Dear Inner Circle,
What an honour it was to march briefly with Uncle Ray on the weekend, to be in proximity to a man of the highest integrity. To hear that he and Aunty Sharon have received threats all week long since is a scar that we collectively bear across our hearts. Many of us would be driven to anger and feel justified in returning it four-fold. Yet here is one who knows that if you don’t transform your pain, you will transmit it. The transformation requires a bearing of the hate inflicted. That can never be demanded or asked of anyone, yet some like Uncle Ray manage to carry it within bruised but unbroken hearts.
There is a familiar comfort within our certainties. So it is only natural that when interruptions to our certainties arrive, we feel discomfort. We construct our certainties carefully, the rituals we trust, the symbols we’ve inherited, the sounds we expect to hear on particular days. Then something arrives uninvited, and the carefully constructed moment splits open.
The booing that greeted the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural offerings at Anzac commemorations this week was, for many, one of those ruptures. What was offered — dance, song, voice — was not a protest. It was a gift. A people saying: we are also here, we have also grieved, we have also lost. Yet for some in the crowd, it landed wrong.
Grace, by its very nature, tends to show up in forms we aren’t quite prepared for. The bagpipes we now receive as quintessentially Anzac were once foreign to many ears. The bugle’s Last Post was borrowed, adapted, made sacred through repetition and love. Every tradition was once an interruption.
What would it mean to let the truth interrupt our certainty? Not to abandon what we hold dear, but to hold it with open hands in an act of trust in what has never let us down, that beauty arrives unbidden, in many forms, that grief speaks in more than one tongue, and that grace has never been the sole property of any single culture?
At Wayside, we encounter this daily. People arrive whose lives interrupt our comfortable categories. Again and again, we find that the interruption is where the grace lives.
Last night we took a moment to lay aside our hurts to celebrate together at Wayside’s Got Talent. Singing the hallelujah song, hearing self-composed sonnets and dancing while juggling beach balls above our heads. The joy we shared wasn’t an optional extra. Sometimes, it’s how we survive.
Thank you for being part of the Inner Circle,
Jon
Rev. Jon Owen
CEO & Pastor
Wayside Chapel
