Kon Karapanagiotidis grew up in a small town in rural Victoria, the son of an immigrant family – refugee grandparents who had escaped war and struggle in their homeland. He was different in a school where everyone else looked, sounded and acted the same. His name was long and difficult to say – too many letters and syllables.
As I wandered the city streets, I pondered. I pondered the decline of the engagement in religious life in our fair land. I explored, in my mind, the ways in which our world has shifted these last several decades.
If you don’t know where you are going, you will not know the way. Fairly obvious I suppose but the reality for most people in life. Do we know where we’re going? Do we know the way to where we think we are heading?
Danish philosopher/theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, told several stories growing up in rural Denmark – many about geese! One story was about the geese who used to make their home on his childhood farm. Each spring he would watch as a new gaggle of goslings hatched and grow.
Greenday I walk a lonely road/The only one that I have ever known Don't know where it goes/But it's home to me, and I walk alone I walk this empty street/On the Boulevard of Broken Dreams Where the city sleeps/And I'm the only one, and I walk alone I walk alone, I walk alone/I walk alone, I walk a-lone My shadow's the only one that walks beside me My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating Sometimes, I wish someone out there will find me/'Til then, I walk alone Al Dubin and Harry Warren I walk along the street of sorrow/The boulevard of broken dreams Where gigolo and gigolette/Can take a kiss without regret So they forget their broken dreams You laugh tonight and cry tomorrow/When you behold your shattered dreams And gigolo and gigolette/Awake to find their eyes are wet With tears that tell of broken dreams
I read a story of a couple who went to the theatre – Tony Campolo and his wife. The show was The Man of La Mancha, and the enigmatic Don Quixote. As they sat in wonderful seats near the front, taking in the story and music, the man was distracted by the woman next to him. She was whispering to her husband, but the hushed tones grew louder: ‘Stop that. You’re embarrassing me. Stop it!’ The man surreptitiously leaned forward and glanced sideways to see a man dressed in a fine suite and tie, very respectable in every way.
A few years ago, there were a couple of different houses built in our street. I watched with fascination as they dug around 70 holes to provide deep and stable foundations. I remember one section where the hole digger (technical term for the large boring drill) kept going down deeper and deeper.
I had a child in the Scripture class I taught some years ago. He was quite hyperactive and quite smart. It was clear he was largely bored with Scripture, which was a combined year 6 Protestant group that 3 of us co-led.
There’s a bloke that used to stand on a corner opposite Westfields Parramatta. There, at the lights, he spruiks his particular line of religious belief with passion and desperation. Occasionally someone will sidle up and engage him in a conversation that encourages and affirms his hard-line, narrow stance. Occasionally someone who had time and energy to take him on did so, but he gave no ground. His size and fierce, passionate manner was intimidating, and most people simply ignored him and couldn’t wait to cross the road.
This morning, like all mornings, our 8 year-old Short-haired Border Collie X Cattle Dog was very keen to go for a walk. As soon as I am up and about, he is persistently nudging or licking me and then looks into the laundry where his lead is. He repeats this in the late afternoon as well, if I am around. Nico loves his daily walk(s)!
Most of our lives are lived in the in-between places, what this week’s story will call the borderlands. This is the place between the places, the moment between the moments. It is the place or journey between the destinations. On the larger scale it might be the journey between our first and last breath. But along this way there are many ‘betwixts and betweens’ or borderland spaces – it is where life is mostly lived.
Theologian Walter Wink (1935–2012) recalls a tense moment in Selma in which a reminder to love their enemies shocked the conscience of the crowd and forged a nonviolent path forward: King so imbued this understanding of nonviolence into his followers that it became the ethos of the entire civil rights movement.