Words From The Edge

It’s a new year, summertime in Australia, time to slow down, find a shady spot and read a whodunit, and try to escape questions that I’d rather leave back in the year just gone:     

Why are my children so different one to the other?

Will the war in Ukraine come to an end soon?

What does 2023 hold for me and mine?

Will Covid ever go away?

Where is God in all this?

Some years have been unforgettable. I spent my working life as a woman in what was basically a world of religious males. As the years rolled on I realized that I wanted a voice in that world, a voice that spoke from a feminine perspective. I bought a computer, mastered the necessary skills and began writing. In 2010 my youngest brother offered to set me up with a website of my own. I registered it under the name Tarella Spirituality. Two months later I sent my first post out into the world.

Tarella was a farm on the edge of the Victorian Mallee country where my mother grew up. The vast paddocks that surrounded the house and drew a line across the horizon must have merged into my DNA, because writing pushes me to look beyond the everyday and ordinary and into the wide spiritual dimensions of life, looking for the sacred hidden there.

 I write about everyday things, the bits and pieces that litter my eight decades. I write as a woman, an Australian, a mother, a lay person, a catholic. I write, in language that is kitchen-table friendly and taps into familiar everyday experiences. I write to pick up where religious education classes or Sunday school left off, to fill the spaces where a lifetime of liturgy and homilies has got lost in religious terminology.   

Tarella lived on in that website until 2018. That year I posted my hundredth piece on Tarella Spirituality while gradually and painfully running in a new knee and publishing my book, A Gentle Unfolding : Circling and Spiralling into Meaning.

I was aware that whenever I wrote anything I was constantly questioning catholic doctrines and traditions that once I had taken on face value, now I was finding them neither life-giving nor relevant. Instead of being close to the religious centre of my life I had drifted out to the edges, in touch, but not real close either.

An opportunity presented itself and I closed Tarella Spirituality.com, replacing it with a new site, more appropriately  titled Words from the Edge.com.au.

These days as I write, I often look back to the certainty of the centre, to the communities where once I found comfort and meaning in the shared beliefs and practices and the words that linked them. And I miss all that. It was safe, something that an edge, and the untrodden space beyond it, can never be. It’s uncharted territory and there’s no GPS. But I’m finding that the silence there can free me to hear the core message of my religious faith in new, relevant and creative ways.

Thank you to those who have encouraged me to keep writing. And as there is a lot of space out there beyond the horizon, I’d be delighted to meet with you and other like-minded God-seekers as we share words from the edge.

Judith Scully judith@judithscully.com.au

A Gentle Unfolding : Circling and Spiralling into Meaning (Available online from major bookshops)  

All the best stories begin at the beginning. Like Christmas. After a bit of preamble the Gospel writer Luke began his version of Jesus’ birth-day story in chapter 2.

And what a story it is!

Set in an occupied country, its people suffering the indignities and restrictions of a bully-boy emperor who had ordered a headcount of his subjects. There’s a young couple, miles away from home and family, with a baby ready to be born any time soon and suitable accommodation impossible to find.

Then the simple words: “. . . the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first born.” That’s the point where Luke can’t contain the wonder of this new-born, wrapped in the customary swaddling clothes and laid on a bed of straw.

He struggles to find the words to tell his readers about the wonder of a baby boy, born in Bethlehem cave. The images fly off the page – sheep and angels, shepherds, stars and music, as he rejoices in  this baby who would grow up to reveal himself as the Promised One.

Chapter 2 of Matthew’s gospel goes even further than Luke. He tells a story of wise men, maybe even kings, of a new star in the sky, a long dangerous journey, and it reads like a Net Flicks plot. This baby would grow up to be a focus of dissension.  

As century followed century, the ever growing groups of Christ followers kept Jesus’ baby story alive. The integrated it into their cultural world, they rejoiced in the stars that papered their wintery night skies and gave a new meaning to the turn of the seasons. As for the 25^th December – well, it was probably due to the weather. Way back in the 3^rd century that date marked the birthday of the sun – a convenient date to link a pagan custom with a Christian one. 

And now it’s Christmas time. Where I live the sun is shining. Everywhere I go there is sparkle and colour. Wherever I shop there is a Chrismassey musical background on repeat. Greetings invariably end with Christmas wishes. Even on the supermarket checkout. Children are excited and the adults are hopeful.

It’s lovely to see how 2,000 years on Jesus’ birth-day is still celebrated, even if the original story has been largely swallowed up by big business and a well-built man with a white beard and a penchant for dressing in red.

And I’m doing my best to like it better than I actually do. I watch the News and the latest bulletins from Ukraine, and I remember Bethlehem and Luke’s lovely imagery where banks of angels sang about peace, that peace the people of Ukraine ache for. Across the world children pay the cost that accompanies family violence and political neglect while we celebrate the birth of the Christ child.

Enjoy the good things of Christmas, spread the peace it brings.  And try to find some time to re-read the story of that first Christmas.  Even better, tell a child the story.

Judith               judith@judithscully.com.au