You usually don’t find Victim Impact statements in the media. But here’s one that made Obadiah cry. (Although that is not hard.) For four months, Ju Zhang’s body lay in a Melbourne landfill. Meticulous police work tracked the killer and identified where her body, callously tossed in a wheelie bin, had been taken. As reporter Erin Pearson wrote in the Nine Papers, “It was, on face value, an almost unsolvable case; a woman missing for more than four months, with growing fears she’d been bundled into a suburban wheelie bin and collected by a rubbish truck.
But it was the statement by the head of a team of garbologists at the tip, read as a victims impact statement to the court, that especially moved Obadiah. And at the end … “Although I never met Ms Zhang when she was alive, it seemed to me, in a strange way, that she and I, who had never met, were on a journey together. I attended her funeral at Springvale, contributed to the limits of my capacity in an appeal to support her destitute parents. My wife and I put together and delivered a hamper for her mum and dad and Jack for Christmas. On behalf of all the landfill team, Kelly, we did our best for you and it turned out that our best was good enough.” (Kelly was Ju Zhang’s nickname.)
Typing this out has made Obadiah weep again; such human goodness by the man at the tip. Harry Patrick Taylor, and the staff of Wollert Landfill, Mr Slope salutes you.
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Grace from some bishops: After meandering across the internet, a rainbow homily made it to Obadiah, who thinks it manages a great “tone”. That’s despite being filtered by translation across language and ecclesial cultures. The message comes from Scandinavian Catholic Bishops, translated by Parramatta, and Facebooked by theologian David Bennett, who manages to be Anglican and Pentecostal.
“When Noah and his kin stepped back into a world washed clean, God made his first covenant with all flesh. He promised that a flood would never again destroy Earth. Of humankind, he asked for justice: to revere God, to construct peace, to be fruitful. We are called to live blessedly on Earth, to find joy in one another. Our potential is wonderful as long as we remember who we are: ‘for God made man in his own image’[iii]. We are called to realise this image by the life choices we make. To ratify his covenant, God set a sign in heaven: ‘I set my bow in the cloud; it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the Earth. When the bow is in the clouds, I will look upon it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the Earth.[iv]
“This covenantal sign, the rainbow, is claimed in our time as the symbol of a movement that is at once political and cultural. We recognise all that is noble in this movement’s aspirations. In so far as these speak of the dignity of all human beings and of their longing to be seen, we share them. The Church condemns unjust discrimination of any kind, also on the basis of gender or orientation. We declare dissent, however, when the movement puts forward a view of human nature that abstracts from the embodied integrity of personhood as if physical gender were accidental. And we protest when such a view is imposed on children as if it were not a daring hypothesis but a proven truth, imposed on minors as a heavy burden of self-determination for which they are not ready. It is curious: our intensely body-conscious society, in fact, takes the body lightly, refusing to see it as significant of identity, supposing that the only selfhood of consequence is the one produced by subjective self-perception, as we construct ourselves in our own image.
“When we profess that God made us in his image, the image does not just refer to the soul. It is mysteriously lodged in the body, too. For us Christians the body is intrinsic to personhood. We believe in the resurrection of the body. Naturally, ‘we shall all be changed’.[v] What our bodies will be like in eternity we cannot yet imagine. But we believe on biblical authority, grounded in tradition, that the unity of mind, soul, and body is made to last forever. In eternity we shall be recognisable as who we are now, but the conflicts that still prevent the harmonious unfolding of our true self will have been resolved.”
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The Comet has arrived: That is the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which Obadiah thought would never make it to Australia – too quirky with a need for a cast that can act, sing, play musical instruments and dance – all four at once when needed. But it has landed, in of all places, The Eternity Playhouse – once the Burton Street Tabernacle in Darlinghurst.
“There’s a war going on out there,” the first line of the musical set in Czarist Rus,sia has added poignancy since Obadiah saw it on Broadway. There is a war going on out there. And the second line, “And Andrey is’t here,” rings true many Andreys will be missing.
(Watch the first song here)
On a lighter note, or Obadiah should say “lighting note,”: Mrs Slope made an acute observation. The whole auditorium becomes part of the stage in this show – the lighting we saw at the Broadway production was a cheeky imitation of the Lincoln Centre lights. So what would work for Sydney? Oh, an Oxford St disco ball. Very Darlinghurst. Very Sydney.
“Comet’s central relationship is between Pierre and God — and it works,” Tara Isabella Burton’s Vox review of The Great Comet (on Broadway) said. “
“When I interviewed the show’s writer/composer (and original Pierre) Dave Malloy for the Village Voice last year, Malloy told me that the entire structure of Comet was designed to allow the show to parallel the story of the young Russian countess, Natasha, whose infidelity destroys her relationship with her absent fiancé Prince Andrei, with that of Andrei’s morose and disillusioned friend Pierre, looking for a way out from his existential malaise among the high society of Napoleon-era Moscow.
“In a section of our interview that was edited down for length, Malloy talked about how a “traditional” romantic musical would have an “A” couple and a “B” couple, each of whose stories would complement the other. (Think, for example, of Guys and Dolls, where the more earnest relationship between Sky Masterson and Sarah is paralleled by the comic relationship between Nathan Detroit and Adelaide). But, Malloy said, the “romance” on Pierre’s side isn’t between Pierre and another person, but between Pierre and God (or the universe, or the big something, or whatever you want to call it).”
Obadiah suggests Comet is a metaphor for today’s tension between liquid modernism (progressivism) and traditional Christianity.
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The lower place: Obadhiah is attending the Undeceptions conference this weekend. He’ll share some highlights later. But he was struck by two incidents, where key people in the audience were spottedby the host, John Dickson who also hosts the Undeceptions podcast. “You did not ring and ask for a free ticket? You bought your own” he commented. Good on you, Archbiship Kanishka Raffel and Cailey Raffel, and Tim McBride Principal of Morling College (who sponsored the event.)