An Obadiah Slope column
A blunder in the classroom: Obadiah is obliged to stick to a curriculum as a volunteer scripture teacher at a local public school. (In NSW and Queensland, volunteers are allowed to teach religion in public schools.)
The curriculum Obadiah teaches is a three-year cycle of lessons, some easy to teach (basically Bible stories) and some more difficult for this bear of small brain to work with.
It is coming around to the lesson Obadiah dreads. It has severely embarrassing memories for me. I can’t possibly teach it again.
Because I messed up once – and taught it. And I knew then I should have not taught it. I knew it was racist but a misplaced desire to stick to the script undid me.
It’s what you might think of as the colour-gospel lesson with six coloured squares. Green is for creation. Red is for the blood of Christ, who died for us on the cross. And in the version I was using, black was for sin.
I had an African student in the class.
You can guess what happened. When I stupidly asked what the black square meant, he responded “It’s me.”
Sometimes you have to admit you are an idiot.
(The curriculum providers have made the dark square into a “dirty” grey one. But I am too scarred to teach it.)
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The cycle of Life: Obadiah’s father remembered seeing the late King driving past on a London street on the last car journey George VI ever took.
And now we are post-Elizabethan.
This makes Obadiah reflects that life circles around us. Obadiah can’t remember seeing the Queen in her last days, but he’s got the same “end of an era” feeling that his dad had on a bitterly cold day in London.
Like his dad, Obadiah has now “seen” the passing of a monarch. Kings, Queens and riff-raff like Obadiah are inside this life-death cycle that was never meant to be. Humankind was not created to experience death
And one day, things will be utterly different when we meet our true king.
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- Not all serious: Sydney’s Anglican Synod (church parliament) had a visitor in the public gallery, who at one point loudly corrected the president (chair) Archbishop Kaniska Raffel on the meeting rules. He looked up to recognise his predecessor Bishop Glenn Davies now of the breakaway diocese of the Southern Cross. To laughter, Raffel told the public gallery to be quiet…
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They were very good at synod All masked (pictured)
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Quote of the week: The Christian isn’t just a pilgrim but a refugee, a migrant in search of refuge. The Christian life isn’t just a pilgrimage but a journey of emigration. Augustine in his writings would often use the Latin word peregrinatio to speak of the Christian life
Augustine’s peregrinus isn’t on a return journey, he is setting out like Abraham to a place he has never been. We are not just pilgrims on a sacred march to a religious site; we are migrants, strangers, resident aliens en route to a patria, a homeland we have never been to. God is the country we are looking for, “that place where true consolation of our migration is found”.
James K. A. Smith, On The Road With Saint Augustine