Hahahaha!

Of Winter in the Antipodes

OK, so I'm here living in Geelong and I'm working down the road about 20 kilometers at St. Ignatius College in Drysdale, Victoria. And it's winter down here. Now, what most people from my neck of the woods would call winter is roughly analogous to what I'm experiencing: it's dark (yesterday was the shortest day of the year and all), it's rainy, and it's cool. Not cold mind you, at least by my standards. But because of the drought of the last few years, I think Melbournians and their nearby neighbors may have forgotten what real winter is like; it seems that for the last few years there wasn't a lot of rain in the winter and the temperatures were a little milder. That has now ended.

With temperatures plunging into the low 50's, people are bundled up like Eskimos. Scarves, wool hats, jumpers, sweatshirts, huge jackets, etc. etc. are all the order of the day. Warranted or not. All of which would be no never mind to me if I weren't living in the Biggest, Darkest, Coldest Church Rectory- EVER. The building, I am given to understand, was originally going to be the Geelong bishop's residence when Geelong split off from Melbourne as a separate diocese. An event which never happened. So it's Bishop Big. High, Georgian ceilings, long corridors, lots of huge bedrooms, a dining room big enough to double as a ballroom. It's really big. The idea, a year or two ago, was that they would lease it out to a group that would develop it into a boutique hotel, and the location for such a venture really is ideal, it's right on the water near a marina in Geelong, so the vistas of the water are beautiful, when it hasn't been overcast and raining. Which would mean yesterday it was beautiful to look out over the water.

So, anyway, back to the development plan. It seems that a 20 year lease was signed and the antique furniture (the Bishop who never was, his furniture) was auctioned off. Then the developers started filing plans, etc. And then, the neighbors became aware of this plan (you can see where this is going, can't you?) and vowed to fight it legally. So the developers dropped the plan, canceled their lease and bailed.

Now the parish priest has moved back in and I have followed suit. He had only moved back in about a week before I did. So we're living in a place that was partially redone to become a hotel (lots of beds in big bedrooms) with little to no furniture. In a mostly non-renovated building. My favorite feature: the circa 1972 velvet wallpaper. Somewhere, there is a steakhouse in the US that has no wallpaper because it was hijacked for a bishop's residence.

It's a little odd rattling around this place with one other person, I have to tell you. It's big, it's cold and it's drafty. Mostly it's weird living in such a big place with only one other person. It has horror movie written all over it. Not necessarily a slasher film, more like "The Legend of Hell House" where there is something creepy and otherworldy going on that you can't *quite* see. More like that.

More to follow...

PS- If you notice the Jaiku feed on the side of the blog and want to join me, let me know and I'll send you a friends invite. Think of it as micro-blogging, kind of like Twitter.

Out the door...again.

I realized that yesterday, while I was rushing around packing, that I didn't get to the action item at the bottom of my 'to-do' list, which was: "Make a new blog entry." So this will be short because I have to be driving in about 2 hours.

I'm getting ready to head out again on another Tertianship experiment. This time I am going to St. Ignatius School in Geelong, Victoria. Two years ago, St. Ignatius was the called Catholic Regional College (CRC). While this might have been accurately descriptive, it seems a little bland by my personal standards, so the name change, to pretty much any saint's name would have been an improvement. But the reason that the CRC changed its name last year was because it has started a twinning agreement with the Society of Jesus and Xavier College, the Jesuit high school in Melbourne. No one knows exactly what this twinning agreement means. Which is part of the reason I'm going there.

To be honest, I don't know what I'll be doing. I don't know where, exactly, I'll be living (other than 'a presbytery in Geelong.' I don't know the people I'll be working with; what their needs are, what they want from the Society and this Jesuit in particular. I don't know. By reading this, you now know as much as I do. So that makes me a little nervous, but everything else that has gone down this year has been so incredibly positive, that I just don't see God throwing a curve ball now. I think the string is going to continue. At least I'm going to act like it's going to continue. Hopefully I'll be posting more soon and we'll all find out what happens next.

Laughter in a Collar

This is Jim Martin, SJ, a noted Catholic author and good personal friend of mine. If you haven't checked out his book, My Life with The Saints, you should.

Here are three You Tube videos of a talk on humor and the Church that Jim recently gave. It's great!

All's fair...

If you know the rest of that quote, then you'll appreciate this. I spent yesterday cruising around Sydney Harbor on the 47' yacht Love and War. She is one of only two vessels to ever win the annual Sydney to Hobart (Tasmania) yacht race three times. She did this in '74, '78 and '06. A gap of nearly 30 years is pretty much unheard of in the world of yacht racing due to technology advances, etc. and she did so because of the handicapping system used so that older vessels can compete. Not only that but the winning skipper of the '06 crew was our skipper yesterday. He was a delightful person whose whole goal in going out with us was to: a) Show a bunch of people unfamiliar with sailing what a delight and wonder it is, and b) to meet and have a day with a bunch of Jesuits from all over the world. And he thought he was getting the better end of the deal. Silly rabbit.

At any rate, we sailed up and around the Opera House, the Harbor Bridge, and all these other famous Sydney landmarks and I had a chance to see them in a way that few tourists ever do, from the water. Initially I was a little skeptical about 15 of us out on the boat; thought it might be a bit cramped. But it was an absolutely GORGEOUS Autumn day here in the Southern Hemisphere, just a touch light on breeze, the sailors tell me. Not that I would know. We puttered along at a leisurely pace, 'cheating' and using the motor for the parts of the day that we had no wind. It was marvelous.

A HUGE thank-you to the family who owns Love and War who were our hosts. There were absolutely spectacular. They are related to a deceased Jesuit here and bent over backwards to make sure we had a good time and were spectacular hosts.

So here I am again, posting another post that is designed to make you jealous. I find it hard to express how wonderful this year is for me. I have great classmates. I have had wonderful spiritual experiences. I have been made more welcome in Australia than words can communicate. I don't use terms like 'blessed' often to describe myself or my life. Maybe I should more often. Maybe that's what God is trying to show me is how fortunate I am and how much He cares for me by just keeping a stream of wonderful people and places flowing in my direction. I don't know. Every time I post something like this, I think, "Well, it can't last. It can't possibly keep getting better, can it?" Yet it does. God is good.


The Opera House from the water. Gives you an idea of how beautiful the day was.


The Harbor Bridge, the Opera House and Adrian K., a German Tertian.


The Sydney skyline and the Royal Australian Navy on display.

His Lips Have Stopped Moving...

As many of you have noticed I have been silent here the last few weeks. My apologies.

Ironically, the reason that I have been silent is not because I didn't have anything to say or report or tell you all about. On the contrary, the problem is that I've been writing a great deal. That is, I am going through one of the most productive periods of writing that I have ever had. I think I've just about got 3 solid chapters for a...wait for it...book.

One of them is a radically re-worked version of the Bush Lunch episode that was my previous post. The other two are similar in tone but different in context; one details an experience I had on the Long Retreat and the other is about a fishing trip I took right before I left West Wyalong.

Now, dear readers, I don't want you to think that you are somehow undeserving of these objet d'arte of the literary kind. The problem is that I think they're good enough to be published in a form (print, in this case) which might get a wider audience than this simple country blog. And, in this day and age when I do get something published it is pretty standard to sign a contract saying it hasn't been previously published elsewhere. Like, say, on the web. So I'm reluctant to post these here and now (and believe me, I've uploaded them and deleted them twice because I really want to share them with someone.) They're good. Really good in my opinion, but then I'm biased. A sidebar note on the productivity: I think that the prodigious nature of my writing these days is a sign of how well life is going down here and how much Grace God is hitting me with. When I can write like this, it's crazy good and that means God is really doing something. More on that in a later post.

In the mean time. I owe you something. You come here looking for something. For many of you it's your way of caring about me long distance, and I appreciate that. A great deal. So, here are some photos of the Epic Herculean Fishing Trip of which I am currently writing. Enjoy and thanks.


This is Bernie and I in a Snowy River snow storm. Self-explanatory, right?


And here we are telling lies about the ones that got away.


This was LITERALLY what greeted me when I came into West Wyalong. They just wanted me to feel at home, I guess.


Breakfast while fishing. The only thing missing? Fish. But that's another story...


I could stand at this bend in the river and fish all day. Heaven will be like Tom Groggin Station. Trust me.


Yep. I've gone bush. Utterly and totally.

Picnic! Bush Style

So, a farming family from the parish invited the pastor of the church where I am here in West Wyalong and myself to what they called a 'Bar-bee in the bush' yesterday. After the late morning Mass, we unwound a bit, changed into casual clothes and headed out of town about 15 miles to the family farm.

Pulling up at the house, Les W., the patriarch of the clan, greeted us at the picket fence surrounding the classically Australian farm house. He was carrying a large platter. "For the meat." He informed us as we got out of the car. "Why don't you just jump back in and follow me out to where we're cooking." Which we did. Across several more miles of farmland that is bearing just a stubble of green from last weeks rains. We ended up in a small stand of Eucalyptus trees (which the locals also call gum trees here.) There, we found a gargantuan picnic table, groaning under the weight of various covered picnicky things, some chairs and a swinging bench arranged in a large semi-circle and about 3 large fire pits with stone rings around them which had lots of...objects buried in the smoldering ashes of each one.

As soon as we got out of the car, we were greeted by the Australian national bird, the fly. In a great swarm. Flies, I have discovered are ubiquitous in Australia and while they appear in numbers that stagger the imagination, and they ARE annoying, they are not as numerous as parts of Southwest Asia I have been in. The other notable quality of the Australia fly is that it is slow. And stupid. So, for the rest of the afternoon, the fly was our constant companion, especially when eating the sweet things at the end of the day... No more will I mention them, because if I did, it is all I would have left to say in this post...fly fly, flyity fly fly. You get the idea.

Already out at the sight were Les' daughter-in-law, Katrina and son Chris. Soon others arrived, with their kids in tow. After about 45 minutes we had a crowd of about 20-25 people gathered, including all the toddlers running about. One of the late arrivals was John. John is the sacristan at the parish, flew missions against the Japanese during World War II and has spent lots of time what Australians call 'up North' indicating the far reaches of the Northern territory where 'going bush' is not an option, but the general mode of living. John pulled up, immediately dug into the boot of his car (what North Americans call the trunk) and produced what looked like, to the untrained eye, two cans, one larger, one smaller. These were not, in fact, old cans, they turned out to be an elaborate and highly efficient heating system for boiling large quantities of water, needed for that staff of life for nearly all of those children descended from that tree known as British Empire, 'tea.' John made 'bush tea.' Heating the kettle with Eucalyptus twigs and using tea bags, but throwing in Eucalyptus leaves as well, and, I suspect, other arcane bush ingredients that I am likely happier not knowing what they are. It will suffice to say that you could tan leather with the tea which was produced. And yet, it did have a certain appeal.

Before the tea though, came the parade of food which began to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the various fire pits. Everything except the desserts had been cooked in them. Two massive Dutch ovens appeared which yielded the tenderest of mutton and pork, two small cast iron pots with handles were excavated which contained peas and carrots, respectively. Seemingly hundreds of large silver nuggets were produced from deep within the ash, some of which were fire-roasted potatoes, some kumera (an antipodal name for a sweet potato-like tuber), and some produced pumpkin (another staple of the diet here which has received little penetration into the North American diet, for the most part.)

The whole affair was kind of like being on the set of "Crocodile Dundee's Thanksgiving Special." Food. Food. More food. Then came what I have taken to calling The Parade of Desserts. With this many women around who are stay at home moms, the number of deserts was staggering. And they all wanted to know 'Father's Opinion' of their dessert. The apple pie was very nice, a touch of apricot and perhaps a little lemon just adding a bit of tartness. The trifle was not to be trifled with. The sponge cake with strawberries, kiwi fruit and cream was delightful, the home made Cherry Ripe, I thought was the punctuation mark in the Parade turned out to be merely a comma, rather than a full stop and was excellent. Reeling at this point, I turned to a cup of John's Bush Tea for a respite, only to be confronted with a huge slice of his birthday cake (we sang "Happy Birthday" in the shade of the gum tree.) At this point, I was ready to lapse into both a mutton and sugar coma.

The setting was truly idyllic, other than the aforementioned pests. A low winter sun, but a warm day, in this tiny clearing in the middle of nowhere. A family of generations of farmers doing what generations of farmers have done for their guests. Food that was as uniquely prepared as it was delicious. Exotic birds, mostly parrots, singing and calling in the bush. Not a snake or funnel web spider to be found. It was quiet in its own, far-from everything way. At least as quiet as an event like this laden with 10 small kids can be. But they were bush kids doing busy things, swinging from trees, playing with toy tractors, etc.

As we were getting ready to go, Jared, the eldest son, and I were standing watching the sun slink toward the horizon in the shade of that mammoth gum tree.

"I love this place." He said. "It's groiyt, idn't it?"

I nodded my agreement.

"People can say all they want about the bush, but sometimes, when I've been out on the farm all day, and I'm on my way back to the house, I stop here in the ute. I just get out, walk around for a minute, say a quick prayer of thanks for this place and head on back to the house."

I nodded again, understanding that there could be no greater compliment he could pay to the Creator, and that nothing could be more heart-felt and appropriate than that simple prayer of thanks. I'd be happy to eat with the flies like that any time.

(I took a number of pictures which, once I regain access to broadband, I will append to this post.)