Category: OUR MUMS

Ave Matilda

For me Cecil B Demille’s 1927 film, King Of Kings, is a visual feast, one of the most unremittingly great depictions of the story of Jesus I have ever seen.

In the above footage from the post Last Supper portion of DeMille’s film, Ave Maria is an obvious choice of melody for the relationship between Jesus and his mum.

Waltzing Matilda, which comes in at the half way mark of this clip, when the focus shifts to Peter, is less obvious.

Peter, an individual, betrayed Jesus, by denying knowing him three times, and thereby betrayed the group of individuals to which he belonged. His own conscience troubled Peter very deeply.

Waltzing Matilda, often called Australia’s unofficial national anthem, is also about betrayal. But it is the betrayal of the human rights of an individual denied his basic right to food by an unjust society.

The swaggy is driven to suicide, whereas Peter recovers to become the rock upon which the Christian church was built.

For me the fusion of these two different types of betrayal is very beautiful.

Perhaps a strange universality but it works for me.

But maybe in a world where there are so many more people than were alive 2 millennia ago, there was more individual freedom, and less betrayal of individuals by groups than happens now.

Something to think about.

And thinking is what living in The Word is all about for me.

Geoff Fox, Sunday, April 6, 2025, Melbourne, Australia

Kathleen Norris

Devout Catholic Norris was born in San Francisco on the 16th July 1880.

When she was 19 years old, her parents died and she became the head of her family. She went on to become one of the highest paid female writers in America:

“I wonder if children don’t begin to reject both poetry and religion for similar reasons, because the way both are taught takes the life out of them.”

“The Christian religion asks us to put our trust not in ideas, and certainly not in ideologies, but in a God …….. Who desires to be present to us in our ordinary circumstances.”

“If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such difficulty recognizing and accepting it? Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”

“Prayer is not asking for what you think you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine.”

“For grace to be grace, it must give us things we didn’t know we needed and take us places where we didn’t know we didn’t want to go. As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.”

“But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.”

God Bless Faith.

The Foundation Of Understanding.

Geoff Fox, 16th July, 2023, Down Under

Incantations For Mums #1 Some Opening Thoughts On Australia’s Mother’s Day

This week, the week of The Ascension, I turn my attention down from the fatherly sky to the motherly earthly foundation of what we are.

A focus on Mary?

About four and three quarters of a year ago in Rembang, Java, the home of the Kartini Museum, I formulated this set of socio-philosophical principles about gender:

1. Men, women and children need to live with love.

This love is an indispensable foundation of human society.

2. Three fundamental mothering capacities differentiate women from men:

A The ability to carry and nurture life in the womb.

B The capacity to give birth to that life.

C The ability to give the best possible nutrition to new human beings by breast feeding.

3 These three qualitative differences give mothers and potential mothers some different human rights and responsibilities to the rights and responsibilities of other people.

4 The modern western demonisation of men and disempowerment of mothers are two sides of the same coin.

5 The cradle of human culture is maternal love.

6 True loving manliness empowers and protects mums.

7 When family life ceases to be a nation’s foundation, the nation’s death is inevitable.

On a very important day in a 175 year old church last year, I came up with the idea “Arma Virumque Me Cano” rewriting a line of war poetry by the Roman poet Vergil to make it more Catullan, less warlike.

In that spirit, I hope the above articulation of gender principles can evolve to become incantations of value to mums.

We need them.

And they need us.

Geoff Fox, 14th may, Australia’s Mother’s Day, 2023

(God Bless Andrea Mantegna of Mantua for creating the above image of Mother Mary to which I have added a few words.)