February 2015 Volume 2: Number 2 1 The Church Messenger The Monthly Newsletter of St John the Evangelist Church Anglican Parish, Dee Why A Very Different Parish! • in the Catholic Tradition of Anglicanism • that welcomes EVERYONE • that joyfully reaches out to share the life of Christ Welcome to the February issue of the new monthly newsletter of St John’s, Dee Why. For over two decades from the 1950’s onwards St John’s had a monthly newsletter called “The Church Messenger”. We hope current members of St John’s will appreciate the revival of The Church Messenger, and enjoy seeing it grow and develop as a means of keeping parishioners informed and involved in what is going on in the life of our parish family. Desperate Syrian refugees caught in perfect storm The worst storm that Lebanon has seen for a decade has buried hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared Syrian refugees in deep snow By Ruth Sherlock, Bekaa valley, Lebanon The Telegraph UK Hanan and three friends busily packed their buckets with snow and upturned them to make turrets for the fortress they were building. It was a moment of innocent relief for the children who — all under eight years old — have spent half their lives enduring the violence and deprivation of war. But in the tent just behind them, its sides buried in snow, Hanan’s mother was in a state of despair. The most violent storm to hit Lebanon in more than a decade has caused chaos in the refugee camp that she has called home for the last two years since she and her family fled the war in neighbouring Syria. The oil for her small stove, the only source of heat in her canvas tent, had burned out and there was no money to buy more. Her blankets and mattresses were soacked after the roof her tent partially collapsed under the weight of the snow. Puddles of water had gathered in the gaps between the tent and floor. There seemed no way to keep her children warm as A Syrian refugee girl walks during snowfall outside tents at a makeshift settlement in Bar Elias, in the Bekaa valley
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February 2015 Volume 2: Number 2
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The Church Messenger The Monthly Newsletter of St John the Evangelist Church
Anglican Parish, Dee Why
A Very Different Parish! • in the Catholic Tradition of Anglicanism • that welcomes EVERYONE • that joyfully reaches out to share the life of Christ
Welcome to the February issue of the new monthly newsletter of St John’s, Dee Why. For over two decades from the 1950’s onwards St John’s had a monthly newsletter called “The Church Messenger”. We hope current members of St John’s will appreciate the revival of The Church Messenger, and enjoy seeing it grow and develop as a means of keeping parishioners informed and involved in what is going on in the life of our parish family.
Desperate Syrian refugees caught in perfect storm The worst storm that Lebanon has seen for a decade has buried hundreds of thousands of ill-prepared Syrian refugees in deep snow By Ruth Sherlock, Bekaa valley, Lebanon The Telegraph UK Hanan and three friends busily packed their buckets with snow and upturned them to make turrets for the fortress they were building. It was a moment of innocent relief for the children who — all under eight years old — have spent half
their lives enduring the violence and deprivation of war. But in the tent just behind them, its sides buried in snow, Hanan’s mother was in a state of despair. The most violent storm to hit Lebanon in more than a decade has caused chaos in the refugee camp that she has called home for the last two years since she and her family fled the war in neighbouring Syria. The oil for her small stove, the only source of heat
in her canvas tent, had burned out and there was no money to buy more. Her blankets and mattresses were soacked after the roof her tent partially collapsed under the weight of the snow. Puddles of water had gathered in the gaps between the tent and floor. There seemed no way to keep her children warm as
A Syrian refugee girl walks during snowfall outside tents at a makeshift settlement
in Bar Elias, in the Bekaa valley
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another sub-zero night fell. “The whole tent is freezing and wet, but there is nowhere else to go,” she said, while politely declining to give her name, a common practice among Syrian refugees who live in the perpetual fear of further trauma and reprisals. Across the settlement where she lives with Hanan and her family, and in hundreds of others, refugees were using a small gap in the snowfall yesterday to desperately reinforce their defences against the cold. International and local aid agencies have mobilised en masse to help the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who are living in Lebanon in parlous conditions as the temperatures plunged, but even in the best-run camps there were women waiting in line, their feet exposed in sandals and without winter clothes. Four years since the war in Syria began, many of the refugees still only have the ripped and faded clothes that they escaped in. Fleeing gunfire, and with no idea of what lay ahead for them, many women simply snatched their favourite possessions: high heels, party frocks and wedding dresses.
Men walk along a street during snow fall in the Duma neighborhood of Damascus. Nobody was reported killed by fighting in Syria on Wednesday, the first day without casualties in three years (REUTERS) One camp yesterday resounded with the sounds of hammering, sweeping and crying, as families tried to mend seven large wooden and canvas shelters that had partially collapsed. Men and young boys trudged through shin-high mud and icy slush, tripping over and sometimes falling to their knees as they tried to drag wooden planks and new canvas to their tents. A toddler, no older than three, stood in a narrow alley between tents, walking barefoot and sobbing because he had lost his parents. Further along a young girl, some 12 years old, was wearing leggings, a thin jumper and flip flops, as she tried to carry her younger brother to spare his feet from the frozen ground. Nariman, 41, from Homs in Syria had covered the floor in pots to collect the water that was seeping through her roof. Miriam, 19, from Idlib, described the fear she and
her family had felt the night before as the walls had started to sag under the weight of the snow. “We ran from the tent in the middle off the night because we were afraid it would collapse on top of us,” she said. “We slept in a neighbour’s home.” “Almost all the tents were damaged in some way. The ones that survived have five or six families sleeping in them now.” So far, the death toll has remained relatively low. In Shebaa, in southern Lebanon, three Syrians died, including one six year old boy, when they were caught in the storm.
A Syrian refugee boy reacts as he stands barefoot on snow outside a tent at a refugee camp in Zahle, in the Bekaa valley (MOHAMED AZAKIR/REUTERS)
UNHCR began taking measures against the chance of bad weather in the Autumn, distributing cash, stoves, fuel vouchers and blankets to the most vulnerable. Almost 250,000 people living in broken sheds and unfinished buildings were given plastic sheeting, wood and basic tools to insulate themselves. But Ninette Kelley, the UNCHR representative in Lebanon, said it was not enough. “Despite our best efforts, the situation in Lebanon remains precarious for refugees given the extremely poor conditions in which they live and the scattered nature of the population. It is a constant challenge to ensure that refugees across more than 1,700 localities remain safe and warm throughout the winter months and have sufficient resources to withstand severe storms.” Joseph Awad, the general manager of the Lebanese charity Beyond, said there were more than 1,300 large informal settlements across Lebanon and the same number of smaller ones. He had been visiting the camps to provide medical treatment and “winterisation kits”, mostly large plastic sheets, to guard against the blizzard. But, doctors said, sickness from freezing conditions is starting to set in. In one camp in the Bekaa, parents waiting in a long line for a doctor to see their sickly children. Inside a small tent, the doctor took their temperatures and diagnosed their symptoms as a nurse wrote down the medicine prescribed. Pneumonia, tonsillitis and bronchitis have all
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become common. But asthma and other breathing disorders, contracted from breathing poisonous fumes inside the tents, are also becoming widespread. With oil for heaters in short supply and prohibitively expensive, the refugees have been forced to burn garbage, including plastics, to keep warm, generating acrid smoke. Outside the doctor’s tent, Kawsa, 28, from Aleppo, comforted her four year-old daughter, Rima, as her small frame shook from her coughs. It was the third winter they had survived in Lebanon, she said, and the situation was only getting worse. Her husband had searched endlessly for work, but the best he could get was as an agricultural labourer for approximately $4.60 per day. At the same time their UNHCR food allowance had been slashed by more than a third and now they could barely afford one meal per day. The storm is the latest blow to Syrian refugees caught in a burgeoning crises that has no respite in sight. Around half of Syria’s entire population of
approximately 22 million has been displaced in the conflict that has already claimed more than 200,000 lives. The disaster has seen an estimated one and half million people flee across the border to tiny Lebanon, itself a country suffering the aftershocks of its own fifteen year long civil war. The economic and social effects of influx have put an unbearable weight on host communities, pushing a further 170,000 Lebanese below the poverty line this year according to a World Bank report. But even as the number in critical need of aid has increased, the level of international assistance has seen a dramatic decline, leaving tens of thousands of people in desperate conditions and no means of escape. But returning to Syria was not an option, Kawsa said; her house was destroyed. “God will protect us,” she said. “This is our only hope.”
Middle Eastern Christians Flee Violence
for Ancient Homeland
Refugees flee Syria and Iraq to Midyat, Turkey, which clings to its diminished role as the heartland of the ancient Orthodox faith.
By Tara Isabella Burton National Geographic Photographs by Monique Jaques, National Geographic MIDYAT, Turkey—On most afternoons, Mor Barsaumo, a honey-colored, fifth-century stone church nestled in a warren of slanted streets, draws a crowd. In the narrow courtyard, old men smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, while children kick a soccer ball across the stone floor. In a darkened classroom, empty except for a few desks, a teacher gives private lessons in
Syriac, derived from Aramaic, the language of Christ. And now, the refugees also come.
Advised by relatives or other refugees, newcomers to Midyat often make the steps of the church their first stop. Midyat and its environs—known in Syriac as Tur Abdin, “mountain of the servants of God”—are
the historical heartland of the Middle East's widely dispersed Syriac Orthodox Christian community. Now the region has become a haven as the fighting in Syria and Iraq has forced Christians to flee their homes. “All Syriac Christians come here. Most of the aid is delivered from here,” says Ayhan Gürkan, a deacon at Mor Barsaumo and a member of the Tur
The fifth-century Mor Barsaumo church in Midyat, Turkey, draws Syriac Christians in what was once the faith's heartland, as well as
refugees fleeing violence in Syria and Iraq.
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Abdin Syriac Christians Committee, set up to look after Midyat’s Christian refugees. Only four of Midyat’s eight churches are still used. Mor Barsaumo is the most central, and hence the easiest for newcomers to find. Its courtyard and schoolroom serve as a de facto community center for local Christians and refugees alike. Gürkan, smoking a cigarette by the church gate, is flanked by two Syrian refugees, Yusep Souleman and Nahir Mirza. Souleman’s grandchildren play alongside local children in the courtyard. Gürkan estimates that of the 500 Syriac Christians in Midyat, about a hundred are refugees—most from Syria, with a handful from Iraq. Midyat is in southeastern Turkey, just 32 miles (52 kilometers) north of the border with Syria. Although an official refugee camp for Christians exists in Midyat, built on land donated by nearby Mor Abraham Monastery, few have chosen to live there. This is due partly to the poor provisions, says Gürkan—tents are no
defense against the region’s cold
winters—but also to the success of the Syriac Christian
community at looking after its own. “They are our brothers,” cuts in Mirza. “They take care of us.” This care is material and spiritual, says Father Ishak Ergun, Mor Barsaumo’s priest, who is also on the refugee committee. Refugees find housing in the neighboring
Syriac Christian Cultural Center, in monasteries such as Mor Gabriel or Mor Jacob, or in apartments the committee helps them rent in the city center. The day before, he tells me, another Syrian family came to Mor Barsaumo. He helped them rent a flat from a
Christian landlord at a greatly reduced rate; community members furnished the apartment. The committee raises funds—soliciting donations from abroad as well as from wealthier members of the community—to subsidize rent when families are unable to pay. He and Gürkan also help refugees assimilate: accompanying them to hospitals and registration centers and filling out paperwork with them, including applications for
asylum in Europe. For many refugees, pastoral care is no less important. “We pray for them,” Ergun says. Not long ago, the community held a three-day fast to “call upon God to stop the pressure and to show a peaceful way forward.” Ergun had just counseled a family that had trouble sleeping because of “the death, murder that they faced in their eyes,” he says. He provided a Bible in Arabic and encouraged
them to read the Lord’s Prayer before bed. “After they read the Bible,” he says, they started to find some comfort. Fear for the Future Once, Christians dominated Tur Abdin. Monasteries dating to the fourth century dot the
Mor Abraham, a monastery on the outskirts of Midyat, is one of many in the area. The monastery donated land to create a camp
for Christian refugees, though few make use of it.
Ayhan Gürkan, a deacon in the Syriac Christian faith, reads
from a religious book before teaching a Syriac lesson, as children toss a ball in the courtyard of Mor Barsaumo Church.
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landscape: from Mor Gabriel, just outside Midyat, to Mor Hananyo, near Mardin. But Christianity has virtually
vanished from the region. From the 1890s through the 1920s, the Ottoman Empire killed tens of thousands of Syriac Christians, a massacre known in Syriac as Sayfo, which mirrored the slaughter of Armenians and Greeks. Today, Midyat’s Christians are uneasy about their culture’s chances for survival. Because Syriacs, unlike Armenians or Kurds, are not officially recognized minorities in Turkey, they cannot teach their language in public schools. And their status as Christians also marks them as separate from their Muslim neighbors. “Midyat used to be a Syriac city,” says Gürkan. “Before the 17th century, there was not one single Muslim, not one single Kurd in this area. You see how it has changed. In 1960, there were 1,600 Christian families in the Midyat city center, plus many thousands more in villages. Now there are not even 120 families in Midyat.” Tensions between Midyat’s Christians and their neighbors rarely boil over into outright violence, but Gürkan remains afraid. “Whenever there is anti-Islamic action in the West, we are blamed,” he says. “We pay the price. According to Muslims, a Christian is a
Christian. We are all infidels to them.” Christians in Midyat have been targeted when tensions flare
elsewhere, such as the conflicts in 1968 on Cyprus between Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims and the crisis in 2005 when many Muslims worldwide protested the satirical depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in cartoons in a Danish newspaper. In 1968, Gürkan says, “they decided who would raid which house, who would seize whose
daughters.” The intervention of sympathetic Muslim neighbors, who tipped the Christian community off and helped guard the churches, calmed the situation. “But we don’t forget that trauma. We still have those images.” Father Daniel Savci, a monk at the Mor Jacob monastery, was kidnapped by hostile Muslim locals in 2007, although he was later released. Two years ago, Gürkan says, a service at Mor Barsaumo was interrupted by an Islamist who
unfurled a Turkish flag. “He could have exploded a bomb.” The Christian community now suspects the same man of having started a fire at nearby Mor Gabriel. “We know what happened in Syria, in Iraq ... we know what the Christian community faced,” says Gürkan. He fears that sympathizers of the Islamic State (ISIS) or other organized groups exist in Turkey. Just Passing Through Midyat Many of the Syrian refugees now arriving in Midyat are the descendants of refugees forced to leave Tur Abdin during Turkey’s Sayfo. They return, Gürkan says, with a sense of fear, one that he himself shares.
“There is no guarantee that it won’t happen again tomorrow,” he says. Gürkan and Ergun do their best to encourage refugees to stay in Midyat, hoping the influx could bring new life to their
dwindling community, but their efforts are often unsuccessful. “We tell them to stay here but they don’t want to,”
sighs Ergun. “There are so many Syriac Christian villages in the region; they are empty now. I am telling them that the future of Europe is not clear, either. ISIS can attack in Europe
Children in a classroom at Mor Barsaumo Church
study the Syriac language, derived from Aramaic, the language Christ spoke. Because Syriac Christians
aren’t a recognized minority in Turkey, their language can’t be taught in the public schools.
Gürkan reads from a religious text written in the Syriac language in a classroom adjacent to the Mor Barsaumo
church before a service begins.
A priest at Mor Barsaumo church is surrounded by
worshippers who are singing select passages from the Bible. In an Orthodox service, nearly the entire
celebration is sung.
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too.” A former Syriac language teacher who has been in Midyat for 13 months, Mirza is anxious to leave; he believes that his application for asylum in Germany, where his mother and sister live, is on the verge of being approved. Mirza invites me to join him for tea at his apartment at the cultural center, which he shares with his wife and three children. As we walk through the courtyard, he points out another refugee: a man in his early 20s, recently arrived from Aleppo. He stands on the terrace, listening to music on his iPod. He keeps to himself, Mirza says. The apartment is small but well-kept, although little light makes it through the kitchen window. The family members gather in plastic chairs around a computer on the kitchen table, where Mirza shows me his Facebook page in Arabic, along with clips and images he has recently shared, nearly all promoting Syriac culture. He shows me a chart detailing the similarities between the first ten letters of the Syriac alphabet and Arabic numerals—proof, he says, that our numerical system derives from Syriac. He plays me a YouTube video: a song in Syriac with images of Syriac monasteries. There is not much else to do
here, he says. He cannot work—one Syriac language teacher at Mor Barsaumo is more than enough—and he is prohibited from teaching in schools. His children do not play with local children, even Christians; he feels they do not understand one another. Nor does he feel able
to send them to school. “It’s for Muslim people,” he says. “Not for us.” He waits anxiously for the papers that will allow him to move to Germany. “We can’t be citizens here. We have no jobs; our children can’t go to school; we have no future for our children; and we can't go back to Syria,” he says. “So the only option is to go to Europe.” But his heart, he says, is still back home. Refugees in Their Homeland For the four monks at Mor Gabriel Monastery, one of the oldest monasteries in the world, the flight of so many refugees to Europe is a painful reminder of how little is left of their world. A few refugees stay intermittently at the monastery, where they receive free room and board as well as money for doing odd jobs, but many head to Europe. Here, Isa Gulten, an archdeacon at the monastery, conducts sporadic lessons in
Syriac. This time, it’s for an audience of one: a German of Syriac descent studying to become a priest when he returns to Berlin. “You are listening to the original language of Christ,” Gulten says, reading a passage from St. Paul’s epistles. “As Christians, we suffer doubly in the Middle East,” he says, pointing to the difference with Turkey’s Kurds, most of whom are Sunni Muslims. “The Kurds here are persecuted just for their ethnicity. But we are persecuted for both our ethnicity and our faith.” This feeling of alienation in Turkey is particularly painful, Gulten says, because Syriac
Christians see Tur Abdin as their spiritual and ancestral home. “It is shameful,” he says. “We are not foreigners. We are people of this land. We have been here since the time of
George Mirza helps his parents in the kitchen of the family’s temporary apartment in the Mor Barsaumo cultural center,
where they wait to learn whether they’ll be allowed to move to Germany. The Syriac community has given them food and
accommodations.
Worshippers touch a cross when they enter and leave Mor Barsaumo Church. The gesture is to remind them that they have responsibilities as a baptised Christian
and that the church is a sacred space, separate from the outside world.
Candles burn at Mor Barsaumo Church, reflected in
the glass of a framed picture.
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Adam and Eve! The government builds mosques, schools for Islam, paying a lot of money to the imams. We all pay our taxes and get nothing. Not for our churches, not for our priests.” The situation of Syriac Christians long established in Turkey, he insists, is not so different from that of the community’s newcomers. “Truly, we are all refugees.”
For now, however, refugee and local alike keep what they can of Syriac Christian culture alive, as they worship at Mor Barsaumo’s twice-daily prayer services. As about 50 people file into Mor Barsaumo for a weekday afternoon service—Souleman, Gürkan, and Ergun among them—they begin to chant, in liturgical Syriac, the reading
chosen by Ergun: Psalm 91, a prayer for refuge in exile. “You who live in the shelter of the Most High, who abide in the shadow of the Almighty, will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress; my God, in whom I trust.’”
MISSION GIVING
St John’s is committed to giving at least ten per cent of its income from offerings to the work of mission outside the parish. This example of generosity and sacrifice by the parish as a whole should inspire members of St John’s to be just as committed in their individual giving towards the ministry
and mission of Christ in our parish and the wider world.
Below is a summary of our budgeted mission allocations for last year.
ANGLICAN PARISH OF ST JOHN THE EVANGELIST DEE WHY MISSION GIVING FROM THE CHURCH 2014
Anglican Board of Mission $2,500 ABM for Specific Projects $3,500 Anglican Aid Abroad $3,000 Anglicare $2,000 Bringa Women’s Resource Centre (Dee Why) $500 Bush Church Aid Society $1,000 Church Mission Society $500 Kaddy Transport (Dee Why) $500 L’Arche Australia Ltd $1,000 Nungalinya College (Darwin) $500 St Christopher’s Home (Fiji) $1,000 Hamlin Fistula Ethiopia (Australia) Ltd $500 Opportunities through Art Cambodia $500 TOTAL $17,000
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PARISH NEWS Op Shop: Volunteers are needed for the first Saturday of each month, and on the preceding Thursday afternoon and Friday morning. Volunteers are also needed on Tuesday mornings to assist with sorting stock. If you can set aside a little time each month, for this outreach please speak with Bev Bingham or Ken Eltham.
Op Shop resumes on Saturday 7 February.
Help with setting up on Thursday and Friday (5 and 6 February) would be greatly appreciated, as well as packing up on the Saturday.
Caritas: First meeting for 2015 will be Monday 2 February at 7:30pm. It will be a planning meeting.
Pancake Day Supper: On Shrove Tuesday, 17 February, after a short penitential service at 6.30pm, there will be St John’s famous pancake supper to be hosted by the Caritas Group. All are welcome. To join in, please enter your name on the list in the foyer. If able to make pancakes (savory or sweet) please contact Robyn Couch (9452 2792).
St John’s Lenten Program Ash Wednesday 18 February:
• Masses with Ashing: 6:30am, 10:00am • Solemn Mass 7:30pm.
Please consider this a Holy Day of obligation. Stations of the Cross: Fridays in Lent beginning on 20 February at 7:00pm. Lenten Studies begin in week of Wednesday 25 February. At this stage there will be two groups meeting in the Library (there may be a third group as well):
• Wednesday mornings at 11:15am (Deacon Sandra coordinating) and
• Wednesday evenings at 7:30pm (Graeme and Robyn Couch).
Please enter your name on the list in the lobby for one of these groups. Mothers’ Union (MU): Our first meeting this year will be after the 10:00am Ash Wednesday Service. Meet in church for the service and after a cup of tea or coffee we will hold a planning meeting. Come with lots of ideas! —
Margaret
The Junior Choir: Please continue to pray for this important addition to our parish, and to recommend it to anybody interested. Annual General Meeting, Sunday 1 March, 11:45am. The Financial Statements for last year will be available from the lobby table. Please take a set to read, come to the meeting, and use the forms provided to nominate parishioners as office-‐bearers (Parish Council, Churchwardens etc.). Always, new people are needed who can contribute in different ways to the work and spiritual well-‐being of the Parish and the management of its property. Current members are: Churchwardens: Bev Bingham, Robyn Couch, Tony Johnson. Parish Council: other members (including nine elected) are Heather Andrews, Valda Ashover, Neridah Byrne, Don Fisher, Pam Fisher, Dudley Johnson, Lynette Johnson, Antal Anne Seddon, Don Stephens, Katherine Ward. Nomination forms are available; please consider your own availability and propose names for the offices to be filled. Organisation leaders are requested to deliver their reports to the office by no later than 15 February.
Anniversary of Ordination: Fr Steven (2nd) ordination as deacon
Wedding Anniversary Congratulations to Heidi and Scott Tobin (22nd)
COMING EVENTS
Mon 2 Feb Presentation of the Lord (Candlemas) Mass 12noon
Sat 7 Feb First Op Shop for 2015
Sat 14 Feb Piano and Viola Recital 2:00pm
Tue 17 Feb Shrove Tuesday Penitential Service and Pancakes 6:30pm
Wed 18 Feb Ash Wednesday Masses: 6:30am, 10am, 7:30pm
Sun 1 Mar Parish AGM 11:45am followed by lunch
Fri 6 Mar World Day of Prayer Naraweena Baptist Church 10am
Sun 5 Apr EASTER SUNDAY Sat 23–Sun 24
May Festival of Sacred and Classical
Music
The Church Messenger: if anyone has any interesting articles or information they feel would be useful to other members of the Parish, feel free to write up a short piece and forward it to the office for inclusion (subject to approval!).
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WE REMEMBER IN PRAYER
Those who are ill: Ana, Sophie, Gloria, Louise, Yvette, Vikki, Helen Bennett, Annette Bird, Alastair Brown, Kay Burton, Stephen Butler, Julie, Nora Davidson, Jacob De Angelis, Gary Fenton, Leah Hermanns, Peter Hill, Jean Knight, Kerrie McAlpin, Grace MacKay, Peter, Ross Morgans, Jean Morriss, Ken O’Donell, Kevin Ross, Tony Tasker, Brian Taylor, George Thiel, Stephen Ward, Noel Warr, Mary, Marjorie Wilson
Others in need of prayer: Belinda, Larka, Anita, Donna, Russell, Thomas, Jasmine and Ryan, David, Deborah, Greg, Leah, Lisa, Mark, Tom, Pam Andersen, Fay Baker, Margaret Baker, Virginia Baker, Elizabeth Balharry, Joy Beness, June Bennett, Cameron Browne, Craig Butler, Shirley Butler, John and Norma Byles, John Byrne, Rosemary Calder, Susan Caldis, Dorothy Cole, Beryl Cornish, Betty Coward, John Cranfield, Fr Jim Cranswick, Robyn Dunn, Anne Evans, Jean Field, Kevin Flicker, Clarrie and Stella Greaves, Norma Halford, Philip Hanlon, Lee Hansen, Marie Hansen, Eric Hastings Snr, Michelle Hayden, Fr Stan & Norma Hessey, Peter Huckleby, Lynette Johnson, Sue Kinging, Alec, Midge Lee, Joanne Lucock, Bob and Vivienne McMullin, Lois Maze, Lilian Miles, Byron Moore, Grayden Moore, Joan Morgans, Stephen
Palmer, Bill and Karin Peters, Fiona Peterson, Joan Preuss, Elaine Rich, Tom and Isabel Ridgway, Debby Roberts, Stathis Sakellaropoulos, Patricia Sara, Bob Satchell, Pam Seddon, Lena Simpkins, Jan Smith, Don Stephens, Jill and Kareena Sutcliffe, Jennifer and Michael Taylor, Joan Taylor, Phil and Margaret Turley, Audette Vaughan, Florence Watts, Val West, John Wickes, Kath Yabsley
Those who died recently: Wendy Champion, Mabel Kennedy, Melissa Clarke-Jones, Jean Martin
Those whose anniversaries of death occur at this time: Lindsay Dowe, Janet Gilliland (1st), Noel Sullivan (2nd), Roy Wotton (priest) (3rd), Sadie Simmons, June Linden (4th), James Menary (5th), John Charles Vockler (bishop) (6th), Bill Moyle, Jack Musgrove (7th), Nancy Romanis, Beth Williams (8th), Luke Hunt, Joan French (9th), Pearl Evans (10th), Jeanette Adams (11th), Lynette Ruckendorfer (12th), Mary South, Norma Evans (13th), Violet Tripp (14th), Sybil Garman (15th), Annie Simpkin, Doug Knight (16th), Wilga Madill (17th), Rupert McDougall (18th), Frederick Williams, Phillip Day (19th), Esmé Gale (20th), Audrey Rayner (21st), Fay Ormerod (22nd), Irene O’Donell (23rd), Alfred Verrills (24th), Jack Pigott (priest) (25th), Stanley White, Jill Satchell (26th), Leon Becker, Gladys Ross (27th), Lillian Lacey (28th)
St John’s Recycling Program: Parishioners are invited to use the collection boxes at the back of the Church for recycling small batteries, candles, corks, printer ink and toner cartridges, sunglasses, spectacles (and cases), and also, to help the work of ABM, used postage stamps and phonecards.
Children are always welcome in all our church services at St John's. In addition, at the 10:00am service there is Godly Play for children from three to twelve years, and our crèche (unsupervised) where parents can take little ones if upset or restless while still following the service on the large TV screen.
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In bygone centuries, Christians said their last farewells to the Christmas season on Candlemas, 2 February. This is exactly 40 days after Christmas Day. In New Testament times, 40 days old was an important age for a baby boy: it was when they made their first ‘public appearance’. Mary, like all good Jewish mothers, went to the Temple with Jesus, her first male child, to ‘present him to the Lord’. At the same time, she, as a new mother, was ‘purified’. Thus we have the Festival of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.
So where does the Candlemas bit come in? Jesus is described in the New Testament as the Light of the
World, and early Christians developed the tradition of lighting many candles in celebration of this day. The Church also fell into the custom of blessing the year’s supply of candles for the church on this day - hence the name, Candlemas.
The story of how Candlemas began can be found in Luke 2:22-40. Simeon’s great declaration of faith and recognition of who Jesus was is of course found in the Nunc Dimittis, which is embedded in the Office of Evening or Night Prayer in the West. But in medieval times, the Nunc Dimittis was mostly used just on this day, during the distribution of candles before the Eucharist. Only gradually did it win a place in the daily prayer life of the Church.
Have you done something which haunts you, or of which you are ashamed? Which makes you feel restless and defensive, every time you think of it? Why not deal with it this month, and put it behind you? Whatever your mistake has been, consider what the Bible has to say to you: • ‘I have not come to call the
virtuous but sinners to repentance’ (said Jesus). (Luke 5.32)
• ‘Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Isaiah 55.7)
• ‘Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning; rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the Lord, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love, and relents from punishing.’ (Joel 2:12-13)
God is inviting you to come to him this Ash Wednesday. What a wonderful offer! Make the most of it, and remember how the prodigal son was welcomed back by his compassionate father. True Fasting This month sees the beginning of Lent, the 40 days of preparation running up to Easter. Although fasting is one of the neglected disciplines associated with this period, it occupies an important place in the Christian life. Jesus began his earthly ministry with fasting in the wilderness for 40 days and he also taught his disciples to fast (i.e. not if but when), ‘when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that it will not be obvious to others that you are fasting, but only to your Father, who is unseen; and your Father, who sees
what is done in secret, will reward you.’ (Matthew 6:17-18). Yet we don’t fast to manipulate God into doing what we want or to impress others. It is not a command, but a choice we have to make to develop our relationship with God. What is fasting? Fasting is voluntarily abstaining from food, etc., to focus on God and give time for prayer, making our lives simpler and making a disciplined choice to put our spiritual needs ahead of our bodily needs. Prayer and fasting usually go hand in hand, as together they glorify God. ‘So we fasted and petitioned our God about this, and he answered our prayer.’ (Ezra 6:23). What are the benefits of fasting? Fasting gives us space to humbly focus on God for his strength, provision, and wisdom and results in a more intimate relationship with Christ. As Isaiah points out, it’s not self-centred, but part of our care for
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the poor: ‘Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to lose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?’ (Isaiah 58:6). Fasting enables the Holy Spirit to reveal our true spiritual condition, leading to brokenness, repentance, and a transformed life, with a heart more attentive to God. How do we fast? Most commonly fasting involves missing one or two meals as part of a day for seeking God. Of course, some can’t abstain from food for medical reasons. Fasting might also include refraining
from TV, alcohol, sex (cf. 1 Corinthinians 7:1-5) or whatever may be getting in the way of us being fully focused on God. ‘Jesus takes it for granted that his disciples will observe the pious custom of fasting. Strict exercise of self-control is an essential feature of the Christian's life. Such customs have only one purpose — to make the disciples more ready and cheerful to accomplish those things which God would have done.’
The founder of Amnesty International, British lawyer and human rights activist Peter Benenson, died ten years ago, on 25 Feb, 2005. He was 83.
Born into the Jewish Solomon family in London, he adopted his mother’s maiden name as a tribute to his grandfather, the Russian gold tycoon Grigori Benenson. He became a Roman Catholic in 1958, when he was convalescing from illness in Italy.
Peter’s army officer father died when he was nine, and he was tutored privately by W H Auden before going to Eton. At the age of 16 he helped to establish a relief fund with other boys for children orphaned by the Spanish Civil War.
From 1941 to 1945 he was at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre, where he worked on breaking German teleprinter ciphers. After the war he began practising as a barrister before joining the Labour Party and standing unsuccessfully for election.
In 1957, with a group of lawyers, he founded JUSTICE, an all-‐party human rights and law reform organisation. Then in 1961, he was so outraged by a newspaper report of two Portuguese students sentenced to seven years in prison for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom during the Salazar regime, that he wrote an article in the Observer, asking readers to write in support.
To co-‐ordinate such letter-‐writing campaigns, Amnesty International was founded in London that July. The response was so overwhelming that within a year groups of letter-‐writers had formed in more than a dozen countries. It is now a global movement of over seven million people.
Initially appointed general secretary, Benenson stood down in 1964 because of ill health. He then became involved in disputes within the organisation, and he resigned in 1967. In 2001 he received the Pride of Britain award for Lifetime Achievement.
Islam urgently needs to find its moderate voice 9 January 2015 by Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff The Tablet The horrifying attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in which 12 people were killed was manifestly an Islamist attack on a magazine which had in the gunmen's view, committed a blasphemy that therefore deserved violent retribution. The attackers’ reported shouts of “God is Great” and “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed” rounded out another episode in what has become an all too familiar pattern of horrors where violence is placed in an Islamic frame. Yet it is easy to miss the underlying purpose of such an attack, which was far wider than an attack on freedom of expression. It aimed to provoke an increase in global tensions and the likelihood of further and wider conflict, as well as to intimidate journalists in respect of how they cover and respond to Islam. So the attack, and others like it, need to be understood as regular acts of terrorism in a struggle for power, and crimes motivated by a profoundly religious, though horribly distorted, worldview. The religious basis on which jihadists justify their actions is therefore a critical issue, and so too the question of who has the authority to define that basis.
Islam, and perhaps Sunni Islam in particular, by virtue of its diffuse and often personal structures of authority, seems to lack effective means for defining the boundaries of the faith. Most especially, moderate Islam seems to have difficulty in establishing that extremist interpretations are wrong in ways that command universal recognition. All too often, young people are able to believe that the most extreme forms of Islam must somehow be the most authentic. We have seen in the last few days once again how this can end in violence and terror. But this is a problem that only Muslims themselves can address. It is profoundly awkward and even self-defeating for the West to seem to be trying to define Islam. Yet this task of defining the authentic and invalidating distorted and extreme alternatives has proved sadly hard for Muslims to do definitively. There is however the possibility of at least defining
who is in a position to do this authoritatively. The historic institution of the Azhar University in Cairo has a weight of history behind it that goes back to tenth century, and the present Grand Imam, Dr Ahmed El Tayeb, (who was educated at the Sorbonne) would very much like play this role. However, the relation of the Azhar to the Egyptian state, since the time of Nasser, has allowed many extremists to question its autonomy and thus its legitimacy. In any case, no one institution can do this on its own when what is needed is action by figures of religious standing across the Islamic world acting in concert. This makes highly relevant the unprecedented milestone achieved in 2005 in Jordan, where 200 recognised Muslim scholars from 50 countries were convened by King Abdullah. Together they represented all eight main schools of Islamic jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shia. They put forward The Three Points of the Amman Message which effectively defines who is a Muslim, and forbids the excommunication (or proclaiming to be takfir) of fellow Muslims, while also establishing the precise conditions required for a religious edict (fatwah) to be authoritative.
This was an historic declaration and should have done much to define who can truly speak for Islam. It would thus have undermined those unqualified for this task such as those who promote violence in the name of their faith. Unfortunately the Amman Message has hitherto largely gone unrecognised at the grassroots level, where its acknowledgement is most needed. There is, therefore, here an urgent task that must be completed if the spurious religious validity used by extremists to legitimise the horrors they perpetrate is to be ended. Failure to achieve this tarnishes the vast majority of Muslims who have no sympathy for such actions and are true to the witness of history, where Muslims have lived for centuries in peace with people of other faiths. The lesson of the attacks in Paris, the spate of hostage beheadings and the cruel rise of the Islamic State, has to be that without the means of establishing the unique authenticity of moderate Islam, things may only get worse. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff has served as Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Cairo and specialised for over a decade in interfaith work.
It is profoundly awkward and even self-defeating for the West to seem to be trying to define Islam
Unfortunately the Amman Message has hitherto largely gone unrecognised at the grassroots level
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British MP calls for better religious literacy in public life by Abigail Frymann Rouch The Tablet Politicians need to be more religiously literate and speak more carefully about the links between religion and security, according to a Conservative MP this week. John Glen, chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Global Uncertainties, said that narratives linking religion and security were too often “disappointingly” simplistic, and added: “We need intelligent analysis that does justice to the realities.” Mr Glen, who is an Anglican, was speaking at the launch of the Religion, Security and Global Uncertainties Report, published by the Open University and the Research
Councils’ Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research. Other speakers at the event expressed concern that the Government’s downgrading of Religious Education could leave children with such poor understanding of different faiths that it would put itself at odds with a requirement in the 2014 Counter-Terrorism bill to “prevent people from being drawn into terrorism”. Dr Jenny Taylor, of Lapido Media, which launched the report, said one journalist “was ordered to leave out the word ‘Christian’ when reporting from northern Iraq” – where Islamic State (IS) jihadists have systematically emptied territories of non-Muslims. She also quoted Iranian-born Georgetown Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who said that Muslims do not accept the moral authority the secular West continued to claim after
distancing itself from Christianity. She added: “This explains some of the appeal of the [IS] caliphate to bored suburban [Muslim] youth.” The report criticised Western coverage that viewed situations through a purely socio-economic lens and discounted stories’ religious elements. A video accompanying the report mentioned the massacre at Maspero in Egypt, in which it was wrongly reported that the Christians on whom government forces opened fire were armed. A conclusion of the report was that the West needed to better understand its religious minorities and the role religion plays in the rest of the world. The report warned that religious ignorance was a cause of both Islamophobia and, increasingly, Christiano-phobia.
Science is now pointing towards the existence of God
Keith Ward Published January 10 2015 The Times
It is remarkable how atheism is becoming fashionable. In Britain it has become almost compulsory to say that you do not believe in God. Very often the writings of well-‐known scientists such as Richard Dawkins are quoted in support of the opinion that science and belief in God are at odds. But there is much contemporary work in science that points in a very different direction. It could even be said that there is now a large amount of evidence for the existence of a spiritual dimension to the world. This is particularly so in quantum physics, which has turned the world of classical Newtonian physics upside down.
In the classical view, the world was made up of elementary lumps of matter (like billiard balls) which moved in accordance with absolute and unbreakable laws of nature, running along predetermined grooves in ways that could be predicted with certainty and excluded the possibility of any non-‐physical “interferences” with the system. Even today, some writers talk about non-‐physical causes as “spooky” and too weird to be true. Quantum physics had made that view of the physical world obsolete. Classical physics is not completely wrong, but it is totally inadequate. New quantum theories make belief in God entirely reasonable, and some quantum physicists even think that something like God is required to make sense of fundamental physics. There are three main strands of the “new” theories. First is Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy, which says that matter does not run along predetermined grooves. At a basic level, nature is “open” — there are many alternative possible ways the world can go, and often nothing physical determines which one is taken. That
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allows the possibility of non-‐physical influences. Second, fundamental particles are “entangled” — there are non-‐local relationships between particles, so that they seem to influence one another instantaneously even over large distances. Again, this suggests non-‐physical influences. Some mathematical physicists say the notion of “matter” is a myth, as matter is just one form of energy, which does not consist of particles. Third, Stephen Hawking, among others, argues that matter cannot exist without being observed, that observation collapses wave-‐functions into material particles. This suggests to many that even events like the Big Bang could not exist without being observed — and who could observe them but God? Hawking does not say this, preferring a complicated theory that every mathematically possible universe actually exists. But at least God is possible. And the idea of God is no more weird than the idea that every possible universe exists, but that observation picks out one as “our” universe. Since this is so, it can be seen to be a travesty to say that materialism or atheism are reasonable, whereas religion is just blind faith. Reasons can be given for materialism and for theism, and evidence can be produced for both. The evidence consists in assembling preferred features of experience and connecting them by the use of key integrating
concepts (like “matter and its basic laws”, on the one hand, or “God and objective values” on the other) which are found plausible. But the choice of preferred features and their integration into a conceptual scheme cannot be decided by some allegedly neutral “reason”. Reason, in other words, is not a magic faculty which decides between basic contested claims about the nature of reality. The job of reason is to see that the evidence on all sides is fairly and accurately, critically and sympathetically, presented. So to present the evidence for God is to assemble those features of experience which point to a transcendent source of value and of intelligible order in the universe, and to integrate them into a framework which is theoretically elegant and pragmatically fruitful in practical and moral ways. That evidence will not, in the nature of the case, be universally compelling — just as the evidence for a scientifically based materialism will not. But quantum physics makes the case for a non-‐material mind-‐like basis of the physical universe pretty strong. Science and God may be more friendly than you think. Keith Ward is Regius Professor of Divinity Emeritus at the University of Oxford and Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College, London
Return from Holidays: Playtime, 0-‐5 year-‐old preschool 2 Feb 9:30-‐11:15am Monday Bible Study – all welcome 4 Feb 11:20am other Wednesdays Pins’n’Needles 10 Feb 9:30am-‐12:30pm 2nd & 4th Tues Youth Group, Years 5-‐8 13 Feb 6:00-‐7:30pm 2nd & 4th Friday 16+ Group 13 Feb 7:30-‐9:30pm 2nd Friday Choir Practice 17 Feb 7:15-‐8:45pm Tuesday Junior Choir Practice 17 Feb 5:00-‐6:00pm Tuesday Mothers’ Union 18 Feb 11:20am 3rd Wednesday
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A brief history of destruction The romance between Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist with a crippling disease, and his first wife is celebrated in a new film, but when the Sunday Times writer met them, religion and the scientist’s hostile family were tearing them apart. Bryan Appleyard Published: 14 December 2014 in The Sunday Times
The Theory of Everything is based on the romance of Jane and Stephen It was a no-brainer, a story that would tell itself. There was this brilliant physicist in Cambridge, a man who studied black holes, weird time and the origins of the stars. His mind roamed the cosmos, but — and here was the angle — motor neurone disease had ruined his body. He was stuck in a wheelchair and spoke through a computer. And so, in 1988, I went to Cambridge, thinking all I had to do was turn on my tape recorder and sit back. Well, I did have a few mildly awkward questions to ask about the book he was about to publish — but he was a brilliant man; he would, surely, like some real debate, some talk about what he did rather than what his body had become. Good story, nice little day trip, I thought. I could not have been more wrong. My meeting with Stephen Hawking and, separately, a few days later, with his then wife, Jane, changed my life almost as much as that book — A Brief History of Time — was about to change his. Nothing went to plan. Far from willingly engaging with debate, Hawking arrogantly brushed aside my trickier questions. He had, for example, forecast that there was a 50-50 chance that by the end of the
century physicists would have a “theory of everything” that would account for the entire universe. I found this ridiculous on many levels — I was right, the theory seems more remote than ever today — but he would not really discuss it. Much more shocking than that, Jane started fiercely criticising her husband before I could even turn on my recorder. She was religious and he was not. In fact, he was aggressively anti-religious, and his anger with her faith was becoming intolerable. He would not be in the same room as her devout friends. “There’s one aspect of his thought that I find increasingly upsetting and difficult to live with. It’s the feeling that, because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be room in the mind of people who are working out these things for other sources of inspiration. You can’t actually get an answer out of Stephen regarding philosophy beyond the realms of science.” Then she added: “He’s delving into realms that really do matter to thinking people and in a way that can have a very disturbing effect on them . . . and he’s not competent.” I wrote my article for The Sunday Times, telling the great mind/shattered body story and toning down my own doubts and the more shocking aspects of the way Jane had trashed her husband to a stranger. I did not want to dilute the big theme and I certainly did not want to harm their marriage just because she was in a bad mood when I met her. I need not have bothered.
Soon after his book came out and at once became a global bestseller, Hawking left Jane to live with his carer, Elaine Mason. The obvious and inspiring Hawking story had become less edifying, routine tabloid fare — the egghead and the nurse, something like that. In a way, however, it made sense. Before the book, Hawking had been an intellectual celebrity — a “cereb” as someone called it — but, after its publication, he was up there with footballers and pop stars, and adultery and marriage break-ups are just the way those guys say hello.
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Hawking is still up there. He has appeared on The Simpsons and at the Paralympics opening ceremony. Now there is even a big movie — The Theory of Everything — based on the romance of Jane and Stephen, conducted in the course of his descent into total physical dependence. Hawking has become the primary contemporary emblem of the word “genius”. Such an emblem needs a physical tag (like Einstein’s hair); Hawking’s happens to be his wheelchair and his computer voice, which he has, with sound marketing sense, declined to have modernised into something more human. Jane’s book, on which the film is based, is a startling document. It finally made clear to me what was going on behind the anger and distress I saw. It was not just Hawking she resented, it was his entire family. “Oh, Jane,” a friend had warned her, “you are marrying into a mad, mad family.” Mad and, in her account, bad. Her descriptions of his relatives — especially his sister Philippa and mother Isobel — evoke characters of pantomime awfulness. They are a comic cast of vulgar, entitled, pompous, soi-disant intellectuals — “aloof, convinced of their own intellectual superiority over the rest of the human race”. They can be sensationally callous.
“You see, we have never really liked you,” Isobel told Jane immediately after the birth of her third child, “you do not fit into our family.” And Philippa once advised her to leave Hawking, with the implication that it was what the family would prefer. Perhaps most hurtful of all — and, to me, most significant — was the family’s contempt for religion. “I found,” Jane wrote, “their tendency to sneer at religious matters unpleasant.” Hawking’s loathing of religion had been apparent in what she had said to me in that interview. And it was active loathing, not the quiet tolerance of intelligent atheists. The Hawkings had to make clear their feelings; it was how they shored up their own identity. This, in fact, made me slightly more sympathetic to Hawking’s abruptness and intolerance. It was just the way he had been brought up. Furthermore, his impatience and determination to eliminate irrelevancies from his life in the face of an unimaginably severe illness would have intensified these tendencies. Of course, this is Jane’s account of the family, and it may be overstated. I have one piece of evidence that it may contain some truth. In the years after my interview, I became obsessed with the idea —
implicit in what Hawking had said and wrote — that science somehow invalidated all other forms of wisdom. I criticised this nonsense in a book, Understanding the Present, and elsewhere. In the midst of the fuss this caused, Isobel Hawking wrote to me. The gist of the letter was, “How dare you criticise my son? Who do you think you are?” She plainly did not think I should be allowed to treat him as a full public figure, engaged in debate. He was, apparently, too special for that. Pantomime Isobel seemed to be real enough. Later, Hawking himself joined in by calling me “a failed intellectual”, a badge I still wear with pride. All of this because I had raised a few obvious questions about, among other things, a theory that has, in the event, turned out to be a fantasy.
But here we are and the whole maelstrom of familial rage and resentment has fallen into a dead calm since Hawking’s divorce from his former nurse and second wife, Elaine. As a “Last Word — August 2014” in the latest edition of her book, Jane writes: “Stephen, the world’s most famous scientist, remains at the centre of the family as well as at the centre of physics. In fact we are all just about to go on holiday together!” They appeared together at the premiere of The Theory of Everything last week. “It’s weird,” said Jane, “but wonderful.” “Weird” is one hell of an understatement. The story has turned, over the decades, into an astonishing tale that merges the personal and scientific into an epic saga that has yet to be properly told. A Brief History of Time utterly changed the context of Hawking’s science and, for a time, of science in general. That book and his physical condition made Hawking a celebrity, everybody’s idea of genius. He would, otherwise, simply have been one of a quite large group of leading world physicists. In fact, it now looks as though that generation’s approach to theoretical physics may have been a dead end. For scientists, the book was a challenge. It sold millions and made its author rich beyond the dreams of the most ambitious academic. A wave of
Perhaps most hurtful of all— and, to me, most significant— was the family’s contempt for religion
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popular science followed, often showing signs of competing to be the weirdest and wildest, as book advances ballooned. Increasingly, science in the public realm strayed far beyond its own competences, latterly deciding its role was to tell people that God did not exist. It was as if a straight line had been drawn from the Hawking family’s haughty hostility to religion to the militant atheism of Richard Dawkins. This is a bad place for science
to be, but it will recover. At least the marital war, the first skirmishes of which I had experienced in 1988, seems to be over. The story has been smoothed into Oscar-ready romance and the theory of everything has been left to the fantasies and superstitions of later generations. Jane glows, Stephen rolls on.
Hate burned in a marriage black hole The scientist’s first wife Jane Hawking could only watch as a nurse tantalised him and usurped her. She reveals how the tensions erupted during a poisonous family holiday
Jane Hawking Published: 14 December 2014 The Sunday Times
The Moulin, our newly renovated house near Boulogne, blinked sleepily in the evening sun as I drove up the track with Tim, my 10-year-old younger son. The inner courtyard was quiet and still, enveloping us like a soft blanket. Inside we ran from room to room, renewing our acquaintance with every old beam and discovering the work that had been done. To our astonishment, the dusty black barn had undergone a Cinderella-like transformation and was ready to accommodate Stephen’s
entourage of nurses. There were still walls to be painted and floors to be covered, but the essential work was completed. The Moulin was ready to receive the whole crowd of our visitors in that summer of 1989, among them Jonathan Hellyer Jones, a musician who had been a comforting presence in my life — and my children’s — for more than a decade. I had also in my optimism invited one of Stephen’s nurses, Elaine Mason, and her family, hoping that the experience of living with us in the same house but in more relaxed circumstances than in our Cambridge home would encourage a greater respect for the self-discipline that was basic to our routine in caring for Stephen.
In public and at home she had been busily usurping my place at every opportunity,
sometimes aping me, sometimes undermining me, always flaunting her influence over Stephen. She had so successfully ingratiated herself that all remonstrance was useless: any comments would be reported back to Stephen, and I would be castigated for my interference. While I had no intention of interfering in any fond attachment that might have developed between Elaine and Stephen, I thought that, as a professional nurse, she might be persuaded to see that there was no room for troublemakers. Naively I trusted too that if she realised that Jonathan and I did not, as a matter of course, sleep together in the same room, she would learn to respect the modus vivendi
that enabled us to go on caring for Stephen and the children indefinitely, come what may. Stephen and his motley crew flew in to Le Touquet in the middle of August. A perceptible tension reigned among the new arrivals. My delight at seeing Stephen met
with a cool response. All efforts to interest him in the glorious views from the house
Stephen and Jane Hawking in Cambridge in about 1990
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encountered the same bored, disdainful expression. Day after day, the truth forced itself remorselessly on me that his smiles and his interest were reserved for Elaine, and I had no doubt that he was being encouraged to despise me because I was flawed and did not conform to the image of perfection with which he was constantly being tantalised. He was being persuaded I was no longer of any use to him, that I was good for nothing. Elaine was in a position of strength: her responsibilities were minimal and she could indulge Stephen by doing anything he asked; she could wheedle and coax, and her specialised training enabled her to attend to his every whim. Since his work and his physical condition were his two principal preoccupations, my role was logically much diminished, and hers was ostensibly greatly enhanced. The familial and intellectual bonds which I had valued and through which we maintained a semblance of normality had apparently become insignificant. Probably with her he had found someone tougher than me with whom he could again somehow have a physical relationship, whatever the other dimensions of their affair. I could not deny him this, and was prepared to accept it in our scheme of things — in the same way that he had generously accepted my relationship with Jonathan — provided that it
was discreet and posed no threat to our family, to our children, to our home or to the running of the nursing rota achieved at such wearisome cost. It was also essential that it must not negate my relationship with Stephen, because I was convinced that without me he would be like a lost child, an unruly, assertive child but a helpless and naive one as well. My fate had been bound up with his so closely and for so long that I could never be indifferent to him, however difficult his peculiar set of circumstances — those of a
disabled genius — had made him. Care for his wellbeing had become second nature to me. Whether it was the slightest sign of distress, discomfort or disapproval that his mobile features betrayed, I could not ignore him. The truth was that I still loved him with a deeply caring compassion. In that emaciated body, despite the power of the mind, his suffering was all too painfully apparent, and it was through that suffering that my feelings for him were constantly being aroused. These feelings were never intended to be patronising;
indeed often they could lead me onto an emotional tightrope, where despair and frustration at his stubbornness and unreasonable demands had always to be reconciled with deference for his dignity and respect for his rights as an extremely incapacitated person. Our marriage, and the large and complex structure that it had become, was the definition of my adult life, summing up my most important achievements: Stephen’s continued survival, the children, the family and the home. It was the long
history of our joint battles against his illness and the story of his success against all the odds. I had dedicated most of myself to it — even if I had accepted help to allow me to persevere without becoming suicidal. True, I sometimes longed for more freedom of movement and resented the
limitations it imposed, but I had never thought of running away from it except — when driven to utter despair — by drowning myself. It was unbelievable that all the marriage represented might now be swept away in a flush of passion. The situation might have resolved itself peaceably had the personalities involved been different, had they been more considerate, less determined, less self-centred, less bent on the fulfilment of their own desires to the exclusion of all else. Perhaps, if I had been stronger and less
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confused, I could have handled the situation differently and with more assurance. As it was, the holiday was a disaster. Stephen became increasingly hostile to both the family and to Pam, the other nurse. When eventually I took it upon myself to point out to Stephen that his and Elaine’s behaviour risked losing Pam from the rota, I inadvertently set fire to the conflagration that would consume us all. It engulfed the old house that day and the following night. Flames of vituperation, hatred, desire for revenge leapt at me from all sides, scorching me to the quick with accusations — the unfaithful wife, the uncaring partner, selfish, work-shy and frivolous. I had had things my own way for too long, they said. I should “put Stephen first”. I faced the attacks alone. I would not demean Jonathan by bringing him into this uncivilised fray, but nor could I douse the flames. It was hopeless to try to point out that, throughout all the alienating distractions of
physics and the grinding, ceaseless demands of illness, I had honestly tried to be a good wife to Stephen; I had honestly tried to do my best, however distorted my own life had become. That Jonathan’s love and help had preserved us and saved me from ultimate despair would never be countenanced as a valid defence. My best was not good enough, and now I was being cast aside in favour of someone who beguiled the sick man with the flimsy straws of extravagant promises and unrealistic expectations. It was the beginning of the death of our marriage. Alone in my room after the first wave of attack had finally subsided, helplessness reduced me to hot, angry tears. My spirit rebelled at the shallowness of so many of the people who had recently come into our lives. They had never come face to face with successions of multiple crises. They had never had to confront the overwhelming trauma of living in the face of death, day in, day out, for more than a
St John’s Parish seeks to be environmentally aware and responsible in our use of resources.
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HOW TO CONTACT US
Where to find us: Cnr Avon Road and Oaks Avenue, Dee Why 2099 Parish Priest: Fr Steven Salmon SSC 0417 359 792 (mob)
Website: www.stjohnsdeewhy.org.au Parish Council Members:
Heather Andrews Valda Ashover Neridah Byrne Don Fisher Pam Fisher Lynette Johnson Dudley Johnson Roz Peterson Anne Seddon Don Stephens Katherine Ward
“The Church Messenger” February 1955
THE NEW CHURCH
________ The proposed plan with which many of us are familiar has been returned to the architects at their request for modifications. When this is returned, other plans will be considered and the earliest possible decision made so that work may commence. A special service will be held launching the appeal and by then a definite date for the laying of the foundation stone should have been arrived at. Meantime, let us work, give, think, pray for its commencement.
