Encounter

What do we find beneath the layer of material goods that surrounds us? Our true selves? Or something more ambiguous? This week Encounter explores possession and dispossession.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

WIND/THUNDER/MUSIC

David Rutledge: What do we find beneath the layer of material goods that surrounds us all? Our true selves? Or something more ambiguous? What does it mean to have nothing - or to have a great deal, and to give it away?

On ABC Radio National, I'm David Rutledge. Welcome to Encounter.

Christopher Sharah: The poor in spirit are those who are essentially detached, who are generous, who are willing to give of themselves and of what they have for those in need. It's not a measure on how much you have in this world, but it's a measure of the attitude you have towards everything.

Jane Smyth: The two of us escaped. My husband did find later that he had his car keys in his pocket, but I really lost everything.

Ross Kingham: It was heart-rending, picking through bits and pieces, finding some things that seemed relatively intact and going through a process of remembering really good times and some really tough times. They seem to be all symbolised in what was left in the ashes.

Di Butcher: People actually had what they stood up in, and often that meant just a pair of shorts. It didn't mean a shirt, it didn't mean shoes, people had blisters on their feet, they had blackened faces.

Jane Smyth: I remember the night of the fire, after we'd escaped, thinking 'I don't have to find my wallet, I don't have to find my car keys, I have no paraphernalia. I have what I stand up in.' And I thought 'that's pretty easy'.

Ross Kingham: Well, I want to be fairly detached from material possessions. I realise that we're embodied within this material earth and its products and services, and these things are to be appreciated and enjoyed.

David Rutledge: As the tide of consumer products in our lives continues to rise, the fantasy of virtuous dispossession, or 'downshifting', becomes more and more attractive: the idea that if we could just get rid of all our stuff, we'd be able to live a simpler, more authentic life.

In today's Encounter, we'll be exploring themes of possession and dispossession - asking what it means to give, what it means to have things taken away, and what's left when we're divested of material goods.

MUSIC

King Lear: Know, that we have divided
In three our kingdom, and 'tis our fast intent
To shake all cares and business from our age,
Conferring them on younger strengths while we
Unburdened, crawl toward death.

David Rutledge: Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of King Lear is the story of a monarch who gives away his kingdom. And it offers a complex perspective on the way in which our social and cultural 'trappings' are disposable things on one hand - but on the other hand, they're deeply bound up with who we are.

King Lear: I do invest you jointly with my power,
Pre-eminence, and all the large effects
That troop with majesty. Ourself by monthly course,
With reservation of an hundred knights
By you to be sustained, shall our abode
Make with you by due turn; only we shall retain
The name and all th'addition to a king: the sway,
Revenue, execution of the rest,
Beloved sons be yours; which to confirm,
This coronet part between you.

David Rutledge: King Lear is shortly to find that dispossession can make you acutely vulnerable.

But first: from a Christian perspective, the vulnerability of giving away what you have is, ideally, a spur to faith. From the Sermon on the Mount we hear that 'to them that have little, shall more be given'. But how does that work out in modern daily life?

Christopher Sharah: This is our dining room, where we eat and have morning and afternoon tea. And what's a very important part of our life is hospitality, that's a huge thing. So most people who need to talk to us, we bring them in and sit down and have a cuppa. Generosity, welcoming people, that's a very important part of our life.

David Rutledge: Father Christopher Sharah is Superior of the Friars of St Francis in Sydney's Parramatta diocese. The friars are a mendicant community, which means they're committed to a life of religious poverty, and they own virtually nothing.

Christopher Sharah: This house is not ours, it belongs to the church and so we inherited most of the furniture that was here, so that if we move, it stays.

David Rutledge: So what do you have here that you own yourself?

Christopher Sharah: Ah. Now that's interesting, what do we actually own? I own my clothes, which is my underwear and pyjamas; my habit - I don't really own the habit, I guess, but nobody else wears it. We don't have much in the way of clothes. We have shorts and t-shirts and runners, because we do exercise, basic toiletries like deodorants and things so you can keep clean. That's about it for personal ownership. But you always trust in God.

The whole purpose of religious poverty is not to have nothing, but to be dependent on God for what you need. And when we say dependent on the Lord, that he will inspire the hearts of generous people to assist you in what you need. But the other side of it is not to be possessive, or overly attached to the things of this world.

David Rutledge: So who are your benefactors?

Christopher Sharah: Oh, all sorts of people. Different parishioners assist us in many ways, like they'll make goodies for us to have a cup of tea with. Some people will bring us a box of groceries, some people give us some money. I've got one businessman - and I'm going there to say mass - he runs a factory, he's very supportive of us, he lets us use one of the cars, he owns it and I just have to maintain it with petrol and mechanical good order.

David Rutledge: You said to me in a previous conversation - and it's an interesting problem that you have - that people can be too generous, and you end up with too much stuff and find yourself having to give it away.

Christopher Sharah: The two questions you ask when discerning whether to give something away or not: Do you really need it, and Do you use it? So the way we do it, we call it a poverty check. We do it at least once a year, and each friar goes around with a pad and a pen, and each of us writes down the things we think we don't need, and we're happy to give away. And sometimes a young enthusiastic friar will want to give away everything, and so you have to say No, hang on, we're going to need this for this reason or that reason - so you don't give it away.

David Rutledge: But how do you decide yourself? I mean when I look around the room here, I can see you've got a CD player, you've got quite a few CDs, you've got a few things on the wall here, I mean you could say that you don't really need those things. So I'm not asking you for a justification, but how do you decide in your own mind? Ultimately when it comes down to it, all we really need is food, water and shelter.

Christopher Sharah: I don't know whether you'd look at it like that, because say for example religious pictures, they brighten up your home, they lift your spirits, they're lovely, they remind you of what you're about. So they actually have a purpose other than just for decoration. Because what's important is - and I often tell this to the brothers when they join - we're running a marathon, not a sprint. We have to look at a life, hopefully we'll have a good length of life, we've got a lot of work, we've got to make sure that we are able to live peacefully and healthily, and with a certain amount of joy.

Goods are not evil in themselves. You see that's one of the things about religious poverty. We're not declaring that the world should live as we live, and we do not hold up poverty in itself as a good. What our purpose is, is detachment.

David Rutledge: Father Christopher Sharah.

Well the Friars of St Francis are fortunate to have a wealthy benefactor, maybe particularly so, in that philanthropy doesn't have deep roots in Australia. A recent report from the Australian Centre for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Studies indicates that while the household incomes of Australia's affluent have risen 36% in the last decade, the rise in charitable donations has been only 0.09%. And while wealthy Americans give nearly 4% of their income to charity, their Australian counterparts give less than 0.05%.

Elizabeth Cham is the former Director of Philanthropy Australia. She says that since 2001, when new tax laws came into force, there's been a renaissance of philanthropy in Australia, with 224 new charitable foundations established. But we're still lagging behind our overseas counterparts, and the idea that those who have a lot should also give a lot away, doesn't seem to have taken off in Australia as it has in the United States.

Elizabeth Cham: I think that partly it's history. The Americans were about running away from government, they were there, going out into the Wild West on their own. In Australia of course it was the government who brought the convicts here, it was the government who built the first roads and the buildings and everything else; it was the government who were funding exploration. So I think we have a very, very different view about the role of government, and therefore our taxes, and we look in Australia to government to do things. Whereas in America it's very much the individual, and I think that in America people, young people particularly, they're inculcated with this view that they should do, and there's also that sense of civic duty that individuals have in America that I don't think we've been taught here at all.

David Rutledge: And what do you think about this argument that says 'I'm a wealthy person, I pay my taxes - I pay a lot of taxes because I'm wealthy - it's up to the government to structure the economy so that my wealth benefits other through creating jobs and so on. It shouldn't be up to me to shell out large amounts of my hard-earned cash.' What's your response to that argument?

Elizabeth Cham: Well, I think that we all know that wealthy people of course don't possibly pay as much tax as the ordinary worker. And I think that's one of the ways that they give, and it's one of the ways that they often prefer to give. Because they in giving philanthropically of course, they have the huge privilege of determining where that money goes, and many people who have wealth of course, are often by their nature entrepreneurs and they feel that they can better use their dollar, use it much more effectively for the community than the government can.

And why philanthropic money is also very important and why I think it's important for wealthy people to give, is because it really is a bit like venture capital in the marketplace. You know, you'd go to the bank for your ordinary mortgage, but if you're looking to do something new and innovative, then you go looking fore someone who's got some venture capital. And philanthropy plays that role for the community sector. It's there to do something unique, it's there to either do some very good research, to pilot new ways of providing services. It's there to convene people who never come together, so they can build their knowledge base and go back without continuing to reinvent wheels. So it's very important and very unique money.

David Rutledge: Elizabeth Cham.

Many religions teach that wealth and material possessions can be corrosive to the soul. Jesus is said to have warned that a rich person has less chance of getting into heaven than a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle. And in the Sermon on the Mount, he says, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit'.

But who are the poor in spirit? Christopher Sharah.

Christopher Sharah: The poor in spirit are those who are essentially detached, who are generous, who are willing to give of themselves and of what they have for those in need. That's the true poor in spirit, because you could be poor, but be greedy and selfish and dishonest. You can be rich and generous and loving. So the real poor in spirit, it's not a measure on how much you have in this world, but it's a measure of the attitude you have towards everything.

David Rutledge: So the poor in spirit could be wealthy?

Christopher Sharah: Absolutely.

David Rutledge: So it rather goes against the other saying that we often hear quoted, that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. You don't necessarily see wealth and material possessions in themselves as an obstacle to what you might call spiritual development?

Christopher Sharah: Well, they are insofar as once you have them all, when you desire them, that becomes the obstacle. It's not easy for wealthy people to develop a sense of spiritual poverty, and you don't find it very often, to my knowledge. I could be wrong here, but I haven't met with it very often. So I think that saying is very true, it's very difficult. But it seems to me that with most people I know, once you walk that road, it becomes a joyful way of life because it actually frees you from a lot.

David Rutledge: Is it also something that allows you to feel unembarrassed or unashamed when you go and work with the poor? The fact that you're actually able to understand what their lives are like because this is how you live as well?

Christopher Sharah: Definitely - insofar as we don't have a lot of goods, and we don't have a lot of money, so it's great when you meet people who are struggling, well at least you're not a rich person condescending down to their level, you're brothers and sisters.

David Rutledge: Father Christopher Sharah.

SIREN

Woman: The signal you can hear now is the Emergency Services Bureau signal which means that we have an important alert to bring you. This is an official Emergency Services announcement: the ACT Emergency Services Bureau has advised that there has been a major deterioration in the ACT fire situation. The following suburbs should be on alert: Macgregor, Holt, Higgins ...

Reporter: Across from Molongo Place Murrimbidgee, the flames are a good three, four times as high as the trees, and there's a couple of fire fronts, and they seem to be burning against the wind, sort of coming towards the northern side, but if you look at it back across the city, I can't even see Telstra Tower from here.

Woman: We've been up, yeah, a lot of people up and down, and we've hosed, got all of the gutters ready and everyone's been pretty much prepared since it started on Saturday.

Interviewer: What's your plan?

Woman: The car's already packed, get the house as prepared as we can, and if the worst comes to the worst, grab the dogs and us and leave.

Reporter: Residents appear just shocked; many of them are standing out in the streets. It's very eerie here, it's almost night-time conditions, we can barely see it's so dark. So no, I don't think anyone was expecting it.

Man: Before you knew it, the house was on fire and then they came around in the ute and told them they've got to get in the back of the ute and as soon as they jumped in, a big fireball hit and they were getting burnt, and we were just glad that everyone was all right, that's all.

Interviewer: How intense was it in here?

Man: Oh mate. Look around, it's as simple as that, mate, how do you think it was? And just the speed of it, it was just unbelievable the heat, and all, it just happened that quick, honestly. The fire was meant to be over the back of the hills - and then before you know it it's in your front yard mate, burning your house down.

David Rutledge: On 18th January 2003, a massive bushfire front hit the western suburbs of Canberra. It was pushed by winds strong enough to uproot trees and properties standing in the way of the firestorm didn't stand a chance. Over 500 houses were burned to the ground. In many cases their owners escaped with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing.

Di Butcher: There basically wasn't a person in Canberra who wasn't affected or didn't know somebody. In some cases there were two and three bits of the family, perhaps, parents-in-law and children who lost their houses.

But I think it was the stark realisation on the day after, when we were actually doing walks through the affected areas, and providing water and very early counselling services, that people actually had what they stood up in. And often that meant just a pair of shorts. It didn't mean a shirt, it didn't mean shoes, people had blisters on their feet, they had blackened faces. It was just totally - the city was black, the people were black, our outlook was black.

David Rutledge: That's Di Butcher, who managed the Bushfire Recovery Centre that was set up in the wake of the catastrophe.

Di Butcher: People missed their pets, I'd have to say that the stuff around animals, the grief and loss - particularly there's a group of girls perhaps an age group of say thirteen to fifteen, who have these wonderful relationships with their horses, and that was absolutely tragic.

Things like wedding rings and engagement rings - I always remember one lady talked about how she was doing the dishes, turned around and the fire was at the front door, and she ran - and she didn't pick up her engagement and her wedding ring on the window ledge, and that was her most powerful memory. You know, the young women that were having, the families that were having perhaps their first baby had their nursery prepared, they had their beautiful grandma's shawl or the family christening gown - your family photos, your kids' photos, your wedding photos, records - plants, a tree, people who have lost a child or a father or a mother had planted rosebushes and things. All of those things that you can never get back.

David Rutledge: There's this idea that it's not what you have that counts, it's not your things, it's who you are, and that if you - you know, what you own is just stuff, and it might be beautiful and useful and whatever, but if you take it away, you're still the same person. Is that idea borne out in your experience by people who lose everything?

Di Butcher: I think it takes a while to come to that. 'Yes', you say, 'aren't we lucky, we've got each other; we've got our children; we're healthy.' That lasts for a little while, but you go to grab your cup that you have your coffee in every night, or you go to put your foot up on the footstool, or you remember your chenille dressing gown and you go to get it, it's not there, and it's like Damn, is there nothing that I can grab that belonged to my past life?

Jane Smyth: We knew we were in danger, but we were waiting for a call to evacuate, which was what we understand would happen. The actual fire front came through our property. It was called a fire storm, and it was as if the sky was raining fire. So there was no way of putting what really were multiple fires with two garden houses.

David Rutledge: Jane Smyth is a Canberra resident whose family home burned down in the fire. The call to evacuate never came, and she and her husband only just managed to get out in time.

Jane Smyth: The two of us escaped. Didn't really have time to grab anything at that stage. I did have a handbag with wallet, credit cards, precious jewellery, precious family photos on my bed, ready to grab, but we had to move so fast, I knew I could run in and grab my handbag, but I wasn't sure if I'd have had time then to get back across the room and get out. So we left just really in the clothes we stood up in.

We had a family home in which we brought up three children, so we had the paraphernalia that goes with that. So a lot of their artwork, or their very old Hornby train set that belonged to the children, were all lost. We lost all our books, they were probably our most treasured possession.

In some ways, our home I think was an expression of ourselves in the way we'd made it. We had designed and built it thirty years ago when our children were small - but that can always be done again, if you've got any sort of creative spirit, it's within you. So some people wanted to reproduce their homes as they were. I know of a woman who went to a great deal of trouble to source the same material of the curtains in her house, and that was something I couldn't understand. I just thought, Oh well, that's a great chance to do something different.

I did lose memorabilia belonging to my father whom I hadn't known, and that was a sadness. I had wanted to pass that to my children, so that was my biggest loss.

David Rutledge: Were there any surprises? Were there any possessions that you had maybe taken for granted and then found once they were gone that you missed them?

Jane Smyth: Yes, family photos. I did have some very, very beautiful photos of the wedding of my great-grandparents, and I realised after their loss how significant they were in terms of my family history. And my great-grandparents' wedding must have been late 19th century, and it was a marvellous record of an affluent Australian family at that time, living in a big Victorian house. So here were guests dressed in Victorian lace with bustles and parasols, women at the front, all the men were at the back, so there was a lot of history around those. And they are irreplaceable - and I desperately wish I had gone to the trouble of having them all beautifully copied and given to other members of the family, but I hadn't considered them at risk.

Ross Kingham: For about half an hour, I hosed and raked, and finally the fire storm hit with tremendous power, with enormous wind. In fact, I remember the wind more probably than the intense heat. I turned around and our back fence, wooden paling fence, was flapping in the wind, could hardly stand up. I'd been in a bushfire before, but this was different, this was like an explosion of incredible power all around us.

David Rutledge: Ross Kingham is a minister in the Uniting Church in Canberra. He and his wife also lost their family home in the 200d fires. I asked him if he'd had a lot in the way of possessions.

Ross Kingham: Compared to many in the human family, yes, we had a lot. But I guess I'd made a decision a long time ago which was not to make wealth or material possessions a priority for my life, so that was probably marked in a reasonably modest home and reasonably modest furnishings.

David Rutledge: What did you lose that was of particular - well, we say sentimental or emotional value - that maybe also carried a sense of your own identity, a sense of who you are?

Ross Kingham: Letters. The last letter of my mother. Children's artefacts that they'd made at school and later. There was a very special bible that my wife had been given which had belonged to her father who had recently died. Those are the things that hurt.

David Rutledge: And you did manage to salvage some things. You've got some things on the table here in front of us. What are we looking at here?

Ross Kingham: Some kitchen tiles - and we've got some more of these tiles, actually, in a suitcase - that I think my son is hoping to incorporate somewhere in his home now, complete with ash and bits of other stuff fused onto them now. A lead crystal ring tree which remarkably preserved three of my wife's rings pretty well intact. A couple of mugs that knew what intense heat was, because of the way they'd been manufactured, and unlike all the other glasses and most of the china we had - all the china we had - they've survived, though they're not able to be used because they bear the marks of molten glass that's been melded into them.

I mentioned a suitcase in which we had some tiles. We have a number of artefacts like that, including a whole stack of charred coins, some of which I can't even recognise whether they're 50 cents or 20 cents or whatever, which to this date - this is over five years after the fire - we've not been able to open.

David Rutledge: You haven't opened the suitcase.

Ross Kingham: It still sits there.

David Rutledge: Why haven't you been able to open it yet?

Ross Kingham: It's too hard.

David Rutledge: And so what you have here, this is the result of going back after the fire and sifting through the ashes. What was that like?

Ross Kingham: It was heartrending, picking through bits and pieces, finding some things that seemed relatively intact and going through a process of remembering really good times in the family, in the home, and some really tough times. They seem to be all symbolised in what was left in the ashes.

One of the things they symbolise is sheer strength. I mean, the fact that clay artefacts can survive that incredible heat is absolutely remarkable. Though they've been marked, of course, by the experience, and the fact that a crystal ring tree can - in a very deformed fashion - nevertheless survive, and can protect other material, and preserve other material - mainly the gold rings - quite extraordinary symbols, I think, of what for me have been other times of extreme pain and difficulty and ambiguity, which in themselves bring their own gifts.

David Rutledge: Ross Kingham.

THUNDER

David Rutledge: We return now to Shakespeare's King Lear who, as we remember, has given away his fortune to his two daughters. But within an alarmingly short time, Lear finds himself dispossessed of more than he could ever have imagined, homeless and driven to madness, reduced to cowering in a beggar's shack while a furious storm rages outside. And he realises that as a king, he's taken too little notice of those who live exposed to the vagaries of fortune.

Lear: Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you
From seasons such as these? O I have ta'en
Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp,
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou may'st shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

Philippa Kelly: Audiences, when they came to see the play, it would have blown their minds, to see a king disrobed, physically and mentally and emotionally in that way.

David Rutledge: Philippa Kelly is a Shakespeare scholar and Senior Research Fellow in English at the University of New South Wales. She's also editor of the Halstead Press edition of King Lear, published in 2002. She says that when Lear gives away the outward signs of his power and status, then that power and status disappears along with them.

Philippa Kelly: What Lear keeps saying is, 'I am the king himself', he still believes that his authority resides in his person - but nobody else of any consequence sees that authority, and Lear is put through the mill in a way that would have been very shocking to audiences at the time.

Just to tell you one other thing that might be useful about Shakespeare's time: the self was very much synonymous with what we see today, as the 'trappings' of the self. So the notion of a self that is sort of internal, separate from its external trappings, is very much a modern understanding. And Shakespeare really straddled the old, what we'd see as the feudal understanding of the self as defined by the circumstances, and the modern understanding of the self as individuated within these circumstances. And one interesting thing about the word 'individual': in that time it meant both autonomous, as we see it, and it meant you and I are indivisible.

So I'm not saying that people prior to and during Shakespeare's time were superficial, or that they didn't have internal selves, it was more a question of understanding yourself as deeply embedded in a religious and political framework that really ordained for people who they were, and what position they served in the world. And as the world moved towards mercantilism, and you had the discovery of the New Worlds, the social fabric really started to change - and the shift in this sense of things could be seen in that King James had to actually issue sumptuary laws (which are laws of consumption) that forbade people to dress above the station that they were born to.

David Rutledge: Because the outward sign of their social status and position was very important?

Philippa Kelly: Absolutely, and it told you and other people who you were. And so imagine Lear losing all his physical trappings, it would mean far more than seeing the Queen of England or the Duke of Edinburgh in Windsor Park. You imagine seeing them nude in the park: in both instances the regent would be labelled mad, as Lear is, but in the case of a king in the 17th century, it would have been the whole order of things within a God-centred universe that was turned upside down.

David Rutledge: Philippa Kelly.

MUSIC

David Rutledge: Along with the pain of dispossession, being reduced to nothing can sometimes bring a certain sense of lightness as Canberra resident Jane Smyth found after the 2003 bushfires.

Jane Smyth: I remember the night of the fire, after we'd escaped, we were at a friend's house, and we had to get in a car and go and register that we had survived. There was a register being put together while the authorities tried to come to terms with all this. And I can remember walking to the car thinking 'I don't have to find my wallet, I don't have to find my car keys, I have no paraphernalia. I have what I stand up in.' And I thought 'that's pretty easy; I can't do much, I can't be expected to do much. I can't expect much of myself just at the moment'. And I did think is a very strange feeling. It was a feeling of travelling very lightly. It was summer, it was warm, so one didn't need a coat or anything like that.

David Rutledge: Do you find now that the things that you do have you hold more lightly, you don't have as much invested in your possessions now? You could lose them and not find it as traumatic?

Jane Smyth: Yes. Absolutely yes. I don't place the same value on possessions. And I remember when I first bought some plates and cups and saucers, I went to a large store near here and bought a very simple sort of kitchen set of plain white. And I remember a friend said to me 'what a good idea to buy those while you're working out what you're going to choose'. And I said to her 'you don't realise: this is what I choose. I want simple, I want plain, I don't want precious, because I don't want the pain of losing it. So we'll just have things that don't matter too much.'

That's changed - I mean, it's five years since the fires, and as we've personalised the new space we live in, there are things now that we've just picked up on some travels we've done recently, that I think we will love - because we would remember the negotiations, the man who helped us, the lovely people in Morocco who packed them up for us, you know.

David Rutledge: For example, what matters now?

Jane Smyth: Oh, it's things that have memory attached to them, new memories. Sometimes it's a gift. After the bushfires, a friend arrived at the door with a quilt she'd made, and it was just rolled up in string, and she said 'this is for you'. So we have this beautiful handmade quilt, and that was such an act of love, and such a generous gesture. But those things will be precious, and they epitomised a home because, it was a quilt or something you could wrap yourself in. It was a creative, artistic thing. It was warm and winter was coming. It's things with meaning attached to them, it's not things you buy in a shop.

Ross Kingham: What I tell myself is that I've always had a fairly detached feeling about possessions. I don't want them to have too much of a grip on me.

David Rutledge: Uniting Church Minister and Canberra resident, Ross Kingham.

Ross Kingham: What I have discovered through the fire I think is more of the power of certain possessions that bear a value of relationship. Those things become more precious, so while I want to be fairly detached from material possessions, I realise that we're embodied within this material earth and its products and services, and these things are to be appreciated and enjoyed.

David Rutledge: It does raise questions though, and we see these questions raised in many of the bible stories, I think of the story in the Book of Job in the Hebrew Bible where this man who has everything suddenly just gets it all taken away from him under the most horrendous circumstances. And it does bring up these questions of just why these things happen. I think Job's quite an enigmatic book in that sense; it doesn't really answer the questions in a way that's easy to get a handle on. But do you feel that as a result of what you've been through, you have some insight into why these things happen and what the meaning of calamity is?

Ross Kingham: One of the fundamental things about that story is, as I read it, is that at the end of the story we are left with an image of Job in an act of profound contrition and worship with the living God. He's lost a lot, but he's found something that I describe as a fresh dependence upon the source of his life. And I think to take that longer view, and to see that beyond all waste and trauma, we can have a deeper and deepened conviction of a God for whom trauma is as much a problem as for us. I think that's one of the rich gifts that comes from loss.

David Rutledge: The really mysterious thing about the Book of Job for me is the fact that at the end of the story he gets it all back. He's restored to even greater fortune than before. What do you make of that?

Ross Kingham: I don't know. To me that sounds like a really nice Jewish piece of literature. This is, you know, the wheel has turned completely now. If you think of that old musical Fiddler on the Roof, the end isn't like that. You have the situation of Jews in Russia early in the 20th century, the pogroms, the incredible persecution of Jewish people in Russia at that time, and the end of the story is of almost complete loss, there's no nice return of wealth and fame and pleasure and stuff for those pilgrims. They're just left with a few sticks and stones, I think they're described, on their back - and they trudge into their future, which they have now to fashion as best they can. I don't think Job's story really gives us licence to think that's the way it should be.

STORM

David Rutledge: We return now to Shakespeare's King Lear. On the heath in the storm, Lear meets Edgar, who is disguised as a beggar and pretending to be mad. Lear asks him what he was in his former life, and from Edgar he learns something of the meaning of dispossession.

Lear: What hast thou been?

Edgar: A servingman, proud in heart and mind, that curled my hair, wore gloves and my cap, served the last of my mistresses' heart, and did the act of darkness with her. Swore as many oaths as I spake words, and broke them in the sweet face of heaven. One that slept in the contriving of lust and waked to do it. Wine loved I dearly, dice dearly, and in woman out-paramour'd the Turk. False of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey.

Lear: Why, thou wert better in a grave than to answer with thy uncovered body this extremity of the skies. Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Here's three on's are sophisticated; thou art the thing itself. Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.

Philippa Kelly: When we think of this whole idea of the trappings of the self, we're saying 'take away those things that entrap the self, and you're left with supposedly the real self.'

David Rutledge: Philippa Kelly.

Philippa Kelly: But what I think is crucial to this emotional or social equation, is the whole issue of choice. Lear in that first scene makes a choice. It's a stupid choice, it's a choice he doesn't understand, but he has and he gives away - and the Fool calls him 'an O without a figure, thou art nothing'. But it's an entirely different situation for those people who have no choice - who are visited with disaster, who maybe don't have enough of a back-up plan, who are born into disastrous situations. For those people, material goods are never trappings.

David Rutledge: Yes, it's interesting isn't it, because we do have a kind of idealisation today of what Lear called 'unaccommodated man', you know, the real, authentic person beneath all the layers of the things that we own, our social accoutrements. But is Lear showing us that actually unaccommodated man is pathetically vulnerable in many ways?

Philippa Kelly: What he says is - he looks at Edgar, and says 'unaccommodated man is no more that such a poor, bare forked animal as thou art.' Lear is looking at this mad beggar and saying, 'I've taken too little care of this. It hasn't been in my world to know how these people, my subjects, lived and existed'. He sees unaccommodated man as somebody that he should have taken care of on his watch.

Elizabeth Cham: In the world of philanthropy, of course, you meet people who've got helicopters, and aeroplanes, and it's always very interesting to me that someone's always got a slightly bigger one, or more of them - it goes nowhere, it's insatiable.

David Rutledge: Elizabeth Cham, former Director of Philanthropy Australia.

Elizabeth Cham: Whereas giving, whether it's time, a small amount of money, you know, whatever it is, a smile, I mean you'd know the Templeton Foundation of course, and as well as their big prize, they also have a huge interest in promoting altruism in the world. And they're now doing all these experiments with neurologists and psychiatrists and theologists, I mean they get them all together once a year and it's very clear from the studies they're doing of our brain, that giving is actually good for you physically as well as psychologically. I mean it makes you healthier.

David Rutledge: I guess the cynical view would be Well, yes, that's all true, but then giving away large amounts of money is still the province of the very rich, isn't it? It's like having a gold helicopter, it's something that only the wealthy can afford to do.

Elizabeth Cham: Yes. but I think increasingly all of us need, particularly at the moment - this decade we are seeing in Australia, as well as the rest of the Western world, the largest ever inter-generational transfer of wealth, as the baby boomers receive the proceeds from their parents house, or properties. And what are they going to do with it? I mean, are they going to sort of do another overseas trip, or get some more wine in the cellar? Or are they going to think very carefully, that possibly if they put a very small proportion of that into a local community foundation, or some other fund that's local? They could name it after their mother, and it's a small scholarship for a child, and over five or ten years that's ten children you've helped - and you get them together, it's like a spider web, and then you can link them internationally if you want to, or you can just keep it local.

Certainly at the moment, it's no longer that we have to be very, very wealthy - Rockefeller-type wealthy - to give, it should be happening in our suburbs at the moment. I think partly many people don't know how to give, they don't think about it in an organised way. They'd like to do it, but they don't know enough about it. And there are certainly in most communities, there are community foundations, and they can be found on the web very easily these days and get some information of how you can do it very easily, and you don't have to be a Rockefeller.

Christopher Sharah: As soon as you give, you seem to get. And that's a pattern of life. And so you know when you give something away, well something will come if you need it. So I don't find I get too attached to things.

David Rutledge: So there's nothing here that you'd regard as precious?

Christopher Sharah: Oh yes, there are some things I'd regard as precious, like that crucifix behind which is from Assisi in Italy, and they're not so easy to get, and it has great significance because it's a replica of the one that St Francis prayed before. So that's precious to us.

David Rutledge: And so when you say these things are precious, when you talk about detachment, if you see something as precious, does that mean that you have a certain attachment to it?

Christopher Sharah: Not necessarily. You could, and that's something I'd have to check in myself, because I'm a human being like anybody else, and you know, there's always that thing that any of us can get attached to anything that we begin to love and get used to having around. But to see something as precious that has a value, to recognise that is not a bad thing, it's a good thing.

David Rutledge: Most people have stuff, lots of possessions, and there's a sense in which our stuff makes us who we are, connects us to other people in our culture or social group who have similar kinds of stuff, and we all sit around and talk about clothes and cars and what-have-you. And in a sense that can be seen as superficial, but in another sense it's a kind of cultural bonding, it connects us to each other. Do you ever feel isolated in having cut yourself off from all that?

Christopher Sharah: No, not really. I don't see that as a bad, what you're saying about people enjoying their goods and using it to connect with one another, I think that's a great good. But we have ways, there's always a million ways to connect with people, and we don't seem to have any trouble connecting with people. If you have a sense of acceptance of others and welcoming which the spirit of poverty gives you, you welcome people and you share what you have with them, then you connect straight away. So we might not be able to sit and talk about the latest of what's going on in cars or computers or whatever, but there's lots of other things to talk about.

David Rutledge: Father Christopher Sharah.

MUSIC

David Rutledge: And on ABC Radio National, you've been listening to Encounter.

Guests this week were Christopher Sharah, Elizabeth Cham, Philippa Kelly, Di Butcher, Jane Smyth and Ross Kingham. Readings from Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Lear (New Cambridge edition) were by David Ritchie. Thanks to them, thanks also to John Spence at ABC Radio Archives, to Kerry Stewart, Louise Katz and Rob Gordon.

Thanks for your company this week. I'm David Rutledge. Bye for now.

Guests

Christopher Sharah
Superior, The Friars of St Francis, Sydney

Elizabeth Cham
Former Director, Philanthropy Australia

Di Butcher
Former Manager, Canberra Bushfire Recovery Centre (2003)

Jane Smyth
Canberra resident

Ross Kingham
Canberra resident and Uniting Church minister

Philippa Kelly
Senior Research Fellow in English, The University of NSW

Further Information

The Friars of St Francis

Australians anxious about cluttered homes
Report from The Australia Institute

Good times and philanthropy

Philanthropy Australia

Music

CD title: Two Times Five Lullaby
Track title: Wind Play
Artist: Rickard Javerling
CD details: Yesternow Records YES004CD (2006)

CD title: Shakespeare's Musick
Track title: Go From My Window
Artist: Musicians of the Globe (cond. Philip Pickett)
Composer: Richard Alison
CD details: Philips 446 687-2 (1997)

CD title: Obsessive Creatures
Track title: Untitled 01
Artist: Sand Snowman
CD details: Time-Lag CD-R (2007)

CD title: Static Traps
Track title: Sat am
Artist: Cheer
CD details: Benbecula Records BEN541 (2008)

CD title: Red Walk
Track title: Autumn Stare Out
Artist: Cheer
CD details: Drifting Falling DRIFTING004 (2008)