It’s a pity the Inner West Review chose to depict pole-vaulting rather than boxing. đ Either way, thank you Sarah Maguire for an excellent write-up.
February 12th, 2022. What a privilege it was to give the opening prayer at the most amazing rally I have every been involved in, and possible the largest rally ever held on Australian soil.
It was painful to see the mainline media denigrate this incredible event. If there really were half a million people there, that was 2% of the entire population of the country! Why the politicians arenât taking us more seriously, I do not know.
Bismillah Hir Rahman Nir Rahim.
In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti
And with respect for the traditional custodians of this land, and elders past, present and emerging:
What a wonderful day this is. What a great day for Australia. It is appropriate that we dedicate this day to God in prayer because we recognize that this battle is not simply a political fight but a spiritual war.
Yes, we fight political overreach and, yes, we fight the profits of big pharma and technological intrusion into our privacy but ultimately we fight principalities and powers and dark forces that attempt to rob our children of their future!
This is our battle, and we are the people. We are the front line. We are the people who stood up when others sat down. We are the people who refused to bow to Baal. We are the people who did not buy the lie. We don’t need to wait for anybody else. We are the people we have been waiting for, and this is our time.
God give us strength. God give us wisdom, and for the sake of our children and the generations to come and our beloved country, Australia, God give us victory in the name of the Father the Son of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
On February 12, 2022, Canberra saw what was probably the largest rally ever held on Australian soil. Commentators mockingly said that the group had multiple agendas – a bit of freedom, a bit of anti-vax, a bit of Jesus. My experience was the opposite – that the half a million people who gathered there were unified around one common hope – to rescue our country back from totalitarian control.
The highlight for me was John Stephan singing, âYouâre the Voiceâ. This was my highlight, not simply because I love John Stephanâs singing, but because of the way the lyrics summed up the spirit of the event â âWe’re not gonna sit in silence. We’re not gonna live with fear.â Watch the video and youâll see one of the Indigenous elders who was at my side, arm in arm with a non-Indigenous woman, dancing and singing those words together. For me, that summed up the event.
Father Dave’s Old School Boxing Academy trained out of the church hall of Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill from 1991 to 2021. We trained many champions. More importantly, we saw a great many crazy kids grow into confident adults, and, in a lot of cases, we played a significant role in that process.
December 31, 2021, was where it ended. We had over 3,000 people sign the community petition, asking the church for a stay of execution. None was given. Even so, as my dad used to say, when the work of God is like a flowing stream, and when someone drops a rock in the stream, the water will find a way around it. Our work will continue. We are currently training at the Fight Lab in Tempe with my old friend, Kon Pappy, and we continue to train at Binacrombi bush camp on the weekends. Join us.
Featured below is some footage taken from our last training session.
You’ll, forgive me for bringing with me the symbol of the cross today I don’t mean to hijack the icon of the church, but the truth is that the church stole this icon from the Roman Empire many centuries ago. Long before this was a symbol of faith, it was a symbol of death.
You’ll remember that the cross was something you got killed with. It was like a noose or a guillotine, except it was something designed to kill people slowly and painfully and publicly.
Jesus was not the only person to be crucified by the Romans. In fact, if you go back a generation before Christ, after the revolt of Spartacus, the survivors of that slave revolution – six thousand of them – were crucified, and their crosses lined the Via Appia in and out of Rome for 100 kilometres.
You couldn’t leave your home. You couldn’t take your children out for a walk. You couldn’t go shopping without seeing the gruesome reminder everywhere of this symbol, which reminded you that the empire was powerful and that you were nothing, that they had the power of life and death over you and you better do what they say, or you will end up here.
Centuries go by and empires come and go, but systems of power and control continue to be re resurrected. None of us have been crucified, as far as i know. Maybe the worst that’s happened to you is you’ve been embarrassed because you can’t go to the pub with your mates or to the movies or to the coffee shop, or maybe you’ve lost your job, or maybe your business has gone bust and you’ve lost your home. It’s a different shovel. It’s the same crap.
What is great is that the church took this symbol of death and turned it into a symbol of hope, because they believed that there are some people who will just not stay crucified. There are some people, no matter how much you humiliate them and torture them and take from them and kill them, they will rise again!
There are some messages that will not be silenced. There are some movements that cannot be stopped. The light continues to shine in the darkness and the darkness is never going to put it out!
To tell you the truth, I didn’t know if we had it in us. I look back at generations past – I know our indigenous sisters and brothers know what it’s like to fight for their land when they lose their sovereignty. I know my parents and grandparents – they fought in great wars to protect our freedoms. I didn’t know whether we’d be up to it, but it turns out, we are.
We have not bent the knee. We have not given in. We have held the line. We might be on the ropes, but we have not yet hit the canvas. We are still fighting, and this is our time, sisters and brothers. This is our time. This is our time, and we are the people we have been waiting for.
This is the time that our children and grandchildren will look back on one day and say “mum and dad, grandpa and grandpa – they held the line. They stood for something. They made a difference. This is our time. We are the people we have been waiting for.
God give us strength. God give us courage. God give us compassion, one for another, and God grant us victory. In the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit. Amen.
If you said âAbraham Lincolnâ, you would be correct, though it was originally said by Jesus (Mark 3:25), referring to an internal conflict going on within an individual person. Lincoln famously took up the phrase in his address to the Illinois Republican State Convention in June of 1858 to refer to his country, which he saw as divided over the issue of slavery. âI believe this government cannot endureâ, he continued, âpermanently half slave and half free.â
That speech came to mind for me as I thought about our situation here today in Australia. We are a house divided, and I do wonder how much more we can stand.
Of course, the issue for us is not slavery, though listening to the language of our leaders, if you didnât know better, you could be forgiven for thinking it was:
âWeâve outlined the freedoms that exist for vaccinated people. However, donât assume that at 80% double-dose vaccination, that unvaccinated people are going to have all those freedoms. I want to make that point very clear.â (New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, September 13, 2021)
Who would have believed a year or so ago that any Australian leader could say something like that about any minority group in Australian society â that those people wonât be allowed the freedoms enjoyed by the majority. It wasnât a slip of the tongue:
âI want to stress again â for those of you who choose not to be vaccinated, thatâs your choice, but donât expect to do everything that vaccinated people do even when we hit 80%, and I want to make that very clear.â (New South Wales Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, September 13, 2021)
I am an unvaccinated person.
Even saying that openly, I feel as if Iâm confessing to a crime, and perhaps I should be wearing a bell around my neck, which is what they once forced lepers to do so that other people could hear them coming. I think they also had to yell out âunclean, uncleanâ whenever they came into a public place, just in case people didnât hear the bell. Perhaps it will come to that for the unvaccinated here too. I hope not.
Either way, as an unvaccinated person I find it hard to hear things like this said by my State Premier â that for the foreseeable future I will continue to be denied freedoms that I had always taken for granted in ths country â freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of worship.
I spent the first 59 years of my life thinking that these freedoms were somehow God-given and that no political leader, particularly in this country, would every try to take them away from me. I was wrong, and then I assumed that if my freedoms were to be taken away, that it couldnât be for long, and I was wrong about that too!
It makes me feel a little ill, thinking that Australia is becoming a house divided between those who are (relatively) free and people like me who will be restricted in where we can go, and what we can do, and who we can see, and barred from pubs and clubs and perhaps even from places of worship.
Never did I believe that Iâd hear an Australian leader say something like this. Even so, it isnât those statements from the Premier that upset me the most. Itâs this one:
âWell, I certainly hope that all of you are vaccinated. I wouldnât want to be in a room with a lot of people who arenât vaccinated.â (New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian, September 7, 2021)
Did she really say that?
âI wouldnât want to be in a room with a lot of people who arenât vaccinated.â
I guess she did.
Surely, she didnât mean it the way it sounded, as it sounds like pure prejudice!
If sheâd said âI wouldnât want to be in a room with a lot of Indigenous peopleâ or âI wouldnât want to be in a room with a lot of Muslim peopleâ, we would immediately be offended, wouldnât we, as weâd see these as expressions of pure prejudice?
We donât allow our political leaders to say things like that, so I must assume thereâs more to it, even though it is a statement that isolates a specific group of people whom she has said are going to be discriminated against by having freedoms denied to them that the rest of the population are going to enjoy.
I assume she means that she doesnât want to be in a room with a lot of unvaccinated people in it because those people will put her at risk â at risk of getting the virus!
I assume thatâs what she means, except that this doesnât make a lot of sense since, as a vaccinated person, confident in the efficacy of the vaccine, why would she be worried about being in a room full of people, regardless of their vaccination status? Isnât she protected, to a significant degree at least, by the vaccine?
Of course, yes, we do know that the vaccinated can still contract the virus, and we know too that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can carry the virus while being asymptomatic, meaning that you wouldnât know that they had it, but that they can still give it to you!
Given that, I can understand why the Premier (or any number of people) might choose not to enter rooms with lots of people in them (vaccinated or unvaccinated) but the key question here is whether the unvaccinated in the room pose any greater risk to the healthy than the vaccinated, and Iâm pretty sure they donât!
Of course, thereâs still a lot we donât know about the virus, and I am certainly no expert, but I think itâs been well established that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can still get the virus and that both vaccinated and unvaccinated people can still carry the virus, and I believe itâs been equally well-established that asymptomatic carriers of the virus (vaccinated and unvaccinated) carry about the same âviral loadâ if they do have it, meaning that theyâre equally capable of infecting others.
Now ⌠I have read that the unvaccinated can carry the virus for longer, which might make people like me more suspect. At the same time though, we are surely less likely to be asymptomatic if weâve got it, since the virus is likely to hit us unvaccinated people harder, so ⌠let me tell you a story.
Back in the early 1980âs, when the AIDS epidemic was at itâs height, I was working with a church in Kings Cross (Sydneyâs red-light district) and we used to have a well-known transvestite guy join us sometimes for our Sunday Eucharist (where we share the bread and wine with each other) and this guy would always make a point of being the first person at the communion rail.
If you donât know the Anglican system, we share a âcommon cupâ, meaning that each person takes a sip of wine from the same cup, one after the other. We wipe the cup with a cloth between communicants but, as you can appreciate, some people do get concerned about the possibility of spreading infection through the sharing of the cup.
As I say, this guy, who was a member of a group known as âthe sisters of perpetualindulgenceâ would make a point of being first at the communion rail, meaning that his lips were going to be on that cup ahead of everybody else. He was making a point. He wasnât known to be AIDS-positive, but people, understandably, had their fears and, at the time, no one was quite sure how easily the virus could be shared.
So what did we do? We all shared in the Eucharist as per usual and ⌠Iâm still here.
Interestingly, when the medical establishment eventually got on top of the AIDS epidemic, they worked out that people putting their lips to a common cup couldnât possibly spread the virus, whether they were AIDS-positive or not. Ironically though, if our brother had been AIDS-positive, his immunities might have been in a bad way, and he would have been at risk of catching a cold from someone if he hadnât taken the cup first, and that could have done him a lot of damage, so he was actually doing the right thing by going first because it was actually him who was at risk and not us!
I think weâre in a very similar situation now. As I understand it, I would actually be at greater risk, being in a room with the Premier and other vaccinated people, than she would be, being in a room with me and my unvaccinated mates.
Maybe that was the point of the Premierâs statement â that she doesnât want to be in a room with a lot of us unvaccinated people because she doesnât want to put us at risk. If thatâs the case, Madam Premier, let me say, âthanks, but no thanksâ. Please let me look after my health while you focus on looking after my rights and freedoms!
The Premier probably wouldnât remember, but we have actually been in the same room together, and we shared a meal together, back in the glory days, and I donât mind risking it again (if it is a risk) as I do believe itâs worth taking just about any risk to prevent this country from becoming further divided.
Let me state my position as plainly as possible: I do want to be in a room full of unvaccinated people. I will also be very happy to be in a room full of vaccinated people, just as Iâd love to be in a room full of Indigenous people or a room full of Muslim people. The bottom line is that Iâm yearning to be back in a room full of people, but if my freedoms are going to be restricted until I get jabbed, I can wait.
You might wonder why Iâm so hesitant about being vaccinated. Just for the record, itâs not primarily a concern about the vaccines, though I do have my questions. The bigger issue for me right now though is this divided country that our politicians are creating, and if we are going to have two tiers in Australian society, with a free majority looking down on a restricted minority, Iâm going to stand alongside those at the bottom until the discrimination ends.
It doesnât have to be this way, Madam Premier. It never had to be this way. There were always other alternatives and there are other alternatives now. Embrace them please!
We need to move beyond this division. We need to become one people again, and we need it to happen now, because a house divided against itself cannot stand.
I have no issue with the Premier (or any representative of the state) singling out those of us who break the law, but the civil law and the moral law are not the same thing. One is secular and one is spiritual, and they need to be kept as separate as church and state.
âOn the appointed day Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people. They shouted, âThis is the voice of a god, not of a man.â Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.â (Acts 12:21-23)
These little-known verses from the book of Acts recount the rather ignominious demise of Herod Agrippa I. This Herod was the grandson of Herod the Great (so called) who is best remembered for his slaughter of the infant children when Jesus was born (Matthew 2), and nephew of Herod Antipas, who murdered John the Baptist (Luke 9). Evidently, they were all chips off the same rancid block.
Herod was âeaten by worms and diedâ, Luke says, and not the other way around. From a medical point of view, we might assume Herod had acquired some sort of intestinal tape worm, but the point here is not scientific but spiritual. Herod died because he was judged by God, and judged because he committed the most fundamental of all human sins â idolatry. He put himself in the place of God.
Today we live in a proudly secular society where we maintain a strict separation between church and state. I support this separation completely, as history has taught us very clearly that once the church is given executive power, it becomes as corrupt as every other human institution.
Constantine was the beginning of the end, in my view. I suspect that his famous vision where he saw an image of the cross and heard the words âby this conquerâ came either from his own imagination or straight from the devil. He took the sacred symbol of the suffering Christ and aligned it with warfare, violence, rape and murder! And when Constantine did conquer all his enemies, the cross became associated with something else â namely, extreme executive power! Political power is not something the church has ever handled well.
Of course, the separation of church and state has two sides to it, and just as I would hate to see the church assume political power, my greater concern today is with the state trying to assume spiritual power! Every time I hear the Premier of New South Wales refer to people doing âthe wrong thingâ it makes me shudder.
âWhen people knowingly do the wrong thing and pretend they didnât know, thatâs not acceptable. ⌠The vast majority of people are doing the right thing but when a handful donât it is a setback for all of us.”
I have no issue with the Premier (or any representative of the state) singling out those of us who break the law, but the civil law and the moral law are not the same thing. One is secular and one is spiritual, and they need to be kept as separate as church and state.
In truth, neither the premier nor the police force, nor any secular judge, has any right to pass moral judgement on us, and most especially when those breaking the law are doing so for reasons of conscience, and yet the premier goes further. She not only passes moral judgement, but presumes to judge what is in the hearts of these law-breakers:
âItâs really people knowingly having disregard, unfortunately, for their loved ones and also the rest of us in breaching the health orders.”
To presume to pass judgement on people like this is really to put yourself in the place of God! I hope the Premier is eating plenty of coconut. Itâs apparently very effective in expelling intestinal worms.
From a Biblical point of view, this question of moral authority goes right back to the beginning. Itâs the original issue that is the undoing of Adam and Eve! They eat of the âtree of the knowledge of good and evilâ, thinking that it will make them like God!
âBut the serpent said to the woman, âYou will not die;Â for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.ââ (Genesis 3:4-5)
Adam and Eve eat of the tree because they think it will give them knowledge, and with knowledge comes power! By attempting to grasp the true knowledge of good and evil, our forefather and foremother are depicted as trying to usurp Godâs authority.
Only the Almighty truly understands good and evil. God alone can judge. God alone understands the complexity of the moral universe, and the complexity of the human heart, and so can judge with love, equity, and compassion.
Adam and Eve eat of the fruit and so gain initiation into a far more complex world, but the serpent lied to them. It is not a world they will ever fully understand and so they will never be able to take on the role of moral judge. They will have to learn their proper place in the created order and learn it the hard way.
In truth, the only person I have seen show more presumption than the NSW premier is the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern. She went even further than claiming the right to judge her peopleâs morality and motivations. She proclaimed herself as the single source of truth!
âYou can trust us as a source of that information,â she declared. âYou can also trust the Director-General of Health and the Ministry of Health. ⌠otherwise dismiss anything else.â ⌠âWe will continue to be your single source of truth,â
Iâm glad that Ms Arden didnât fall from her podium at that point, clutching her abdomen. Even so, I canât imagine King Herod sounding any more presumptuous!
Forgive me for singling out these two women here. The irony is that these two were the politicians I had most admired prior to this latest trial.
I was so impressed with how the New Zealandâs Prime Minister handled the terrorist shooting at the Christchurch Mosque in 2019. Along with many others, I thought of her as a model of compassionate leadership.
Similarly, with Ms Berejiklian, I was deeply impressed with her relative restraint and calm over the early lockdowns, particularly in comparison with the Premier of Victoria. I thought of her as the gold standard of Australian leadership. What happened? Did the adulation go to their heads?
The bottom line is that these politicians â our Premiers and Prime Ministers â are not God. They can make up laws and they can arrest and punish us as law-breakers, but they cannot assess our moral characters, they cannot ascertain what motivates us, and they cannot pass judgement on us as human beings. To presume that they can is to risk an unhealthy encounter with the worms!
We must keep a separation between church and state because we must maintain the distinction between law and morality. If we lose that distinction then we lose any basis for criticising the actions of government. If the law-makers can decree what is right and wrong, then no law, no matter how insidious, can be questioned.
Many Germans fell under this sort of delusion a century ago â giving the Nazis the right to decree what was right and what was wrong. The Nuremburg trials ruled that the German people had no excuse â that they should have known better. âI was just following ordersâ was not adequate, as everyone knows deep down that was is ordered and what is right are often two very different things.
I believe we are in a similar situation to that of the German people in the early 1930âs. Iâm not suggesting that we have any dictator like Adolf Hitler waiting in the wings, but the issues we are confronting are identical. Are we willing to take a moral stand against laws that are clearly unethical?
For the last eighteen months we have been dealing with laws that stop us meeting for worship, prevent us from being with those we love when they are in need, and can even forbid us from embracing our children. We have seen the cost of these laws on mental health, on domestic violence, on job loss, business collapse, street violence, depression and suicide. At some point we need to say, âenough is enoughâ, and I fear that if we donât say it soon, there will be no path back to Eden-like existence we once took for granted.
As for our politicians, I donât believe they are willfully trying to usurp the Almighty. Indeed, I suspect that the real intentions of the Premier of New South Wales are made transparently clear every time she expresses public condolences for those who have been killed by the virus.
The Premier reads us a list every day â details of individuals who have died of (or with) COVID in the last twenty-four hours. At time of writing, itâs generally around three or four people each day, and we hear the Premier express her grief over these deaths and extend her condolences to the families.
I have a problem with this. Iâm not suggesting that itâs wrong for our leaders to grieve those who die, but why single out those who were COVID positive? According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, around 55, 000 people die each year in New South Wales. Thatâs more than a thousand per week or around 150 per day. If the Premier is genuinely upset over the deaths of the three who died who were COVID positive, what about the 147 who died the same day without any trace of COVID? Arenât their deaths tragic? Why donât we grieve them and extend condolences to their families?
The real problem we have with our Premier is not that she cares too much for those dying with COVID or too little for anybody else. The problem is that she, and all her political colleagues, are only focused on one thing â minimising COVID deaths. They arenât deliberately trivialising all forms of death and destruction that are not directly COVID-related, but all this collateral damage is not their problem. COVID is their problem, and they will take every option that is available to them, including taking on God-like powers if they can, to make their problem go away.
This is the real question then â how did the political establishment become so myopically fixated on only one aspect of this worldwide tragedy? Is the media to blame? Was this tunnel vision driven by the pharmaceutical companies? Is there really some secret cabal of sinister men behind it all? In the end, it doesnât matter. It is still a total failure in leadership on the part of Australiaâs political elite.
âDo not judge others, and you will not be judgedâ, warns Jesus (Matthew 7:1), for indeed, these things have a way of coming back on us. For the moment, non-COVID deaths are not the problem of our political leaders, but as the toll of devastation from the lockdowns rises, it will become their problem and they will be held to account. That is, unless the worms get them first!
Farewell to our Fight Club in Dulwich Hill
Father Dave’s Old School Boxing Academy trained out of the church hall of Holy Trinity, Dulwich Hill from 1991 to 2021. We trained many champions. More importantly, we saw a great many crazy kids grow into confident adults, and, in a lot of cases, we played a significant role in that process.
December 31, 2021, was where it ended. We had over 3,000 people sign the community petition, asking the church for a stay of execution. None was given. Even so, as my dad used to say, when the work of God is like a flowing stream, and when someone drops a rock in the stream, the water will find a way around it. Our work will continue. We are currently training at the Fight Lab in Tempe with my old friend, Kon Pappy, and we continue to train at Binacrombi bush camp on the weekends. Join us.
Featured below is some footage taken from our last training session.