Out of the Box, Into the Ring – Warcry March 27th, 2004

Father Dave Smith is a hard man to pin down. Literally. One minute he’s on the phone talking about life as pastor of a Sydney inner-city parish, and the next he’s living it. SOS calls and all.

‘I got called out on a domestic situation,’ he tells me a day or so later when we resume our interview. ‘The woman was pretty distraught; she just really needed someone to talk to.’

If you are in any doubt about Smith’s love of humanity after reading his new book Sex, the RIng & the Eucharist, then you just haven’t read it closely enough. The book, which could easily be subtitled The Life and Times of a Humanitarian, throbs with the author’s frenetic energy and almost obsessional need to understand his fellow human beings.

However, with it’s inclusion of street talk and adult themes, it’s fair to say that not everyone in his Anglican diocese considered the book their cup of tea. Well, there was the issue of the title for a start.

‘The title comes from what I call the ‘one-on-one” experience,’ Smith explains with quiet persistence. ‘It’s the “me-and-you” experiences, so for me it stands to reason that sex, the ring and the Eucharist are those points in life where you really touch base with your partner, your sparring partner and God respectively.’

Which brings us to another of Smith’s driving forces. Not only does the 42-year-old pastor of Dulwich Hill Holy Trinity Anglican Church and father of three go out of his way to help his community, he’s also more than a little partial to a good fight. And not only in the ring.

It’s almost glib to call Smith ‘dichotomy in action’, but it’s exactly this question that has acted as a magnet for both his supporters and detractors.

There is little doubt, according to his friend Sydney freelance journalist Steve Lacey, who first interviewed Smith for the Sydney Morning Herald, that Smith is one out of the box.

‘From our very first meeting I thought he was a very warm individual, he says. ‘with a great sense of humour, a great laugh. I’m a real straight shooter and if l could think of any bad points I’d mention them, but I can’t.’ For Lacey, Smith is a rebel in the true sense of the word, i.e. a real embodiment of Christianity

‘He seems to represent what I believe are Christ’s teachings. He hates the whole idea that the church is like a middle-class golf club, very gentrified, where people dress up in their Sunday best. Father Dave cuts through all that bull. He gets right to the heart of Christ’s teaching.’

It helps that the community Smith lives and works in is every inch his community. Duiwich Hill is a mere hop, skip and jump from Redfern, where he grew up and where he has seen and experienced four decades of the Sturm and Drang of the everyday.

It’s poetic then that Smith’s own journey to priesthood was nothing short of biblical. While his childhood was happy enough, he found himself marooned after his parents’ divorce, which he dealt with by hiding behind a bad attitude and black leather.

‘I hit rock bottom at the age of 18, and had a short life expectancy.’ he recalls. My mother had died by this stage and my brothers and I were living with Dad and it was really hard.

But I always had a respect for my dad (Smith’s father was the late, celebrated university lecturer Rev. Bruce Smith), and I never stopped respecting him despite feeling enormous distance from him.’

He may have been distant, but Smith’s father was tireless in trying to awaken and stimulate thought in his wayward son. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, Smith recalls something just clicked.

‘There was one conversation we had that was about morality and he was suggesting that there is a deep sense of right and wrong within us that we can’t escape, and for some reason these sorts of notions really got to me and I found myself eventually coming to an honest realisation that what I was doing was wrong.’

Not long after, Smith recalls feeling the unmistakable pull of God calling him to a life of ministry.

‘I saw the principal of the seminary and asked what I needed to do to get in there,’ he says ‘And he told me to go away and get a university degree and then come back. So I did.’

What followed was a period of insatiable learning. At theological college Smith embraced existentialist philosophy, in particular the teachings of Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. who had rejected the formal framework of philosophy to embrace subjectivism

Life seemed remarkably rosy. He was 23. a pastor, husband and father of a young daughter. Then he entered a second round of darkness.

‘I got married at 21,’ he says, ‘and was divorced by 23. It hit me pretty hard.’

By all accounts this is something of an understatement. In his book Smith cites his own ‘selfishness’ as one of the main catalysts for his marriage breakdown. After his divorce he spent several years stumbling around in an emotional wilderness which included a half-hearted attempt at suicide, before he found himself back in Redfern and outside the Mundine Gym.

The gym (brainchild of Redfern-born middleweight champion Anthony Mundme), situated on one of the roughest streets in one of Sydney’s roughest neighbour-hoods, would play a key role in Smith’s psychological and spiritual renaissance.

That’s the paradox of Redfern,’ says Smith. There’s enormous violence coupled with some of the best people you will ever meet.’

The gym is where he also learnt the art of fighting. Fighting is more than sport,’ he writes in Sex, the Ring and the Eucharist. ‘Its a way of life. It is the defiant decision to confront your pain directly and not to be overcome by it. Mundine’s gym taught me that. or at least it played a significant role.’ Fighting, he continues, is not about showing brute force but about taking control.

‘I did two years of teaching boxing and wrestling in a juvenile detention centre. That was the roughest place I ever taught at. Every time I’d go there there’d be this dread and I’d have to prove my credentials to the new kids, because they’d want to try to beat me up just to make a point.’

‘What I’d do is very quickly, very quietly, tie one of the kids up like a pretzel,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t hurt him, and I’d tell them that this is what we were trying to do, that wrestling or boxing was about taking control without abusing that control.’

That’s one reason Redfern’s recent street riots were such a tragic backdrop to Smith’s ministry. Not only does he feel ‘linked’ to Redfern by sheer proximity, but the images of violence splashed across television and newspapers were a resonant reminder of the dangers of allowing it to fester unchecked and uncontained.

‘The problem we’ve got between the white and Koori kids is not something that will be solved overnight.’ he says. ‘It’s a deeply embedded social problem that runs across the country.

‘Here in Dulwich Hill it’s an extraordinarily multicultural area. We’ve been Greek, Lebanese, Vietnamese, and Islander and we’ve had problems with gangs, but what we’re seeing now is at a grassroots level where there just seems to be enormous tension between black and white kids, which was unanticipated and inexplicable.’ Getting this aggression off the Street and into the ring is the thinking behind his highly popular Fight Club.

‘Getting in the ring is a very powerful way of teaching, particularly, men to become close to each other, without having to compromise their heterosexuality.’ he says.

If you go to the pub, you will see guys who’ve got a few beers into them and they’re all over each other. You know, they get a bit drunk first and then it’s I really love you mate”. It’s a reflection of the fact that men need that sort of closeness with each other, but it’s very much our Aussie white culture that we just cant do that.

I think when you can meet these needs by having a good wrestle with each other, in a context where you’re not trying to hurt each other but are genuinely competing in a good and powerful way. It’s tremendously fulfilling.’

Someone else who can lay claim to understanding the culture behind a good fight is Smith’s second wife Angela, herself no slouch in the ring (although her preference is for kickboxing rather than wrestling).

‘I totally agree with David that the ring is an unpretentious place,’ she says. ‘And that’s something I really do like about it… although with young kids and a busy parish I don’t really have too many chances of stepping into one these days.’

Angela was relatively new to the Christian faith when she and Smith met in the early 1990s. He was the catechist at the church she had started attending and was still married, so it was a few years before a friendship let alone a relationship began.

But, aside from changing her view of priests as being ‘old and drab’, she came to realise that Smith was someone with unlimited energy and integrity.

Unlike herself, she says, her husband is ‘completely obsessive and relational’, which can be cause for friction on the odd occasion. ‘David will have people here 24 hours a day,’ she says. ‘But he knows I couldn’t work like that. I need my time out.’

Before taking on the mantle of ‘clergy’s wife’, Angela was a professional woman of independent means, and it’s little wonder that she found her first few years at the parish emotionally and psychologically exhausting.

‘I had no idea what I was getting into,’ she says, ‘living on site and going into fulltime ministry. I’d have to say the whole time has been quite tough because we don’t nave a normal ife.

‘I mean it’s exciting, it’s like being on a roller-coaster and David is a very intense personality, so when I say tough I dont mean it resentfully, but it has been very momentous, difficult at times and definitely emotionally charged.’

Steve Lacey recalls this intensity in his friend first-hand. A few years ago Smith managed to entice Anthony Mundine to a charity fight and Lacey went along to lend his support.

‘Dave took it so seriously,’ he says, his voice still ringing with surprise. ‘He had the hooded top on and marched into the ring with his entourage. I went out the back and tried to talk to him but he just didn’t want to know me, he was just so centred, so focused. I must admit I thought at the time, “Come on Dave, it’s just a charity thing, get a life”.

‘I was surprised because it’s unusual for him to take himself so seriously, except, as I learnt, when it comes to his boxing.’

The same could easily be said for his family, his God and his community.

‘If there was a bigger purpose in writing the book,’ says Smith of his writing debut, ‘it was a real desire to communicate something of the faith to the people I know.

‘A lot of the guys I mix with at the pub or in the ring have no idea what the church is on about. They really see Christian people as a different culture who think they’re better than they are, and part of my goal is to try to communicate that I am just another human being struggling with my own stuff.’

Sex, the Ring and the Eucharist, RRP $24.95, can be ordered via www.fatherdave.org.

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