I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose from the dead;
he ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father;
from there he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
- The Apostle’s Creed, part of the Anglican declaration of Faith.

How can an allegedly intelligent man, so cynical, so satirical, so stubborn as Rick Eyre commit hinself to the Christian faith and maintain most, if not all, of his existing philosophies and beliefs? It’s not as absurd as it may look. In fact, it’s not absurd at all.

I consider that I have always believed in the concept and existence of God, and that, certainly in the last decade or two, I have believed in Christian values - though not necessarily adhered to all of them. My concerns were not with God or with Jesus Christ, but with organised religion. So often in history it has been done badly, especially when invoked as a justification for politics, power or wealth.

But not all religion is like that, and at the parochial level, the church can and does provide an enormous power of good. I can go on in depth about particular issues, but I’m happy to have tied my beliefs to faith in God and Jesus. I believe that with the Anglican church, I am in the right niche, a local church with a strong contemporary family and community focus, a denomination that is part of a global Anglican communion. And a faith that places value on our devotion to God, rather than what God can do for us.

There are some policies of the Sydney diocese of the Anglican Church that I do take issue with - in particular, its opposition to the ordination of women as bishops. The church can only properly flourish if it is able to make the most of all of the talent available among its clergy.

The other question relates to gay clergy. I’m quite undecided on my attitude towards gay clergy - the biblical attitudes to homosexuality are open to a lot of controversy - but whatever happens, I believe that a schism of the Anglican Communion must not happen. Tolerance is the important thing here.

Does my committment to Christianity mean that I have become part of the Religious Right? Not on your proverbial. I believe that the ideal Christian practice is one of humanity, social justice, and equality. While I believe in tolerance, acceptance and engagement with all legitimate faiths, I do have problems with the deregulated “free-enterprise evangelism” that has become so prominent in the US and seems to be permeating the pentecostal movements in Australia and elsewhere.

Religion and politics? There’s room for both - in parallel and ethically consistent streams. I’ll need further blog posts to outline examples of these.

Finally, for now: don’t worry about me turning this blog into a platform for evangelism - that’s not my style. But you can slightly more religious context from time to time, especially when I get into discussing the Episcopal Church of USA and its relationship with the rest of the Anglican Communion.

In every census from 1986 to 2001 I answered the question asking about my religion with the word “Nil”. When the next census comes around on August 8 this year I will be recording my religious status as “Anglican”.

My committment to Christianity, which took place in the second half of 2005, surprised some of my friends and family, who probably saw it as a reaction to my break-up with Di. But it goes far deeper than that. The fact is that I have never been that far away from the Christian faith.

Let’s go back to the beginning. I was baptised in 1960, when I was a year old, at what is now the Belmont Squash Centre, near Lake Macquarie. In those days it was Belmont Methodist Church. Though I was notionally a Methodist, in real terms that meant little. At scripture time at Marks Point Public School I was in the Methodist class run by Mr Middleton, but for Sunday School I went to the only church in town, the non-denominational Marks Point Mission.

I think Sunday School had a counter-productive effect on me, I can remember being bored stiff by the Old Testament bible stories. Stories of the Middle East two or three thousand years ago just didn’t cut it for me. I didn’t really help that I was the only one in my family who was actually going to church. That I did was due to the interest of my godmother, my auntie Enid, who was (and is) a devout Baptist and took her godmotherly role of looking after my spiritual upbringing seriously.

Nonetheless, when I started high school in 1971 I decided I had had enough of Sunday School and stopped going to church. I then did the teenagerly thing and rebelled against religion. My early teens, in which Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was my hero, saw me take a deep interest in Marxism, having been suckered in by the naive simplicity of John Lennon’s “Imagine” - particularly the “no religion” bit. (Was I really an admirer of Chairman Mao in those days? Yeesh!)

When I was around seventeen/eighteen I was at the peak of my book-reading years, inspired I must say by reading the complete “Lord of the Rings” trilogy in a week during the school holidays. Among the vast array of Penguin Classics that I read during that phase of my life were translations of The Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, some of the Upanishads and a book of Buddhist scriptures. While in no sense was I shopping around for a religion, I believe that reading these books as part of my literary travels has been an invaluable experience in more recent years. None of these books, however, had as profound an impact on me as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “Frankenstein”.

There’s probably little else to say about my spirituality until the mid-1980s, my mid twenties. (Even the Methodist Church in Australia was gone by then, merged with the Presbyterians into the Uniting Church.) By that time I was, politically, a Keating Laborite, but sometime around 1985 or 1986 I reached the conclusion that I did actually believe that there was an omnipresent being that governed our universe. My mantra, in response to those who enquired after my faith, was that I “believe in God but not in religion”. For it was the negative effect of religious differences and abuses of power that I saw as being detrimental to society.

There’s a long and involved buildup to this that I won’t go into here, but by the late nineties I realised that I no longer felt the emotion of hatred towards people on a personal level. I know this wasn’t absolute, but much more so than in my younger days. I think that I recognised from that time onward a conscious acceptance of the qualities preached by Jesus.

Nonetheless, I would never have seriously contemplated taking up religion if I hadn’t met Di. In many ways she has been more of an inspiration to me than she is ever likely to acknowledge. When I accompanied her to church at All Saints, Petersham on Good Friday 2000 it was the first time I had set foot inside a church for anything other than a christening, wedding, funeral or election in almost thirty years. I was, however, to remain a casual attendee to church after that, declining to participate in Communion because I saw it as a ritual.

We were married at All Saints, Adara was baptised there, and I was becoming more sympathetic towards the church, especially to its value at the parochial level. Even as our marriage was deteriorating, I was becoming closer to the church. I participated in the Lord’s Supper for the first time on Christmas Day, 2004.

When our marriage came unstuck very rapidly in May 2005, I turned to our minister, Antony Barraclough, for guidance and support. I think initially I was looking for some sort of referral to a church counselling service, but Antony began holding regular bible-reading sessions with me.

After a couple of months, he had won me over. From being a “secular Christian”, sitting on the other side of the fence following Christian values without having the belief in the Gospels, I know was ready to embrace faith in the word of God, as delivered by his Son, Jesus Christ.

Bazz, as everyone calls Antony, has been an excellent source of support and inspiration to me over the past year. I now play an active role in the running of the Sunday morning services, and have revamped the church’s website.

Does this mean that I have abandoned my political beliefs and my philosophical ideals in committing myself to Christianity? Far from it. That’s the subject of my next chapter.

I’ve just been fined $100 by two Revenue Protection Officers of the State Transit Authority for travelling on a bus with an invalid ticket. I don’t know any further details. The officer confiscated the ticket and refused to tell me how it was invalid. His reply to my repeated requests for details were “You should know what date it expired” and “You should have a better idea of what’s on your belongings.”

As we were getting off the bus at my stop, the wiry-looking smug one was lecturing me on the correct procedure for paying fares. Because of the noise I couldn’t hear and asked him again once we were on the footpath what he was saying. His reply was “You know what I was talking about.”

What followed was the first time in my life that I have screamed at a man in uniform. And actually it was the first time in years that I have lost my cool in public. I don’t think they liked being told that they were denying me some basic principles of natural justice. Not that I was quite so literate at the time, however I did speak to them in civil language, just that it was at the top of my voice with steam surging figuratively out of my ears.

Now I’m so damn forgetful these days that it is entirely possible that my ticket had expired, in which case I’m prepared to cop the fine. But I simply do not know because that bastard wouldn’t tell me.

Anyway, my complaint to the State Transit Authority is on its way.