Breakfast with Bes
Yesterday morning I had coffee with Bes, one of the most fascinating of friends. When I first met Bes she was in the Australian Army in the 51st Battalion in Cairns, which seemed an incongruous place for her to be (though any preconceptions I had of military personnel have long since been shattered). In previous years she had danced for the British Royal Ballet, in subsequent years she went back to London to study spiritual education. She now works in Marketing at Australia’s only privately-owned monastic town, New Norcia, having moved into that role post being the education manager.
Talking to Bes is always stretching, though our beliefs have diverged in more recent years such that an impasse is often reached when the essence of the conversation is the infallibility, authority or inerrancy of Scripture – or at least that is what I perceive as its essence. When I visited New Norcia a couple few years ago, I quite strongly differed with this Benedictine Abbot’s wielding of the bible and a fashioning of God after our own preference. Yesterday we came down to discussing what it looks to be a Christian – which sounds, perhaps, like a bread and butter conversation, but what is to be said of the apparent "fruits of the spirit" in those who don’t acknowledge or haven’t surrendered their life to Christ? What does "spirituality" as an abstract good actually mean? ...
I always walk away from these conversations having to reaffirm my own position at certain battle lines. I also always walk away from these conversations feeling dissatisfied with the state of my own earthly pursuits, that mine is an unstimulating, uninfluencing existence - most particularly in recent years as what I do has drifted far from all passions. This I am not always so sure what to do with. Yesterday it compelled me to take the 3 for 2 Borders voucher and go and purchase (I must do something about his extra bank account I seem to have for books, like that second stomach people have for icecream) The Writing Life and For the Time Being by Annie Dillard, as well as To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (people ought to be shocked because that is modern fiction, and I simply don’t do modern fiction – I put back Romola and Daniel Deronda for these books!). So, I am not sure whether or not I am expecting the course of my life to be altered. While we all wait and see here are some photos from New Norcia, a most intriguing little piece of 19th century Spain in the middle of the West Australian bush.
