In May last year there was a tremendous hullaballoo over some photographs in an exhibition in Sydney by the Melbourne photographer Bill Henson.

Critics accused Henson of taking and profiting from pornographic photos of children. The storm raged for a number of weeks, the photographs in

question were confiscated from the gallery by the NSW police and commentary raged back and forth. Henson himself had little to say apart from

the one line I heard him say; something to the effect: it is necessary to do this.

For those of you who don’t know of Henson’s work he is one of the world’s most respected contemporary photographers. As with most brilliant

Australian artists, though, he is not as highly regarded at home as abroad. His photos are characterised by the sort of haunting chiaroscuro typical of

the paintings of great artists like Caravaggio. And his photos are immense; sometimes up to maybe eight feet in height. What is controversial about his

work is that very often they contain images of naked or semi naked young people inhabiting that borderland space between childhood and adolescence.

The images are highly charged with feeling but they are not pornographic. The subjects are often naked but their portrayal is not sexual.

About four years ago there was a retrospective of Henson’s photographic work over the past 30 years at the Potter Gallery at Fed Square.

His works filled the entire temporary exhibition rooms on the ground floor. One of the series of photos which most affected me was a series

of immense images, a whole wall full, of groups of young people, naked and alone in the carnage of a car wrecker’s yard. The figures were bathed

in a haunting blue light while surrounded by the darkness; they were alone; you could their aloneness, abandoned in an industrial wasteland;

without protection; with no adults to guide them; utterly exposed to the elements; and without comfort, warmth or sustenance. They were discarded

 like unwanted, expendable cars.

For myself there was a sense that Henson was trying to say something to the effect that we abandon our children in our contemporary Western society,

leaving them metaphorically naked  and utterly to their own devices in an industrial wasteland. I realised there was great truth in what the pictures

were saying. As this dawned on me I realised that this abandoned state of our young people is also a damning indictment on the adult population

who leave them to their own devices; while at the same time actually failing to be adults themselves.

We hear from Mark’s gospel one of the passages which appears in all the gospels where Jesus welcomes children. There are two aspects to this

welcoming by Jesus in the gospels. In one of the interactions Jesus always welcomes the children which are brought to him while the disciples at

the same time are trying to turn them away. Jesus places the child in the midst of the crowd and tells them that unless they become like little

children they cannot enter the kingdom. The other story is the one we have heard today; Jesus welcomes the child and tells his hearers that if

they welcome the child, they welcome him.

The important thing to understand about this welcoming is the fact that children in ancient society were essentially considered to be non-people.

This is quite contrary to our society which seems to place so much emphasis, so many resources, so much attention, on our children; not so in Jesus’ time.

Jesus exhorts his followers to welcome children (the non-people) in the same way as he exhorts them to welcome the blind the lame, the poor the naked

-  and find himself in them.

Childhood is in a bit of a crisis in the west. Children are not able to be children for very long. Their innocence is invaded and colonised by the marketers

and they are drawn into teenage concerns before they are ready for adolescence, and once this is done they then inhabit this two-decade-long teenage

twig light zone which runs from 8 to 28. And while the education system struggles to effectively form them they are very effectively formed and targeted

by a marketing system which grabs their attention and their loyalty and holds it. In this battle to hold attention parents seem to feel powerless to shape

their children’s lives short of cosseting and closeting them from the world.

Kids are seen as the fertile ground for sowing seeds of consumerism which will bear a lifetime of fruit for the marketers and advertisers. Apparently the

CEO of Kids r US has said that if you own a child at an early age you can own them for years to come. I have been reflecting on my own penchant for

shopping lately and I’m realising that my consumerist habit was formed very early and that it was both overt and subliminal messages in advertising which

shaped a sense of self-worth which is in part tied up with a desire to buy and own.

Where all of this impinges on us as we reflect during the Season of Creation is that it is to a great extent our desire to consume in the West which is driving

our ravaging of the earth. We have been for quite some decades now forming people with an insatiable desire, and sense of entitlement, if not obligation,

to consume. A huge amount of our stuff we don’t actually need when it all boils down. One of the things we are going to have to consider as we reflect

on the effect we are having on the planet is that we will need to stop inducting and forming our children as consumers if we want to claw back some of our

consumption.

 Have you ever stepped back and watched a family as a child at their first birthday or for their first Christmas is receiving a gift. This giving of the first gift is

an induction process; an initiation ritual. If you haven’t observed this just step back next time and watch. It’ a sort of religious initiation. Watch how excited

and committed the adults are about making sure that the child gets the message about receiving things. They are being inducted as little consumers. The child

learns from the adults very quickly that this ritual matters; it very quickly shapes who they are and how they relate to the others close to them.

We might like to say nice warm and fuzzy things about the giving and receiving of gifts and generosity and all sort of things like this but it is in essence

an induction into consumerism; a consumerism which is strangling the planet. We do need to do some rethinking about how we go about this sort of thing.

If only we could induct our children with the same sort of enthusiasm and focus, and unashamed commitment, to the life of faith or the beauty and wonder

and mystery of the cosmos. These takes on life or the world or to what our sense of self worth is tied don’t just happen; we are inducted into by others

in some way or other.

The letter of James in its often strong and uncompromising language asks: those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they

not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and you do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something

and you cannot have it; so you engage in deputes and conflicts.

Now we may feel that the charge, that if we cannot have what we want then we are willing to commit murder, does not apply to us but we do inhabit

a world, especially the developed world, where over a long period of time rulers and governments have been willing to commit murder in order that their

subjects and their citizens might have. Maybe in our own time it has been most explicitly expressed by Uncle George when he consistently repeated in

the face of the Gulf War and issues of global warming that the American way of life is not up for negotiation.

As I said last week it is very difficult to have a sense of hope in light of all that is happening around us. The temptation is to retreat into a siege mentality or

lash out or encourage others to lash out on our behalf.

Gail gave me a copy of the newsletter from the Centre for Ecology and Spirituality during the week. Br. Trevor Parton writes:

The future is full of uncertainty and ominous signs. We need to confront our challenges with  a mixture of anger, desperation, resolve and creativity,

but the flip side of all this is a need to re-engage our heart with this wounded reality that is our Earth. Our best resolve and creativity will come  from a

deep love for life, a love that needs expression and nurturing. In order to do this Trevor repeats a saying from Brian Swimmer, author of a Canticle to

the Cosmos. He says:  Find profound joy in life.

The gospels were written at a time of deep tumult in the ancient Mediterranean world. Maybe they felt then, as we feel now, that their world was rapidly

spiraling out of control. The attractiveness of the followers of Jesus was that they seemed to be profoundly centred and joyful; even in the face of martyrdom.

Committing ourselves to the way of Christ involves us marching to the sound of a different drum than the one which the world will beat for us. The measure

of the way in which we rear our children and shape our communities is reflection of how serious we are about whether we think this way of Jesus matters.

As parents and grandparents what are the things we will induct our children into? As members of the church what do we think it is important to induct

people who are enquiring into? Surely our greatest desire and most basic need is to find profound joy in live. Often this won’t come unless we are willing

to abandon some other things first. And surely it is in one sense the constant aim of the spiritual life. It is the abandoning of ourselves to child-like simplicity

and trust in the goodness and love of God that will allow us to rest secure in all that we are. In doing this we can know that profound joy is to be had

in the knowledge that we are God’s graced children, friends of the son and blessed by that spirit at the core of creation.