From time to time in life, disillusionment can really settle upon us.  Why can’t we and others live up to the ideals that are important to us? Why can’t things just be as they should be? Why can’t people live as we want them to?  We can be left wondering, are our ideals ever possible?  Are they ever able to be realised?  However, one of the most radical truths we will ever learn in life is that which is expressed by the Australian novelist, Les Murray, “The mystery of life is not solved by success, but by failure, a perpetual becoming.” We can spend our whole life learning the meaning of this.  It confuses…

Anxiety about identity may, in the future, well be observed as one of the defining characteristics of our own age.  The curious paradox is that whilst, on the one hand, perhaps as never before, we have the opportunity to celebrate individuality and diversity perhaps as never before have we been less sure about who we are. In the musical The Gondaliers Gilbert and Sullivan once suggested ‑ rather prophetically I think of our own time ‑ when, “everybody is somebody, nobody is anybody; if everybody is abnormal, we don’t need to worry about anybody.”  And so, we have fallen into the story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and…

In his novel, The Great World, the Australian writer, David Malouf talks of ‘the little sacraments of daily existence – “all those unique and repeatable events, . . . movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the beginning.”[1]  Malouf is alluding to the flow of life that goes on underneath the façade of life, under all the things that occur through the exercise of…

Once upon a time there was an old man who lived on the outskirts of a town.[1]  He had lived there so long that no one knew who he was or where he had come from.  Some said that once he had been very powerful, a king, but that was long ago.  Others said no, he was once very wealthy and generous, but without much now.  Others said, no, he was wise and influential, and some even said he was holy.  But the children just thought he was a stupid old man and they made his life miserable.  They threw stones at his windows, left dead cats on his doorstep, ripped up the garden, and shouted…