Soul Pilates with a Spirited Crone
Presented at Restoring Dignity Building Bridges, the 2025 National Restorative Justice Conference. We’re about to tip toe where angels fear to tread. In my reflections about restorative justice I raise the often-marginalised territory of spirituality and religion, wonder about remorse…
some people may be surprisedto find that I spend a lot of liferummaging around in the pastnot because I long for some nirvanathat was better than now – not at allbut because it seems so like now my bible fascinates…
I didn’t catch your namesaid my friend the nurseto the doctor, who hadn’toffered a name or smile feverish, full of infectionnot making sense of muchstill upright, I felt a bother, assumingI wasn’t sick enough to be there hospitals, said Thomas…
sick, flat on my backstaring at the ceilingReality wanted a saywondering, raw as alwaysif this was how I would dieno cat, dog, human or fish beside me why should that be a problem? I askednot to me dear, she saidpositively…
Times change. Dial A Prayer is now a thoroughbred stallion that lives near me, but in the 1960’s it was a machine. A prayer machine that people could phone to hear a daily prayer. This was where my public writing…
Truth matters. By this, I mean the Truth that connects us to Source; that calls us to be in service to something greater than ourselves. The Truth that brings light to darkness enables us to see who we are rather…
Trying to write about trusting my dreams reminded of the book, Like Catching Water in a Net. Val Webb, Australian theologian, and author, points out that the search for the Real is no simple matter. ‘The more we succeed in…
At 21 years old, on a sunny December day in Auckland, I was facing one of the biggest challenges of my life. Dad had rung to tell me that Mum had just a few months to live. She could come…
‘I just want to believe’, she said. The group went quiet. ‘Believe what’, I asked. ‘That the organisation will live up to its values’. There it was laid bare. The human desire for organisations to fix the world. To be…
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was hot news as I wandered into my favourite bookstore. Colleagues were offering opinions about President Putin’s actions, but other than thinking war is futile my understanding of the situation was limited. However, I was interested…