MAGAZINE NO. 165 [Apr 2026]

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

EDITORIAL 3
TRUTH TELLING: AN INVITATION by Helen Boerma 6
PANE TRANSPARENT by Rita Glennon 12
COMPANION PETS: A FAMILY’S SPIRITUAL
CONNECTION by Toni Hassan 13
IN DEFENCE OF DARKNESS by Liz Jakimow 18
AN ODE TO PERSIA by Milad Milani 23
ON WRITING ‘AN ODE TO PERSIA’’
by Milad Milani 27
FROM THE PASSING TO THE ENDURING
by Paul Kielich 29
EREMOS INFORMATION AND MEMBERSHIP 32

EDITORIAL

Without Judgment
Conversations Across Divides

This time last year, I began my April editorial with the opening words of Woody Allen’s satirical ‘My Speech to the Graduands’. Here they are again: 

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. 

If those words seemed grimly appropriate for the state of the world a year ago, things only seem to be worse now. As I write this, the war in the Middle East, which its instigators told us would be over in a matter of days, is dragging into its third week, and its consequences are reverberating around the world. The world seems increasingly tribalized, with opposing camps unable to see virtue in their perceived ideological enemies. Nuance, generosity and understanding seem things of the past.

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But it’s not all gloom and doom. It never is.

Recently, I came across a sermon given on 4 October 2015 at Westminster Abbey by the then Canon Chancellor at St Paul Anglican Cathedral, the Reverend Mark Oakley.¹ The Bible passage from the Gospel of Matthew which he was addressing deals with Jesus calling his disciples to cast out unclean spirits. ‘Today we can hear this charge to the first Christians to cast out unclean spirits,’ he says, ‘and think it's not really relevant to us here in our century as he's probably referring to something now done better be in hospital.’ But, he warns, the modern world has its own unclean spirits which are ‘still alive and kicking today’.

He whimsically names three of them: Gloss, the spirit of beauty and surfaces; Obese, the spirit ‘of gathering, of acquiring, who is never satisfied’; and Punch, the god of violence and division – ‘if hate can be escalated he’ll have a go – if they don’t agree with you, lash out. If they’re different, slap them down.’ 

Don’t we see these demons wandering unchecked across the surface of the earth in the 21st century?

So how do we cast these spirits out? How do we lift our world into something resembling a place of compassion, where our commonalities rather than our differences define the paths we tread? Oakley concludes his sermon with this incident from his own life:

I was brought up by my grandparents and my grandfather had flown in the Royal Air Force in World War 2 and he was a bit of a hero to me but he never spoke about his experiences, except one day mentioning ‘Dresden’ and weeping. I didn’t understand then as a young boy but I grew up and learned why. He has since died but two years ago I was asked to preach in the reconstructed Frauenkirche in Dresden. He was very much in my mind. On the way to the train station at the end of my visit the taxi driver asked me why I was in Dresden and I told him I had always wanted to come. ‘Why?’ he asked. I took a deep breath: ‘Because my grandfather was a navigator of a Lancaster bomber and on 14 February 1945 I know he flew here as part of the bombing raid and he could never talk about it.’ The man was quiet and then said, ‘Ah, that was the night my mother was killed.’ He pulled over the car and turned the engine off. He then turned round to me, put out his arm out to me and said, ‘and now we shake hands.’

There’s your answer, or at least a hint of it. He concludes: 

That man, like me, knew the facts. He knew the horrors of that night, he had lived his loss, learned about the thousands dead. But he knew more. He had become wise. He knew how to make a full stop into a comma, how to interrupt revenge into something more true.

Turning full stops into commas, keeping the sentences of history and of our lives open, allowing for the story to remain unfinished, for the possibility of redemption – that’s our task. In short, doing what Jesus commanded us to do: forgiving when all we want is revenge; finding the best in others when we want to see them as irredeemable - and, through doing this, finding the best in ourselves. 

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This year, Eremos is exploring a theme which is so pertinent to the health of our broken world: withholding judgment and seeking to encourage conversations across the great divides of our society. The motif will permeate all Eremos activities, our events, retreats, workshops, social media and the magazine. 

Let’s see if we can give each other respect in our conversations, encourage generosity and the true exchange of ideas. Let’s create an environment where we can listen rather than speak, approach each other with open arms rather than closed fists. Let’s not assume we’re right and everyone else has got it wrong.

Mark Oakley concludes his sermon in this way:

. . . we rightly ask what it might mean to be loyal to the past, but the more urgent question is how can we be loyal to the future? And that is over to you and to who you become, to the things that you believe matter. And it will mean taking authority for yourself and casting out some very powerful unclean spirits of our times, like that taxi driver, if hope is be restored and we preach not just in our words but in our lives that the spirits are seen for what they are and the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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This will be my last editorial for EREMOS. After six years at the helm, I’m stepping down and handing the reins to Toni Hassan. Toni is a Walkley Award-winning journalist and author who has written for The Saturday Paper and The Sydney Morning Herald. Her formative years were at the ABC including at AM and the Religion and Ethics Report. As well, she’s writer (you’ll find her ‘Companion pets: A family's Spiritual Connection’ in this issue), an artist whose images have often graced the cover of EREMOS, a nationally respected social commentator and activist, and she has a Diploma in Biblical Studies. I’m very confident that I’m leaving EREMOS in extremely capable hands.

As a way of transition, I’ll be interviewing Toni in the August issue of the magazine so our readers can get to know her and what they can expect from her forthcoming tenure. 

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In this issue, Liz Jakimow suggests that darkness shouldn’t always be associated with evil, that the God who made light made darkness as well. Milad Milani celebrates in poetry and prose the concept of Persia, a vital reminder of the elegance of its culture and the sublimity of its spiritual tradition in distressing days for the region. Paul Kielich discovers the numinous, the great ‘other’ which defies human expression, in the grandeur of nature, and Toni Hassan explores the nature of a grief which encompasses far more than human life. Helen Boerma, marking 26 January, reflects on the need for Australians of all persuasions to face the truth of the country’s savage past through the story of Auntie Elva Taylor, proud Dungatti woman. The issue rounds off with Rita Glennon’s delicate and vivid poem, ‘Pane transparent’.

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Without judgment: conversations across divides.

Let’s give the final word to a poet. In his beautiful poem, ‘Equanimity’2, Australian poet Les Murray talks of the value of equanimity, where everyone is ‘off the high comparative horse/of their identity’, where there is no hierarchy of class, ideology, ethnicity, intellect, physical prowess, gender or sexuality. This is where we need to meet, Murray, suggests, not judging each other and beyond the yawning divides which prevent us from truly seeing each other, on a canvas that’s:

a field all foreground, and equally all background,
like a painting of equality. Of infinite detailed extent
like God’s attention. Where nothing is diminished by perspective.

John Foulcher
Editor

1. https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-sermons/sermon-given-at-evensong-on-the-eighteenth-sunday-after-trinity