We are repainting the outside of our 100 plus year-old beach shack. From time immemorial, it has been a kind of dirty olive; we are radically breaking with tradition this time and going grey. So we’ve spent a lot of time poring over colour charts at the paint shop and fiddling around with sample pots on patches of flaking weatherboard.
There is a bewildering array of greys, and most of them are gorgeous. White greys, blue greys, green greys, all sorts. Even the names – basalt, wallaby, windspray - are enticing.
As the work begins, I go for my evening walk along the water and realise that at dusk, everything at the edge of the ocean is shades of grey. The water and the dune grasses are green-grey, the sky is blue-grey, the wet sand is gold-grey and pewter. Grey is the colour of the Victorian bush, a palate it has taken me a long time to appreciate in all its soothing, subtle, extraordinary beauty.
Grey might also be the metaphorical colour for our times. In an era of COVID-19, we are all receiving a crash course in uncertainty and, hopefully, in humility, patience and generosity. Now, more than ever, I treasure a religious faith that deals in shades of grey, not hastening to ostracise or condemn.
I am a passionate God follower, but black and white religion repels me. It is cruel, flattening, excluding, unimaginative. When push comes to shove, these are probably the only absolutes I hold to:
• That I need to live with as much authenticity, compassion and courage as I can;
• That the creative power that made the universe is a great and generous heart of love, that I, like many others, call God;
• That my best chance of living a strong and loving life is by drawing on that heart of love; and
• That the story of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, along with the hope revealed in Jesus’ defeat of death, give me the best pictures, both of a loving God and of a human life lived with complete integrity.
That’s it. Everything else is up for negotiation. Uncertainty is the undercurrent of human life, uncomfortable as we find it. That’s what makes thoughtful religious faith, engaged with context, so hard. There are few certainties. Life is nuanced. We are all both flawed and fabulous, heroes have feet of clay and even the richest and most tender of marriages is complicated. I believe that God is love and that I want to be part of that. Everything else is shades of glorious grey.
This was published in The Melbourne Age on 10 May