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Savage subsoil seeded with Spirit’s fruit?
Tim Shearer spoke to me recently about the way the increasingly ‘raucous and rude’ behaviour of Aussie fans at major sporting events. The article he drew to my attention depicted a loud-mouthed, look-at-me, I-want-it-now society. At first I wondered if Tim was just joining the charge of grumpy-old-men led by NSW Chief Justice, James Spigelman, who last year lamented ‘the prevalence of boorish behaviour and lack of ordinary manners’. However, an even younger man had remarked to me recently that the seven deadly sins had become the new virtues. And when I considered it did appear that if not virtues, they had become mere behavioural problems, requiring treatment.
All this came flooding back as I listened to our Ambassador to the US interviewed as a special guest on Radio 774. He was gracious and unaffected by his eminent role and invited first name familiarity, which his interviewers loved, however he ran into difficulty when asked whom he found most impressive in Washington; there are so many impressive people in the political and business world he inhabits. He hesitated to name any one person, but when pushed named President George W Bush. This clearly riled one of the two interviewers who immediately asked ‘Who was the second most impressive?’ I was struck by the interviewer’s sustained efforts to denigrate the Ambassador’s choice. He clearly expected only bad could be said of the American President. The interview faltered.
Missing from the interviewer was a certain civility. A little grace, courtesy and patience would have been more in order. I found myself thinking for the second time that day of the ‘fruit of the Spirit’; of love joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness gentleness, humility and self-control; mentioned in the Bible passage, Galatians chapter 5, that had been read in assembly that morning.
Year ten students study William Golding’s Lord of the Flies . The story is about a group of boys who survive a crash on an island, and rapidly loose all traces of civility and social cohesion. Golding presents a bleak view of the shallowness of ‘civilization’ rather akin to the views of Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness . To both authors ‘civilisation’ is a shallow veneer over a savage and selfish heart.
In 1841, much earlier than these writers, the Reverend James Forbes wrote about the aborigines in Port Phillip District. They were, he said, formerly ‘sole lords’ of the domain; but now the actions of the white settlers against them betray the utmost ‘savagery’. Although, no doubt, he had many of the foibles of his generation, in this correspondence he stands out as dignifying the indigenous peoples and sensitive to the brutality of his fellow migrants. What opened him to this radically humane perception? It was the influence of Jesus, producing in his life the Spirit’s fruit.
In William Golding’s story there is one boy who has a positive outlook. His name is Simon. He is notable in helping the ‘littluns’ when fruit on a tree was beyond their reach. Simon kindly brought it down to them. Alas, in the end he is killed by the other boys in a savage dance orgy. So Simon appears as a Christ-figure. With our civility transparently thin at times, the fruit of the Spirit is uncannily beyond our reach. Simon provides for the least significant people in the story in the same way as Christ brings the fruit of the Spirit to those who seek it.
It is to be hoped that our good manners and social cohesion are not merely a veneer, but a consequence of the fruit of the Spirit seeded deep in Scotch soil.
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