WORDS Ann Rennie

Kindness and courage show us a way forward in times of difficulty and despair.

On the noticeboard in the kitchen the following quotation is pinned up next to school timetables, netball fixtures, bills, overdue reminders and postcards from the past. It is a yellowing fragment from the 19th century poet, Adam Lindsay Gordon, whose bronze statue is sited next to Parliament House in Melbourne.

Life is mainly froth and bubble
Two things stand like stone -
Kindness in anothers trouble.
Courage in your own.

I have always admired its sentiment about those perennial standard-bearers of the best of the human condition, kindness and courage. Kindness is a word that rarely makes the headlines, as courage often does, but it is the unsung glue that keeps communities together. It is visible in the small actions of wheeling in the elderly neighbour’s bin or the larger acts of anonymous philanthropy.

As we enter a period of economic uncertainty these two qualities will be needed in abundance.

I am no economist—the domestic budget is all I can manage—but as I sit in the local garden café on a beautiful God-given Sunday afternoon, enjoying a frothy cappuccino, I begin to wonder how various small businesses will fare this year if we don’t continue with a few of the small pre-downturn happy habits that give our lives that bit of bubble.

The loss of a shift or part-time hours can impact on university students and their ability to study and self-support. The loss of the same for a family may mean the difference between getting new school shoes or not. Reduced hours and fewer customers do not bode well for those who feed and water us away from home—the many thousands in hospitality, the suppliers and growers, the retailers and delivery drivers, the chefs and kitchen hands—all those in the human chain of activity which is the rhythm of our lives.

But the loss of a job is nothing compared to the loss of life.

The recent Victorian bushfires have scarred lives and landscapes as we again learn the harsh lesson of the beauty and the terror of our homeland.

Black Saturday left only the charred cemetery of houses and business and schools and churches. Husbands will never come home again, country kids will no longer ride bikes and horses, grandmothers will no longer clasp their grandchildren in that perfumed embrace that is the link of love from one generation to the next. But fond memories will be held tight, and stories and laughter and jokes and new-forged myths and the tender mercy of time will keep the lost alive.

After the dark days, the light emerges. Out of the stark spears of scorched and blackened forest, people will start again. They will emerge from the numbness and devastation and stumble forward, carrying each other’s shock and sorrow to recreate their communities. They will rebuild lives and remember loved ones and they will know that others share their burden. The Holy Spirit of the Great South Land will be at work amongst them, in that solidarity of standing together, shoulder to shoulder, as they remake the home and hearth. They will know that our wide brown land is not so wide that we cannot feel each other’s pain.

The Easter story gives us pause to reflect on Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. There were the dark days of denial and betrayal, of despair and doubt, days of dust and ash, of the incalculable suffering of the Passion. And then the Resurrection—hope eternal for all of us, the never ending story of God’s love.

Let us hold the Easter story close during these times knowing that after the dark, in that the fiery Calvary of those lost and those left behind, there is always the light.

We are ever an Easter people of kindness and courage as we walk together waiting for better days.