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The Anglican Church in Tasmania Search |
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a healthy church...transformingLIFE |
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Book review
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The speakers and presenters at this conference reflected upon the many facets that arise when these qualities of our humanity converge, and most of their papers are presented in this book. The Rev. Dr Christopher Newell AM, keynote speaker, addressed the 'principal wound of the Church - that being an inability for folk to accept the way they are made.' He does this by reflecting with his audience upon the use of prayer that demeans rather than supports and encourages the prayed-for person. He argues that the recognition of the value or gifting of a person is eclipsed by a focus upon the disability he or she lives with. Christopher, in his second paper, contrasts this attitude with an account of pastoral care that holds in tension an awareness of the patient's disability and acute discomfort, being met by a ministry of non-anxious presence. The Rev. Dr Mary Caygill, Principal of Trinity Methodist Theological College, the second keynote speaker, explores living with depression in the light of her writings about the exilic experience of the Jewish people. Mary, in her exploration and reflection on her living through depression quotes from Kat Duff's book Alchemy of Illness… 'we are both diminished and enlarged through the agency of our illnesses, and so opened to the possibility of new life. The losses are many and visible; the harvested grain is smaller, but so much more useful.' The question of relationship between health and theology arose as a consequence of a prayer spoken during a service when the intercessor prayed, 'for those with mental illness who have lost their minds'. This, she said, took her into a string of questions 'how did she lose it, where did she lose it, will it be found…?' Mary concludes her address with a prayer by Michael Leunig that perhaps sums up the conference: 'We pray for the fragile ecology of heart and mind. The sense of meaning. So finely assembled and balanced and overturned. The careful, ongoing construction of love. As painful and exhausting as the struggle for truth and as easily abandoned.' |
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