Chapter Seventeen
I thought about it.
As I walked along the Maroondah Highway to the church for a meeting with the pastor I really thought about it.
I thought about Grant before his spell in jail. The notorious Mr Fixer. Then I recalled him afterwards. In just the three months between his release from prison and his death he had done things that few people knew about.
Once he’d turned up at my flat after midnight, so excited about his latest notion that he hadn’t been able to sleep. “A chain of stores in Australia to sell hand-made goods from the poorest parts of Indonesia,” he’d told me. “Help lift the people out of their poverty. I’ll put you in charge.”
Another time it was a campaign to make the Bahasa Indonesian language taught more widely in Australian schools. Then he’d been having talks with the pastor about working with the church to establish a network of welfare centers for new migrants. He had even started borrowing my dangdut cassettes and he expressed an enthusiasm for Indonesian pop music. No Westerner could feign that.
The main entrance of the church was unlocked and I walked inside. The pastor’s wife Esther was there, smartly dressed as usual in a tan trouser suit with flared collars. She was hanging a tapestry on a side wall in preparation for the Easter services. It was a modern rendition of the crucifixion, about eight feet tall, with Jesus portrayed in black silhouette against a red background. It was simple but stark.
Esther had enlisted Melissa, who was standing on a stepladder, stretching up, her back to me. She was wearing pale yellow jeans and a high-necked red sweater, and she looked like a trapeze artist about to attempt a particularly dangerous routine.
With Anzac Day also approaching, I noticed that Esther and Melissa had arranged a small floral tribute near the piano, around a centerpiece of a framed black-and-white photo of the cemetery near Gallipoli, in Turkey, where so many Australian soldiers perished.
Esther spotted me. She pointed to Melissa, smiled and gave a thumbs-up sign. I smiled back.
I walked into the pastor’s office. He was seated at his desk, a weary expression in his eyes, and writing with a pencil on a large pink notepad. For the first time I noticed that his hand trembled as he wrote.
He beckoned to me to sit, then raised his eyebrows in a quizzical manner. I told him what I had been hearing, including Tom Traherne’s assertion the previous day that Grant’s prison conversion was phony.
The pastor’s reaction was the same as mine. “Grant was a new man,” he said firmly. “A new creation.” He resumed his writing, as if that were the end of the matter.
“Tom Traherne seems to think that Grant was probably still involved in a lot of dubious activities.”
The pastor put down his pencil. His eyes moved slowly around the small room, as if checking for listening devices. Then he leaned forward and looked at me. “I have seen many people come to church for all kinds of reasons. Often it is because they are pressured into it by a friend or relative, or because deep inside them they sometimes feel it is the right thing to do.” He paused. “Most of them don’t stay.”
He placed his large hands on the side of his chair, and looked for a moment as if he were about to stand and start preaching a sermon. But he remained seated.
“Of course, getting sent to prison is a time for reflection,” he said. “It isn’t too difficult to decide that you’ve been a bad boy and maybe you should try to change. It certainly doesn’t do you any harm with the prison authorities when they see you trying to be a better person. A lot of prison converts don’t stay converted, that’s for sure. But I will also say that being sent to prison can put you in such a state of despair that God’s spirit is able to do mighty work in you.”
Now he raised himself slowly to his feet. He walked to his bookshelf, crammed with volumes on theology and philosophy.
“Johnny, I’ve seen some marvelous conversions in my time. God’s spirit cannot be resisted when it is at full power. I spent thirty years working in the Western Desert, out near Alice Springs.” He pointed to a framed photo on the bookshelf of himself with three Aboriginal men in tribal costume. “The Aboriginal people are some of the most spiritual people on earth, and I have seen whole communities struck by God’s spirit. Slain in the spirit, if you will.”
He paused again, a reflective look on his face.
“Johnny, I don’t talk about this too much, even in Christian circles, because people start to think you’ve been smoking the local herbs. But I can remember this one night, when I was preaching to a group of about a dozen Aboriginal men and women. It was a completely clear night, but as I finished there was a flash of lightning, and suddenly half the people started speaking in tongues. Then they were crying, and a few started praying. Within a week they had all changed. They didn’t become good Christians as most white fellows would know it. They didn’t dress up in suits to come to church on Sunday. Some of the men had a couple of wives, and they didn’t suddenly divorce one. But they were changed people. They stopped drinking the grog. Married men stopped playing around with other women. The change shone through in everything they said and did. God’s spirit is more powerful than anything we can imagine.”
He moved back to the desk and leant on it with both arms. His face was near mine.
“Johnny,” he growled. “It was God’s spirit that touched Grant.”
I hadn’t noticed Melissa standing just inside the doorway. She smiled. “He’s right, Johnny,” she said. “Grant really was a new man. I ought to know.” She went back to her tasks.
The pastor took his seat again at his desk. Even just a couple of minutes preaching to me seemed to have depleted his reserves. He stared blankly at his pen and paper. I stood to leave, but he looked up and indicated that I should wait. I sat.
“Johnny, I’m worried about you.”
“No need for that. I know how to stay out of danger. Better than most. You know that. More than twenty years fighting in the mountains. I can take care of myself.”
“I’ll tell you why.” It was as if he hadn’t heard me. “I’ll tell you why.”
I waited.
“It’s because you are too much like me.”
Too much like Pastor Thomas? A score of rejoinders rushed to my brain, some flippant, most rude. But I held my silence.
“You want to change the world.”
What’s wrong with that, I wanted to say. But I didn’t.
“You know something? I hated studying at Oxford. Why? Because I couldn’t wait to get out to change the world myself. The trouble was, so many people were supporting me financially in my studies that I had to stick it out. And then my supporters lined up this job for me at a little church out near Warrnambool. Boy, did I hate that place. The only good part about it was that I met Esther there.”
He glanced out the door towards his wife, still working on the decorations, as if he needed some kind of confirmation of this.
“But as soon as I could, I took off into the outback. To help the Aboriginal communities and make the world a better place. There was just one problem.”
He raised his eyebrows, as if it were a quiz show and he expected me to tell him what the problem was. But then he continued.
“Just one problem. I was full of anger. You know something? I spent my first ten years in the outback angry. I was angry at the world because it wasn’t perfect. I was angry at myself for not being able to fix all the problems. I was angry at God for not making the world perfect and for not giving me the power to fix things. And you know something else?”
He looked at me hard. I shrugged my shoulders.
“Probably the worst of it was that I didn’t even realize that I was angry. I was meant to be helping the Aboriginal community. But spiritually they were teaching me. In their quiet, deeply spiritual way they taught me that the world may not be perfect, but it’s all in God’s hands. They taught me that I didn’t have to be busy all the time. They taught me to be still and to listen to God. So I spent
probably the next ten years learning to release my anger, to stop trying to be the perfectionist all the time, and finally then I was ready to teach. I was in the outback for thirty years, but it was only the last ten years that I did much good.”
“And you’re saying that’s my problem?” Now I really was feeling angry. “Sure. There’s plenty to get angry about. Especially if you’ve grown up in East Timor and you’ve seen what’s happened to your country. Seen the whole world ignore your plight.”
“There’s injustice everywhere. We must fight it. But we have to accept that ultimately God is in control. We drive ourselves into the ground if we try to right every wrong. But that’s what I was trying to do. And that’s what you are trying to do too.”
“No, I don’t think…”
“I often preach about the need for forgiveness. And by forgiveness I mean love and reconciliation. Because until we can forgive our enemies we lead lives of bitterness and anguish. My problem was that I needed to forgive my enemy. That’s your problem too.”
“You mean all the Indonesians? Like Alberto, who tortured me and raped wives in front of their husbands and…?”
“No. You know who my enemy was? It was myself. I needed to forgive myself for all my twisted anger. I needed to learn to love myself. And that’s what you need too. You need to learn to love yourself.”
I fell silent. Once more the pastor had put me off guard. I had no reply.
He changed the subject. “The only good news from what you’ve told me recently is that you seem to have found someone who might be your father. Do you really think so?”
“It’s about the best lead I’ve had since I’ve been in Australia.”
“La Vinne. It’s not impossible.”
“John La Vinne. A young Australian in East Timor for a year around the time I was born. It has to be him.”
“You say you’re trying to locate him.”
“Rohan’s already talked to some of the army’s media people. They’re going to check out his records. But they don’t have that name on their computer files, so it means he quit the military a while ago. They say they’re going to have to dig his name out from their archives, which are all in warehouses. That’ll take a few weeks at least. It’s not priority.”
“Not for them,” said the pastor kindly.
He looked down at his papers and I knew it was time to leave.
“Since Grant’s death I’ve had a lot to pray about,” he said, without looking up. “You’ve given me one more thing.”
The pastor enjoyed prayer. He was happy.