Life as a lost sheep
Yes even after all this I managed to
wander away from faith in Christ, like the “lost sheep” which
figure in both the Old Testament and Jesus' parables.
A year after baptism and confirmation I
was living in Wesley College. It is a Methodist residential college
for Sydney University. My parents were still overseas, and I was in
first year engineering. I wasn't going to church; religion seemed
to have just dribbled away. I seem to remember a lot of Sunday
mornings spent at the city Leagues Club drinking and taking in the
comedian of the week putting on the show with the jokes he couldn't
use in the mixed audience that evening.
A year later again I was still at
university but now sharing our old family home with my sister. Still
no church. I didn't understand about “depression” in those days
or perhaps I would have sought treatment. I just sat through most
lectures half listening, half tossing up which would be the best way
to kill myself. Weekend relaxation was sitting out in the garden with
a half gallon flagon of sherry.
I was, as many students were,
politically left wing, and a supporter of the anti- war movement. I
marched in the Vietnam demonstrations. For those who remember
Australia at that time, conscription came in and conscientious
objectors were only recognized if they were total pacifists. Those
like me who only objected to fighting in a particular war risked
going to prison for two years. The allowable alternative, which I
found acceptable was to go into the defence force reserves. They
would only be called to fight if Australia were attacked and that I
was happy to do. I chose the Naval Reserve. I was for a few years
part of one of the engine room crews for the Reserve patrol boat HMAS
Archer. It was small: 140 ton and 100ft long. It had very powerful
V16 diesel engines, so it had a good turn of speed. The published
figure I think was 24 knots. Not in the class of planing hulled
boats, but in heavy seas they have to drop off the plane and crawl
along. This sharp bowed, steel hulled craft could just punch through
the waves.
I will relate a story here about one
incident on the patrol boat because it shaped my thinking in an
important dispute I had later later with an Archbishop.
It happened like this. We had taken the
patrol boat away for a two week exercise. By naval regulations we had
to have a regular navy ERA (engine room artificer) in charge even
though we had a reservist skipper. The skipper was a barrister in
civil life, had a great deal of “presence” and was a Lieutenant
Commander. The charge ERA was young, inexperienced, working class
and only a Petty Officer.
We set out from Sydney. The skipper
ordered a maximum speed. In the engine room we were regularly
“dipping” the fuel tanks. I was at the bottom of the food chain
but I heard one of our reservist ERA’s telling the young regular
navy charge ERA that he must tell the skipper to slow down because we
were going through too much fuel, but “Charge” couldn't front
this barrister/ Lt. Commander.
I was on engine room watch keeping as
we approached Mackay. We had drained the last drop out of the last
fuel tank into the two little gravity tanks which fed the engines as
we crossed the bar into the river. An engine failure then would have
been disaster. We had made it, but only just. About midnight we tied
up. Straight away we refueled all tanks. This completed the skipper
immediately set sail. Now I didn't know these facts at the time, I
read up on them later, but you NEVER draw off a ship’s tank that
has just been re-filled. You give it at least 12 hours to settle.
Otherwise the gunk that has been stirred up off the bottom of the
tank during filling does nasty things to your engines. We had filled
all five tanks. Then we sailed immediately out among coral reefs.
I went off watch and went to bed. I
was woken up by a tap on the shoulder. What hit my awakening senses
was the silence. There is never silence on a ship, always the
reassuring hum of machinery. It was silent and it was dark. Our ERA
who had tapped me on the shoulder said, “engine room, we’ve got
trouble”
The story was that just as the ship was
entering the Whitsunday Passage, with coral reefs on all sides one
engine had failed. A clogged fuel filter was quickly discovered to be
the cause and replaced. The Skipper to give him credit immediately
changed course and headed for the open sea. By the time I woke we had
lost both generators and both engines. We were “dead ship”, but
at least safely out in the open sea.
In time we dismantled and cleaned the
clogged components, got the generators and engines working, and after
36 hours drifting helpless we sailed under our own power but escorted
by another patrol boat back into harbour.
The Skipper blamed the fuel company for
giving us dirty fuel. They pumped it out and re filled our tanks. But
I expect tests would have shown that the fuel supplied was not the
problem. By the time we got back to Sydney the talk was that the
charge ERA was being blamed.
Certainly under naval law he could have
prevented it. On a naval vessel the captain is supreme. To refuse to
obey his orders under (enemy) fire is a hanging offence. But in one
thing the chief engineer can countermand the captain’s orders. If
the captain orders a certain speed and the engineer calculates that
that will risk running out of fuel he can say “sorry sir, we can’t
afford the fuel we have to go slower” and he has the last word.
We nearly got into serious trouble
because a young working class engineer could not exert his proper
authority in the face of a formidable and socially elevated senior
officer who was skipper of his ship. Hold that thought until we talk
about the proper spheres of authority the Anglican Church gives to
vicars of parishes Vs archbishops.
Back to the lost sheep story:-
So, I was now living on my own;
depressed and desperately lonely.
They say “man’s extremity is God’s
opportunity”. Well I do say “Thank you” to God that he took his
opportunity.
With no one else to talk to for much of
the time I started talking to God. I had a solid old car, and used to
take long weekend drives out into the country. I would drive along
talking to God as though he was just sitting in the passenger seat.
With some trepidation I say that he started talking back. No, I don’t
mean audibly – that is an auditory hallucination and yes I have
talked to people with serious mental illnesses that have had
those! No, I mean as a verbal communication inside your head. Oh yes
I have also had to deal with people with mental illness who have had
“voices” in their heads, and it was nothing like that! With
mental illness the “voices” are dysfunctional. Many years after
these events one youngster with a drug induced psychosis told me that
voices in his head had told him to do things like sit in the middle
of the road, and to try to hang himself. Another time one of my
parishioners rang me from the psychiatric ward of the local hospital
where he had been taken some weeks earlier by the police. He wanted
to check with me because voices in his head were telling him to “kill
the bad people”. (I raced up the hospital, told him that that voice
was definitely not God, then persuaded his doctors in very definite
terms that they needed to increase his medication!) No, when God
started talking back to me, I do know it was not mental illness!
It was neither auditory hallucination
nor dysfunctional “voices” of mental illness. I firmly believe it was God being
very kind and giving me the thread I needed to hang on to to survive.
It worked.
Some people who cared suggested that I
should go back to church for the social contact. I resisted. True I
had found (or rather been found by) God again, but church was a big
step.
The breakthrough came when I went off
on a road camping trip by myself – and came back two days later
because I just couldn't take being alone any more …. That Sunday
night I went back ... to Turramurra Methodist church.
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