Furnass Landscaping and Other Oddities

Really? This is right up there with the name of the person who runs Food for the Poor: Robin Mafood...or Bill Geyser the plumber, or Father B. Maturin who wrote Self Knowledge and Self Discipline: How to Know and Govern Yourself. No lie. But Fern-ass Landscaping? I saw this on a truck, barreling past me the other way as I came swinging out of one of the infernal round-a-bouts. I tried for awhile to see what it might sound like in Australian- "FUHRN-ahss" or "Fuhrn-AhSS" but I couldn't excuse it based on accent. Then I felt kind of sorry for them...it is like having a big ink stain on the back of your pants for an interview. Or it makes them unforgettable. Fine line at the best of times. Disturbing visuals, too.

I think someone doesn't know their French...or English. This store is pathetically trying to be cool, I am sure, or they really don't know any other languages and are hoping no one else does, either.

I don't think "nab" is a good name for a bank. It's our bank. Uh oh.

I can't.

And finally: Here I am in Bolivia in the 80s testing a weeping statue in a CAT scan:

No. That's not me. Or is it? Was I there? Help. 

A Sword of Joy, A Sword of Sorrow

How can I do justice to this week? How can it come together in any coherency?

On Tuesday, we learned that our friends and colleague in Wyoming had lost two of their three little daughters in a car accident on the icy road between Lander and Riverton; on Saturday we celebrated the wedding of my cousin's daughter.

Tuesday I spent in shock and grief. My thought was that there is no middle ground when something like this happens--either there is deep meaning, an eternal meaning, or the world would be better off bombed. The death of a child, a child of parents who were and are deeply generous, loving, faithful friends, followers of the Lord, seems inexplicable...and thus the shock. Your world is rocked, shaken to pieces, if you allow yourself to think about it, and you must look at another way to pick up the pieces because there is nothing in you that can do it yourself. You know that; you feel your helplessness in the face of this sorrow.

What hurts one member of the Body of Christ hurts all the members...if we are family, if we love each other with the supernatural, eternal love of God, then we are all connected in deeper ways than we understand and can grasp.

It was the same with the wedding: In seeing the joy of this young couple as they stepped out in hope, we shared more deeply than just like watching a movie; we became, by witnessing it, by supporting them, part of their life, their success or failure in living up to the impossible. When another couple has been shattered by death of the new life they helped bring to the family of God, we become part of their journey back towards healing.

I have felt this supernatural yoking so many times, especially when one night my beloved friends came over to rescue me from my despair, my weakness unwinding me after months of sickness. They came and they sat on my bed (I looked like hell) and they had no solutions--but they were the solution. They exhorted me to fortitude, to courage, to understand the deep anxiety that was exacerbating the physical problems. They became family then; they sat in the Red Tent with me (a place where women in ancient times would meet to rest, so to speak) for hours and cried with me and smacked me with charity in turn, as I needed it. They are now an integral part of my journey, even if I never see them in this life again. Never seeing them again in this life doesn't matter, really, if one is looking from eternity. The bond has been made because it was made in God's charity.

So I sat in the Pittwater Uniting Church (why not "united"? Are they perpetually in the process of getting together?) and watched Hannah come down the aisle with her father, and she looked like an angel, like St. Elizabeth the princess who loved the poor. I saw the parents give a 'blessing of release' on their adult children, a blessing to become the root of a new tree. I could see the deep love of these parents who had to, in another way, say goodbye to their children.

I felt conflicted, and sad, as I grieved with my friends, and yet rejoiced to see the courage of this couple to take on a life which always, in this world, carries the possibility, the likelihood, of great pain. But these two pledged to put God first before all others, before each other, so I have great hope of the strength of their marriage, for, as Fulton Sheen spoke of, a marriage made as a strand of three--husband, wife, God--is a strong rope that can weather much. And if one strand is the living God who does not, can not, break vows?

I know too much, too, about my extended family, to have complete and unadulterated joy. I know enough about myself to have this. I know too much now about human nature. There is hypocrisy and suffering and sin even in a place filled with flowers and ceremony and pure and good promises. We live always under threat of rain. 

I thought, though, as I sat later at the Collaroy Retreat Center overlooking the ocean, that suffering does indeed pull our life down around us--our own sin, the sin of others, injustice, tragedy. We tend to build fortresses around ourselves, fortresses that contain a universe of meaning that we can deal with, for some of us, that excuse our failings. I have been there, in a fortress of my own making that became a real prison. It seemed the easier route, to rationalize things, to say it was all for love or this or that, but it became a prison and a place of fear. I was afraid to lose the chimera because I had idols.

So sometimes the walls come crashing down and it feels like destruction; but it is also a chance to look at things anew, to search for reality, for Truth.

Sometimes, the walls come down "from no fault of his own or his parents" but because God has some greater good in mind, because He believes in someone so much that He grants them a special road of suffering, the precursor to a greater crown, the chance to walk the road He walked, the road His mother walked out to Golgotha. Sometimes the sword pierces the heart of the best of us, just like it did the Theotokos, the Mother of God. It pierced her because part of her 'fiat' was to be a part of the redemption of the world, that suffering that saves the world, what St. Paul calls "making up what is lacking in the suffering of Christ."

But even with my 45 years (which counts for a little now), I tread where angels fear.

I just know now that those, myself included, who break promises or run from suffering, or think that happiness consists of feeling good or being fulfilled in this life, are missing the greater good; they have traded gold for candy rocks. Happiness is being good; freedom is being free to orient towards and live the Good, the Truth. Happiness, the deep and solemn joy that C.S. Lewis tried to put words around comes through suffering--and joy--and the courage to bring fragile relationships and children and life to the foot of the Cross, in hope of eternity, a new heaven and earth, where "He will wipe every tear from their eyes and there will be no more death' or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away."

St.Patrick's Day in Kellyville at The Mean Fiddler Pub....or Tradies and Suits in Costume

Above: Major Patrick Hyacinth Killikelly (Sr.), Army Surgeon

Above: Patrick Hyacinth Killikelly (Jr.), Irish tenor

We decided to go out for St. Paddie's. Thaddeus, due to the exorbitant cost of beer here in Australia, has been deprived and was almost sweating for a Guinness. The sweating must be because Thaddeus is part Irish, the grandson of an Irish tenor, Patrick Killikelly, who, his daughter tells me, was a mean S.O.B. with a voice like an angel. I don't know about the S.O.B. part first-hand, but I've heard a recording of him...and it was like listening to an angel, clear and powerful and adept. His father, in turn, was, I hear, a strict and foreboding man (to his youngest granddaughter) who was a surgeon in the American army, given a medal and the right to be buried in Arlington because he helped develop and personally test the malaria vaccine, at personal risk. So I hear...but this is from Irish people. And you know, the Blarney Stone and all that. But pictures of both men, the tenor and the surgeon, show a certain intensity and steely passion that might very well produce a tenor and a hero.

So the Irish came out in Thaddeus yesterday; he wasn't being a mean S.O.B. or a rigid army man; he was concerned about finding his green shirt and getting out to The Mean Fiddler in Kellyville. Can't get any closer than that to Ireland, when one is at the bottom of the world. The Mean Fiddler is a very cool place, a sprawling pub and lounge and stage and family friendly communal gathering hub. It is a pub of the old school with great food but with ten times the sitting space of the old Irish variety. They don't have to squeeze together in small stone buildings because it just doesn't get that cold here. So it was cool Irish sprawl, or what the Irish might do without the wind from the Irish Sea.

Some stats have declared that nearly a third of Australians can claim some kind of Irish ancestry. The early Irish were both convicts and free settlers; the interesting thing about the Irish coming to Australia is that perhaps the majority of them were not petty thieves or not-so-petty murderers, but rather political problems.

The Irish Problem. What's their problem? Are they a Problem, or do they simply, and deeply, love their independence? Currently I am reading Bede the Venerable's History of the English People and he mentions the Irish and Scots as fighting with the English--all the way back to the dawn of history, or recorded/remembered history in the British Isles. The interesting thing is that Bede, himself a Briton, mentions over and over the English cowardice in the face of the marauding Irish and Scots. The English finally, according to Bede, begged the Romans to help--and these intrepid soldiers built a wall across the north of England...eight feet thick and twelve high. The British seem to have gone the other extreme of courage and even seem to want to maintain a sort of Hadrian's Wall...but I'm out of my depth there. I just remember an oddity in South Africa, when we met anti-apartheid activists in Jo-burg...they had a sister-affiliation with Northern Ireland...they seemed to see a certain similarity to their own situation in that of the Irish. I have often wondered what the truth is, as we do so often when we foray into the messy and oft-spun world of history.

It seems, then, that the taking of prisoners and cultural clashes between the Irish and English begins from of old, from before Christianity. It may be, like in the Balkans, a fight for which the source is still raw, but lost to memory. Rawness without reason. Or, it could be that religion fired the old conflicts into action again. Or, a completely new conflict.

At any rate, it seems clear that the Irish have always had fire in their hearts; they have been deeply political, even in Australia--the Castle Hill Rebellion in the late 1800s was an Irish rebellion. Now, it seems, the Irish in Australia have become--Australians; more content with status quo, less religious. The Irish here are as firmly in the Suit Class as they are in the Tradie Class.

 In Australia there is a very sharp distinction between "Suits" and "Tradies"--Suits are, well, people who wear suits to work, the managing class, the ruling class; they correspond to the American "White Collars." "Tradies" are "Blue Collars" or those who work in a trade rather than a profession. Liam, an Irish-Catholic aquaintance of mine says, "The Tradies don't trust the Suits...they see Suits as manipulating them or taking advantage of them because of their ability to use language to get things, or because they have control of the money game."

St. Patrick himself was both a Suit and a Tradie...he was born to upper-class Roman parents on the coast of Europe, and was educated and privileged. God suffered him to be kidnapped by Irish pirates and he worked for many years as a shepherd, a slave of the powerful pagan class in Ireland. In the sweat and dirt of the mountains and fields, he met God, who set a fire in the young man's heart that would, eventually, burn paganism out of Ireland. He escaped home and then, incredibly, returned to the place of his suffering to lay his life down for the Irish. In his suffering, through the power of God, he had come to love them with a supernatural love.

 Or he was sweating for a Guinness. No, that's not it.

Last night, celebrating the great saint at The Mean Fiddler, we saw Tradies in their trademark neon workshirts, and families who sounded Irish, and Suits with Ireland Rugby shirts, all listening to an Aussie band who played--American classic rock hits. There were also some inexplicable costumes. Hopefully they were costumes. Here's a little photo/vid taste....

First, Aussie take on speaking to an Irishman:

Boy, the food was excellent--lamb stew, meat pies ( a big deal in Australia, generally), fish and chips in newspaper, and bread pudding.

Why is Arnold Schwarzenegger everywhere? Why do I know how to spell his name?

Tradies:

Ah, Guinness...once, the CEOs of Coors, Michelob and Guinness went to a bar together. Of course Mr. Coors ordered a Coors, and Mr. Michelob a Michelob; but Mr. Guinness ordered a Coke. When the others looked at him funny, he said, "Well, if you lads are ordering soda pop, I thought I should join you."

Well, as Thaddeus was enjoying his real beer, he was busy giving us a philosophical conundrum...that's when you know he's happy...beer and conundrums.

This Thaddeus is now always hungry:

Bread pudding with a whiskey-butter sauce and cream:

No comment (which is a comment):

Sign on top says "Fr. Michael"; sign below says "Confessional." Pretty sad when the confessional becomes Marie-Callendar type kitsch. Who can fit in there anyway? Gumby?

Looks like we need St. Patrick back.

Possibly Over-reading Signs

I'm fascinated by traffic signs and funeral homes here; I'm convinced that the differences in signs are themselves signs of cultural differences. I'm probably over-reading and coming up with crazy interpretations, but it's fun, anyway.

I noticed right away that Australian funeral businesses are just that: businesses. They aren't 'parlors' tucked away discreetly in some non-descript brick building on Second St, or 'Valhalla'--that is, mansions with sweeping lawns, a veritable virtual heaven.

You'll find them as small stores in a strip mall:  Just another business beside sewing shops and clothing stores, and just two doors down from Sultan's Persian Grill. This just struck me as odd--I wonder if we Americans need to either hide death, or romanticize it. Well, there is one Australian funeral business that does just that, even though it is a chain store company showing up in strip malls....I saw this sign (below) as a huge billboard along the M 2:

Okay, that's weird. And even more weird 20 metres wide as you're barreling down the motorway at 110 km in a small metal box. It's like she's waiting for you to crash and hopes you'll stop in for a consult. She's probably right though; I bet women are better with families around funerals. Just not sure why she has a bush hat on. She'll foray in where no one dares to go and leave things clean and smelling like a rose? Gross.

I thought this one was pretty hilarious; 'smash' would translate to 'auto-body'--once again, it seems that we have a difference--the Australians are just willing to call it like it is--a smashed car--and Americans seem to want to somehow not say it, or not to deal with the fact that we all die or our cars get occasionally smashed...maybe both at the same time. Someone should put a White Lady next to a smash shop.

The next one: My first thought was, a thought that lasted about two weeks, "WTH does that mean?" Now I know but I'll leave you with the pleasure of mystery.

My favorites are the traffic signs. Here's a few with some probably messed-up interpretations based on my shallow knowledge of Australians. Fun, hey?

I used to get lost--I mean really lost--in the labyrinthian Australian shopping centre car parks. I could not find the Exit, mainly because "Way Out" is used interchangeably with "Exit." So sometimes you can Exit and sometimes you gotta go way out. "Way Out" is more gentle--"exit" comes from the Greek word "exo"-- "out" basically, "out" both as a place (outside) or also as in "get out." "Way Out" doesn't have any connotation of rude commands to dogs in the house; it is just a fact, like "Toilet." Just there to clue you in.

Damn four-wheel swiveling trolleys. I found that 'trolley' comes from the Old French "troller" which means "to wander in a carefree way." Well, the things do certainly wander, but do not leave me feeling carefree, especially after I've struggled with it, actually twirling around to get it around a corner, no longer caring if the milk crushes the bread. I wonder if they would have to change the word for it if they advisedly locked the back wheels. Up America!!! But I like the more English full-sentence requests, rather than the "Shopping Cart Return." Now why am I okay with "Way Out" and not "Shopping Cart Return"? They are the same simple indication of a place, no command involved. No idea. I just like more humane, conversational language while I'm trying to remain human in traffic.

Here's just a cute one, my sister's favorite:

Yes, those are little Calves with cute old-fashioned shoes. That's all you need to know--no need for a full-figure with a round head and arms and everything. Just Calves Walking. That's the part you need to know, right? That the Calves are Walking. Simple. Seems also less de-humanizing than the stick figures somehow. I somehow care more about hitting those cute calves than the bobble-head stick figures. There are some stick figures though, and one has an old husband and wife. The sign says, "Aged." When I see that, I just say, "Okay, thanks for the concept."

I just like this one and here's what the Oxford says about the origin of the word "queue":

"...late 16th century (as a heraldic term denoting the tail of an animal): from French, based on Latin cauda 'tail'."

So Americans are more mathematical (line)--what is a line, anyway? Does it exist in reality? Do points exist? Damn, if you're in a line, do you really exist? Aussies are thinking rather about being whipped around on the tail of an animal, or that queuing necessarily means you are at the tail of the beast, you are the last part and must simply accept it. You are not in the middle of the heraldic sheild, on the vert rampant but towards the edge, at the end of the butt of a beast holding up the central sheild of meaning. Accept it. Australians are generally more willing to queue in traffic, I would say. In fact, you queue in the correct lane way before you have to turn left or right. They don't seem to like the Toyota Corolla that wavers and whips around between lanes. I've got a new sign now for the honkers though, after I made myself promise myself that I'd stop using the bird. It is a very expressive wave, a little like the Queen on procession, but a lot more violent.

Okay, and this is the best one, from an American point of view. This one stopped me in my tracks and gave me all kinds of weird visuals:

And finally, people can be signs, too. We came across these young men, pictured below; they were on parade at one of the city hall-type buildings, a sign that the Governor-General of Australia was about to arrive. The Governor-General is the British Representative of the Queen in Australia. The current office-holder is an Australian woman. It was interesting to see the pomp and cirmcumstance; what does it mean to dress up all alike with bagpipes and weapons, all in a row, for an important personage? Is it a willingness to submit to review or a sign that this person has the authority to judge? Do Australians care that they have a Governor? I remember the empty, un-lived in Governor's House in Annapolis--well, it wasn't un-used. We did swing-dancing there, had classes, and listened to concerts there...it had become a symbol of the commonality, or community of people, a place of fun and learning, rather than the symbol of authority from a paternal nation. Here, the Governor does have a House and lives there, still a symbol of a parent country. This, I think, is one of the greatest differences between Australians and Americans, we who have so much else in common--from wide spaces, new world existence, optimism, to a bit of a butchered lower-class English accent handed down...it is their willingness to stay loyal to more ancient traditions, a monarchy that sets them apart in one way.

Fellowship, Feasting, and Stretching the Heart

My parents are here, and so my nuclear family is once together; this doesn't happen very often anymore, with one of us in Manhatten, one in Sydney, and two on a small island off the coast of Washington.

For the first time in many years, too, we have had some time alone as a nuclear family: the kids are in school, Thaddeus at the office, and so the Wryes have been exploring and enjoying each other...it reminds me of the four of us in the Opel traveling across Europe to the UK for a wedding, or to Neos Marmaras for our summer hols.

We talk about things now, as all adults; for the first time in many, many years, since 1996, really, we can really talk, because the kids are in school. The kids are wonderful of course, but it is nice to just be with those who share the most memories with you. We can talk freely about our adventures but now, with hindsight, and age, there is a reckoning with regrets. My parents will now say that "We should have stayed in Greece" and I say, "But we couldn't." There are painful events there that makes clear God's providence even when you can't see it at the time. My sister and I and my parents. We grieve over Afghanistan and our memories of sweet tea, blue skies and Miralee. I nearly cry each time I think of him--he was probably just a few years older than I am now, then, and he looked about seventy. He was a country man who took care of us..and he really took care of us; more than that, he loved us. He watched me like a shepherd watching over the littlest lamb and took me to school, through the dusty streets of Kabul, me sitting on the handlebars of his ancient bike, his arms around me. He spoke Farsi to me; I only have a memory of speaking to him and hearing him, but I have no memory of the Farsi, except "Imjabeeb, Tamim." He told me when we left, "You come back to see me" and I said, "I will, Miralee." I never did, because Afghanistan was never safe again, and Miralee is most likely dead now. I can cry about Miralee with my nuclear family, because they loved him too. I remember telling Miralee about Christ, wanting him to know about a God who loved him; I look back on that and wonder what he thought of a five-year-old instructing him about God's love, he a man who loved simply and without guile.

Though we have so much struggle and adventure common, we've all traveled such different roads: I am a Roman Catholic, my parents are Evangelicals, and my sister has a deep faith but not attached to any certain church. We see politics so differently; there are deep crevasses of belief and understanding that we have had to choose to cross--or not.

I believe love always chooses to cross, as I have watched both my parents do, and my sister...forgiveness, tolerance of the good kind, love; the difficulty for all of us has been how to do this without compromising one's understanding of the truth. Perhaps it is the Third Culture existence we four have lived for so many years, that stretching of the mind and heart that allows us to cross, to risk our comfort zones, and to deepen our sense of the truth by trying to understand each other. This is what I wanted my children to gain by living in another country: this stretching towards the Other, not a receding in fear.

We can certainly stretch here: We are surrounded, in Parramatta (city just west of Sydney proper) by Asian people, Indian, Arabic...at the Parramatta cathedral the other day, five people were lined up for communion: a black man, Indian woman, Arabic man, white man, and the person giving out communion was Asian. In our neighborhood, a South African 'colored' couple live across from us (Beryl, who has been in Australia for thirty years: "We had our reasons for leaving" was all she would say); an Indian family who have a lovely grandmother who waits for her grown children to come in the driveway; Jeff, an Australian draftsman who is divorced; Tracy's family, who are in and out; and Abe, who says "I am not religious but there is some special Presence in your chapel over there at the college" and "I sometimes can see a kind of aura around people who are very good." I desperately wanted to ask, "Do you see one around me?" but didn't dare--the truth might hurt.

Food has been multi-cultural, too: My sister took us all out to an Indian restaurant; we ate lovely dishes of chicken and lamb and laughed at the Bollywood movie on in the corner. We talked about the New Delhi trip in 1968; I began my existence there, and my sister almost ended hers there by nearly falling off a balcony. I thought of my parents, young and clueless and in southeast Asia. How did we all survive? My sister said later, "Well, I look back on all that--and I think 'I did survive. I survived."

Outside the Passage to India here in Blacktown, there were Sikhs in shorts--great name for a band: Sikhs in Shorts.

I know there is great good in homogeneity; a culture has its history and deep connections, like siblings in a family. In Lander, we experienced a sense of American rooted-ness and we knew Lander before the new Safeway and before Old Town Coffee was in existence; we saw six classes of students come through the WCC doors. We had deep loves of places and friends and people knew us; there was "oh what year was the choir singing that" and a love-hate relationship with McDonald's in the sunset, marring the mountain view, and I always thought of Clarissa bemoaning the fact that on Resurrection Day she didn't want to come out of her grave on Boot Hill above Holy Rosary and see---McDonald's.

Now McDonald's is "Macca's" and Hungry Jack's is our love-hate relationship with fast food...Woolworth's has become 'the store' and I've got my little labyrinth ways up to school. I always break the rules at a certain roundabout...I'm still an American who needs to bust through the rules, especially if they don't make any sense. That's why we have a military base in the middle of the Australian outback. No, Thaddeus has not said a word. But I am wondering if this is good? Or not? I'm slowly taking a survey here on that one. I guess a 747 flies in and out of there every day. Weirdness.

But anyway, do you leave all those roots? Is it Right? I am an adventurer at heart, like my Dad, but as I age, I see the real value of roots. I feel the heartbreak of not seeing beloved friends now. And I wonder, "Is it right to do that to them, too?" It isn't just my own heartbreak. I think that heaven must have both adventure and a deep, eternal, abiding, daily knowing of others. That doesn't really happen in this life; it is full of regrets and goodbyes. It is a race and friends are those who give us cups of water along the way, as we do for them, and we hope to see them in the Garden someday: "I will meet you there."

So we're both stretching and trying to feel at home. The name for our house surfaced: Peach Pit House. You'll have to come and you'll see why. The kids are starting to say "What marks did you get?" and "I've an assessment next week" and "Maths homework is due." They are learning that Australians do not want to say they are good at anything, or out of the ordinary, for fear of appearing to be putting themselves forward..."The Tall Poppy Syndrome" is what it is called...and you can see it a little even in traffic patterns. Australians will stay in their lane patiently even when there's a long line; the rare person will try and get round the line by sneaking in (usually me).

Again, though, I know my real roots lie in a land not accessible by transport of any kind. Adventure can bring that home in a new way. Living in another culture heightens a feeling that is always present, for all people: a sense of searching, longing, for home, the restless heart of St. Augustine.

We all did get down to Curl Curl, my new favorite beach, where my loving cousin took us all the other day. We went back on the weekend. There are points on each end, and Australians have particular places on this beach with which they identify: "North End" or "South Curl Curl." The water is myriad colors of green and blue, and there's a sea pool built into the rocks on the south end; it is filled by the changing tides, and the Curl Curl Swim Club was having races in the pool. There's also a nice little cafe, not too expensive (tea for $4 and flat whites (latte) for about 3 or 4). The walls are orange, tiled floors, beach towels made into pillows on the bench along the wall; colorful water glasses and people in their suits and sandy feet relaxing out of the sun. The lifeguard station is just next door and the lifeguards were driving round in a kind of 'ute' (truck) gathering signs and moving them.

I also got back down to Sydney a couple times--ML and I had tea at the Queen Victoria Building, in the High Tea Room; each tea set was a different version of Royal Albert china and we sat in plush chairs and talked. I also met Delaine from Lander at the Circular Quay and had lunch...lovely and strange to be with someone from home.

We're going to try and do a Wrye Tea before ML leaves: we've done tea together at The Ritz in London, The Plaza in New York, The Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, some kind of sort of tea in Prague. "What was that?" Some of us have done Fortnam and Mason in London, The Metropol in Moscow, Hotel Astoria in St. Petersburg...so we're excited about the Sydney one.

And there's a family wedding coming up: Hannah Thornton is marrying Jakin Mai in two weeks. We're all to go out for the weekend to a retreat center. I was thinking that it was strange that in two weeks, the majority of my grandparents' descendants will be in Australia. What do you think of that, Grandma?

"Who cares? I'd rather you were all Home in heaven."

"Oh. Just don't make me eat that turkey giblet gravy, or I won't come."

"Oh, for the Love of Pete's Sake, Holy Cow, Fiddlesticks."

Weddings, feasts, and fellowship with families are sometimes like a taste of something beyond earthly existence; so is the beauty one sees at Curl Curl: the sky meeting the water is the place where eternity begins, like a door in the world, but we can't get there except through struggle, through the race, through being stretched beyond our limits. My grandmother had a cheap poster, cheap but framed in a gilded frame, cheap but magical. Pictured was a banquet table, an impossibly long table in a sunset, set with beautiful china and candlelabras, in a dimming light wherein it is just time to light the candles. I used to stare at that picture for a long time, wondering. I finally realized at about six, on one of our Stateside visits, that it was a place waiting for me, waiting for all of us, a feast for the King. I wondered if I would be dressed right. I want to sit next to my grandmothers and have us all be young women. I want to ask Miralee for forgiveness that I made a promise I did not keep, and to tell him how many times I have thought of him and been grateful for his gentle heart that made me feel at home in the mountains of Afghanistan; I want to spend time with Mrs. Fagerson and Rusty and Mary Dean and Clarissa and all those I've been inspired by and loved; I want to embrace those I've hurt, and who have hurt me, for the wounds to finally make sense, to be wounds like those of the saints, redeemed wounds that have made me love better.

The set table seemed to be waiting for laughter, and food, and wine, and light. It was all ready but for the guests.

A Sublimated Desire for Heaven

I am now at one of those points where I don't like Australia. The foreign-ness has lost the new-veneer and has become rather an irritant. I have days where I think, "And why did we come here?" or "I even miss Lucy and Momo." The candy wrapper is off and the candy turns out to be a date-bar--just another place, full of imperfect people, like we are imperfect.

Though life has become rather more grind now, I still don't have the sweet balm of friendship...until my sister hugged me at the Sydney airport. It is kind of like being with a second-self, being with a sibling. Even though we are profoundly different in some ways, we speak a more common language than is possible with anyone else, a language born of common childhoods. We know why we can't stand lakes, or why she likes blue and I like red--likes and dislikes that don't even need the boulders of words around them.

As she sits opposite on her i pad, exhibiting the same expressions and quiet demeanor, I read a thesis by a student--and friend--from Wyoming. The thesis is a profile of grief, the grief she is bearing as a result of her sister's sudden death last May.

I look at my sister, I look at my small griefs, and I drink in what Lorine is saying...it is a profound exposition of how love is both purified and deepened, and born, through grief. The idea that Mary the Mother of God was given the most profound griefs because of the most profound love a human could experience--between the Mother of God and God--is something to contemplate long-term; the idea that her ability to be the Mother of the Church, that the largeness of her heart was in part accomplished by the sharing in the suffering of her Son clears so much up for me, as a former Protestant; it is like looking upon a new and beautiful landscape, through the gift of a young woman who risked so much to put her grief on paper in a college thesis.

There are some things that make the grind and foreign-ness recede into proper perspective, yet I also think that having the experience of being displaced has its own lesson, its own beautiful landscape.

As a Third Culture Kid, I've never really felt at home anywhere, except perhaps for a brief few years on Anatolia College's campus. That was the world, those were the years, when I remember unassailed, cloudless happiness. The world was magical, Narnia was alive and well just above the clouds or behind the German House on the Boy's Side, and God was speaking through the quiet wind dancing with the pines in the forest. Thumper the basset hound was our quarry, and the world of clear water was a car ride away with Dad driving. Adult concerns were a far away rumble, and I knew every rock and path and tree as a friend.

I realized the other day that some part of me is still that nine-year-old, wondering why on earth I have to think about issues like justice, why every landscape, every place, every person (including myself) becomes sooner or later a deep burden, full of issues and problems and the grind. I feel deeply tired in the soul, a petty grief of grind--nit-picky issues in every area, health issues that have to be managed, bills managed, meals made...and the attempt to Keep Calm and Love Australia.

This week, I also taught the first part of St. Augustine's The City of God. As usual, the students themselves taught me so much, and as always, their youthful hope and certainty is like aloe vera on a burned soul like mine.

We talked about justice. St. Augustine is making the distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, and I realized that my soul is thirsting for that City of God, and that I sometimes feel I have either got too comfortable in the City of Man, or have been simply ground down by it, by trying to expect from it a justice that it cannot have.

Justice is difficult to define, because it is both universal and very particular--in fact, it is very difficult to universalize justice, because what it requires can change with a change of persons and situations. It is both a standard, an Idea, and an art, a Practice. St. Augustine says, "Justice is love serving God only, allowing one to rule well all other things."

The key word, we decided, is St. Augustine's inclusion of the word 'love' in the definition. In the City of Man, we most often see justice as a kind of contract delineating a person's obligations to another. This can become less about love than just protection of interests.

To me, the fundamental insight of St. Augustine is that justice is truly determined, in a universal way, by the choice of and orientation towards an end. In other words, what is your highest end? Is it the self, like it is for so many of us? Or is it, in a less selfless way, the orientation of Aeneas--towards the common good of a certain city-state, like the founding of Rome?

Aeneas' orientation towards Rome as the highest good becomes clear in his choices around justice. He can commit what we might call injustice to Dido, the woman he lives with and leaves, or to Turnus, the man from whom Aeneas takes a bride, because his highest end is the foundation of a particular city. His acts of justice are not universal, or based in true charity, because not everyone is for the good of Rome; when a person becomes an obstacle to that end, their claims to justice and mercy become disposable, and it becomes virtue to dispose of them.

If the end is the self, then projects or even apostolates or mission work can become warped--because they are all tending towards what the self wants them to be...and justice becomes a matter of everyone serving one's own ideal--in reality, everyone should start to serve the self, and a kind of small pseudo justice-in-practice takes over. But it feels like justice, because it does serve an end.

I thought more about St. Augustine's use of the phrase "love serving God only" and I realized that justice in the City of God is about orienting all the parts towards the whole, Love, towards a common good that reaches the good of all people because this common good is sourced in the Creator of All, who is also Love itself. It must be a selfless, kenotic (self-emptying) justice if it is to have true, clear sight, if it is to have anything to do with Agape. Only this kind of justice can truly satisfy us, can truly answer us. It is born, though, of the will to suffer, to empty oneself, to get oneself out of the way. To become part of a universal one must leave the selfish needs behind. Only then can one rule well.

I remember a leader I respect saying, "I realized that I had to have tremendous patience to lead well; that I had to suffer the needs of others, their weaknesses, and my own." This is a man heading towards true justice, in which the institution at hand can have an address in the City of God. Patience is love. We have the least patience when most enamoured of ourselves, of our own ideals, our own gifts. The signs of a just man are these: He does not speak about himself, but focuses on realizing the gifts of others, allowing them to, in some way, eclipse him; he is a facilitator, not a guru; he is patient with himself and others; he is not threatened or paranoid, because his end is Love, and not his own success. He is then sharing in the suffering--and the love--of Christ. He becomes Christ.

When a leader or any person is oriented towards God, it is love--it must be, to be true orientation, because God is Love. In this love, the Whole is aspired to, not secondary or lesser ends, and so justice then, and only then, becomes universalized and true. All else are copies, or attempts, or mere contracts.

Love gives clear sight, and the love of God gives wholistic sight, which can then be a true platform for ruling all else. Any other end only produces slavery, not justice.

I thought, too, as I spent another delightful week with St. Augustine, that Fr. Seiker was right when he told me that "You have a sublimated desire for heaven." I am searching for the City of God, but I have been searching for it like one searches for an ideal homeland in the physical world. A fruitless search.

At the time Fr. Seiker said this to me, I was yet again going through some homesickness for Greece, for the time of my life when I was childlike and I was happy, before all the "sh- hits the fan" as my friend Steve likes to say. Perhaps some of it is wanting Dad to drive and do the taxes; perhaps some of it is wanting just the freedom that you think an adventure like moving to another country will afford you.

But all these things fail eventually. Fr. Seiker said, "Your homesickness for Greece, for that time, is a sublimated desire for heaven." At the time, I wanted to say, "Shut up." I didn't say it, of course, but that was the reaction immediately from the tired soul I am.

Over the months, especially in actually moving, I see this more clearly as truth. I am looking for Home, for my proper end; only through this orientation will I find justice, and love--and be just myself.