RANDOM STRIKES RAW MATERIAL : A GOD IN RUINS

Asylum seekers, Greek/Macedonian border

QUOTE

"Toyota is good for jihad," my driver said. I could only agree, noting that this was one advertising logo the Toyota company would probably forgo. There was moonlight now and I could see clouds both below us in the ravines and above us, curling round mountaintops, our headlights shining on frozen waterfalls and ice-covered pools.
Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation.

TEXT

He couldn't remember the exact circumstances which found him in that church in Ballarat, but it was easy to believe, in that gloom laden atmosphere, that Something Wicked This Way Comes. He had his own encounters with priests as a teenager, encounters he would rather forget. The heightened atmosphere of the day threw a harsh light on what had once been moral ambiguities, but were now simply abuse. Sometimes it didn't seem to matter much, in the light of so many stories, so much suffering; everybody's experience was different. Pain was not always sent to bless. Humility was a divine trait. His own experiences were now little more than fragile memories; unpleasant, but there had been much that had been unpleasant.

He could feel the furnaces burning beneath him, and the furnaces burning in the sky, the slipstreams of shadows, the insufficiently vanquished voices. All would be well, he was sometimes told, but at others the carping continued to erode. There were times he thought he could name his tormentors, but at others they were simply out of reach, beyond the border of the real, and he was simply batting at shadows.

They sat around grand tables in large houses, elegant luncheons with all their friends. It was never assumed otherwise, that they weren't interested in young men, in the sins of the flesh, and how they reconciled all that with their beliefs, and with the faith parishioners put in them, was never discussed. It was all too elegant, the conversation, the food, the houses, the accepted wealth. The fragilities of the flesh. All that God had made wonderful. Here in these remote places, the city limits not really all that far away, the infinite desert, stark beauties of the land. But there were shadows flying above, beyond and around them, and brief moments in time, asked to swim in the pool while fat middle aged queens drank too much champagne in the deckchairs cast round the garden, ugh, it was all too much.

If they could feel the end time coming, as it so often seemed, the thin veneer of the physical world, none of it came as a surprise, that destiny was finally being borne. He saw the shorts for a movie Eye in the Sky, and looked at the astonishingly rapid development of technology, and felt, if not gifted with crisis alarmed, puzzled, perplexed, saddened and perhaps even a little exhilarated by the desperately declining circumstances, a world that was driving headline into disaster, the perfidy of the great powers, the farce of American democracy played out on screens for all the world to see, and the ever expanding power of the Abrahamic God, drawing power from so many sacrificed souls, from the martyrdom of millions.

Trump. Hillary. The chatter of radio news from surrounding apartments and houses breaking through morning bird sounds, a blessed relief he sought, a consternation in ever changing moments, a world which was not his world, a time when all the greats could be accessed at a moment's notice, a click, a TV screen, a world far from the agrarian dreams he had sometimes held, instantly vapid, instantly revised, repatriated, a reclamation project on his own soul which would seem, even in the increasingly difficult circumstances the world now faced, to be a minor project in the face of so much history. The visitors, guardians one might have called them if they were not so dismissive of a single life, could barely contain their delight. Transcended, they ate not at flesh but at the soaring enthusiasms, the brief misunderstandings, the terrible doubts, held out a hand to assist before disappearing back into the matrix, as he struggled to find some sort of centre, to adhere to the motto of the day: "Steady as she goes."

THE BIGGER STORY:

ABC:

EU migrant crisis: French police move in to dismantle Calais camp; Greece-Macedonia border fence stormed
By Europe correspondent James Glenday, wires
Clashes have broken out between French riot police and asylum seekers as authorities began destroying makeshift shelters in the grim shantytown on the edge of Calais known as the "Jungle".
Police lobbed tear gas canisters at protesters as around 20 workers moved in to start pulling down the shacks by hand on Monday.
As night fell some 150 people threw rocks and struck vehicles heading for England on a port road which runs next to the sprawling camp.
Several trucks and cars were blocked by asylum seekers on the stretch of road overlooking a piece of ground which had previously been part of the Jungle.
Australian Kirsten Shirling of the Good Chance theatre group, based in the Calais camp, told ABC NewsRadio the protests flared up again on Tuesday morning.
"About 9 o'clock this morning they brought in the bulldozers and about 50 police cars and over 100 police with chainsaws, a water cannon and literally started evicting people by force," she said.
"Houses were pulled down by chainsaws and bulldozers, and when people were defending their houses that's when the teargas was fired.

SMH:

Live coverage: Day four of Cardinal George Pell before the abuse royal commission in Rome
Date March 3, 2016 - 6:53AM

Day four of Cardinal George Pell's testimony to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, via video link from the Quirinale Hotel in Rome.

Lawyers representing victims of abuse are now questioning Cardinal Pell
Cardinal Pell has clarified his comment from earlier in the week about the abuses of Gerald Ridsdale that shocked many, in which he said it was a "sad story" but that it "wasn't of much interest to me".
He said this morning: "I remember messing up the sequence completely. I regret the choice of words. I was very confused. I responded poorly."

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