Pieces of Eternity

expression.

A moment of Eternity

Before dawn, Sydney smells of the decaying fruit of the ancient fig trees and stale beer.

That musty smell is one of Sydney’s few constants, for, like a snake shedding its skin, it is always changing to match its growth. Along Broadway, only the facades of the old pubs remain. The old factories and the breweries have been levelled, and in their place new glassy apartment complexes are sprouting. The old church of St Barnabas’ Broadway disappeared in flames a few years back after rats chewed through the power cables, and it has risen again as a shiny white new structure.

But these are the streets that once belonged to one of Sydney’s most legendary and elusive characters. If you had been a shift worker at Tooth’s brewery knocking off at dawn in the 1940s and 1950s, you might have glimpsed the gaunt figure of an old man hunched over on the pavement. On closer inspection you would notice that he was writing with a piece of chalk, in an immaculate copperplate hand, the single word ‘Eternity’.¹

Walking a hundred yards further, he would stoop again and write the same word: ‘Eternity’. The workers of Sydney, trudging to the beat of the daily routine, would smudge it with their feet. The heavy rains that regularly drench the city would wipe the slate clean. But still the word would come, however temporarily it stayed: ‘Eternity’.

For years, the identity of the writer was unknown to Sydneysiders – a living ghost of the city. But however secretive and elusive he was, he was certainly no ghost. The old man, it turned out, was a returned soldier and reformed alcoholic named Arthur Stace. Stace was a child of the city’s underside. Born of hard-drinking parents in working-class Balmain, he had fallen into a life of petty crime as a teenager, for which he spent some time in gaol. Lacking an education, he at one stage worked as a runner for his sister’s brothel. He also began to drink heavily.

Stace returned from the First World War half-blind and gassed. Subsequently, his life spiralled out of control. He was a hopeless drunk, consuming bottles of methylated spirits when that was all he could afford.

Life took a dramatic turn for him, though, when he walked through the doors of St Barnabas’ Broadway one evening in the mid-1930s. In the pulpit stood another extraordinary man of Sydney, the Reverend R. B. S. Hammond, who had a ministry to the hundreds of homeless and poverty-stricken men in inner-city Sydney – a problem exacerbated by the onset of the Great Depression. The message that night so gripped Arthur Stace that he went over to Victoria Park and, kneeling amidst the fig trees, gave his life to Jesus Christ.

Things would never be the same for the desperate Stace. He gave up the drink, for a start. A couple of years after that, he turned up to hear the well-known evangelist John G. Ridley preach on the subject of ‘The Echoes of Eternity’. What did Ridley say that night?

‘Eternity, Eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney. You’ve got to meet it, where will you spend Eternity?’

Time had not been kind to Arthur Stace, and yet he put his hope in eternity. His mind and body were scarred by his experiences, and he was little use to anyone from a human point of view. Other than grog, nothing had gripped him until this moment when he caught a glimpse of ‘the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity’² (Isaiah 57:15, the text from which Ridley preached that night). Evading cruel time is not the greatest challenge a human being has to face, it turns out. It is the approach of eternity, which we cannot evade.

But the One who inhabits eternity has approached us. He has walked the same dusty ground and lived in a body exposed to the ravages of time. That verse from Isaiah 57, which describes God in such lofty terms continues: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.’

The God of eternity, it turns out, dwells with such as Arthur Stace, the broken thief and drunk. Stace later said: ‘Eternity went ringing through my brain and suddenly I began crying and felt a powerful call from the Lord to write Eternity.’

Writing was not Stace’s strong suit, to be fair. He claimed that he could barely even write his own name. He told a journalist from the Sydney Sun that the word ‘Eternity’ came out smoothly, in a beautiful copperplate script. He said then: ‘I couldn’t understand it, and I still can’t.’

A minor miracle? A fraction of lucidity emanating from an otherwise addled brain? Whatever the explanation, Stace spent the rest of his life inscribing the message of ‘Eternity’ on the pavements of the suburbs of inner Sydney – more than half a million times, on some counts. Though Stace is long gone, and only a couple of examples of his famous word remain, he soon became part of the city’s legend.

Thirty-three years after his death in 1967, they wrote Stace’s copperplate ‘Eternity’ on the Harbour Bridge. It was to celebrate what was in fact a sliver in time, when the clocks tripped over from 23:59 on 31 December 1999 to midnight on 1 January 2000. Nothing could have been less eternal than that moment of cork-popping excitement. The fireworks exploded, or glowed, and then burnt out.

Though the bridge’s display was pretentious and self-congratulatory, where Stace’s was anonymous and humble, it was uncannily like the message in chalk. It was an ephemeral invitation to consider the eternal, a momentary invasion of that which transcends mere moments. It was a challenge to the ego of the city and its inhabitants. You look permanent and unsurpassable, as if you have been here forever and will stand forever. The old hymn puts it beautifully:

Frail as summer’s flower we flourish

Blows the wind and we are gone.³

Like the chalk on the pavement, we are soon erased. And yet (as Stace instinctively knew when he heard of it), in Jesus of Nazareth, eternity has walked into the middle of time, humble and compassionate, speaking a word of mercy and hope to the lowly and rejected. In that glimpse of eternity, we are confronted with our own vulnerability and temporality. But we are also given the news that God, even in his eternity, has come looking for us in time.

Part One

The God who laughs and loves

01

Imagine no religion

Religion, it seems to me, suffers from a silly hat problem.

If you have ever tuned in to the ABC’s flagship religious affairs programme Compass, which used to appear after the ‘bonnet’ drama of a Sunday night, then you could be forgiven for thinking that the group of people labelled ‘the religious’ are those who wear funny hats. As the opening title sequence of the show scrolls by, viewers are treated to a veritable Facebook of curious millinery – along with some impressive facial hair.

To average ABC viewers, watching as they iron their work clothes, the message is clear: these people are not ‘us’. They are definitely ‘the other’; a group or groups of people to be observed, categorised, wondered at – and sometimes even frightened of.

But is there such a category as the ‘religious’? Does ‘religion’ even exist?

I am not convinced that it does – at least, not in the sense that the word is commonly used. The concept of ‘religion’ operates as an anthropological term, which, like most academic language, enables the object under examination to be placed at a scholarly arm’s length. Like exotic butterflies, religions are to be caught in the wild, observed under the microscope, described in minute detail according to their visible forms, and then pinned to polystyrene.

There are three enormous traps into which this method steps – and the result is a colossal misunderstanding of the ‘religious’. Categorising things is so much a part of our approach to life that we imagine it promises more understanding of a subject than it can deliver.

Our first mistake is that we think we have discovered a coherent concept because we can describe things that the various religions apparently have in common. If the religions are to be understood because of the things they seem to have in common, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that the things they have in common are the most important things about them. The problem is that the massive differences between the faiths are then ironed out. After all, termites and elephants both have legs.

The second trap is really a variation on the first. It comes with the triumph of imagining one has discovered the single catch-all concept at the heart of all ‘religions’. Scholars with this sort of claim – and believe me, they are not modest about it – imagine themselves sublimely objective in this, uniquely capable of divesting themselves of all vestiges of their home culture and its variety of religion. For example, it is no accident that scholars from Christian backgrounds have gone looking for a ‘God of love’ as the core idea of all other religions. It is a peculiarly Christian way of homogenising other faiths and we can see this in the work of the philosopher of religion John Hick (1922–2012) and Hick’s lesser disciple, Episcopalian Bishop, John Shelby Spong (1931–).

Third, if we think in terms of ‘religion’, we will become far too distracted by the external and cultural forms of religion. This is what I mean by the ‘silly hat’ problem. When I was chaplain at an Anglican school, I was often sent sample ‘Studies in Religion’ textbooks. They were uniformly hopeless, in my opinion, because they concentrated almost entirely on ceremonies, rituals, ecclesiastical haberdashery and religious festivals. Was this what ‘religion’ was about? Perhaps, if one were to look from the outside, as someone not ‘religious’ in this sense, but we do not understand Christianity at all by observing its outward forms. In fact, we may completely misunderstand it. What happens visibly is only a pointer to what has happened invisibly.

In its most hostile forms at the hands of a Dawkins or a Hitchens, the idea of ‘religion’ is a means of dismissing it. If you pollute the concept with enough human evil – and goodness knows, there is plenty of that to share – you can make it start to look like a concept you would be better off without. You then end up implying that the lady across the road who goes to church each week is just as evil as Osama bin Laden.

But more often, using the term ‘religion’ is a way of taming the phenomena collected under this heading. If it can be boiled down to its core elements, and if I can then see that these core elements are available without ‘religion’, then … well, why would I bother? I do not look good in hats, and I like to sleep in on the weekends.

So, I want to invite you to ‘imagine no religion’ (in the words of John Lennon). If you are really interested in understanding those people you call ‘religious’, then realise that thinking in terms of ‘religion’ is getting in the way. And what is more, you will continue to think of yourself as ‘not religious’, if you keep believing in ‘religion’. Why deny yourself the chance of being challenged – and even changed – by what you discover?

02

The atheists are right

Hence are we called atheists.

And we confess that we are atheists,

so far as gods of this sort are concerned,

but not with respect to the most true God, the Father of

righteousness and temperance and the other virtues,

who is free from all impurity.

(Justin Martyr, 103–165 AD, First Apology VI)

I should like to propose a thesis that may seem somewhat unlikely for a Christian theologian. Namely, that the atheists are right. Or, at least some of them are. But insofar as they contend against the existence of God, or attack the authenticity of the Bible, or pit faith against reason, I would say they are badly mistaken.

There is, however, another form of atheism, which Professor Merold Westphal of Fordham University calls ‘the atheism of suspicion’. This form of atheism is represented by the works of those great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figures Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and to some extent Darwin (or at least, his descendants). The work of these scholars serves to expose the bad conscience of much religious belief. They were less interested in evidence than in motives. In their different ways they believed that they could undermine belief in religious propositions by showing that believing often served less than pure ends. As Westphal puts it, ‘Its target is not the proposition but the person who affirms it, not the belief but the believer.’⁴

For Karl Marx, the father of communism, religion served as an instrument of social control by which the upper classes could maintain their wealth and prosperity. As he famously put it, ‘religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.’⁵

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, viewed our religious beliefs as an expression of wish-fulfilment. We

tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.⁶

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of nihilism, religion was an expression of the ‘will to power’ of the priestly class. Christianity taught self-denial and hatred of the body. It tried to ascribe meaning to suffering and therefore taught people to accept their feeble lot meekly.

Though Charles Darwin himself did not pursue this line of thought his followers, such as Richard Dawkins, have pointed to the evolutionary advantages of the religious sense. Religion has offered a sense of cohesion and unity for tribes and nations, which advantaged them in developing as cultures. Furthermore, recent studies of the human brain have shown how we are naturally receptive to religious ideas at the level of our physiology.

If we are religious, then, it is because we have evolved to be so.

The best response to the atheism of suspicion is actually to acknowledge that much of what they say is exactly true. We do not have to be expert historians to recognise that Christianity has been used as an instrument of exploitative social control, a means for justifying greed and imperial expansion, and the excuse for maintaining social privilege. It has been the cloak for reprehensible