ol i kam, ol i kam

I loved this call to meeting at the AGM of the Church narapela day. Ol i kam = everybody come. Fr Stanley preached on Sunday and he spoke about feeding his neighbour's dog Spoti. I give Spoti some scraps and bones and leftovers but God does not give us these things. He gives us good things. Pren bilong mi went as a young student long Canberra and he met a girl but before they got serious he said she should visit his village to see if she could accept his way of life in a single roomed house made out of woven grass and bamboo floor without the conveniences of running water na electricity. This is what Jesus expects us to do when we obey the call to follow him - forget the material thing of the multiroomed house with modern conveniences and come in to share his humble home with little facility for bodily cleansing but perfuming of many Godly hearts.
This sem pren bilong mi went with other prens to a hotel in Canberra one night and a gruff "Aussie" told him "Black bastards should go back to your own country". Mi pren said, I might be black but I am not a bastard. I would like an apology please. Ignored, pren said a second time and the "Aussie" hit him. Pren retaliated and to this day carries a limp finger from where he broke it.
A godly heart can only come from humility and there is much of it here in PNG but Australia has been flooded by arrogance even of the racist kind. The humility of the down to earth Australian has been robbed of us by Australian yobbos who persist in calling themselves "Aussies" - now a self endearing term robbed from the memory of soldiers who justifiably earned the endearing epithet in the trenches in WW1. These "people" use the memory of the good deeds of ancestors to bloat their own valour and importance. When we start to believe the deeds of our ancestors belong to the mythology of our own making, we become trapped in mythology and assume it is reality and we no longer create our own reality. The mythology of others is not built on by ourselves and we die. It happened to the Greeks after the Persian wars and the Romans and the British Empire and no doubt it will happen to the American Empire. Rogues like PM Howard have made the mythology of heroic exploits of others an art form which is disrespectful of those who own the myth and unproductive in creating reality which can become a new myth.