Scotch College

Moving the Goal Posts, AgainChaplain’s Reflection

We watched as the electric Toro moved across the Main Oval balancing the long posts and we knew that the seasons were changing. At Scotch the people who move the goal posts are Mick Smith and his Ground Staff team. There is something comforting about this rhythm of school life; the switch from summer to winter sports is a feature as regular as the fall of leaves. Of course there are some confusing elements, winter tennis, seven-a-side (summer rugby!), and the like, but overall the change is obvious. We could almost be persuaded that the advance of time is circular, and comforting, but we know there is a disquieting linear element.

Perhaps I am just especially susceptible as I get round on crutches, waiting for a stress fracture to heal, but I felt vividly confronted with this aspect of change. As Moderator and former minister of the parish I was invited to speak at the 100th anniversary service of the little Presbyterian Church in Warburton. I found myself again and again talking with parents who, it turned out, were the children when I was there in the early 1980s. Sometimes, with relief, I recognised them, but often they had to remind me of whose kids they were.

This almost imperceptible change invites reverie. Leonard Cohen gave expression to it early on in a song called Passing through:

I saw Jesus on the cross on a hill called Calvary
Do you hate mankind for what they done to you?
He said,"Talk of love not hate,things to do - it's getting late.
I've so little time and I am only passing through.

Another great troubadour of our times, Bob Dylan, wrote a beautiful benediction for a child, sung best by Joan Baez:

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young.

It’s not surprising that both Dylan and Cohen should echo the themes of the ancient prophet. Isaiah, the evangelical prophet, envisions a time when those who wait on the Lord will be ‘forever young’ he says they ‘will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint’. (Isaiah 40:31).

Cohen carries a more urgent if less biblically expressed element of this into
his recent Villanelle for our time:

This is the faith from which we start:
Men shall know commonwealth again
From bitter searching of the heart.
We loved the easy and the smart,
But now,with keener hand and brain,
We rise to play a greater part.

So, the poets remind us, the posts are in again, but it is for the ‘08 season. Time has moved on, the players have changed and the old teams, older now, move on. They, and we, will surely fade into memory. On what ‘strong foundation’ might we yet rise to play a greater part? In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, another lyrical Jewish poet and prophet, claims to be that foundation. Incredibly, his words ring true and can still reach, enrich and transform us. In him we embrace love itself