Into the Tiber and Wading

I mentioned in my last post that I'd been looking closely at the Mormon Church.  The counterpart to that, obviously, would be leaving the Catholic church which I joined ten years ago.  Oddly, this doesn't seem much of a wrench.

 

It would be a bit of a wrench, of course.  Leaving a church which is such a force for good in the world is a wrench, especially when everything else in your life screams out 'loser'.  On the other hand, I ask myself how I would change if I remained in it.

 

By and large, I've been tolerably at peace with the church's teaching on marriage and on the position of divorcees.  I'm also conscious that it's poor form to look for reasons to be unhappy.  Yet the more I look at my situation as the 'abandoned spouse', the more disenchanted I become.  It seems to me that for all the episcopal blather about pastoral support, my future in the Church is a choice between two unpalatable options:

1. If (and only if) I'm prepared to remain alone until the day I die, I can remain a member in full communion with the church; or
2. If I can't endure lifelong solitariness and repartner, I can remain part of the church as long as I'm content to be restricted to sweeping the church, making the tea, running the errands, and keeping my eyes on the floor during Communion.

When I posed this dilemma in a Catholic group on GooglePlus, a commenter pointed out that the way I've worded (1) is a little unfair.  Rather than being alone for the next fifty years (or until I get hit by lightning; whichever happens first), I'm called to live in chastity and continence.  The commenter was perfectly correct, but I still think my wording was justifiable.  Everyone over the age of about 15 knows that the unique bond of love between man and woman is something different from the love one has for one's friends or family.  The latter is at best an ersatz when it's used to replace the former, and it's deception to pretend otherwise.

The second item is more complex.  No less a figure than Pope John Paul II said

I earnestly call upon pastors and the whole community of the faithful to help the divorced, and with solicitous care to make sure that they do not consider themselves as separated from the Church, for as baptized persons they can, and indeed must, share in her life. They should be encouraged to listen to the word of God, to attend the Sacrifice of the Mass, to persevere in prayer, to contribute to works of charity and to community efforts in favor of justice, to bring up their children in the Christian faith, to cultivate the spirit and practice of penance and thus implore, day by day, God's grace. Let the Church pray for them, encourage them and show herself a merciful mother, and thus sustain them in faith and hope.

However, this help and care always looks the same: Integrating those who are divorced and repartner into the life of the parish means giving them other roles than being a communicant.  It's unlikely those roles can include being on a church committee, or teaching, or being a eucharistic minister or a lector*.  It does mean that priests should "involve them in the charitable works of the Christian community for the poor and needy, and ... awaken the spirit of repentance by acts of penance that prepare their hearts to accept God's grace".  As I said above: making the tea, sweeping the church and running errands. It's terribly hard not to take this as being told "you really do have a place in our community - just don't forget that it is and always will be right at the bottom".


Probably I'm guilty of the sin of pride, but this is why I'm very close to leaving the Church I was so happy to enter. If I stay, I hate the thought of what I'll become after 50 years of negativity and bitterness.


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* "However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist. Besides this, there is another special pastoral reason: if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.": John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, at para 84

The Goulburn, the Tiber and the Great Salt Lake

Hi everyone,

Short update tonight.  It's been a 'kinetic' couple of days.  Wednesday, to Tatura for a cheque handover for SES followed by the Blood Bank to make a plasma donation.  The latter had something of a left field event: because I'd been scrambling to get to things all day, I was still wearing my work clothes, which are by and large grimy, dirty and ragged (typical farm hand!).  Come to find out, it was my 125th donation, and they asked to take a picture of me.  Why did it have to be the day I looked like a man who'd dressed himself out of a brotherhood bin?!?

So today turned out to be my 125th donation. The nice people at the blood bank asked to photograph me ... Naturally, this was the one time I'd shown up looking like I'd dressed myself out of a Brotherhood bin!!! #scruffy #bloodbank #onlyme

A post shared by Stephen Tuck (@sdtuc2) on May 17, 2017 at 4:58am PDT

Thursday I brought mum into town so she could go to the dentist and I could go to the dentist and I could go to the doctor.  I needed a prescription renewed.  Unfortunately my usual doctor was home sick, and so I saw a stand-in who was understandably keen to rattle me through fast so he could see his own patients.  I may need to go back and see my own doctor in due course and have my medication reviewed.  I seem to be having a few days of late when I'm keen to take a double-dose (no, not to try and top myself; only to lift the clouds a bit).  Either that or I can start listening to Little Sarah.

It was a good day and so I went out for a run late afternoon.  While I was running my phone began to buzz with messages as there'd been a callout (a combined assist ambulance / land search job).  I finished my run and drove in.  The team had been well lead and done a great job, so I just waited at the de-facto staging area in case further hands were needed (they weren't).

Friday saw me back in Shepparton to see my new jobsearch provider (I sacked the last one and transferred my file).  God knows if it'll lead to work of any sort.  I'm less than optimistic at the moment.  Just at present, nearly everything I touch in my own life seems to malfunction or backfire.  This may or may not be why I've been feeling a weird pull towards the Church of Latter Day Saints in the last few months.

Perhaps I should explain.  A few months ago I saw a copy of the Book of Mormon at the op shop.  I had a hankering to buy it then but didn't, but the thought of it kept nagging at me.  When I went by the next time, I bought it and I've been slowly reading it.  I'm not completely convinced - yet - that it's divinely inspired scripture.  However, I'm far from convinced that it's a fake.  Even allowing for the accounts of its translation (or composition, depending on one's bias) being embroidered, it would have required Joseph Smith to have an imagination and breadth of vision worthy of Tolkien for it all to have sprung from his brain.  Added to which, it frankly doesn't 'ring' fake (for comparison, try Ronald Weinland's effort 2008 - God's Final Witness).  I've still been feeling a 'pull' in the direction of that church, and the Mormons that I've talked to online simply couldn't be more welcoming.  I've never had any cause to feel not-welcomed by the Catholic Church, save that as a divorcee (which at the moment is a large whack of my identity) you do feel like you're less a member of the faithful and more a problem to be managed.  I guess the thing is that just at this moment, what I want most in life is a fresh start.  The image of the Mormon wagon train heading west to the Great Salt Lake for exactly such a thing has an undeniable appeal.

A Mormon wagon train entering the Salt Lake Valley (Image from here)

I'm sure I'll write more about this in the weeks to come, but right now I'm so badly out of ideas that perhaps any way forward looks good.  And if that way is a challenging one?  I don't think I mind that.  I swam the Tiber once.  Perhaps, despite anything the atlas says, the Tiber flows into the Great Salt Lake.

Cannery Days

Hi everyone,

So I'm out of work again.  "What?  You were even in work?"  This is what happens when I fail to blog for ages.

I picked up some work at the cannery in Shepparton from early March until yesterday.  The work is seasonal and matches the summer harvest season for fruits.  I was initially placed in the peach section for a few weeks, and then I was off for about a month, until last week when I was called back in to work on tomatoes.  Each time I was placed on afternoon shift (that is, 3pm to 11pm).  My role was described as "Knockdown Wash" and was much the same for both peaches and tomatoes: that is, to go to a series of hoses and use them to hose down conveyor belts and machinery so that the produce kept moving smoothly and muck didn't build up.  In each case the challenge was to do this without spraying other people with water by accident,

We couldn't take phones into the factory.  Doing so would have been essentially instant dismissal.  However, the National Archives of Australia have a couple of photographs which are reasonably representative.  The one which most sticks in my mind if this one, of a woman sorting peaches in 1963 -

Sorting peaches before canning, Shepparton Preserving Company
(NAA: A1200, L43906)

It sticks in my mind because the sorting bench in the peach area seems basically unchanged since that photo was taken.  I'm not sure how old the peach slicing machinery was, but it didn't look new.  What did look new was the machinery in the tomato area, which seemed to have been bought from Perri & Catelli in Italy -



Image from here

The work wasn't especially arduous.  A little dull, at worst.  The pay was good.  Every so often I wondered what the people from my past life as a lawyer would think if they could have seen me.  Note: I thought about it, because in an 8 hour shift you have a lot of time to think.  I didn't really give a toss.  It was work and I needed the money.  That's all.

Water will always find its own level.

A post shared by Stephen Tuck (@sdtuc2) on Mar 18, 2017 at 3:56pm PDT

I'm not sure what the next job will be.  Whatever I can find I expect.  There's a climb ahead of me, but at least there's something ahead of me.

The run for Red Cross

Hi everyone,

Finally blogging again.  I've been away a while - I found some work and also found that the time I had available to write mostly went on things that I thought might pay.  I'll catch you up on all of that in later posts.  I wanted to tell you about an interesting run I was on the other week.

If you're linked to me on Facebook, you'll probably remember that I set up a fundraising page. I was going to run the 26 kilometre (16.25 miles) Axedale-to-Heathcote event in the O'Keefe Running Festival in order to raise money for Red Cross.  I completed the run, and I'm very happy to report that I was able to raise $313.00.

This run was tougher than any other race I've entered.  The day started with two emails that I saw as soon as I woke up.  One was an update fron LinkedIn about a former colleague whose career is going great at a time when mine, well, isn't.  The other was an email from the ex (enough said).  Anyway, those emails pitched me into a bad attack of the blues all the way over to Axedale.  Even my tablets couldn't budge it, which is saying something.

 

 I walked down to the starting point for the race, by the Campaspe River at Axedale.  It was a beautiful, peaceful setting on the O'Keefe Rail Trail.  I dropped off my bag with the nice folks from Athlete's Foot, collected my race bib, and started stretching as the race briefing started.  What was unusual was that I wasn't excited.  The blues were robbing me of any enthusiasm to race.  The only real thought in my head was "I'm here: let's just get the bloody thing done".  I think it's the only time I've ever started a race like that.  The race photo from the start pretty well captures my state of mind (it's also one of the few race photos of me where I don't look like the offspring of a hippopotamus and the Michelin Man).

The trail follows the route of the old Heathcote-Bendigo railway line.  The line was closed in 1958.  As best I could tell, it rose more-or-less steadily from Axedale to Heathcote.  However, you really didn't feel the climb: the railway engineers who built the line had much the same goal as runners today: as many gentle gradients and straight lines as possible.

The blues kept at me through the run.  I suppose everyone experiences depression a bit differently; for me it's mostly physical.  I feel like I'm wearing a kind of harness that straps a 25 kilogram (55 pound) sack of salt onto my chest and back, and as well as carrying the extra weight they squeeze the air from my lungs.  This was precisely the feeling that accompanied me on the run: a crushing extra weight.  I've run in ankle weights before.  I can tell you I'd pick them over running with the blues any day.

The trail ran through the bush around Axedale and eventually began to climb into more open country.  At about the 18 kilometre mark it skirted Lake Eppalock.  Every so often other groups of runners joined us from other events - the quarter marathon and 5 kilometre for two.  The race was remarkably well organized that way, with cohorts not clashing as they merged.  Drink stations were set up about every 5 kilometres which suited me fine.

 

I crossed the finish line in Heathcote in a time of 2:41:48.  Not my best time, but reasonable given the length of the race.  The end point of the race was genuinely welcoming: fruit and water were provided to runners, and there was a bevy of community groups holding barbeques and selling coffee.  I love this sort of thing that brings towns together.  It was a nice touch that the finish line was marked by miniature pit-heads: appropriate as one of the major sponsors was mining company Mandalay Resources!

Because this was a point-to-point race, the organizers supplied buses to take runners back to wherever they'd left their cars.  The soft chair in the coach felt heavenly.  The blues were still gripping me when I got back to my car.  In a way this was a relief: there was none of the sense of letdown when the race was over.

Worth every step! Not my best time in any sense, but a stunning course and great event. #running #runnerlife #fitlife #racing

A post shared by Stephen Tuck (@sdtuc2) on Apr 23, 2017 at 2:07am PDT

I've run longer distances than this race.  I've certainly been over harder terrain.  But I don't think I've ever done a race this tough.  Athletes of all stripes tend to use cliches like "digging deep".  This one required me to go on when there was nothing left to dig into.