The Whitest White Country On Earth

Alt Title:  Terra Nullius, White Australia, and Immigration

You sit there, half paying attention to the old lady reading out the scriptures.  2:45, the last bell rang some 15 minutes ago.  You sit there in that ground floor classroom, with its posters of Macbeth, and Hamlet.  You try to listen to that old lady, but you zone out.  The words wash over you, they flow into the background.

You wonder how you got there in the first place.  Why, you didn't even know the difference between Catholic and Protestant.  You dimly recall a childhood friend mentioning how he was an Anglican.  How Anglicans were meant to hate Catholics.  You didn't get it then, and you don't get it now.  You never went to church anyways.  So when highschool rolled over, you decided to join scripture class.  

By the 3rd or 4th year, people started to leave.  You and a friend remained, possibly out of guilt.  After all, it didn't seem fair to leave them there, seemingly to preach to an empty room, all alone.  They were kindly old people.  They were faithful, yes, but they weren't judgemental.  They would tell you of the Jesuits, the White Rose, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  They would read from the New Testament, and gently remind you of the necessity to forgive, the necessity to treat your fellow men as equals.

You stopped going to scripture.  You never really had faith, anyways.  Never felt that connection to God, never felt anything when the praying began.  In the end, you sheepishly explained to the teachers that you had decided to quit scripture.  Handed them a forged letter from your parents; you didn't want to stir up trouble at home.  Your parents weren't even religious anyways.  In the end, you never said goodbye to those kindly old folk.  

In those intervening years, you'd hear of religion being used to justify absurdities.  The ever present rambling of 'Judeo-Christian' values, the hammering in of 'Australian values', 'Christian values', and the supposed incompatibility of those we've bombed.

But religion, at least to you, will always be that tepid classroom, those afternoons spent half asleep, listening to the drone of scriptures, the drag of silence during prayer.  It will always be the patience, the kindliness of those priests, those men and women of God, who talked to everyone, even if they didn't listen.  Those men and women who firmly, who deeply believed that we should treat others as we treat ourselves.

You were never religious.  You may never be religious.  But religion will never be more than those quiet afternoons to you.  And I suppose you can at least remember them with a detached fondness.

Amen, I suppose.

***

Due to be rewritten 

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