You can smell the fear, almost taste it
in the television pictures of riots,
and on talk-back wireless;
the end of civilization as we know it.
If only we could go back
to the cream-picket-fenced,
white Christian Australia
of those pre-coloured
box-camera photographs,
and dwell there, secure and unthreatened.
Interrupting rudely
in this season of Advent,
we hear the promise of new things
unheard of revolutionary promises,
the lifting up of the poor and humble.
Then come the amazing words
from the lips of God’s angel messenger
to a young teenaged girl
who is about to experience
the end of her predictable world
with an unplanned pregnancy;
accompanied by all the shame
and potential violence
of her fiercely legalistic religion.
They echo through the next three decades,
and the two millennia that follow,
calling the faithful to a life of defiance:
“You don’t have to be afraid!”
No comments:
Post a Comment