ADDRESS GIVEN BY BISHOP GARRY WEATHERILL, WARDEN OF
CHNin the Community House Chapel on Holy Name
Day, 7.8.13.
Come, Holy Spirit, giver of life and love, grant us
for our hallowing thoughts that pass into prayer, prayer that passes into love
and love that passes into life with you forever.
In 1974 I was
one of 600 students who enrolled in Anthropology 1 at the University of Adelaide. The topic had never been offered at the university
before. It was the sort of thing that
every trendy young 1970’s person wanted to do: to understand about humanity and
to look at foreign cultures and to try and understand a bit more about
ourselves. And so with six hundred
others I crammed into a small lecture theatre – if you didn’t get there at
least twenty minutes early, you didn’t get a seat. We sat all over the steps, and stood at the
back, and listened to amazing lectures about the Trobrian Islanders and
witchcraft among the Azandi in Africa and reading chickens’ entrails in
Nigeria. It was marvellous! I loved it!
I went to every tutorial, and the Tutor was a man called Anthony. He was a New Zealander, and he insisted on
calling me Peter. For some reason he
thought that, in the class list, I was Peter White and Garry Weatherill was
another person. So he would write on my
tutorial papers, “Well done, Peter. An excellent effort.” - even though it said
Garry on the front. About half way
through the year I got a letter from the university saying that as I hadn’t
submitted any work or attended any tutorials, I was precluded from sitting the
exam! So I raced up and said to Anthony,
“I’m actually not Peter. I’m
Garry.” He said, “Oh, aren’t you Peter?”
I said, “No, I’m not.” So that was cleared up (but I didn’t do very
well in the end of year examination).
About twenty
years before that, I learnt about my own name, Garry. I found it very hard to say as a baby, and
apparently I used to call myself Gug; so in the family I was known as Gug. My father insisted on calling me Gug
everywhere – “Come on, Gug,” he’d say – until I was about seven, when I said,
“For heaven’s sake, Dad, my name’s Garry!
Get it right!”
The university
story is about recognition and understanding.
The story about my dad is really about recognition and personhood, about
maturity and recognising who I really was.
I was no longer a baby who couldn’t say his name. I was somebody called Garry. I might’ve only been seven, but I was trying
to understand who I was and how I fitted in the world. An important part of that was knowing my name
was Garry.
These days, of
course, anybody called Garry is recognisably from about 1952 to 1965. There are not many modern Garrys. I guess it was the influence of Garry Cooper
on a generation of parents. But that’s
what I’ve got, and so I’m a Bishop Garry – sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? – I
should be Bishop Simon or Bishop Charles or Bishop Roland. Not Garry!
But it’s the name my parents gave me, and it’s bound up with my identity
as a human being, and about my maturity as a human being. This is who I am.
Today we
celebrate the Holy Name of Jesus: Joshua
– God saves; Jesus, the Son of God, the one who is at the heart of everything
we do and are as Christian people; the Name that means so much to us, and the
Name that’s all about our identity and our maturity as well as about the
identity and maturity of the Lord himself.
I think we don’t need to worry too much about his maturity. I think it can
be assumed. But as we seek to be his
disciples, those people who are marked as belonging to Jesus, people of the
Holy Name, Paul gives us some deeply uncomfortable reflections, doesn’t he?
In that
wonderful passage to the Colossians which is normally read at weddings (that’s
where you hear it most) he talks about the characteristics of the people who
carry the Holy Name. Listen to those
characteristics again: “Forgive each other; clothe yourselves with love which
binds everything together in perfect harmony; take on compassion, kindness, humility,
meekness and patience.” I’ve been around
the Community of the Holy Name long enough to know that sometimes you see
compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience; sometimes you
don’t. I’ve belonged to enough
communities - my own family and other communities – to know how hard it is, in
the rough and tumble of everyday life, to be patient with the people who drive
you crazy, to be meek when you know that you’re right, to be humble when you
should be celebrating your many gifts, to be kind when you’re just exhausted,
to be compassionate yet again when you’d rather just give up. Above all, Paul says, put on that hard thing,
forgiveness, which is at the heart of every Christian relationship.
If we are truly
to reflect the nature of Christ and are to come to the full stature, to
maturity in Christ, we need to be experts at forgiveness when we fail in those
other characteristics – and how hard it is to forgive people when we are truly
hurt. It’s easy to forgive little
hurts. But at those times when we feel
deeply rejected by the ones whom we ought to be able to trust, when we feel
that our love is not returned, when we feel that we are taken for granted, it’s
hard to forgive. And yet those of us who
seek to be followers of the Lord Jesus need to take these invitations very
seriously indeed: kindness, compassion,
humility, meekness, patience and that hard thing, forgiveness. Yes, we can sing psalms and hymns and
spiritual songs, and do all sorts of things in the name of the Lord, but unless
in our everyday relationships, in the rough and tumble of going down the
street, or in parish communities, unless it’s in those ordinary, everyday
relationships, that we see real Christian maturity, we will never reflect the
true nature of Christ.
Over this last
weekend the Diocese of Ballarat has had three consultations, with over a
hundred people participating, as we looked at the possibility of ordaining
women to the Priesthood. And I’ve been
deeply encouraged by the kindness and the meekness and the humility and the
compassion that people have shown to others with whom they disagree. Twenty-five years ago a Ballarat priest said
on National Television, “You might as well ordain a meat pie as ordain a
woman.” That sort of rudeness and pain
and deliberate damage to other Christians ought never to be part of our common
life. I was deeply encouraged over the
last three days by the real sense of Christian maturity that people who have
deeply differing opinions about this important matter showed to each other in
their careful and respectful conversations.
I don’t know what the outcome is going to be – I know what I want it to be. But we don’t always get what we want – not
straight away, anyway. But I know that
in that time together the people in my Diocese who participated in those
conversations were actually living the life of the Lord, in their giving way to
each other, in listening carefully and respectfully to each other, in praying
with each other, and in not reacting with flash or with pain when difficult
things were said. And I have great hope
that we might actually move towards some common ground in the Diocese of
Ballarat.
Now that’s no
different from every other Christian community.
All of us from time to time flash unkindly at others. Yet if we are truly to be people of the Holy
Name we need to reflect the nature of Christ and the maturity of Christ, and
live lives that are thankful, and based on that hard thing, forgiveness. If we do know how to base our lives around
giving way to each other, it might actually just be possible for us to “do
everything we do in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ”, and so come to the
measure of the full stature of Christ, to true maturity as his sons and
daughters, as his brothers and sisters, as his friends.
