Igniting the spark: John Bond is an MRA worker in Canberra, Australia, and a member of the National Sorry Day Committee

For A Change, Dec-Jan, 1998 by John Bond

My life has been shaped by my certainty that the force behind the universe--which I call God--loves his creation and, astounding though the idea is, loves even an insignificant speck like me. And he wants me to spread that love. When I try to do that, I find peace and satisfaction. This experience has given me hope and direction, and enabled me to cope with tragedy.

That sounds simple, but it is not. It is easy to love the lovable. Far harder to love those who most need love--the greedy, the hate-filled, the hopeless. To do that, I need a new perspective on life. Instead of being preoccupied with `What can I do?', I try to understand what God wants done. That has launched me into tasks far beyond my strength or ability. When I need help, people respond; and so does something beyond human understanding.

Learning to discern what God wants is like learning to be an artist. A painting is a wholehearted outpouring of all that the artist is, expressed through a skill developed by disciplined training. So is a life given to God.

For me, the learning starts afresh each morning when, in a time of quiet, I try to understand what God longs for in me, in my family, in my community, in the world. And I ask how I can help bring that about.

I look at the possibilities which my circumstances and skills open up to me. As an MRA worker, my aim is to ignite the moral and spiritual spark in each person which can heal and transform our society. That gives me common cause with many people of civic and religious conviction. I also have children, whose upbringing is important in determining where my energies are directed. And I care for refugees who have come here from war-torn areas of Asia.

These tasks give me a framework through which I try to spread love. Mostly it is steady, undramatic work. Through it all, I keep seeking for ways to change the ugly attitudes I encounter.

In 1997 a national inquiry presented a report into a tragic episode in Australian history, when thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their families in an attempt to assimilate them into Western culture. The Government tried to ignore the report. Many of us felt this was short-sighted. Here was a chance to bring into the light a source of deep pain. My colleagues and I invited the inquiry chairman, Sir Ronald Wilson, to Canberra, and several thousand Canberrans heard him in the city's forums and through its media.

As he and others spoke across the country, support grew for a national expression of sorrow at the harm caused by this policy. As a result, half a million Australians took part in a Sorry Day. For the first time, the `stolen generations' felt that the nation understood their pain, and this has proved healing to many.

It was exhilarating to be part of a nationwide spiritual explosion. But serving God does not mean living on an emotional high. There are times of severe struggle too, which can often be understood only in retrospect, if at all.

The new awareness in Australia which led to Sorry Day was partly stimulated by Aboriginal elder Margaret Tucker's moving autobiography If Everyone Cared, in which she tells of being removed from her family as a child. The book sold 20,000 copies, spawned films, and her story has been reproduced widely in school textbooks.

I marketed that book for six years, at a low period of my life, when I was struggling to find any sense of direction. Unknown to me, my work was laying foundations for Sorry Day.

I was low because painful mistakes had made me aware of how much I had to learn about discerning God's will. Despite my genuine attempt to serve God, I had harmed other people. It took me time to realize that I was shaped by cultural norms which may have built the British Empire, but did not encourage those around me to flourish.

So now, when I meet people who cared for Aboriginal children in church and government institutions, I understand something of their pain at the recent revelations. They were encouraged by national policy to play a part in a practice which we now realize did immense harm.

We are so fallible! How do we find the confidence to try and discern what God wants?

I find it in my belief that there is an absolute morality, valid for every society. My myopia can make it hard to see, but the more I try to see it, and let this shape my own personal decisions, the more my eyes adjust.

That adjustment has been helped greatly by my attempts to see the world through the eyes of those I have hurt. So much so that I have concluded that I can best help to promote a healthy society by bringing opponents together. It means enduring clash, and being misunderstood, until both sides begin to see the truth in each other. When that happens, then people feel able to leave the past behind, and look to new goals.

If this is my aim, many of my traits which cause me pain become assets. Acceptance of my fallibility makes me welcome the help of others. Knowing that I need forgiveness punctures my ego, and that frees me from worry about what people will think. Giving others the credit helps me appreciate them. Recognizing the ugly side of my history undermines my self-righteousness.