Anglican Diocese of Perth

Northern Region

An address by Bishop Brian Farran at the Candle-light Vigil at S. Nicholas Church, Duncraig,
Sunday, October 20 2002.

Tonight we gather to offer at a distance our love, our common human feeling, our solidarity and our prayers with those who are grieving and suffering - Australians, Balinese, and especially those folk in our neighbouring suburbs of Kingsley and Woodvale. The past week has been an emotionally wrenching time for Western Australians. We have experienced a war zone in a holiday playground. People went to Bali as tourists and returned as victims of a terrorist bombing the magnitude of which defies our imaginations.

As one mother said on talk-back radio, Australians have experienced in their children's backyard, their playground, what so many others have experienced as a daily reality for decades. This morning a young Lebanese woman in one of our churches spoke to me of her profound sympathy for Australians, whilst relating to me the horror of her childhood in Beirut

Tonight we pray and offer a spiritual covering over those in grief and pain. We must realize the long term nature of the personal suffering of the families and individuals whose lives have been so drastically altered by the Bali bombings. Many thousands of Australians throughout this national day of mourning will have shown their care in a spiritual way.

Already Australians have responded spontaneously and generously to the physical needs of the victims and their families. People have ached with heart-break, knowing from their own love of children, parents and friends, what suffering others must be experiencing. This has been a deeply sensitizing time for us all.

A principal concern is to maintain the support that so many will require for a very long time. The families of all involved in this tragedy will have to make substantial adjustments, for grief is a very turbulent process. Grief is also very personal. We do not grieve in a uniform pattern. And grief is psychologically magnetic - it attracts to itself other unresolved issues that were dormant, but that under the impact of such a tragedy, are activated, thus complicating the awareness of those grieving.

I have on behalf of the Anglican Church assured the secretary of the Kingsley football Club of our willingness to provide on-going support to those from that large network who need counselling. As I alluded earlier, such a profound and horrifying event sears itself into people's psyches, and will require skill and sympathetic understanding both from specialists in such care, and in families and friends. Relationships are known to falter under these pressures, simply because the pain is so intense that victims get locked inside their pain.

We all need to be wiser and more caring, really gentle with each other for many days yet, for no matter who we are, the fragility of life has hit us in the face!

The Christian experience, I think, is that we are not alone in our suffering and grief, in our anger, pain and confusion. The distinctive revelation of God through Jesus Christ is that God suffers too in the pain of the world, and is open to the frustration and waste that has characterised human evolution and history.

One understanding of the cross of Jesus is that within the mystery of the inner life of God, God is in and through Jesus in that agonizing and brutalised death, making amends to us for all the cost that humankind experiences in God's creation.

Usually we think of the cross as God forgiving us. The cross can also be the site where we forgive God for all the precariousness of a creation in which freedom can be misused, and innocent people made to suffer.

We know that the journey to healing for so many will be long and costly. Some Australians will have to come to terms with altered or scared bodies. Some others with the death of ones they loved deeply and desperately. Still others with the searing memories that may hold them for a very long time.

All of us will need to re-evaluate our lives, for we know now that we live in uncertain and less secure times. This constrains us to be more certain about our relationships and our priorities. Overarching this re-evaluation may be the opportunity to rethink what we most fundamentally believe, especially about the nature of God.

The Christlike God of the Christian Church is a God who is expended in suffering and anguish in solidarity with humankind, and who soaks up all the poison of evil so that goodness, love and hope are the enduring experiences open to humankind.

One young Australian doctor who was surfing in Bali and who acted immediately as a volunteer in the hospital at Kuta spoke in a television interview not only of the mind-numbing horror of the condition of the victims, but of seeing Ahumanity at its best@ in the way the victims dealt with their woundedness and cared for each other. There is in the midst of such carnage the wonder of goodness that provokes us to better humanity and reaches towards God.

We need to remember those wondrous acts as we absorb this tragedy. For those are intimations of what is most real -faith, hope and love.