This week a good friend of my son, Andrew, dropped in to see me. Their connection was through music and he had just begun a Masters. We had seen each other at a function for new post-graduate students.
“I’ve had this idea buzzing around in my head since Sunday. There is so much distrust and suspicion being promoted in our country at the moment that I want to do something to counteract it, something positive to show how people of different faiths can live together. I want to put together a multifaith band to perform on Denton’s “Show and Tell”!
So the conversation began, how musical multifaith might work.
Finally I gave him contacts for a couple of people who might help.
He’s given me a picture of a new kind of Symphony Orchestra on the stage of the Adelaide Town Hall – all kinds of strange instruments. What they will play and how they will play together will have to be worked out by this new generation.
But this multifaith band on Denton may be a start!

Yesterday I had coffee with a psycho-therapist who had heard about our multifaith chaplaincy at Flinders. She recognises that the spirituality and religious traditions of individuals who come to see her may be an important part of therapy and healing. She has a dream of a retreat centre where shattered lives may be put together, but one that may draw on the services of practitioners of various religious traditions, called in, as appropriate, to assist in the healing process of individuals of those traditions.
I thought Multifaith Chaplaincy at Flinders might support and connect with this initiative.
Let me know if you would like to, too.

Also this week, I received a very new 93 page report entitled Spirituality on Campus, conducted by students themselves, in an Anthropology elective, at ANU in Canberra. It is certainly fascinating reading, and a sign of the times, and of the future, I think. Interestingly, most of the students doing the work are women.
The section on Chaplaincy in this piece of research articulates what I think we, as chaplains at Flinders, have sensed for a while and, I think, affirms the kind of directions we have taken. More of this kind of research needs to be done.
Let me know if you’d like a copy.