For enquiries regarding the Sydney Community or to speak with a priest, please contact:

Rev. Lisa Devine 0401 367 808

REGULAR SERVICES
Please refer to the programme.

Services & events are held at:

The Christian Community
8 Montague Street
BALMAIN NSW 2041
christiancommunity.sydney@gmail.com

Management Committee:

The Management Committee of the Sydney Congregation contact:

John Shaw Ph. (02) 47573731

Gospel Readings: HERE

.

MAY 2011

_________________________________________________

A Friendly Universe

According to Albert Einstein, the single most important decision any of us will ever have to make is whether or not to believe that the universe is friendly. When Martha Beck discovered that she was pregnant it did not seem like a friendly gift from the universe. It was anything but planned. Yet she had been dimly aware of an “elegant behind-the scenes string-pulling” even as this child was conceived despite all sensible precautions. She surprised herself with a decision to keep the child.

“By the time the five minutes had elapsed and the pregnancy test results were undeniably positive, I knew that I would not be scheduling an abortion. That was all I knew. I wasn’t sure why I had made the decision to continue the pregnancy. I could feel the puppeteers around me, sounding their invisible bells in some inexplicable but irresistible cele-bration, and I strongly suspected that this meant I was losing my mind. I checked to see if I was still pro-choice. I was.

I examined my internalized schedule for the upcoming year: my teaching, caring for Katie, intense classwork, John’s travel. This was simply not the time for a baby, I thought. But at the word baby, the joyous carol swelled again, and the magic filled my eyes with tears. I stood up, teetered a little, and went to tell John that he was going to become a father a second time.”

As well as much illness, the pregnancy was marked by unusual experiences and inexplicable episodes which she did not even dare to confide to her husband lest he think she was losing her mind. In fact one of the first intimations of her pregnancy arrived through a disabled passerby who tells that the baby is good and to take care of it. Signs and wonders from behind the scenes gave her “the eerie impression that my life was completely under control – but not my control”. An ‘irrational certainty” competed with the ‘rationalist credibility’ which she was reluctant to give up. Yet “the story will not stop unfolding and will not stop asking me to tell it”.

In a visionary dream during the pregnancy an ageless youth handed her a letter with words in an unknown tongue that give her a sense of coming home after years in alien territory and of deep comfort. “A brilliant golden light, like the reflection of the setting sun over water, flashed and sparkled from every mark and line. It was as though the pen had not put down pigment but scraped away material reality to reveal something inexpressibly beautiful shining beneath it.” She ‘knows’ that this youth is her unborn child.

“The people who spend their lives working with disabled children are the most accepting, loving , optimistic-but- realistic human beings you could ever meet, To them, no child, no matter how disfigured or inept, deserves anything less than unconditional acceptance. Adam’s therapists probably don’t know that I, with my three Harvard degrees and my relatively sound body, got more from their sessions with Adam than did Adam himself. As I sat watching them, all the parts of me that I had sent to the Deepfreeze years before thawed, and stretched and began to consider the idea that the world might not be altogether hostile.”

A strange woman once gave Martha a message from Adam: “He says that you shouldn’t be so worried. He says you’ll never be hurt as much by being open as you have been hurt by remaining closed.”

St. John offers a baptism into a friendly universe that radiates with goodness, beauty and truth, despite all rational evidence to the contrary.

Lisa Devine

From: Martha Beck, 1999, Expecting Adam, Random House, New York.