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A vibrant, multicultural community with “heart”

I was honoured by Christos Tsiolkas and Zoe Ali to speak briefly at the opening of their photographic exhibition, City Gallery, Melbourne Town Hall, September 2 – 22 January 2011.

Entitled “A New Jerusalem: Faith and the City”, it was walking through Melbourne and discovering the sites of religious and sacred observance in the architecture, design and public space of the city, that Christos and Ali were convinced that their exhibition had to celebrate the communal and compassionate aspects of religious life.

Opportunistically, I filch what Christos and Ali have to say about their work to motivate a project dear to my own heart and piloted already by Rob Grogan’s history of Sts. Peter and Paul: “From Green to Red and White” (available at church).

I want to survey the “sacred sites” existing in South Melbourne, at least. Let Christos and Ali light our fire.

“As young children first coming across the illustrated Bible stories (in those books in doctor’s waiting rooms in which the Egyptians, the Babylonians and Hebrews always looked Saxon or Celt, and Jesus and his disciples always appeared Aryan) there were two stories that disturbed us in particular. The first was the destruction of the tower of Babel; and the second being Lot’s wife being turned into a pillar of salt for daring to turn back and witness the destruction ravaged on the Cities of the Plain. Both instances seemed a shocking over-reaction by God.

Of course, with age, we came to understand both stories as being allegories of what happens when the authority of God is challenged. But once a story no longer possesses the legitimacy of absolute truth and lays open to imaginative interpretation, then the possibility also arises of reclamation. In the stories of the tower of Babel and the destruction of the Cities of the Plain (both from Genesis, the first book of the Torah, the Hebrew foundation text of the three siblings religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam) the emphasis is on punishment and retribution. In this exhibition we want to, very gently, speak of possibility and redemption. Sin in the city is everywhere and we are a little tired of the frenzied manner our media, our politicians and our religious fundamentalists and bigots are forever seeking it out. In this collection of photography, imaginative and Scriptural text, and items of the City of Melbourne, what we are seeking to explore is the beauty to be found in the spirit of the city. We are offering, quite deliberately, an interpretation of the religious experience that seeks peace not conflict, reconciliation not opposition.

It was walking through Melbourne, through discovering the sites of religious and sacred observance in the architecture, design and public space of the city that we were convinced that our work had to celebrate the communal and compassionate aspect of religious life. Our city is full of churches, the skyscape dominated by the Christian spires of St. Pauls, of St. Patricks, of the Presbyterian and Wesleyan churches. The European colonisers that developed the city believed that the spiritual life of the new colony was as important as its economic development. But the churches and cathedrals were built on land stolen from the Indigenous owners. Spirituality and the sacred do not only reside in bricks and mortar, and the Wurundjeri and Bunurong peoples who lived in the lands we now designate as “Melbourne” possessed a spiritually rooted in the soil and the air and the spirit of this place. This sense of the sacred is not a history but a living presence at the heart of our city.”

This is what I’d like us at Sts. Peter and Paul to embrace as our own neighbourhood evolves, after 150 years, into a vibrant, multicultural community with “heart”.

R.J.M.