Sermons and Confessions

I’m not looking forward to the next few weeks when our TV screens will be filled with the Olympic Games.  I’m not a sports fan.  I was never good at sport and I have very little interest in most sport.  Many of my fellow Australian males think this makes me a homosexual at worst or an eccentric at best.

I understand the benefits of sport.  Sport can be a good way to get exercise.  It can be a good way to learn teamwork.  It can be a great social experience and it can be fun. 

There are also downsides.  It can be a good way to get injured.  It can foster over competitiveness and encourage judgemental sectarianism, with communities split in their fanatical loyalty to one side over another.

It is, of course, an activity in which human beings engage and as such is as flawed as the humans who engage in it. 

My problem with sport in Australia, and it is at its worst during the lead up to and running of the Olympic Games, is that Sport is given a status far in excess of other valid human activities. 

We shall hear over the next few weeks how “We” have done in the medal tally.  We shall see ordinary sometimes very flawed humans lauded and criticised all over their success or otherwise in physical activity.  A success largely dictated by random genetics. 

“But” I hear you cry “These athletes slog their guts out to achieve their medals”.

They do and they should be praised for that and proud of themselves.  My point is that we do not give the same treatment to other people who slog their guts out working for charities, working for their families or even working to achieve greatness in the arts, business, politics or other fields.

I’m not proud that most Australian’s can’t name our VC winners but they can name the captains of the cricket team.  That they speak of Warnie as a hero, but don’t know who Weary Dunlop was.

After the 2000 Olympics in Sydney Gold Medal winners were awarded the order of Australia medal.  People work in charity their whole lives and don’t get an AO.  In my opinion this was a devaluing of the Order of Australia, but it does illustrate my point about where our society’s values lie.

I suspect that part of the obsession with the Medal Talley is that we can see our country’s name on a comparative level with the big guns of the USA and China.  This in itself annoys me.  We are not a world power with those countries, however much we want to be, and Olympic Medals don’t stack up beside economic or military power.

So I wonder if there are any good DVD’s in the shops to get me through the next few weeks!

My birthday present some time back was a ticket to go to Prince Caspian - Narnia II.  Went along today the last day of my little holiday.  It was great.  I really enjoyed it, but… First I have to confess to being a big fan of the book (and all the Narnia books). I discovered them in the school library around the age of 11 and was fascinated by the stories and the idea of escaping to a magical land where I could be a grown up.

Did this film really need to be 3 hours long?  There was a lot in it that wasn’t in the book and some stuff from the book that didn’t make the film.  Peter is made out in the film to be a really up himself teenager with anger managment issues. Quite different from the Peter in the book. Why, oh why did we have to have a love interest between Caspian and Susan?  It is said that CS Lewis didn’t like women much.  He certainly writes Susan out of the stories in a rather sad way through the Dawn Treader and Last Battle stories.  I don’t think he would have approved of this.  The whole scene of Caspian riding to Susan’s rescue in the woods is completely out of the nature of the story and made me exclaim out loud “Oh for God’s sake!”  (It was one of those moments of “whoops that came out a little too loud for a public cinema”, but you get the depth of my reaction). 

I loved the effects and the battle scenes.  The acting was good except that William Mosely as Peter is just as wooden as he is in the first one.  Still very happy I went and anyone who likes the genre and isn’t as stuck as me on the story will love it.

Tonight my son came to tell me that he was scared by Monsters.  He had been listening to “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” by CS Lewis.  It was one of my favourite books as a child, but I guess I would have been scared too if I had heard a dramatization of it at the age of eight. The scariest part so far is the part where they are on the island and an old sailor tells them that if they go too far they will fall off the end of the world.  I can tell my son something that might help him.  They don’t fall of the end of the world.  It all ends up alright in the end. Nice that I can still set his mind at rest.  Wish I could tell him how it works out with the real monsters, global warming, terrorists etc.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have watched, enjoyed and owned pornography.  I suppose it started as a teenager when like most boys I was interested to find out what girls looked like and what people did.  The few items of porn that were available from other, richer boys were exciting and fascinating and they fostered my burgeoning sexual fantasies.   It’s hard to explain the fascination and excitement that I felt at that time, it’s not true that boys think about nothing else, but in my experience it is true that their thoughts can turn very quickly and intensely to sex with very little prompting.    As an adult this fascination has matured and changed but hasn’t really gone away.  Of course I am married and have two children, proof to the world that I have had sex at least twice.  I own two pornographic DVD’s and I look at pornography on the internet although I haven’t ever subscribed or bought porn on the internet.  I’m not under any misconception that the stories reflect anyone’s real life and they certainly don’t reflect the sexual thinking or acts of any woman that I have been close enough to ask about the subject.My justification was that the movies and pictures were of adults who were being paid lots of money to perform under their own free will.  It enhanced my fantasies and sometimes made the fun activity of masturbation more interesting and exciting.  In short a fairly harmless practice. That view has been challenged in the last couple of weeks.  I recently heard John Safran and Father Bob (Sunday Night Safran, Triple J) talking to two women who have a ministry in Los Angeles that works with people in the porn industry.  According to these two women, ex porn stars themselves, most porn actors are victims of child abuse.  Their self esteem has been damaged and they try to make sex a meaningless act that they can do for money.  Often they have drifted from stripping or prostitution into the porn industry.  Often they are supporting drug habits.  They are vulnerable people who are used by organised crime to make these movies.  Many are suffering from STDs because most pornographers ignore laws that forbid the exchange of bodily fluid in these films.  Many of the actors are stuck in the industry, too afraid to leave and fearful of being recognized by potential normal employers.  Some are even suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I can’t say that I will never look at porn again, but I certainly can’t think of it as harmless any more.

For those of you who haven’t realized from the name of this blog, I was raised as a Catholic.   I don’t go to Mass.  I don’t pray much.  I cannot share the church’s views on homosexuality and I think the church itself is somewhat old fashioned, male dominated and political organization that makes terrible mistakes.  That said at heart I think of myself as a catholic.  I still feel comfort and connection when I do go to mass and still believe in a Jesus Christ who died and rose from the dead.   To that end I think it’s great that there is such a thing as World Youth Day and that it’s being held in Australia.  It would be a great adventure to be a young delegate going to Sydney.  It’s great too that the Pope is in Sydney for World Youth Day.  I don’t have any problem with the government paying money for him to be here.  They pay for other world leaders and they pay money for sporting and cultural events.  The money generated by the visitors (more visitors than the Olympics) will more than offset any cost. Whatever else the Pope may stand for he fundamentally stands for Jesus Christ.  JC was about people living together, trying to have compassion and understanding for each other and about them growing spiritually.  The church hasn’t always practiced Jesus teaching, but the teaching itself is pretty good.  Maybe a bit of Christianity will rub off onto the church and the pilgrims.

I took the opportunity today to go to the movies.  Hancock is the sort of movie aimed pretty squarely at blokes.  Plenty of amazing effects and plenty of action with a few really good site gags.  I had heard that the ending surprised and disappointed some critics.  Not so for me.  At the risk of spoiling the ending for anyone who hasn’t seen it I really liked the fact that the goodies won, the hero stayed a hero and the girl stayed with the guy.  I’m glad I went.

Took the kids to the movies last weekend and we all enjoyed this movie.  The boys are now practicing their kung fu moves against each other.  It reminds me of how my brothers and I responded to an episode of “Monkey Magic”. 

Lots has been made of the over bearing message of if you try hard you can achieve your dreams.  This certainly is there and I agree it is a bit of a wrong message.  (I mean if you don’t have the talent it doesn’t matter how hard you work or how hard you believe… but that’s another post sometime).  I didn’t find this message over bearing.  We loved it.

I admit to being very intolerant of what I perceive as bad manners.  I’m probably quite old fashioned and no doubt overly sensitive but I get offended when a person behind the counter can’t even make eye contact or thank me for my custom.

It’s fast food outlets where this phenomenon strikes most.  I do understand that it’s probably pretty boring work, but on the other hand the only thing the job has going for it is that you get contact with lots of different people.  If you can’t even be bothered to make eye contact once throughout the course of the transaction you really are making your own life hard.

Today I was so frustrated with this behaviour that, at luchtime, when faced again with particularly poor service at the local “Ravenous Johns” (as known in the US as Meat Monarch) I asked the young man behind the counter “Don’t you have any manners?”  A pretty stupid question really and probably not very helpful to changing the long term situation, but it was just venting.

I think if I was the franchise owner of these restaurants I would be turning up unannounced and acting as a normal customer just to check the service level.

I know that Generation X  and Y don’t value manners the way that I do.  These restaurants are the first jobs for many gen x ers and as such owe them some responsibility to train them for entering the workforce where baby boomers will expect a certain amount of good manners.