Nine hundred people attended St Brigid’s Catholic Church in Marrickville on Saturday night for a Bali memorial service. Some knew the community members who died in Bali – Debbie Borger and her daughter Abbey, 13, Robyn Webster and Louisa Zervos.
I was one of the many who didn’t know them. I’m new in Marrickville, and a loner to boot. Someone I met briefly at a local cafe a while ago rang last week to suggest I come along. Regular church goers said there were an awful lot of people there they hadn’t seen before. Abbey was a student at the local Catholic school. The school opened and blessed a garden for her today. Since her death, the school’s theme has been peace.
The beauty of the mostly Tongan choir’s voice was itself enough to make you cry. Marrickville is the first stop for many migrants to Australia and it felt like every nationality on earth was in church.
My father wanted to be a Methodist minister and preached his way through his teens. He lost his belief when he applied his logical engineering mind to his religion. He sent his children to Sunday School, and I lost my belief when my teacher didn’t answer my question: “If God tells us not to murder why did he kill all all those people by flooding the river after Moses crossed it with the chosen people?”
I wasn’t planning to go to Church. I found myself doing so after reading an article in the Good Weekend by Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism W.W.Norton). Berman is a left winger who supported the overthrow of Saddam but despised Bush’s case for war, which he believes was so mendacious and incompetent the world was now in greater danger than before the war. Berman has studied the works of the Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb, hanged by Nassar in Egypt in 1966:
Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep. In the shade of the Qur’an is a masterwork, in its fashion. Al-Qaeda and its sister organisations are not merely popular, wealthy, global, well connected and institutionally sophisticated. These groups stand on a set of ideas, too, and some of these ideas may be pathological, which is an old story in modern politics; yet, even so, the ideas are powerful. We should have known that, of course. But we should have known many things…
‘The truly dangerous element in American life, he believed, was not capitalism or foreign policy or racism or the unfortunate cult of women’s independence. Instead, it lay in the separation of church and state. As Qutb saw it, under Christianity’s influence Europeans began to picture God on one side and science on the other. Religion over here, intellectual inquiry over there. The church against science, the scientists against the church. Everything that Islam knew to be one, the Christian Church divided into two. And, under these terrible pressures, the European mind finally split asunder. It was the fateful divorce between the sacred and the secular.
Their scientific and technical achievements allowed the Europeans to dominate the world. And the Europeans inflicted their “hideous schizophrenia” on peoples and cultures in every corner of the globe. That was the origin of modern misery – the anxiety in contemporary society, the sense of drift, the purposelessness, the craving for false pleasures. The crisis of modern life was felt by every thinking person in the Christian West. But then again, Europe’s leadership of mankind inflicted that crisis on every thinking person in the Muslim world as well, which could only make the experience doubly painful – an alienation that was also a humiliation.
That was Qutb’s analysis. In writing about modern life, he put his finger on something that every thinking person can recognise, if only vaguely – the feeling that human nature and modern life are at odds…
And so, Qutb produced his manifesto for Islamic revolution:
We keep learning how well educated these people are, how many of them come from the upper class, how wealthy they are. And there is no reason to be surprised. These people are in possession of a powerful philosophy, which is Sayyid Qutb’s. They are in possession of a gigantic work of literature, which is his In the shade of the Qur’an.
These people believe that, in the entire world, they alone are preserving Islam from extinction. They feel they are benefiting the world, even if they are committing random massacres. They are certainly not worried about death. Qutb gave these people a reason to yearn for death. Wisdom, piety, death and immortality are, in his vision, the same.
It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas. It would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb.
But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of co-ercion and non-coercion.
This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The anti-terrorists had better speak sanely of deep things.
Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, for better or worse.
But who will speak of the sacred and the secular, of the physical world and the spiritual world? Who will defend liberal ideas against the enemy of liberal ideas? Who will defend liberal principles in spite of liberal society’s failures?
President George W Bush, in his speech to Congress a few days after the September 11 attacks, announced that he was going to wage a war of ideas. He has done no such thing. He is not the man for that.
Philosophers and religious leaders will have to do that on their own. Are they doing so? Armies are in motion, but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion?
There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding – one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.
I went to Church.
***
No media. Such a relief that the Church decided not to publicise the event. No outer eye – exploitative or otherwise – to milk it, sentimentalise it or reduce it to just another ‘package’. Regulars said there were an awful lot of people there who’d never been to St Brigid’s before. Of many faiths. The power of word of mouth.
The priest, Father Tom McDonough, asked us to hold each other’s hands while we said the Lords Prayer, I held the hand of an old man on my right and a young woman on my left. We sang this hymn:
Let there be peace on earth
and let it begin with me
let there be peace on earth
the peace that was meant to be
with God as our father
children all are we
let us walk with each other
in perfect harmony
Let peace begin with me
let this be the moment now
with every step I take
let this be my solemn vow
***
Parish priest Father McDonough delivered this homily:
There have been so many reminders these last weeks as October 12th drew nearer; so many articles, documentaries, examining how the survivors of that terrible bombing have survived, asking families how they have managed to get on with their lives without the presence of the loved ones who had made life worth living.
And as sentences were handed down these last weeks on those who did the bombing and those who did the planning there comes the realisation that retribution and revenge can never bring satisfaction.
As you families dealt so much more immediately with the intensity of your pain and grief and loss, like everyone else in Australia we in the parish and in the local community also have had to come to terms with what had happened.
Those of us there will not forget the crowds at St. Clement’s for Robyn or the cloud of butterflies released outside the Church; nor the crowds here at St. Brigid’s for Debby and Abbey. I will never forget Debbie and Abbey’s funeral mass here and the procession down Livingston Road passing by the whole of Casimir College standing silently and weeping in a Guard of Honour. Mr. McCormack told me that afterwards the whole school walked back to the college in complete silence, gathered in their homes rooms in complete silence, trying to absorb what had happened.
Two weeks ago at our Year 12 graduation, our school captains reflected that Year 12’s primary responsibility this year was trying to help the school community deal with tragedy years before such young people should ever have to face it. They felt they had to be a model for the school community, grappling between anger and the desire for revenge and the gospel values that they had been taught.
Only those who were there, only those of you who had lost someone, can stand in each other’s shoes and really know what it is like, Most of us don’t know how you have survived.
The rest of us, all we have been able to do is to be near, we have tried to stand close, to be there if you needed us. Being there for each other is all we could do.
One thing Bali taught us is that we can only survive by supporting each other and looking after each other. We have learned that family and friends are all we’ve got.
Community after community, colleges and schools municipalities and country towns, football clubs and surf clubs, factories and firms have been brought together, helping each other grieve, helping each other accept what can’t be changed, helping each other not to be destroyed by the pain helping each other to live.
We’ve been reminded how careful we have to be never to take things for granted, about what the important things in life really are, and I guess we have also learned how unimportant much really is. We’ve also learned that we have to go on doing the ordinary things, the normal things, the daily things, and not to let hate or bitterness or despair or distrust or suspicion bring us down.
If they did, then the terrorists would really have won – they would have destroyed not only the people we’ve loved but also the love and the laughter. They’d have stopped us from living.
So many people who died in Bali were so young, but I know at our school one thing we learned – how even such a short life as Abbey’s was in fact really full and that she had touched so many people in such a short time.
I said at Abbey and Debbie’s funeral that they had so much living to do and that it was up to us to do that living for them. And it is true of them and of all who died at Kuta, Bali: We can shed tears that they are gone or we can smile because they have lived.
We can close our eyes and pray that they’ll come back or we can open our eyes and see all they’ve left.
Our hearts can be empty because we can’t see them or we can be full of the love we’ve shared.
We can turn our back on tomorrow and live yesterday or we can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
We can remember them and only that they’ve gone or we can cherish their memory and let it live on.
We can cry and close our mind, be empty and turn our back or we can do what Debbie, Abbey, Robyn and Louisa would want: smile, open our eyes, keep loving and go on.