The Gift I Never Asked For

Love won’t be real or tested unless we somehow live close and open-heartedly with those who have no safe place to lay their heads. The greatest lesson I have learnt from Wayside Chapel, is that I know very little about love. My degree in Social Work didn’t teach me this, and other training I have received has only really shown me how to obey and conform, not how to love. I’m still trying every day to learn how to love, and how to resist closing my heart when the pain gets overwhelming.

Religion tends to be for people who fear hell, spirituality is for those who’ve been through hell, and so my gurus have taught me that spirituality holds the pain close and is the path to compassion. A long-time friend said to me recently, “I can never forget the pain, because it drives me to others, it grounds me, and sometimes it even disables me, but it never leaves me, and I wouldn’t want it to, it’s the gift I never asked for, but it’s the one I’ve got.” Love brings with it suffering, of course, but joy too, giving us a little foretaste of what life could and should be like, and helps invigorate us for the journey ahead.

During NAIDOC week we are celebrating the theme “For Our Elders.” A culture that idolises being “forever 21” isn’t a healthy one and provides conditions where elder abuse can sadly emerge. This year’s wonderful theme from the first peoples of this land encourages us to care for our elders, and to hold them in high place, where their wisdom is celebrated as essential to building healthy and thriving families.

Tonight, Wayside are hosting some brilliant young guests from The Uluru Youth Network, who will be presenting on the Voice to Parliament. I’m looking forward to being part of the conversation that’s driving historical change in Australia. We so often lack “a safe space” for conversations that matter. A safe space isn’t one where dissenting views are silenced, it is one where all contributions are respected. Are we losing our ability to give that respect? It is essential for us to be a free society. The English philosopher John Stuart Mill once wrote that one of the worst offences against freedom is “to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral.” We can do better, but we need to unlearn a lot of bad habits if we are to do so, and I hope tonight is an opportunity for us to live that new world into existence.

A few years ago, I saw one of our most experienced and compassionate team leaders sitting in the gutter with a young man, who had his head in his hands as he wept. He was covered in vomit because he was withdrawing from heroin, and the pain was overwhelming him. He couldn’t see a future for himself in that moment, but his feet had taken him to us, and not a dealer’s house. This morning he bounded up to me - he hasn’t been here for over 5 years - to say hello. He was in town for a job for NAIDOC Week and he was proudly showing his son, “Where I used to be, not where I am.” To see a move from despair to a future filled with hope is a testament to his courage and to our people who live by the motto, “We’d rather be lost with you than saved without you”.