You come to appreciate it best when you find you’re losing it

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

Dudley Clendinen is dying. He’s 66 years of age and has Lou Gehrig’s disease. There is no cure.

“I sometimes call it Lou,” Dudley wrote in July 9’s The New York Times, “because the familiar seems less threatening.”

He describes the disease as one where the nerves and muscles pulse and twitch and progressively die. “From the outside, it looks like the ripple of piano keys in the muscles under my skin. From the inside, it feels like anxious butterflies trying to get out.”

There are a couple of types of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Dudley has the worst kind, the one affecting his ability to breathe. That brings death sooner.

He’s discovered it has changed his focus. “We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die.”

I have difficulty believing, as Dudley writes, that facing death is “one of life’s greatest and most absorbing thrills and challenges.” But I can see how it would capture your attention. “This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left. That is the weird blessing of Lou. There is no escape, and nothing much to do. It’s liberating.”

Sometimes you have to think about death to appreciate life. Perhaps you come to appreciate life best when you find you’re losing it.

Dudley tells how he has come to appreciate a Leonard Cohen song, “Dance Me to the End of Love.” He writes, “That’s the way I feel about this time. I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love.”

I’m thinking we should discover these dancing, spinning around, happy rhythms of life earlier than at the end.

The key: build a sense of belonging through social networks

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

Attending church helps you be a better neighbour than those who don’t go to church, if . . . . And the “if” is fascinating. Here’s the list: If you have close friends at church; if you discuss religion frequently with your family and friends; and if you take part in small groups at church.

In sociology-speak, these are “extremely powerful predictors of the entire range of generosity, good neighbourliness, and civic engagement . . . not just of religious good works.” This is the finding of Robert Putman (he wrote Bowling Alone) and David Campbell from their Faith Matters survey in the US.

In their book American Grace, they note devout people who go to church and sit alone aren’t much more neighbourly than those who don’t go to church at all. It comes from “chatting with friends after the service or joining a Bible study group, not from listening to a sermon or fervently believing in God.”

They suspect an atheist who becomes involved in the social life of a congregation is more likely to volunteer to serve at a soup kitchen than the fervent believer who prays alone.

In brief: “It is religious belonging that matters for neighbourliness, not religious believing.”

Their findings intrigued them, so they checked other national surveys. The surveys confirmed their findings—with a “kind of robust correlation . . . uncommon in the social sciences.”

The key is involvement in a religious social network. This is significant. In a follow-up survey, they discovered those who had loosened their ties to their church network had also reduced their civic involvement.

We’re commanded to love our neighbours (see Romans 13:9). These findings suggest that might well start with building a sense of belonging at church through developing social networks.

Religious freedom: worth defending but within boundaries

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

When Carnita Matthews accused a police officer of threatening to rip off her burqa so he could identify her (June 9), the burqa again became an issue. Some felt it strengthened their campaign to ban the burqa. Others were more concerned about the actions of police officers.

Fortunately, the police video recording the incident showed the officer acting calmly and unthreateningly. Ms Matthews has apologised.

Behind it all, though, is the bigger question of religious freedom—the freedom to believe and practice your religion in ways meaningful to you.

Yesterday’s The Sunday Telegraph featured an interview with the New South Wales Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione under the headline, “Show us your face.”

“This is not about disrespect; this has got nothing to do with religion,” he said. He argued there were times when whatever covered the face—a veil, a motorcycle helmet, a ski balaclava on the snowfields—needed to come off for identification purposes.

So, where do you draw the line with religious freedom? When does risk or threat to the community or, in this case, the ability to identify an individual, take a higher priority than the freedom to practice religion? It’s obvious when life or security (individual and national) is threatened, intervention is needed.

I don’t know of any mainstream religion that would disagree with this. And in the Matthew’s case, the Islamic Council clarified its position: “Islamically, for purposes of legally identifying an individual, a woman can remove her face covering, in the presence of a male.”

Sadly, in our multicultural, multiethnic and multi-religious nation, some are still suspicious of those who act or dress differently. Some even label them as extremists. A few suspect under every burqa lurks a terrorist.

That’s nonsense—and should be treated as such.

Absolute freedom for all is impossible. Only a few ever achieve absolute freedom—several of them now symbols of evil (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot etc). Religious freedom is worth defending and celebrating, but it will always have boundaries. The Matthews incident demonstrated that.