Scotch College

Re-Imaging Ourselves; Re-Shaping the Future.Chaplain’s Reflection

Scotch boys and Ruyton girls performed superbly in The Insect Play. My congratulations to all involved in staging the performance. I thought it was a big challenge to ask the boys to be butterflies – did I imagine they managed other insects more easily?

Because the theme was dark indeed, I decided to check up on the authors, the brothers Capek, Josef and Karel, so I went to Wikipedia. There I learned of the avante-garde movement in Prague. The Insect Play of 1921 was the brothers’ best known work although Karel had a 1923 play – R.U.R. – with themes prefiguring The Matrix!

“The avant-garde movement adopted an explicitly critical attitude toward, and asserts its distance from, the dominant values of that culture. In this way it attempts to make society re-evaluate what it hold as real and true.” Well one could see this in the play with the Tramp alternately glorying in, and then despairing of, his humanity.

It is clearly very important to be able to critique the dominant attitudes and values of our culture. Extracts from Bill Simon's book, Back on the Block, published in the Good Weekend (The Age 23/5) made one feel such critique is imperative. He records not only what appears as criminal brutality in the boy’s home in which he was incarcerated, but the then government's policy of intentionally destroying indigenous family ties.

The Jenny Macklin ‘takeover’ in the Alice Springs indigenous camps situation (The Age, 25/5) suggests we are no nearer an understanding and resolution of cultural issues today. How are we to adequately critique our contemporary culture? Perhaps the movie Samson and Delilah will help us think this through.

Those of us who embrace Christianity know the New Testament places firmly in the position of having begun as the people of God, but not yet being what we should be. We are in transition. We are being re-shaped in the pattern of Christ.

Of course, there are forces that would shape us radically differently. Leonard Cohen sings I'm guided by a signal in the heavens/I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin/I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons/first we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin. We could add to this list of powerful guides by which people are misdirected to harmful destinies. Do we need a new avante-garde movement to fully expose them?

The apostle Paul says to the Christians in Rome “Don’t let the world press you into its mould” (Romans 12:1,2). In his estimation we need our minds transformed in union with Christ. To do this we must listen to God’s Spirit, speaking through the Bible, and to each other. How else will we learn to love God and our neighbour?