paul once Saul, involved in three events. Events almost contemporary with the Gospels but unlike the Gospels, almost unchallenged for veracity. Real men, real events, real faith.

The Kingdom realised.

The shape of the new Age in three mystic events. The Kingdom of the Christ founded in the Acts of the Apostles, in three real moments. Mystic moments which are repeated time and again in real people’s lives. The spiritual foundations of the Kingdom. The life changing epiphanies of the faith, the Spirit in action in the world.

The coming of the Spirit to Peter and the throng at Pentecost; the coming of the Spirit to Paul and his subsequent conversion; Peter’s vision of cleanliness followed by the coming of the Spirit to Cornelius and the gentiles.

The form of the Kingdom revealed as spirit and vision.

© 2008 Epiphanist

Complacent kingdom, a

priest in a presbytery

meets people’s needs for a

heaven on earth,

Satisfactorily

filled by domestic bliss,

their hope’s in a church still

short of true worth.