{"id":642,"date":"1999-02-05T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-02-05T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanuera.com\/cmwp\/?p=642"},"modified":"1999-02-05T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"1999-02-05T00:00:00","slug":"funeral-of-veronica-green","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/?p=642","title":{"rendered":"Funeral of Veronica Green"},"content":{"rendered":"
I<\/span>‘ve been casting my mind about, during the last few days, asking myself what it is that could possibly express the uniqueness of Veronica Green. I think it is all to do with liberation. She was a woman liberated. Her freedom was entire and irrevocable. And what is most important, it was a freedom which she herself won by dint of personal pain and personal inner struggle – personal experience. And that gave her a possession of an interiorness in the spiritual life which included an uncommon insight into the inner meaning of ordinary people’s lives. It gave her a vision about the core meaning of living and a drive to unfold that vision to those of us who were hungering for it.<\/p>\n

In this I have been struck by the striking resemblance. Veronica’s life bears with two figures of depth and imagination. Francis Webb, the Australian poet, and Jacques Derrida, the Algerian philosopher. Each of these visionaries found in themselves a compelling need to identify with the marginalised – those who are most often pushed out of sight and left to struggle without support, and out of that need was born the determination to do away with constraining structures that imprison people in a state of disguise and pretence, the blinding structures based on power, that render blind people from knowing what it means to be human. The first call of humanity for all stands without option, to put first in our life what society regards as the last and. least.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

In 1962, when Francis Webb was 37 years of age, and he was an inmate of Parramatta Psychiatric Centre, he realised that, if he was not to be released, he would prefer to return to Ward 2 to be with friends who were suffering the most degrading humiliations. "During the first week I spent there (in Ward 2) I was entranced by a new vision of man unindoctrinated, denied me for so many years. To keep this vision alive and burning is my duty and my joy. Out of that experience of empathy with such suffering people came the determination<\/p>\n
May my every bone and vessel confess the power
\nTo loath suffering in you
\nAs in myself, that arcane simmering brew.<\/div>\n

\nVeronica was like Webb, a disindoctrinator, when indoctrination has come to take the shape of heavy grooves and deeply established ruts in the patterns of religious life in all its forms.<\/p>\n

S<\/span>imilarly, Jacques Derrida has come to be known as the father of deconstructionalism because he was so revolted by the way structures are used to destroy heartfulness in the ay people who manipulate the structures of power and control in the very act of ignoring those who are entitled to be served first.<\/p>\n

Veronica was indeed a deconstructionalist and she had her own inimitable way of deflating pretentiousness in Church governance, the empty words deprived of any spiritual sound. She had been round this track a million times before so she met this phenomenon with a wordless knowing smile. Those joggers which she asked to be placed on her coffin represent, not only the instruments of freedom which she used to skip and dance through mysterious and mystic places on mountain tops and valleys of Australia and of Ireland, but they also represent the running away from cruelty which she knew from her earliest days when she was a Ward of the State; she had a self-trained ear for hearing the sounds of ruthlessness in the voices of politicians in Parliament or religious life. As she sighed at the murder of the forests she was moved to a healthy irreverence towards empty religious phrases that in reality cloaked comfort and secular power. Two verses of John Shaw Neilson bite their way home.<\/p>\n

Sister, I dare not ask you cease your sighing;
\nIt is a part of you, however long.
\nStill you are rebel, all the Gods defying,
\nOffering no tiresome honey in your song.
\nWhat is it that you see, what thing is wrong?
\nCan you with your dull eyes that gleam suspicious
\nSee in the darkness Lucifer malicious?<\/p>\n

Sister, you have irreverence, ’tis salvation:
\nFor the dull world it is the sorest need.
\nThat wayward fire, men call it Indignation,
\nSpurs the lone hero to the perilous deed.
\nIt finds the flaw in many a tiresome creed.
\nThough you and I go westward unlamented,
\nLet us at least be stoutly discontented.<\/p>\n

from John Shaw Neilson’s "To the Peacock Lady"<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n

C<\/span>hrist counselled the rich young man to rid himself of all that pecuniary baggage if he was to find life, so Veronica detected the fraudulence of the rich young nuns of this world and her life quietly offered the implied suggestion of advice that they drop their load of worldly compromise if ever they could find life, and indeed offer life to others. This diminutive woman was the one who actually stood towering over the religiously counterfeit by the simple unconcealable test of knowing them by their fruits. While they stood fatuously tongue-tied, spiritually impotent and impatient for the next round of vacuous board-room talks, carefully honing the very Gospel into the shape of economic rationalism, she was reaching deep into wells of mystical and Celtic spirituality. While their greatest fear might be of losing status, honour or role, Veronica made it perfectly clear that she had nothing whatsoever to lose. She was her own woman, and it was clear that she would stay that way to the end.<\/p>\n

The way she dealt with the processes of her own dying were by any standards impressive. I would like to offer you 3 poems by John Shaw Neil on as they seem to hint at the spiritually incisive power of this woman who remained open to the grandeur of the earth, the colours and the perfumes of the flowers and the song of the birds.<\/p>\n

THE WOMAN OF THE FOREST
\nShe has not peace; she hungers still for the clean air,
\nShe did not grow in the city, but was wickedly taken there.<\/p>\n

She has not peace in the city; oh, she is strangely stirred
\nWith the green leaves, and the manna, and the low voice of a bird.<\/p>\n

The tied-up folk in the city, they say she has never smiled
\nBut she will talk to a little bird as a mother to a child.<\/p>\n

Ever in noise of Folly she wanders ill at ease
\nOnly in dreams she travels for a playtime with the trees.<\/p>\n

Oh the trees are a proud people, and they have proud ways,
\nAnd the leaves have a strange courage in the moistening of the days.<\/p>\n

The tied-up people see her; they laugh at her shoes and gown,
\nFor she is a forest woman, who was carried into the town\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

FLOWERS DO INVADE US
\nAt noonday or midnight we know that the flowers do invade us
\nNot alone with sweet colour nor any quick speech that they know
\nThey tell us in haste of the wish of the God that ‘has made us<\/p>\n

In sunlight or in conquest, as songs in a (drink) so they find us
\nThey tell us to dance, though we move not.
\nWe strive to be happy, and here is the bloom that can blind us.<\/p>\n

In shadows, the blackest of shadows, the flowers do invade us
\nThey bid us remember the things that can never be told.
\nThey speak for the dead, and the dead with the flowers can upbraid us.<\/p>\n

Though the years and the sorrows the close prisoners have made us
\nThough the hills that we climb not they laugh at how long they delayed us,
\nBut whispering here in the gloom still the flowers still do invade us.<\/p>\n

They are not bitter at all who have fallen before us,
\nHow diligent are they forever in quiet chorus,
\nThey sing without lips, and still without speech they implore us.\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

FLOWERS IN THE WARD
\nThey speak not of torment
\nNot blackness nor sin.
\nQuietly as angels come
\nDo the flowers come in.<\/p>\n

Forgetting all frailties
\nOf humankind,
\nWith sweet scent they give back
\nSight to the blind.<\/p>\n

See, they come quickly
\nAs rainbows come.
\nBeckoning they give back
\nSpeech to the dumb.<\/p>\n

From green hills they journey,
\nWhere joys first came.
\nWhispering they give back
\nYoung feet to the lame.\n<\/div>\n

\nThen there are the words of the Irishman John O’Donohue, who was Veronica’s friend:<\/p>\n

On the day when the weight
\ndeadens on your shoulders
\nand you stumble,
\nMay the clay dance to balance you<\/p>\n

And when your eyes freeze behind
\nthe grey window and the ghost of loss
\ngets into you,
\nMaya flock of colours, indigo, red
\ngreen and azure blue
\nCome to awaken in you
\na meadow of delight.<\/p>\n

When the canvas frays in the
\ncurack of thought and a stain of ocean
\nblackens beneath you,
\nMay there come across the waters,
\nA path of yellow moonlight
\nto bring you safely home.<\/p>\n

May the nourishment of the earth be yours
\nMay the clarity of light be yours,
\nMay the fluency of the ocean be yours,
\nMay the protection of the ancestors be yours.<\/p>\n

And so may a slow wind work these
\nwords of love around you,
\nan invisible cloak to mind your life.<\/div>\n

\nC.J.Dennis, who sang so tunefully of our responsibility for custodianship of the earth, composed these lines which were inscribed on the poet’s own tombstone:<\/p>\n

Now is the healing, quiet hour that fills
\nThis gay green world with peaceful and grateful rest.<\/div>\n
Ted Kennedy, 5 February 1999<\/div>\n

\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I‘ve been casting my mind about, during the last few days, asking myself what it is that could possibly express the uniqueness of Veronica Green. I think it is all to do with liberation. She was a woman liberated. Her freedom was entire and irrevocable. And what is most important, it was a freedom which she herself won by dint of personal pain and personal inner struggle – personal experience. And that gave her a possession of an interiorness in the spiritual life which included an uncommon insight into the inner meaning of ordinary people’s lives. It gave her a … Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homilies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/church-mouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}