Current Issue

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

EDITORIAL 3
THE GOD WHO IS DOING MORE
by Pastor Matthew 5
AT PLAY by Mark Beresford 10
THE HERMIT’S JOURNEY: A REFLECTION ON
‘EUGENE STOCKTON: BLUE MOUNTAINS HERMIT’
by Alex Nelson 11
COVENANT by Eugene Stockton 15
JEANINE LEANE’S ‘GAWIMARRA GATHERING’
reviewed by Judith Keller 16
GROANING by Liz Jakimow 19
DIARMAID MacCULLOCH’S ‘LOWER THAN THE
ANGELS: A HISTORY OF SEX AND CHRISTIANITY’
reflections by Victor Branson 20
THE FUNERAL by Liz Jakimow 26
REFLECTIONS ON ‘JUICE’ BY TIM WINTON
by Toni Hassan 27
WHAT IS RELIGIOUS FEELING by John Hanan 33
EREMOS INFORMATION AND MEMBERSHIP 35

EDITORIAL

Last week my wife and I were at a loose end and decided to take a break from work and see a mid-week film at the cinema. There wasn’t much on, but The Story of Souleymane (Dir Boris Lojkine 2025) looked interesting: advertised as a ‘thriller’, it followed two days in the life of Souleymane, a Guinean asylum seeker in Paris, as he approaches an interview with authorities to determine whether he can achieve French citizenship. Souleymane works in food delivery, ‘criss-crossing the frenetic Parisian streets morning to night, in a constant race against the clock’, as the blurb on the Palace Cinemas website put it.

It would do. Jane and I had spent six months in Paris when I had a writing residency there a few years ago. At least, we thought, we’ll get some footage of a city we’d come to love. 

Our expectations were, however, disappointed. It wasn’t a thriller and there were no vistas of pretty streetscapes. Rather, it was a harrowing portrait of a young man desperately trying to survive after having experienced all sorts of trauma to get to France in the first place, a man subject to exploitation and exhaustion whose sole priority is the care of his mentally ill mother in Guinea. The ending of the film – which I won’t give away here - was devastating. It’s a film everyone should see.

‘Well,’ said Jane as we walked back to the car, ‘that wasn’t the Paris I remember.’ We walked in silence a little further and then turned to each other. ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it was.’

We stayed in a studio in a large complex for artists, musicians and writers from all over the world, and every night a small colony of homeless men would wait till darkness and then set up their tents on its extensive balcony. In the morning they would pack up and go, and the staff would hose down the balcony. The next night, they would be there again. Indeed, you couldn’t go anywhere in Paris without encountering the homeless, refugees with no legal status and scammers trying to wheedle a few euros out of the well-heeled tourists and Parisian citizens. But we, like most Parisians, chose not to ‘see’ them; we chose instead to be dazzled by Paris’s art and culture. They hung around at the periphery of our vision.

Right now in America, people of different nationalities are being hauled from the streets, imprisoned and deported by an army of men in masks, and good ‘Christian’ people are looking on approvingly. They can do so because they appear not to see human beings, but ‘illegals’ exploiting the goodness of the American people and robbing American people of their jobs. They see not  people like Souleymane; they see criminals, ‘the worst’ other countries have to offer, as President Trump has disingenuously described them. And in doing so, they’re losing sight of their own humanity. 
Things are no different here, if not so dramatic. Perhaps we all see what we choose to see, and it shapes our vision of the world, reinforcing what we think is best for us. 

It’s not the way Jesus saw things. Time and again, he saw the people everyone else was ignoring – the sick, the outcasts, the despised – and he took them from the edge, placed them at the centre. And respectable citizens didn’t like it, didn’t appreciate their demotion in status. In this, no matter what our political persuasions or religious affiliations, he gave us a template for righteousness. No matter how much we fail to live up to it, we should never abandon it in a world full of suffering and injustice. 

It's at the heart of Eremos’s reason for existence. 

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This issue of EREMOS is a little different. There are book reviews and reflections on books everywhere – Alex Nelson reflects on the writing and person of Eugene Stockton, Judith Keller reviews indigenous poet Jeanine Leane’s collection, gawimarra gathering, Victor Branson ponders Diarmid MacCulloch’s tome about Christian attitudes to sex and sexuality, Lower than the Angels, and Toni Hassan considers Tim Winton’s foray into dystopian fiction, Juice. Preceding these reviews, Pastor Matthew tells the moving story of a group of asylum seekers from Africa here in Australia – their experience is not so different from Souleymane’s in The Story of Souleymane. To conclude a packed issue, John Hanan thoughtfully explores the notion of ‘religious feeling’. 

John Foulcher
Editor