I’m not normally inclined to quote myself, but I do so here today. Not long ago I was invited to preach at the funeral of Fr Bob Maguire, a well-known Melbourne priest who more than any other awakened a sense of vocation in me and led me to the seminary. In the course of the homily, I said this:
Bob was an Aussie original who presented a face of religion that Australians recognise and respond to. He wasn’t a wowser; he was always on the side of the battler; he was about action, not just words; he rolled up his sleeves and got stuff done; he was down to earth, had mud on his boots; he didn’t judge or condemn; he wasn’t tribal, but opened his door to all; and, not least, he had an unrivalled and uncontrived sense of humour. Put that profile together, and you have the kind of religion that has a chance in this country. Put the opposite profile together, and you have the kind of religion that has no chance.
I haven’t heard much of Mary MacKillop’s sense of humour, but it’s hard to imagine her humourless, and contemporaries who knew her well spoke of her good humour and easy laughter. But everything else I said of Bob Maguire could be said without hesitation of Mary MacKillop, another Aussie original: not a wowser, on the side of the battler, action not words, sleeves rolled up and stuff done, down to earth with mud on her nuns’ boots, not judging or condemning, not tribal but open to all.
The opposite of that profile would be lemon-lipped and wowserish religion, walking away from the battler, all talk no action, no mud on the boots, quick to condemn and humourless. A caricature, you say. But that’s how we who are religious can be perceived, and even how we can be at times without realising it. In the end it’s a choice between religion with a human face and religion with an anti-human face; and before all else both Mary MacKillop and Bob Maguire were memorable human beings.
Mary is a canonised saint, and I very much doubt that Bob will ever be that. Yet he achieved a kind of credibility unusual for religious figures in this country; and Mary did still more. Her credibility reached and reaches still deeper and wider, which is one thing her canonisation recognises. The way in which Australians responded and respond to both of them gives the lie to the oft-made claim that this country is a hopelessly secular spiritual desert. Australians will respond to religion, even enthusiastically, when it appears among them with the right kind of face, the kind of human face we see in Bob and Mary, the face that reveals God-with-us.
Early in the last century, the French Catholic writer Charles Peguy, a contemporary of Mary’s, noted a widespread denial of the Incarnation, even among the devout. He called this “a mystical disaster”, by which he meant that it led people to think that to find their way to the divinity they had to deny their humanity – thus producing religion without a human face. Peguy insisted that to find our way to the real God we had not to deny our humanity but to embrace it fully, as God had done in taking flesh, becoming one of us. Mary certainly embraced her own humanity to the end; and this in tum enabled her to embrace the humanity of others, especially those who had least. In doing this, she showed the human face of religion, the human face of God, not just to Catholics but far beyond confessional borders. When she was canonised, the Church universal recognised that in seeing Mary we were seeing something of God.
But that recognition didn’t come quickly in this land. Christianity was a transportee to Australia, an exotic rather than a native. It came with a very European face and garb. When the Europeans first settled here they found nothing as they expected. The seasons were different; so too the flora and fauna, trees that shed their bark and kept their leaves, birds that laughed and animals that hopped.
In early colonial art, you can see the artists struggling even to see the land and its creatures. Kangaroos were painted as big rabbits. Only slowly did Australians come to see things as they really are. They eventually acquired Antipodean eyes.
As they began to see differently, Australians began to speak differently, to dress differently, to build differently, to live and work differently. They put down roots in the land and spoke less of home as a place on the other side of the world. That was certainly true of those who, like Mary MacKillop, were born here rather than elsewhere. Her parents were Scots, but when I imagine how Mary sounded I hear an Australian accent rather than the Scottish burr. And when she begins her mission it too looks very Australian rather than an export from Europe. Her religious habit was imported from elsewhere and ill-suited to the climate here; but the work of Mary and her Sisters was native rather than exotic. Like her, it was an Aussie original.
That was one of the reasons why Irish-born bishops, like my predecessor James Quinn, were puzzled, even troubled by Mary and treated her so poorly. First of all, her background wasn’t Irish: that was one strike against her. Secondly, she was Australian-born: that was another strike. At the time, there were bishops who wouldn’t accept anyone born in Australia for seminary training; but at least they were male. Mary was female: and that was a third strike against her. To make matters worse for some who opposed her, she was a non-Irish, Australian-born female who wouldn’t do what the bishops wanted. But this changed over the years to the point where the Irish-born Cardinal Moran could say after blessing Mary on her death-bed: “I consider I have this day assisted at the death-bed of a saint”.
That was a long way from Bishop Quinn’s expulsion of Mary from Brisbane or Bishop Sheil’s excommunication of her in Adelaide. As with the colonial artists, it took the bishops and others a long time to see Mary as she really was.
In the years following European settlement, Australia was a fearful place. There was the fear of distance, with a colony so far from home and the assistance home could offer in an emergency. There was the fear of starvation as early crops failed. There was the fear of the native peoples and their attacks upon settlers; and there was a fear that the convicts would rise up against their masters and overthrow them. Anxiety settled early in the Australian psyche. Into this anxiety Mary was born, and in this anxious world she heard the words of Jesus we have heard in the Gospel: “I am telling you not to fret about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and how you are to clothe it”. Hearing these words, Mary came to a mysterious and powerful trust in God’s providence. As she wrote to her mother Flora in 1867, “You ever taught me to look up to and depend upon Divine Providence in every trouble”. She in tum taught her Sisters this prayer:
Divine Providence can provide. Divine Providence did provide. Divine Providence will provide.
0 merciful and all-provident God, hear our prayers and grant our petitions.
Thanks to Flora, that kind of trust was in Mary’s DNA, and through her it entered the DNA of the Sisters of St Joseph.
This explains her extraordinary serenity in the face of all trials and troubles, her refusal to yield to her fears, however potent and justified they may have seemed. Mary never ceased to hear in the depths of her being the first words of the Risen Lord: “Peace be with you” – by which he means, “I have seen the worst, I have gone to the very heart of darkness, and I have risen as light. You have nothing to fear; your fears are a bluff’. Hearing his voice, Mary not only entered the peace of Easter: she became that peace. In St Paul’s words: “The peace of Christ reigned in her heart”; and like the jar of meal and the jug of oil it was never spent or emptied. It flowed ceaselessly from deep within Mary into the lives of countless people, especially the young, calling them gently but firmly to live beyond fear, to walk out of the darkness into the light. That’s why, like all the saints, Mary MacKillop stands for ever as a witness to Easter.
Yet she was a witness in a land where we celebrate Easter not in spring but in autumn, a land where we still sing of the green blade rising when in fact the brown leaf is falling. Her witness was Antipodean; it looked different than it had in Europe; it was easily misunderstood by those who saw with the eyes of the Old World. As she wrote to Pope Pius IX in 1873, “It is an Australian who writes” – and this before Federation when there were separate British colonies, in three of which Mary had lived. She could recognise what bound the colonies together and what made for a distinctive Australian identity. That’s why she still speaks across borders in ways Australians get – not just Catholics or even Christians but a host of others who recognise Mary as one of us.
Yet she’s one of us who belongs to the whole world. That’s what canonisation says, and it’s why Pope Francis focused on her in a recent General Audience. In the end, however, Mary belongs not just to us nor even to the world. She belongs to the God of the human face and the peaceful heart, God-with-us.
She may be the patron of the Archdiocese of Brisbane to whom we entrust ourselves and all our anxieties today, but the girl from Fitzroy who became St Mary of the Cross is, by the grace of God, for everyone, for everywhere and for ever. Amen.