Flowers, a platypus and music speak of God

An Obadiah Slope column

Glory: After church, Obadiah headed up to the Hawkesbury to a spot only open to the public 12 days a year to learn more about God’s glory. Muogamarra Nature Reserve rises high above the Hawkesbury River, but it’s not the spectacular views that make it better. It’s a hotspot for native flowers. Glory. How can anyone not believe in a creator?

Obadiah’s more significant other (MSO) researched the season, after Obadiah referred to “spring” although it is August still. the local season is Wiritjiribin, the D’harawal season of wattle flowering and the end of cold windy weather. Obadiah and MSO have been learning about local seasons on our last few trips. they make more sense.

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And the next day – just by coincidence – its was an urban flower fest because it was cherry blossom time at the Auburn Botanic Gardens. And shaped by humankind, in a manner that the wildflowers of Muogamarra are not, the Glory shone through the blossoms.

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Vote prayers: Obadiah caught this on the democratic convention livestream – “A Vote is a kind of prayer for our future and our prayers are stronger when we pray together.” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia speaking in the cadences of the black church. “I saw him holding a Bible and endorsing it as though he needed it. He should try reading it . It says ‘to walk humbly and to do justice.’ It says ‘for as much as you have done to the least of these.'”

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Aussie Aussie, Oi Oi Oi: Obadiah took the pledge to become a newly-minted Australian citizen this week. When he arrived at the cavernous Marrickville town hall – dour brick on the outside, gorgeous plasterwork on the inside – there would have been 600 or more chairs set out. “This place won’t fill up, surely,” he thought, but it did. The Welcome to Country by a local, Uncle Alan, had a special significance. “welcome, welcome, welcome,” he finished, welcoming the 94 of us into the country.

Inner West Mayor D’arcy Byrne led us through the oath, getting us to say it in two batches. Obadiah was in the first batch, and we pledged:

“From this time forward, under God,
I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,
whose democratic beliefs I share,
whose rights and liberties I respect, and
whose laws I will uphold and obey.”

Then, a second batch, slightly larger in number, stood and said the same pledge without the “Under God” bit.

To Obadiah, it made sense to say “Under God’ as he made this promise. But two pledges – what a great way to handle what, in another country, could be a culture war issue. Good old Aussie pragmatism.

And the card with Obadiah’s pledge on it, had the other one on the other side. Yes, and in Sydney you can make the train seats face the other way by flipping them over!

It was a simple moving ceremony. And it happens each month, with the Leichhardt Celebrity band playing each time – finishing with the National Anthem, and then sneaking in the song that should be the national anthem ‘ “We are one…”

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The week’s reading: Obadiah has been reading some theology he came across in what might seem an odd place, a program for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Sydney Dance Company. Stan Grant has an essay in the program booklet for a night of Arvo Pärt and Johann Sebastian Bach’s music that were intertwined in a concert called “Silence and Rapture.”

He begins “In the darkness just before the break of dawn I see God in a moonbeam. I hear a splash and peer over the bridge and there, illuminated, is the unmistakablke form of a platypus. The old people here had told me abouyt a family of these shy, strange mammals living in the creek that runs alongside my house in a small village in New South Wales’s Snowy Valley. On my morning and evening walks I searched for them, but they were elusive. Perhaps I was looking too hard like a pilgrim trying to find God when it is God who must find me. Now – when I am not expecting it – she appears.

“I watch her now as she swims in the stream – dancing almost. – in the streak of silver that lights up the water. There in the cold dark before dawn, I think that this is what it must be to see God: this is Eden, where God walks in the garden. …

“The platypus knows nothing of the Fall. She does no harm, raises no armies, profits no fortune. What is God? Saint Augustine said if we think we know God then we do not know God. Saint Thomas Aquinas called God ‘Ipsum Esse‘ – the act of existence. Yes. That is it. the impossible possibility. the known unknown. the creation ex nihilo –from nothing, comes something. Creation is an act of love and we known God by our capacity for love.”

Obadiah finds this act of reinforcing the Christin themes that were embedded in the music which spoke of “Hope and Temptation:the garden of Eden”; “Tragedy and Passion: Garden of Gethsemene”; and “Redemption: Garden of Heaven” truely impressive.
Stan Grant has seven pages of 9 point text to explore these themes.

How would you begin an essay to be read by concert goers?