At Adelaide Writers' Week in March, journalist George Megalogenis asked Leigh Sales who had surprised her most in the research for her book Any Ordinary Day. She replied: 'Steve Sinn, the priest. Because I'm not religious myself and I felt like we were going to have nothing in common and his way of looking at the world wouldn't make sense to me ...'
Sales' book is an investigation into how people survive the worst that can happen. The book's tagline is 'Blindsides, resilience and what happens after the worst day of your life.' Sales met Jesuit priest Fr Steve Sinn through Juliet Darling — one of the people whose story of traumatic loss is told.
Sales told Megalogenis: 'So Steve Sinn said to me you have to accompany people when things happen to them.' And I said to him, "How do you know what to say? Do you feel like God tells you what to do and what to say?" And he said, "Well no, I've got no idea. I just show up and then I'm just there and if I say the wrong thing and they snap at me it doesn't matter ... It's not about me it's about the other person. You just have to show your willingness to keep accompanying and stop thinking about yourself and what you might do wrong."'
This willingness to accompany and be alongside brokenness recalls for me the writing of Bill Williams, a man with a chronic disability who experienced the regular presence of carers. In his book Naked before God: The return of a broken disciple, he said he craved 'a non-anxious presence ... I've been with people who are not made anxious by my brokenness, and I've seen the difference. It is, in fact, the best definition of ministry I have ever heard; I nearly wept when I heard it, it so defined what I needed.'
There is a deep reciprocity in this awareness, one that trusts that the presence of two humans together is a solidarity even within the profound loneliness that suffering can bring. Sales writes of the way Sinn helped Darling: 'By offering his own bewildered humanity, Steve Sinn allowed Juliet hers.' There is no sense of proclamation in this awareness, it is not about being holy or trying to 'present' the Divine; it does not come with the kind of theology that needs to put in a word from the sponsor.
When I was a chaplain, I stumbled on a prayer fragment in some all-age worship resources. I learnt it by heart before I recorded its source, but it has come back to me often. It encapsulates those moments when we are moved by the grace of bearing witness to one another's lives: 'You made each of us to take you as a gift to others.' This is echoed in words Sales quotes from the priest — 'We are his presence to one another, human beings.'
At Writer's Week, sitting in the deep shade of big oak trees on a hot day in Adelaide, Sales recounted another story. After the tragedy of Walter Mikac's wife and two daughters being shot and killed in the Port Arthur massacre, one of his friends could not face meeting him. Mikac literally had to run after the man, who had turned and fled up the street. Mikac had to be the one to say to his tearful friend, 'It's okay, Doug, you don't have to say anything.'
"There is a deep reciprocity in this awareness, one that trusts that the presence of two humans together is a solidarity even within the profound loneliness that suffering can bring."
This scenario was repeated a number of times by friends or strangers who found his story too much to bear and feared saying the wrong thing. Mikac told Sales that there's nothing anyone could say, no matter how badly it came out, that could be as bad as what had already happened to him.
Having heard Mikac's story, Sales tells of her resolve to visit a friend who was dying in hospital. 'I still had all exactly the same feelings. I was scared to go up to his hospital room, I was scared the nurses were going to do something gross ... I'm scared he's going to be like crying and in pain and I'm scared I'll say the wrong thing ... but I just sort of felt like, after Steve said you have to accompany, I felt like it doesn't matter that I'm scared, that's alright.
'This is scary. I should be scared of this, but I still have to keep going there because I hung out with this friend at good times and weddings and parties and at the pub and at dinner and all the rest of it. And don't I, at the very least, owe them to come and sit next to them in their hospital bed when they are about to die and in great pain ...'
She turned up.
Julie Perrin is a Melbourne writer, oral storyteller and associate teacher at Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity. Her first book Tender: Stories that lean into kindness will be published by MediaCom in May.