Part Three - Wednesday. The Sexual God.

It is strange looking back from my life now to that distant time when I was leaving the clerical caste of the church. It is as if I am recalling a previous lifetime. I now can hardly imagine how that person was really me. At that time I remember fearing that in leaving the Catholic ministry I was throwing away a status that I could have used for good. But at that time, my more romantic side thought that this was worldly thinking, that if I was meant to live as a beggar, that would be where I could be most effective. I had learnt that it is the low, the child, the despised that the voice of Wisdom often chooses as her oracle.

I never saw Jackie as a temptation to desert my pledge to serve God - on the contrary, her love and presence was for me a divine gift and an enrichment. I had made a vow of celibacy which I saw as my pledge never to break my marriage with the God - and in response it seemed I had been sent Jackie by this same God so I could learn about life, love and children. I believed I could accept this gift without breaking my link to God. Instead I delighted and rejoiced in receiving such a gift and thanked my God for her.

Looking back on this time, I see that my own path, my own liberation, required the demolition of my patriarchal status and the dismemberment of my old self with all the fears that boosted it. I had no conceit that this was the path for all. It was simply my own path, my own calling.

As for losing my status in the patriarchy. Well I had been trying to lose it since it were given me. I had no wish to be part of any elite. In the eyes of the Church and my parents I had fallen from it by giving in to sex and breaking my vow of celibacy. But for me my fall was off stony pinnacles of pride and stolen power down onto a fertile plain.

I found that I had "fallen" to a place that seemed inordinately rich and complex, a virtual rain forest of possibilities. Hand in hand with my human lover, with Jackie , my divinely given companion, I had to find my way. Instincts were the main guide.. Blind trust led me. There were many things to learn. I thought of sex as a celebration of life, as a divine gift in its own right - but my knowledge then was entirely of intellect without a shred of experience to back it and very little instinct.

And Jackie turned out to be a revelation to me. The one who brought me other dreams. Those of children, of real poverty, complete trust in providence, of being part of a sacred nature that needed no supernature to be holy.

One of the first lessons she had to teach me was about sexuality. She found my lack of sexuality perplexing. She thought, she later owned, that the Catholic Church had done a very good job in making me sexually inhibited. She set out to educate me so we could better share in the delights of creation!

This really threw me at first! I can remember thinking "What on earth shall I do?" ! My reaction was not from prudery. In theory I thought human love and sexuality divinely ordained and wonderful. But that was in theory. OK for prayer and contemplation. But in practice - how should I react? I loved Jackie . Yes. But I did not feel any passion. I was almost stupidly angelic in my lack of co-ordination between soul and body!

What was going on in me? I had no comparative way of judging. All I could think was that if I loved her, then I should be free in self giving, that this was the divine way of acting. My ambition should be, was, to make her happy. I wanted to give myself to her. But at first I felt the engine of my car simply had no fuel in it.

Over the ensuing days, among the many arts she revealed was masturbation. I laugh now at my incredible chastity at the age of 28, a chastity that was no virtue. What virtue could it be when vowed by an asexual? Looking back at the time when I was so inexperienced it seems to me that I am thinking of another life, another incarnation, another era, that I am remembering the thoughts and actions of another person.

I can remember an earlier day in this previous existence, when I was still at the seminary and about 23 years old. I was walking through the study hall at Highcliffe Castle in my long black cassock and sash when the prefect (the priest in charge of students' welfare) came up to me. He had a very worried expression. He was staring below my belt. He hummed and haard and then said that I should keep my hand out of my pocket. He suggested it could give the false impression that I was masturbating. I was simply amazed by his suggestion. The truth of it was that it had never occurred to me that sexual pleasure was waiting at my finger-tips. I had never thought to experiment with masturbation. I was as if very pre-puberty. Given I now enjoy sex - it amazes me that I could have been such a Peter Pan.

So Jackie had quite a task on her hands. She did not then know quite how hard it would be. But I was a willing student. She taught me the gentle arts of loving, how to gentle her, how to be with her. It was so new to me. had never been with a woman before. Her body felt so surprisingly different from mine, soft, strange, other.. I felt enveloped in her love for me. I wanted to give myself to her without reserve and was very willing to learn how this could be.

And she with much greater expertise and experience taught me much that was so magical - the way that tension and pleasure mounted in the groin, the sudden explosion of rich fertile seed, and the strange peace that came once it was over. A male salute to life that I could give, a blessing, a shower of seed. A blessing that Jackie was happy to give me. There was a wonder in this, a strange marvel - and an odd jarring feeling at the back of my brain that this was most out of keeping with my inner secret reality, somehow an alien experience, a blessing from another world. I wondered that it were possible at all. Hesitatingly I told Jackie of my strange fantasy that I had not been able to destroy, that I was a girl. But we both chose to leave this in the world of fantasy. In accepting that we loved each other, I had chosen to enter this world of male sexuality. I had much to explore and learn. Any odd feelings we put down to my being so long in a world of celibates.

At least I did not share the arrogance of Aristotle who argued, in an age when God the Mother was still celebrated, that the male seed was more important than the mother in the creation of new human life - the woman being merely the used and planted field, not the giver of half or more of the chromosomes and of the nurturing. Not sharing this conceit, I could not share the view of Churchmen that believed that wasting seed was almost the same as killing life, a view endorsed by Pope Paul VI 7 years after Jackie gave me my first lesson in male sexuality when he declared masturbation a mortal sin akin to murder. (Declaration on Some Questions in Sexual Ethics 1975)

It was not that the Church saw the male seed as holy. Although it carried life, they still saw it as somewhat "yucky". The Church Fathers argued that Christ could not have possibly have entered a womb "contaminated" with semen - and that thus the Holy Spirit must had made her pregnant without employing any sperm This view has effectively continued until today inside the Catholic Church. In 1987 Pope John Paul II declared Mary the Mother had "preserved her virginity intact" - meaning with an unbroken hymen. (Encyclical Redemptoris Mater Eu 348). Also in that same year, a female theologian, Uta Ranke-Heineman, lost her license to teach within the Catholic Church for saying that Mary was probably not a biological virgin.

But at the time the Fathers lived, many other early Christians regarded such accounts of Christ's miraculous conception as a stupidity: firstly because they did not share the "contamination" theory of human semen: secondly because in their bible it was the Goddess Sophia , also called the Holy Spirit, who came to Mary to ask for her consent to pregnancy. The "Gospel according to Philip" read: "Some said, "Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit.' They are in error. They do not know what they are saying. When did a woman ever conceive by a woman? " Mary was a virgin in the sense that she had not being defiled by "powers" - referring to evil forces rather than to semen.

The Church argued against masturbation that the sexual pleasure it gives us has been provided solely for the procreation of life - and thus to do it solely for pleasure, is a misuse of pleasure, a misuse of our body, that can only lead us down the original path through which sin and evil entered this world, down into the hell of lust. This argument might seem stretched to you, but when I worked as a Christian priest masturbation was the "sin" that most worried Catholic men. In 19th century England doctors cruelly wired foreskins so they could not be pulled back to stop boys masturbating - and girls did not escape. I have mentioned how in France and England they had their clitorises cauterised "with a white hot iron" in order to stop them masturbating. (Dr D. Zambaco. "Onanism and Mental Disturbance in Two Little Girls" L'Encephale 1882 cited in Eu 218).

But of course such sick practices were far from the minds of Jackie and I in our romancing in the late 1960s. Instead there was a wonder, a delight, a circus of love, of touch, of laughter, of talk, of learning about each other. And in joy and laughter I learnt that the phallus after all has a purpose apart from aiming water and being a handle - that it could make women happy and me still happier. The intense pleasure it gave me made me hope my transgendered fantasy would pass. I lifted with her happiness. It was a bond, a rod, a maypole around which we danced. Jackie wanted a child. I never thought to have a chance at creating. For me it was a wonder that I could take part in this, incarnate our love as another human, our love lifting us, making us one with the creator.

Looking back, reflecting, an element was missing from my loving that perhaps men experience. I do not think I saw Jackie quite as men normally see women. Jackie was the sister, the teacher, the sharer of life and dreams, the lover. She gave me great richness. Opened me to the magic of engendering children. She also taught me much about myself. It was wonderful to give her joy. But I think I felt increasingly in bonding with her that there was a commonness between us, not that she was the alien other that gave me a completion - not the feeling that I have since experienced as a woman in exploring heterosexual love.

In loving her for the remaining period I survived in the male role, I learnt much that was new to me about my genitals and thus something about malekind. I found the penis, never attractive to me, was capable of much delicacy. It is of a man yet moves independently of his will. Instead it stands between the couple, a bridging organ, that can be controlled and enjoyed by either partner, that can give ecstasy to one, both or neither. No wonder the Hindus and many other religions have exalted it as an emblem of divine creative power. It took me thou' a long time to realise this. I thought it was just the males that had exalted it. Now I see that it is the organ that both genders jointly control and therefore of great importance to women too.

This was so different to how the "Fathers" of the Church regarded their own male parts. When I looked into this I found to my surprise that their attitude towards women was shaped by their attitude to their penises! One of the greatest of them, St Augustine, believed that the pursuit of sanctity meant gaining complete control over his own body. The human body, like nature as a whole, had become corrupted through the Fall of Adam and Eve. It, like nature, was now to be subdued and conquered.

St. Augustine was very influential in this matter. Influenced by the Stoics, he had worked hard to gain complete control over his body - but there was one organ which he could not conquer. He incredibly saw its involuntary movements as disobedience. Eventually he worked out this was so. He theorised that God had given men this disobedient organ to remind them that the "original sin" was disobedience. Later others took his theories still further. They asked how, if men could not control the movements of their penis, could a woman give a male an erection? The answer was that she was using magic, enlisting in this the power of the Serpent, of Satan. Augustine wrote his thoughts in his book "On Marriage and Concupiscence".

"When the first man transgressed the law of God, he began to have another law in his members which was repugnant to the law of his mind, and he felt the evil of his own disobedience when he experienced in the disobedience of his flesh a most righteous retribution recoiling on himself... When it must come to man's great function of the procreation of children the members which were expressly created for this purpose will not obey the direction of the will, but lust has to be waited for to set these members in motion, as if it had legal right over them, and sometimes it refuses to act when the mind wills, while often it acts against its will! Must not this bring the blush of shame over the freedom of the human will, that by its contempt of God, its own Commander, it has lost all proper command for itself over its own members? Now, wherein could be found a more fitting demonstration of the just depravation of human nature by reason of its disobedience, than in the disobedience of those parts..?" (Augustine - p32Gos)

Augustine wrote the crucial scriptural interpretations and texts on which the Catholic church today bases its ban on contraception. He concluded by attacking all sexual pleasure by saying: "This lust, then, is not in itself the good of the nuptial institution; but it is obscenity in sinful men, a necessity in procreant parents, the fire of lascivious indulgences, the shame of nuptial pleasures". ch11 "Lust" was only tolerated when it was directed to the continuance of the species "It is impermissible and shameful to have intercourse with one's wife while preventing the conception of children" 85 eu ch 13 In the 20th Century Pope Pius XI would quote Augustine and add that God would pursue "with the highest degree of hatred" all those who practised contraception. (Casti Connubii, 1930)

Augustine lamented that this disobedient and "unseemly member" was celebrated in Roman pagan rites. "the rites of Liber were celebrated with such unrestrained turpitude, that the private parts of a man were worshipped in his honour. Nor was this abomination transacted in secret that some regard at least might be paid to modesty, but was openly and wantonly displayed. For during the festival of Liber this obscene member, placed on a car, was carried with great honour, first over the cross-roads in the country, and then into the city. But in the town of Lavinium a whole month was devoted to Liber alone, during the days of which all the people gave themselves up to the must dissolute conversation, until that member had been carried through the forum and brought to rest in its own place; on which unseemly member it was necessary that the most honourable matron should place a wreath in the presence of all the people". The City of God. Book 7 Ch 21

Some Christians would castrate themselves rather than have their penises disobey. Thus the famous Christian writer Origin who died in 254AD said he followed the example of other Christians when he castrated himself at the age of 18. (Commentary on Mt. 15.3 - see p 51 of Eunuchs.) This was not peculiarly an early Christian concept. In India the Jains taught that men could beneficially achieve the withering up of the male organs by meditation. (p 39)

This belief that the male sex drive was an obstacle to perfection lead pious Christian men into dreadful guilt complexes - and in turn they tried to shift the blame for this onto the influence of women. Tertullian, another major Christian authority, expressed his fear of female power in a letter to women that read in part: "even the grace and beauty you naturally enjoy must be obliterated by concealment and negligence.... it is to be feared, because of the injury and violence it inflicts on the men who admire you." St. Augustine likewise wrote in a letter: "What is the difference whether it is in a wife or mother, it is still Eve the temptress that we must beware of in any woman." (Letters 243, 10). Hans Kung noted that "Augustine shaped Western Theology and piety more than any other theologian - he became the spiritual father of the medieval paradigm" that would lead to the burning of thousands of women as witches.

St. Augustine would go totally off his head with fury when the pretty woman who might force on him an erection with her magic turned out to be also an hermaphrodite or transsexual - but more about this later.

Augustine and Tertullian's experience was clearly not mine. I was not upset because I could not control the movements of the penis I experienced it as an independent entity that I could observe, feel but not dominate. Instead of worrying about its independence, I was more concerned about how it could be wrongly used by men, turned into an organ of domination, of hurt and exploitation although I had not yet experienced what it is like to be its victim.

A few months after we first met, Jackie and I spent a magic week in a room on the Isle de Saint Louis in the middle of the Seine in Paris, on an island connected by a footbridge to the Cathedral of Notra Dame, a sacred hill within the water. We wondered, wandered, eat onion soup in Les Halles, watched artists in Montmarte. It was a dream, a blessing. Another trip was to the Lake District where we climbed to a pool half way down a mountain side twix two waterfalls, on the Milky Gill, where deep in a pool that floated between earth and cloud we could overlook the earth or flip back and laugh under the falling water, part of a cascade that ran from heaven to a fertile earth.

I wooed Jackie with all the grace of the Irish gab to persuade her that she was not taking me from my priesthood - which was her fear. I saw in her a dream - perhaps as men do. A wild woman lived in my dreams, a woman who dreamt her ideals and made them real. Jackie symbolised this person for me. As a separate person she was untouchable, untakeable. She was she and could not be me but she helped to teach me and I have much to thank her for. In the Irish epic called The Tain, Cuchulainn was sent to study the art of fighting with a woman, Scathach, the Shadowy One. Jackie was the shadowy teacher set on my own path.

But this dream about the wild woman was in part about me. The male self-image that I then held onto needed to travel, to find this wild woman that flitted through my dreams, to find the aspect that is often missing in a boy's upbringing. Perhaps all males need this, to stand strong on their own feet, erect, happily proud while touching and feeling the female earth beneath their feet, the female thighs embracing them and protecting their male bodies, feeding and inspiring their wild free creative mothering side. Here they would find Kali, the Hindu Goddess who said the word Om to create the universe. Later I would learn this that women need conversely to know their male side. In this balance lies the truly divine power of creation.

I had found in loving Jackie a secret that no one had taught me. It was that giving seed was also a sacrifice. The giving of sperm left me strengthless, empty yet full, in suspense, quiet, richly now barren while the work of fertility passed to another human. It as a giving that was a receiving of Jackie 's welcome, a bonding, perhaps a new life. I died a bit as the wheel turned. (This experience of emptiness, of weakness beside a stronger woman, is very scary to men who despise women.)

An ancient British story tells of what happened when the great magician Merlin, the advisor to King Arthur, fell in love with Vivienne. He agreed both to give her his magical secrets and to be held a captive by her as long as he could stay with her . The meaning in this for me is that true love captures us and makes us willing to share our power. Merlin found himself complete when with her and wanted nothing more. I felt that I must also surrender all that was mine to give. I did so and Jackie freely give of her own riches. This surrendering involved for me as it does for all lovers great vulnerability, great trust - and a great leap in the dark.

But this male experience in love-making of surrender, brief exhaustion, emptying, had made too much for some of the ancients. Grecian and Roman pagan Stoics saw sex as not desirable in that it weakened a man. They thus recommended that men should abstain from acts of intercourse unless they intended procreation, saying that sexual joy was not a sufficient reason to engage in sex . The Stoics exalted "virtue" - meaning by this a virile masculine strength. (Vir being the Latin for a man). They thought women were not exhausted by sex - so thought sex was not as damaging to women.

The School of Stoics flourished from 300BC to 350AD. It dominated much of the Grecian world and was important in Rome in the days of the early Church. They put control of sexuality at the centre of morality. The stoic Senaca wrote to his mother Helvia around 50AD: "If you reflect that sexual pleasure has been given to man not for enjoyment but for the procreation of his race, then if lust has not touched you with its poisoned breath, that other desire will also pass you by without touching you." P13eu. His disciple in Rome, Musconius, went further and argued that any act of sex that was not for procreation was immoral. P12Eu. But Musconius was not anti-woman. He argued, unlike Aristotle, that men and women were equal in nature and equally virtuous - and that women deserved equal education opportunities. p12

Such views led Pliny the Elder, the pagan naturalist who died in an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD , to praise the elephant because it had such a mastery of its own sexuality that it only mated once every two years. Natural History 8/5

Another who had much influence over how the Church developed was Plotinus, a second century Greek philosopher (205-270). Writing in the Greek tradition of weaving together philosophy and mysticism, he saw us all as emanating from God - and fated to long to return to God, to the One, to eventually become the One by returning to the womb of life. Men can experience in love-making this need to become one, to return to the womb. I felt this. But he also saw us as needing first to purge ourselves from corrupted matter - so thought a harsh ascetical preparation was needed for loving God and achieving unity with Him. His teaching was influential in the schools of Christian ascetics that gave rise to the monasteries.

He also held, in common with many ancient pagan religious thinkers, that ultimately the deity was One who was beyond gender. He saw male and female energy united in the Godhead through a divine trinity made up by One Ineffable God from whom had emanated both a male Nous or Mind and a female Psyche or Spirit. Christians were to strip from this Trinity its gender balance. As they believed, as had Aristotle, that the male was superior to the female, they felt they must eliminate any talk of "inferior' female energy in the Trinity.

My own instinct is that soul and matter , male and female, all flow from the divine and are interwoven. There can be no matter without soul, no matter that is not alive - and no matter without the presence of the divine. Souls are the spirits of life within creation, within nature, and when gendered, as are human souls, are daughters and sons of the divine spirit that makes, supports and loves all matter, all creation.

But if souls and bodies are intrinsically linked, what happens to the soul when a body dies? Many instinctively believe that we live on after death but can a soul so intimately woven with matter survive without matter? A modern Christian view is that the soul survives in an incomplete way until the resurrection of the bodies on the Last Day. But I see another way, that our spirits never leave this created sacred world but live on within it, one'd in love with the divine creating energy that sustains our world, living beyond time, in an act of ecstasy united with the great Wheel of life, oned with the lover who sustains the wheel.

As for gender and divinity, I see gender as an aspect of life that we apply by analogy to our visualisations of divine energy, knowing that gender must be present within the divine energy because it exists in us and we are part of the deity. A great English Christian mystic, Blessed Julian of Norwich, wrote around 1400 in the gnostic spirit:

I it am; the might and goodness of the Fatherhood.

I it am; the wisdom and kindness of the Motherhood.

I it am; the light and grace of blessed Love.

I it am; the Trinity.

I it am; the Unity.

I it am; the high sovereign goodness of all manner of things.

I it am; that which makes you love.

I it am; that makes you to long

For the endless fullness of all true desires.

Her words echoed much that was in my heart. I felt they came out of the common pool of human mysticism and would be understood by the mystics of many a different race. She expressed the unity we must have within us.

Although gender is important, when life first started, a virgin creation reigned. The first life did not need genders to reproduce - and still many species retain this property. But long before primates appeared, a spit occurred. From that time the family of species that includes humankind took on two genders, as if two species in one species, created to serve our survival. This split was functional - but left us with a yearning to become one again. Male and female we now are. Virgin parent we once were.

But this splitting of genders has given us reason for a milliard love songs as well as a pattern for the other union, of the human with the divine, of ultimate sex as heaven. This sexual joy in unity - it is for me a lesson, , a mystery, a teaching of how we are to be fulfilled in knowing the other and God in ecstasy, in orgasm, in knowing completion.

Jackie and I discovered a Lebanese poet, Kahlil Gibran, as did many of the more radical or romantic of our time. He wrote in "The Prophet" ;

"When love beckons to you, follow him,

thought his ways are hard and steep.

And when his wings enfold you yield to him,

Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.

And when he speaks to you believe in him,

Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.

Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun.

So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth...

Life gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;

For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."

And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course...

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires;

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night." (P17)

Gibran wrote with an ancient Lebanese Middle-Eastern understanding that human love unites us with the very spirit of the Divine, that when we love, we are "in the heart of God." This concept is as old as the human spirit. In ancient rites of pre-Christian times as well as in many ancient cultures that have survived, the wedding of humans was a sacred image of the wedding of Deity and Earth, of the Oneness that love creates, uniting Divinity and Matter. The cycle of the year, the crops, the pups, the foals - all were seen as dependent on and part of the creative energy of the Creating Spirits, Deities or Ancestors.

Early Christian documents recorded similar thinking about marriage. They spoke of it as a symbol of the oneness between Christ and His people. "Husbands love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her... Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself... For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and he two shall become one flesh.." Ephesians, 5/22-32 The God and his people become one, women and men likewise become one.

This text also embodied an ancient concept of the God having to die that we have life, just as the wheat must die that we live - a mystery the Greeks celebrated in the Eleusian Mysteries.

But "one flesh"? The anti-flesh, the anti-women faction of the early church must have been deaf to this verse. They could not easily reconcile it with their belief that the flesh had been corrupted by the Fall - and so they concentrated on other biblical texts that they could make fit better.

They twisted Paul's chauvinism making it much worse. Letters written after Paul's death were quoted as if from him (and still are). But those that are still thought of as authored by him were misinterpreted. "Wives be subject to your husband ", Ephesians 5/22 ,is quoted, ignoring the adjacent clause, "be subject to each other." Some quoted Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, 7/25 which said "do not marry". But Paul in the same chapter emphasised that Jesus had not say any such thing. "Now concerning the unmarried, I have no command of the Lord." I Cor 7/25. Convinced that the world was about to end, Paul's personal opinion was that it was better to avoid marrying in such circumstances. He however ended with this instruction to those who had partners. "do not refuse each other except perhaps by agreement for a season that you may devote yourselves to prayer.. but then come together again." There is no hint here that he believed that sexual relations were not entirely good.

St Augustine misinterpreted a saying of Jesus about the need for couples to stay together. The apostles had protested to Jesus against this saying of his, saying that if one could not divorce, it was better not to marry. Jesus then conceded "not all men can receive this" adding "I say this by way of concession". His response applied to his statement about divorce, but Augustine took it as if Jesus had endorsed the view of the apostles that it was better not to marry.

St Jerome went ever further. In translating the Bible into Latin, creating the Vulgate version that would be used for centuries, it seems he deliberately doctored the text to make it advocate celibacy - when in fact it held that marriage was most sacred. He dropped from Tobias a verse that said "it is not good for a man to be alone" p12Eu In his personal teaching, Jerome fundamentally set himself against St Paul by teaching that sex in marriage intrinsically dishonours those who take part. "If we abstain from coitus we honour our wives; if we do not abstain, - well what is the opposite of honour but insult?" (Adversus Jovianian 1/7}

It is worrying to think that it was this same Jerome who was asked by Pope Damascus in 382 C.E. to revise the Latin Gospels and who went on to revise the rest of the Christian bible. The Emperor Constantine sixty years earlier, in 322 C.E., had given Eusebius of Caesarea, an enemy of the gnostic Christians, the task of selecting which books went into the New Testament as we have seen. (Xref tues) Jerome was now given the sole responsibility for revising the text of the selected books. His version would be that accepted in the Western Christian world until modern times. Scholars have remarked that the whole of the New Testament has Jerome's style. (Cambridge History of the Bible Vol 2 p 84). Jerome in a preface addressed to Pope Damascus said: "You asked me to revise the Old Latin version and , as it were, to sit in judgment on the corpus of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world, and in as much as they differ from each other, you would have me decide which of them agreed with the Greek original ... for there are almost as many texts as there are copies." The Eastern Christian Churches never fully accepted Jerome's version and there are remained small differences between these Churches as to what books made up the New Testament until today.

The Fathers of the Church did not go quite so far as to say that marriage was evil. They saw it as a regrettable but necessary for a highly dangerous and potentially spiritually lethal activity. Sex was so dangerous that it should only be employed for the procreation of children and never for pleasure. Ambrose, the teacher of Augustine, praised marriage for its usefulness - but said "virginity is the one thing that keeps us from the beasts."

There were women who welcomed this advocacy of celibacy for many found male demands on them were arrogant and controlling. In virginity one could seize back control of one's life by banishing men from it. Even in 1999 a survey among young adult American women found that a large percentage found intercourse painful

When at the age of 29 St. Augustine had become a Christian, he deserted the women he had been living with for 12 years and by whom he had a child. His views about women were reflected in his book "De Genesisi ad litteram", written around 415AD, in which he said there must have been sex in the Garden of Eden for what else were woman created for, for what else were they good for? "I don't see what sort of help woman was created to provide man with, if one excludes the purpose of procreation. If woman is not given to man for help in bearing children, for what help could she be? To till the earth together? If help were needed for that, man would have been a better help for man. The same goes for comfort in solitude."

The influence of Augustine sadly reached through nearly a thousand years to influence Thomas Aquinas in his teaching that marriage was the least of the sacraments and then another few hundred years more to Martin Luther and Calvin who carried Augustine's views into the Reformation. Luther wrote. "No matter what praise is given to marriage, I will not concede it to nature that it is no sin... How foul and horrible a thing sin is, for lust is the only thing that cannot be cured by any remedy! Not even by marriage, which was expressly ordained for this infirmity of our nature." Commentary on Genesis 3/9 Luther 103 He also wrote: "A woman is never truly her own master. God formed her body to belong to a man, to have and to rear children."

But in the New Testament there is no suggestion that sex in marriage is only permitted for the generation of children. Marriage was seen as good in its own right, a sacred symbol of a bonding of God with life, of Christ with the Church - and the apostles showed no sign of shame in travelling with their wives. This was the common understanding in a society which glorified the family as did Judaism - and in most of the surrounding Greek and Egyptian religions which celebrated the "sacred marriage". Their views were far from what Augustine and Martin Luther were to teach in Christ's name.

Since in my family home my mother ruled and had been put upon a pedestal by my father, it was not until I got to study theology that I realised with some horror that women were seen by many famous Christian and Pagan male teachers of the past as temptresses and inferiors - and that this dreadful state of affairs had been justified with a pseudo-scientific theory the purpose of which was both to make women accept such a status as natural and to excuse males from feeling guilty about suppressing their sisters' rights.

Such "scientific" theories on female inferiority unfortunately have extended to modern times. For Freud, women were not physically but psychically inferior to male. He wrote in his "An Outline of Psychoanalysis": "A female child has, of course, no need to fear the loss of a penis, she must however react to the fact of not having received one. From the very first she envies boys its possession; her whole development may be said to take place under the colours of envy for the penis. She... makes efforts to compensate for her defect - efforts which may lead in the end to a normal feminine attitude. If during the phallic phase, she attempts to get pleasure like a boy by the manual stimulation of her genitals, it often happens that she fails to obtain sufficient gratification and extends her judgement of inferiority from her stunted penis to her whole self.: n70 p522g

But in nature that the male of the species is not always as essential as is the female. Many species manage reproduction without males - and in some rare cases the male has a much shorter life - such as with the Australian phasogales. This is a squirrel like creature that I have watched gamble in high eucalyptus forest in the Yarra valley of SE Australia. The males of the species are born in spring, make love in the autumn and then die. The female lives on for perhaps another year or more as long as they have far more responsibilities for the continuance of the species.

The pseudo scientific justification for males having a higher status than females pre-dates Christianity. Aristotle argued about 300 years before Christ was born that the female body was an imperfect version of the male's. He called them defective men. (On the generation of animals, 2/3). He maintained that men as the "active principle" in nature are superior to women who are merely the "passive principle". This view was then controversial for he lived in a time when Goddesses were still honoured. But other pagans shared his views. Patriarch wrote: "Woman is a real devil, an enemy of the peace, a source of provocation." Aristotle did not originate the theory that women were physically inferior to men for it is also found in Greek dramas written two hundred years earlier, in the 5th Century before Christ.

The famous writer of tragedies, Aeschylus (525-456BC) had Apollo say: "The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows." Thus the Goddess Pallas Athena could be born directly from the head of Zeus. "There can be a father without any mother. There she stands, the living witness, daughter of the Olympian Zeus, she who was never fostered in the darkness of the womb." (Eumenides, II 658-60, 736-65. Translated by Richmond Lattimore.)

But Aeschylus knew this was a "modern" view. A Fury in the Oresteia drama protested strenuously against this dethroning of the mother "Gods of the younger generation, you have ridden down the laws of elder time, torn them from my hands" . Some believe, such as the scholar Riane Eisler, that Athena by declaring for the Father, symbolically sealed the fate of womankind. ref. Riane Eisler "The Chalice and the Blade" HarperSanFrancisco 1987 p78?

In a way the male god was claiming the same power as that possessed by the earliest Goddesses. He had become a Virgin God - able to create of himself without need for a partner. Today the more liberal Christian clergy will speak of the Mother God - also meaning a God who creates. The medieval academic, Meister Ekhardt spoke of God's natural place being on the birthing table. The hermaprodite may possess both aspects of both genders - but still normally had only one gender identity. Thus we say the Goddess not the Angrogyne creates of herself. Thus I too say I am a woman even if born an hermaprodite. Thus the male god remained male while giving birth.

Aeschylus has embodied in his plays a male rationalisation for a process that had begun hundreds of years earlier - perhaps during the development of major agricultural societies. The clearing of "wilderness" in which there were many sacred places and many sacred food sources was supported by a new-bred theology that found its way eventually into the Book of Genesis. It held that the Deity ( or Deities) had set humans over nature and that it was proper for it to be suppressed and controlled for the benefit of humans. The Deity also allowed, even ordered, land to be seized by warfare. All this was based on concepts still alien to the culture of hunter-gatherer societies. When I was working ]with Aboriginal nations in Northern Australia, I found that children would animatedly discuss seeing their first fields on trips to other parts of Australia - for monoculture was a very strange concept for a people that still knew how to use every naturally occurring species and who had a sacred place to honour every food source.

In these early agricultural empires in which men had justified taking control of the economy and armies, they had also justified taking control their families. Women whose wombs were now seen as only the nurseries of children produced from male seed, came to be controlled, fenced in as if they were fields, so that men would know which children they had fathered. The image of the mother goddess had lost her supremacy as a source of life - although it took many hundreds of years for her to be displaced by a totally patriarchal male deity image.

In Western Europe there were similar developments documented in "Celtic" legends and history. In Northern Ireland, in Ulster, there was around this time a major change at the Oncoming Winter's feast ( now known as Halloween). This was a harvest festival where all the gifts of Macha, the Mother Goddess, were traditionally celebrated including the "mast', the food from beech trees. But, when a male warrior culture became dominant, the warriors brought to this feast their own harvest, their collection of amputated heads - calling these "the mast of Macha". They said life came from the head and from shed blood, rather than from the womb or from the naturally shed blood of women. (As in the Greek myth in which Athena was born from the head of Zeus). The warriors also slept with these heads held between their thighs in a crude simulation of child birth.

Greece was also influenced by philosophies from the far East. The Buddhist faith was then under male control and held that women were reincarnated at a lower level than men. Buddha when dying said to Ananda: "Women are full of passion, Ananda; women are envious, Ananda. Women are stupid, Ananda. That is the reason, Ananda, that is the cause, why women have no place in public assemblies, do not carry on business and do not earn their living in any profession. "P134 w-hist.

But none of these ancient beliefs replaced women from all the sacred temples, none of these ancient societies were so scorning of womankind as were the "Fathers" of the Church. So what caused these "Fathers" to become so extremist in their views, so vehement about women and sexuality? Why did Christ's own practice of a woman friendly ministry change among his followers so quickly into a woman despising ministry? Although the Fathers worked within a sea of different religions, no other group can be held responsible for the Father's ugly attacks on women, on gays, on the transgendered. Effectively they were the authors of a major distortion of Christ's teaching that is still deep rooted in the Catholic Church and in society.

Perhaps part of the answer is that the "Fathers" were engaged in what they saw as a contest for the control of a developing Church. They put more energy into attacking fellow Christians than into criticising the Pagans who were throwing Christians to the lions. They wrote countless polemics against other Christians in which they distorted Christ's much more tolerant teachings. They were clearly determined to destroy the influence of the non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian Christians of a gnostic inclination. One of their first acts when their faction gained power through the Emperor Constantine was to have the books of these other more pagan-friendly Christians burnt and their meetings made illegal.

These gnostic Christians gave to women sacred ritual roles - but this still does not explain why the Fathers came to write so vehemently against women. Perhaps a clue to this lies in Augustine's reaction when the British monk Pelagius attacked him for still adhering to the beliefs of the Manichaeans to whom he had once belonged. Augustine furiously denied this, explaining that whereas the pagan Manichaeans taught that nature was evil, he taught that nature was created good but through the sin of the first humans had been corrupted and made evil.

This was part of the explanation of why they wrote so despisingly of ordinary women. He and the other Fathers were as concerned as the Iron Age farmers with the mastery of nature - and women were experienced by them as part of a reluctant nature that did not want to be mastered. They justified their mastery of women by quoting the Bible. They put down the reluctance of women to accept male domination to the devil's influence - explaining that corrupted nature both dominated the lives of women (as was evident with their periods) and kept them more in the domain of Satan. They saw the salvation of women lay in persuading them to be "virtuous" or male-like. The very word "virtue" originally meant "male-like".Q 178

Their attacks on women may also have been influenced by the politics of blood that accompanied the rise of patriarchies. In this rise, the blood of the womb, the most ancient symbol of human fertility, was replaced in religious significance by the blood shed through male circumcision, through war and through martyrdom.

A creation myth reflected this change by saying that humankind did not come from a Mother Goddess but from the mingling of a male God's blood with the soil. The Bronze Age Babylonian myth of Marduk had him destroy his mother; "Then the lord paused to view her dead body, that he might divide the monster and do artful works. He split her like a shellfish into two parts, half of her he set up and called it sky." (M278) - turning the rest into the earth. He then slaughtered a younger God who had loved his Mother/Consort and "out of his blood they fashioned mankind." (N6 Tiamat 279)

The first Christians lived through a time of bloodshed. The Emperor Nero scapegoated Christians for a fire that destroyed Rome, impaling them through the anus on stakes, tarring them and setting them afire to light his parks and games. This would have sent a shiver of absolute horror around all the Christians communities of his empire. Such a climate can both inspire and dehumanise its victims. Tertullian became a Christian after watching Christians dressed as pagan gods being massacred in the arena. He wrote that he first enjoyed this - but soon came to admire those who could so triumph over pain.

Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, another "father" and fierce critic of the Gnostic women, saw fifty of his people rounded up and killed - because the Senate decreed that provinces could cut the cost of the regular gladiatorial games by replacing expensive professional gladiators with killing Christians and prisoners as entertainment. A Christian was budgeted at one tenth of the cost of using a 5th rate gladiator. 84

In such a climate some Christians transcended their fear by declaring that just as Christ had conquered death through shedding his blood, so would they. They volunteered for death - sometimes embarrassing Roman officials who did not want to kill them. They formed a highly macho Christian sect that saw martyrdom as a short cut to heaven. There was joy among them when one was martyred for, in Christ, they were confident of victory.

Almost as if they were Celtic warriors, they believed that the blood they shed in the gladiatorial circus was the seed of life, that Christians could be born into a higher life only through the blood shed by martyrs. Tertullian wrote: "the sole key to unlock paradise is your life's blood." N58 p85 When some women joined the men in facing death - as also was the custom among the Celts whose women fought as warriors, they said these women had transcended their female nature to become men.

From all accounts, many went to their deaths very bravely - and women in trance and ecstasy took a significant role. The group in Lyon found courage in a young slave girl, Blandina who outdid all in not allowing torture to break her spirit. "Blondina was hung upon a post and exposed as bait for wild animals ... she seemed to hang there in the form of a cross and by her fervent prayers she aroused intense enthusiasm in those who were undergoing their ordeal" (gos73)). In Carthage around 203CE another woman, Perpetua, took the lead. She kept a record of the dreams she had as she prepared for death. One was that she had become a male in order to achieve victory. "And I was stripped naked and became a man. And my supporters began to rub me with oil as if for a wrestling match." When in this dream she was victorious over the gladiator, the fencing master greeted her as a "daughter." She was androgynous in victory.(Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. Trans. P. Dronke in "Women writers of the Middle Ages.")

Her prison diary, completed by another, told of their belief in a "second baptism of blood" A woman with her called "Felicitas, glad that she had safely given birth so that now she could fight the beasts, going from one blood bath to another, from the midwife to the gladiator, ready to wash after childbirth in a second baptism." Later when another man was savaged by a leopard and drenched in blood, this too was called: "a second baptism". The diary recorded that the crowd cried at this: "'Well washed! Well washed!'". The diarist commented: " For well washed indeed was one who had been bathed in this manner."

The leaders of these death defying Christians organised their groups or churches as did other shedders of blood, that is, along military lines. They brought all their churches into a tightly structured unity under one leader, the Bishop of Rome. As a General in charge of an army demands absolute obedience, so too did they demanded absolute obedience be given to all the officers of the Bishop of Rome, even to the relatively lowly deacons. The Roman Army was commanded by a divine Emperor. Likewise the Bishop of Rome was said to speak in the name of God. Disobedience, they said, meant damnation. When many Christian communities refused to agree to this supremacy of the Bishop of Rome, the supporters of the Roman Bishop promptly declared that those who did not agree were disobeying the supreme commander, God. Even Ireneus, Bishop of Lyon, who campaigned against the gnostic Christians, was surprised by the zeal shown by Rome's bishop in trying to impose uniformity of practice. P99 -

The gnostic Christians in their turn had their own name for the Christians who were attacking them. They called them the "Catholics" or univeralists, because they were forcing Christians everywhere into the same mould. p 105

These Catholic Catholics, while reorganising their part of "Christianity" along male lines, putting hierarchy above co-operation, obedience above consensus, scornfully dismissed and attacked any of the "weaker" sex who "trespassed" into roles of power within the church. These were now totally reserved for men - much as we have seen happen in modern times in Afghanistan at the hands of an equally male, blood, warfare and martyr centred Islamic sect . These Christians like these Mughadin? banned women from education.

And they poured scorn on those other "wimps" - the gnostic Christians - for few gnostics had volunteered to be martyred, saying in effect. "If you were not willing, eager, to be killed, then you were not worthy of Christ.". A leading Catholic Justin said darkly that he did not know if the Gnostics practised cannibalism and promiscuity but "we do know " they are "neither persecuted or put to death", suggesting that the Gnostics had done a deal with the pagan authorities. Pagels 84 Tertullian, after saying that blood was the sole key to heaven, added bitterly "but the heretics go about as usual"

The Gnostics on their part were horrified at the joy the Catholics showed at the sufferings of their companions in martyrdom. They said perfection could not so easily be purchased through the shedding of blood. Rather it was to be found through meditation, the mystic marriage of the soul and through living lovingly in the community. They rejected the claims of the Catholics, calling their bishops and clergy "waterless canals" 106.

The Catholic Christians did not extend their exultation of blood to that naturally shed by women in childbirth and menstruation. This was an absolutely different affair, a product of a fallen nature, so contaminating and dangerous. Blood from childbirth was considered more dangerous than that from menstruation - and the Father of the Church Jerome (d420) who had responsibility for revising the New Testament wrote about menstruation: "When a man has intercourse with his wife at this time, the children born from this union are leprous and hydrocephalic; and the corrupted blood causes the plague-ridden bodies of both sexes to be either too small or too large." (Commentary on Ezekiel 18- 6) Archbishop Caesarius of Arles later (d. 542) warned: "whoever has sex with his wife during her period will have children that are either leprous or epileptic or possessed by the devil". This supposed link between women and the devil would put in danger the lives of European women for centuries .(Eu p22) In the early Middle Ages influential Catholic theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas taught that it was a mortal sin to make love to a woman during her period - because her blood would harm male seed. Menstruating woman including deaconesses were barred from Christian rituals. Theodore of Balsamon explained "They were allowed to approach the altar but because of their monthly impurity they were ousted from their place in liturgy. (Eu ref.25)

There could not be a greater contrast with the attitude towards female blood shown by the sacred practices of Australia's natural peoples. At least one nation taught that when a woman stops bleeding and leaves the Rainbow Serpent, she is carrying the divine power of fertility for it is in the days following that she can conceive a child

In 9th century Ireland the Christian phobia against female blood continued. Thus the Celi-De monks taught that an excess of blood was the cause of sexual lust. It was this that made women the temptress for they taught that menstruation clearly revealed that women had too much blood. But there was hope for women. If they starved themselves until their periods ceased, they could achieve perfection.

The status of women fell so low in the next centuries in Christendom that the Church Council of Maçon in the Sixth Century seriously debated whether women had souls. The decision that a woman did have a soul was only carried by a majority of one.(p64gos)

But to return to the tale of the rise of the Christian patriarchy during the first half millennium, Tertullian himself eventually was convinced he was wrong by some of those whom he had attacked. He left the authoritarian catholic sect and joined the Montanists. He then attacked the very doctrine he had for so long maintained by saying that wisdom comes from within and not from a bishop's dictate. The Montanists were, it seems, exploring the common ground between gnostic Christianity and the faith of the Gallae, the transgendered priestesses who honoured the Goddess Cybele. 110

While the Christian community increasingly became split between the Catholics and Gnostics, more and more pagans had become Christian. This was partially because it was fertile times for a new faith based around supportive communities that saw themselves united in a God who loved them to the point of death. The story of how Christ had come back to life after three days dead, a story that took on greater detail as Christianity grew, had enormous resonance within the Pagan community for it seemed Christ had personified in his own life the great pagan myths embodied in the major and still popular initiation rituals of the time. The discipline of the Catholic Christians also became much more appealing to the Imperial authorities than the ecstatic rites in some temples.

But as the more militant Catholics took control over Western Christianity, the ascetic and anti-women attitudes of the Fathers became enshrined within the Christian communities. Sexuality became more and more outlawed. In the 6th Century, Pope Siricius wrote to a Spanish bishop, Himerius of Tarragona (385) to say that although a priest could be married, it was an obscene lust (obscena cupiditas) and a crime for him to continue to have sexual relations with his wife after ordination to the priesthood. As for the correct attitude a priest should have towards his wife, Pope Gregory the Great, I, wrote to Bishop Leo of Catana saying that from the day of their ordination, priests should "love their wives as if they were sisters and beware of them as if they were enemies." (Dialogues. 4/II).

I would have been putting Jackie into great jeopardy if I had lived in those days. Pope Leo 9th seized and enslaved in his Lateran Palace the wives of priests. (Cf. Kempf, in Jedin, Hadbuch de Kirchengeschichte, vol III 1966 oo 407ff) In 1089 Pope Urban II declared that if a Sub-Deacon was unwilling to be separated from his wife, "the prince may enslave his wife" (Decretum Gratiani, pars II , dist XXXII, c10) In England the famous Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, called a synod in London that terrorised the wives of priests by making them the property of the bishop.

Sex split the Christians apart. The rift between the Catholics and Greek Orthodox was finally effected when Cardinal Humbert, the leader of a papal delegation to Byzantium, on July 16 1054 , damned and "expelled" the whole eastern half of the church, because they had married priests. He reported with horror: "Young husbands, just now exhausted from carnal lust.. serve at the altar. And immediately afterward they again embrace their wives with hands that have been hallowed by the immaculate Body of Christ. That is not the mark of a true faith but an invention of Satan." (C Will, Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae graecae et latinae" 1861 p126) (eunuchs 107)

But at that time the battle for celibacy in the Western Church was not yet won (It was never won in the Eastern churches where Augustine never had such a following as in the West). Many Western priests had valid church weddings in the 11th Century despite the fuming of Pope Gregory 7th, (d 1085) who called priestly marriage "a crime of fornication" in a letter to Bishop Bernold He ordered that Catholics must boycott all church services held by married priests under pain of excommunication. This caused much outrage. Bishops refused to implement this ruling and wrote reminding the Pope that the teachings of Christ and the apostles were in favour of marriage and that the apostles were married.

In 1139 Rome finally declared invalid the marriages of Roman Catholic priests - (Can 10) (eu5) but this did not stop the practice. The Synod of Munster in 1280 forbade priests to attend the weddings or funerals of their children (can2) and in the 14C the wives of priests were denied church funerals. p 112

A man sainted by the Catholic church, Bonaventure (d 1274), a famous Franciscan theologian, taught "because the sexual act has been corrupted (though original sin) and has become, so to speak, stinking and because human beings besides are for the most part too lustful, the devil has so much power and authority over them." He quoted the biblical book Tobit that Jerome had doctored to make it pro celibacy.

Unfortunately for women, Aristotle's views on the inferiority of women and on the male generating the entire embryo which then grew within the woman were adopted and strengthened by the most influential of Catholic medieval theologians, the 13th Century St. Thomas Aquinas whose theological teachings dominated the education of Catholic priests right up to until the 1970s. The rediscovered theories of Aristotle provided him with an useful extra justification for the exclusion of women from the priesthood.

He explained the birth of female babies was solely due to a defect in the mother or the environment - he suggests girls are conceived because a damp wind was blowing at the time: "for the active power in the seed of the male tends to produce something like itself, perfect in masculinity, but the procreation of the female is the result either of the debility of the active power, of some unsuitability of the material, or of some change effected by external influences, like the south wind, for example, which is damp." N67 p 521g This mention of dampness was a reference to a further development of the mock scientific theory of why women were physically inferior to men. It was that women's bodies contained too much water . This explained why they had softer skins and were so fickle.

The Roman church having lost its link with the eastern church partly over sex, then lost the northern half of Europe also partly because of its attitude to sex. When Luther defied Rome by allowing marriage to the clergy, Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg wrote: " I know all my priests are living in concubinage. But what should I do to stop it? If I forbid them concubines they either want to have wives or to become Lutherans" (Mornes to Cardinal Farnese, Mounumenta Vaticana, ed. Laemmer 1861 p 312) Eu. 113 Today marriage of clergy in the Protestant and Eastern churches are seen by the Roman Church as a major obstacle to union. The other bigger obstacle is the presence of women in the priesthood of Anglican and other churches. Sex is it seems still the great issue in Christianity.

For me, it is incredible that despite all this in-fighting, all this corruption of religion, that somehow among the debris was preserved some wisdom and some knowledge of Jesus as friendly to women. The evidence of modern archaeology and pagan documents have confirmed his existence, but cannot confirm that he was the God-Man who demanded repentance. My own view is that it is more likely that he lived as the travelling preacher, healer and very wise man who saw us all as the Children of God, as all partaking in the divine, all with a Father in Heaven, who incorporated into his teachings aspects from Judaism and from the surrounding pagan faiths. He said both that he was the "son of God" and that we were "the children of God." This seems to be the picture emerging from much modern research into the origins of early Christian texts.(ref.- see paper saved 20th Sept.) I also think that he had a path he had to tread, a myth that he had to live for the sake of all of us - and that we too have paths we must tread, myths we must express and live for the sake of all.

I think and hope that it is always this way; that the true Wisdom humans need is always there for those that know how to look. I think the same wisdom can be found in all religions and cultures - for it comes from the nature of the human spirit. Right around the world are people who believe we are all children of Creation, of a living Creation. I think this basic religion is part of our collective unconsciousness and part of our creation.

I had resolved in my mind these disputes while still training for the priesthood. My celibacy was a vow not to wed false Gods, the Gods of money, worldly success, security and to keep true to the God I had wed that I saw utterly romantically. I never saw sex as bad because for me nature was holy. Thus there was little reason for me to refuse this gift that Jackie and I had been given. I wonder now why wasn't I more inhibited by the years of indoctrination? I do not know. A certain naiveté and romanticism perhaps had protected me - along with retaining a belief in a my relationship with a Lover God who was not at all judgmental. I am very grateful that I was so protected from guilt complexes.

Shortly after I took my university finals, Jackie and I planned to celebrate our marriage in the borrowed large home of a Ceylonese architect friend. A Catholic priest was to be our master of ceremonies. Many trainee priest friends were coming. An Anglican priest wrote us songs, another friend was to sing them, we had balloons with Snoopy pictures, and every guest, male or female, was greeted at the door with a bunch of flowers purchased in a dawn raid that morning on Covent Garden market.

Before the wedding celebration, we went to the registry office to officially but not sacredly wed. The sacred part would be that afternoon. We did not go to the registry office because we saw ourselves as needing the state's approval but because we saw ourselves as taking on a social obligation by deciding to have children - and we were thus announcing to society our intention. We did not see this as our wedding. That was to happen that afternoon among our friends.

Jackie found a silk yellow dress, long and simple, in a shop selling clothes from the East. Her parents had come over from Australia and insisted on providing the catering. They engaged a caterer that also did functions for Princess Anne. We told the company we wanted something simple. Rice salad and salmon was the simplest they could dream up. We said the cake should only have one tier. A man in dark suit and waistcoat arrived an hour before the ceremony carrying a brief case. He carefully took from this the cake dressings and placed them on the single tier cake. We asked if the waiters could be relaxed, mix in, be informal. We were told that their staff never fraternised! But on the day they were fine - and formal.

A Dominican priest who led anti-nuclear marches to Aldermaston, much loved by the many who got to know him, Father Simon Blake, came to officiate dressed as a fisherman in a blue sweater. He would have been excommunicated by a man in white in Rome for so flaunting the rules. Jackie and I would also be excommunicated. The sanction was automatic - but ineffective as the Pope did not know who was present (And Fr. Blake has since died so I can now safely make this public.)

I remember how Jackie coming down the staircase into the large room of the celebrations, wonderful in her dress, long hair dancing, eyes sparkling, the balloons and flowers everywhere, into a throng of wonderful people come to celebrate with us, the sharing of music, of song, and the promises of marriage made before Fr. Simon Blake - and the rest of it is a happy haze except I also remember coming back much later to a crazily made up bed with strange sound effects organised by the friends at whose home we were staying that night.

Thus with a simple but wonderful ceremony we married and entered far deeper into the world of the sexual God. My title of bridegroom went back into the time when a cherished Goddess of the British Isle was called Bride. Her emblem was a white mare. As such she rode the skies as the sun. I was the groom of the Goddess, the Groom of Bride. And Jackie of course stood to me as the Goddess Bride. That night she was the ancient wonderful "night-mare" - a word that has reversed its meaning because of the Christian fear of sex.

A groom

to the Mare

the Sacred horse

the white mare

the Goddess

consummated

night groom,

with night mare

scary, yes

like first kisses.

A Gibran poem on marriage gave us wise advice. "let there be spaces in your togetherness, and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls...give your hearts but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together yet not too near together, for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow." (P20)

I felt I was still the knight, the priest, still bonded with my Lover, still on the same path. But my role was not to be part of a clerical elite, but to share, to empower, strengthen others, serve the priesthood of the whole community. Not dominate.

Now started a new adventure. Armed with two rucksacks, Jackie and I set out some days later from Brixton in South London. At the bus stop down near the traffic lights in the centre of town an old lady asked if we were going far. With glee we said "Only to Australia."

Jackie was planning with her Australian friends to set up a "House of Hospitality" in Melbourne for the homeless people of the road. It would be something akin to the house for alcoholics and drug addicts where we had first met in Maldon Road in North London "s Camden Town. This community was inspired by a Christian anarchism that came from knowing Christ outside the institution and which was taught in the "Catholic Worker" movement by an inspiring old American lady who lived her own teaching, Dorothy Day. Unlike her, we were rejecting the institutional Church, but were determined not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. We had both found within its cavernous halls some marvellous individuals and excellent Jesus teachings.

Jackie and I had decided to work together in this House of Hospitality. When we set off overland for Australia we owned 500 US dollars each - but it was 1970 when dollars went further. Our first stop was in Heerlen in the southernmost part of The Netherlands where we had friends in a college that trained Catholic priests. We stayed with one of the teachers. Much to our surprise, the students and some teachers asked us if we would again ritually celebrate our marriage so they could be part of it - and would we please do so by co-celebrating the Holy Mass with us both behind the altar presiding as priest and priestess! We were amazed, delighted, grateful, at being asked to do such a wonderful thing.

Side by side Jackie and I stood behind the sacred altar on which was a chalice of wine and a plate of bread - all that was needed for the sacred meal. We felt bonded in the mystery, one flesh, one couple, bonded, in life and in priesthood. We were one with the circle of participants. We knew that we were presiding as a couple put together by a divine blessing. We were celebrating life while one with Jesus and all our ancestors and teachers. It went beyond the church in which we stood. I felt one with the whole creation - celebrating with this food the bonding of Deity and Creation, the wedding, of God and Universe. With the happiest of smiles we gladly celebrated.

I, your maker. I, your lover,

Spirit of the sap that gives you life.

Here, is my wheat, my bread, my food.

Eat it, know it, live it

become one with my bounty,

And know that I am one with the golden wheat

that blows in the wind

I am one with the grain broken by the mill

I am one with this bread that enters your mouth,

Come, take me, I am yours whole and entire

And take this cup of wine

the holy grail, the tinkers mug

filled with the fermented blood of grapes

Drink this

And taste the blood of divinity

Know that I am the least of my grapes

Whole and Entire

I am the one met in ecstasy

I am the cup, the grail, the mug

The source of all life

Drink, Eat,

Love and be Merry.

And know that I am one with

You that I love,

All that that I love,

The One in which is the end of all desire.

I t had previously been something of a mystery to me how I would be able to use my priesthood now that I had been divested of patriarchal rank but this experience pointed the way. I had simply to trust in the path given to me. I felt I had stripped off the first layer down towards the gold of life. The dismemberment had commenced that I hoped would lead to my rebirth - but I had still very far to go and learn.

From Heerlen we set out for Asia. Our journey was intended as a pilgrimage during which we hoped to discover something of what we were to do together. It also gave us a period when we could be alone, away from the pressure of everyday life. We first picked up medicines from a Swiss friend, then hitchhiked across the Alps by a minor lonely pass. In Yugoslavia a crazy Dutchman, rushing to catch up with a woman friend on a bus tour, drove us non-stop to Istanbul where we explored markets, different food and found wonderful Byzantine mosaics, including one I searched out showing a woman as a member of the Holy Trinity for I wanted to see how they once celebrated the ancient Sophia.

After Istanbul, we travelled by local buses and trains so we could get to meet the people of these countries. The local buses were used by few foreigners. The service was elegant. Cologne was put into our hands so we could clean and cool our faces, iced water sat in a fridge next to the driver, everything decorated in bright colours. We had decided our first destination would be Tarsus, St Paul's home city - basically because it was a city we had heard of and was on the Mediterranean. We asked the driver to drop us when we reached the coastline despite it being nearly too dark to camp,. When we started to put up the tent, the ground was too hard for tent pegs, solid below a crust of dirt. Eventually we slept in a tent hung up between a long rocky ridge and a bush.

In the morning we were delighted to find that the long rock behind us was a fallen Grecian column, the hard rock beneath a pavement, the nearby rocky promontory a Crusader's castle built of Grecian ruins. A rocky island off the coast hosted another castle. We washed in a half submerged building, marvelling at the quietness of a scene that was once a place of culture and then of blood. In the West, charities run "crusades" yet in the Islamic world the word recalls the barbarity of a horde of blood thirsty savages inspired by a warlike version of the blood religion of the early Catholics. They believed that if they died they would be baptised in blood. But it was not the path of all Christians of the 1100s. In Southern France a Cathar Christianity was embracing pacifism and purity before it too was the target of a Crusade. In the rest of France and England bands of hundreds of men and women were dragging stones and scaffolding poles, chanting or in silence, building the great gothic cathedrals that were mostly dedicated to a woman, to Mary as the Mother of Peace - as if trying to build a glorious stone forest as a counter balance to the men of violence.

In Tarsus, as we had missed our train up through the mountains into Turkey's heartland, the station manager pushed two waiting room benches together to make us a double bed, then, wishing us a good night, locked us in till morning. I think Paul of Tarsus would have approved. Marriage was sacred for him even thou' he was somewhat chauvinist.(As I have mentioned, biblical scholars say he did not write the more chauvinistic writings attributed to him.) Next morning a Turkish family shared food with us on the train as we climbed dramatic valleys. Others invited us to visit them in their mud walled and simply elegant homes.

In Eastern Turkey, near the bus station one very early morning a group of Kurdish shepherds with cloth caps and crooks stood solemnly in the market place in a circle watching a lamb being born in their midst. In the nearby road bullocks were pulling a cart with solid wooden wheels - a design not changed for over two thousand years, a truly biblical scene. In the fields the drivers of ox teams stood on surf board-like boards as they went over heaps of grain to crush the grain. We had left a frantic Europe for another world where old crafts and ways survived.

In Iran the Shah still ruled and we met in Teheran highly westernised members of the government services who explained to us their plans to educate both girls and boys. From here we went south past the golden mosque dome of Quom to await the dawn in the central square of Isfahan. As the first light stirred us, great mosques greeted us, like open portals to God, with wonderfully tiled and lettered half domes and pillars. Attacked by the smell of bread baking we went down side streets to find small open fronted shops with deep ovens made of open-topped earthenware vases. They expertly spun flat bread then slapped it onto the inside heated surfaces so it could quickly bake.

We next crossed by bus the mountains to the Caspian Sea where for the last time in Asia we used our tent. It felt so out of place, conspicuous and guaranteed to attract attention that we did not get it out again. We had found that local hotels only cost pence. Then we went to the holy city of Moshad, where we met girl tourists complaining about having to cover up bare knees. Jackie veiled her hair and covered her legs when we went to quietly watch the worshippers and to honour from afar the holy place within the city. As we passed through markets, drunk coffee and chatted to locals, we heard and felt the first mutterings of the nationalistic and religious storm that would lead to the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs.

The men (for few if any Iranian women used Moshad's coffee shops ) expressed to us a softly uttered determination to keep up the honouring of old Iranian and sacred ways threatened by the westernisation that accompanied the Shah's regime. It seemed to us strangers that the freedom of women to expose skin and chose their clothes were foreign concepts that were resisted out of national pride. It was understandable but we felt uncomfortable. The worse of incidents would take place on the train crossing Pakistan where a man, husband to some of the travelling women, invaded the supposedly all female carriage and harassed Jackie. I had thought her safe in that carriage.

Afterwards some very apologetic Muslims told us the treatment she had experienced was not in accordance with the teaching of the Prophet, that he had never wanted women to lose their rights to education and freedom. They explained that Mohammed had greatly honoured his own wife. The veiling of women was first intended as a mark of respect for the women of the Prophet's own family - not an instruction for all women.

The Koran, dictated by Mohammed to scribes while he was moved by visions, forbade earlier practices of lamenting the birth of girl babies and of killing them. It gave women legal rights of inheritance and divorce that were not possessed by most Christianised western women till a thousand years later - although Irish woman received this protection from the Pagan Seancchus Mor code before Islam appeared. After Mohammed died, a chauvinistic elite of male teachers took over Islam, just as happened in the first centuries of Christianity. The secluding of women in harems is a custom they adopted and developed from the practices of Christian Byzantium (p 184 A history of God, Karen Armstrong.) The custom of hiding female faces perhaps was more due to the prejudices of St Jerome than of Mohammed

We had reached to Pakistan by crossing Afghanistan, fortunately before all the recent wars began. A taxi with only first gear grindingly and slowly had taken us and a party of seven Pakistani men - all wonderful and courteous - from the Iranian border to Herat. We stopped on the way for a meal at an ancient inn with high fortress walls, niches for oil lamps and rich carpets on which we sat cross-legged. After the ceremonially washing of our hands, a feast fit for ancient kings in beaten bronze or copper bowls was set before us.

When we arrived in Herat at midnight, it seemed like a scene from the Dr Zhavago film. Stallions and mares in rich harness and plumes were galloping with light carriages down the streets passing us while we called at the high double wooden gates of ancient caravanserais to find one with room for our party. When we gained entry, we found behind the gates a large open courtyard with a well at its centre. We slept in a hall with high windows and minimal furniture that formed the left side of this yard. We rolled up in sheets or sleeping bags upon the floor, males and females in the same hall, as we were told was the tradition.

We then travelled by local bus to Kandihar on a road built with Russian aid then went from Kandihar to the capitol Herat down a road built with American aid for both the great powers were rivals here. About a week later we were in India. It had taken us a leisurely and unforgettable 7 weeks to get here from England - and cost us so far about 100 US dollars each. But it was 1970.

India had long attracted both of us. We consequently found ourselves feeling very much at home here - strangely so for a country so different. Perhaps this was so because we have in Europe an instinctive memory of inheriting much of our culture from India in the distant past as is maintained by many historians?

We wanted to get to know India, emptying ourselves as much as we could of our western baggage, so we decided to keep away from other Europeans or Americans. We thus had no intention of joining the hippy throng that were then heading for ashrams to study mediation. But our intention was sabotaged by the providence that governs us. It was a very small thing. An infected toe. This led me to asking for medical help from a house we chanced on in the foothills of the Himalayas. It had a notice on its door saying it belonged to the Student Christian Movement - a non-fundamentalist and radical organisation that I had joined at university. They nursed me for a full week without charge and then dispatched us to an ashram they very highly recommended. It was in Risikesh where the river Ganges enters the mountains.

W e found it on the river bank. I think it was called the Divine Light Ashram. It had attached to it a general hospital and an eye hospital. Three branches of medicine were practised here - of which only one was the Western. When I had heat stroke, a monk with a trident painted on his forehead came to visit me. We were warned that rooms had to be kept shut lest the monkeys raid them and take our possessions. - and this proved true! One day I watched a cow walk along the top of an outer stone wall of the Ashram in order to reach tree leafs. I was not surprised that they thought their cows sacred. They seemed to be a different species to those I had known in Europe. Nature felt very close here.

The Beetles had made Risikesh famous when they went to study there under the Maharishi. One day we went by ferry boat to visit his ashram across the river from our own. It had a very different atmosphere. It was modern with an air conditioned meditation hut and with a bath in the tree top which a priest told us was "to help communing with nature". We wandered along neat paths set between trees where we met several sophisticated and westernised priests. We did not find this ashram that impressive.

We found at our ashram that we were invited to join in prayer in its traditional Hindu temple. One part of the ritual was the passing of a flaming lamp between all present. When it reached us, copying the others, we waved the flame towards us, asking that it purify us. At the end of the ritual we were all give a little of the food that had been dedicated to the Deity. It was the first time we had taken part in a non-Christian ritual and we much enjoyed the privilege. We wondered how unchristian it really was? The flame was a symbol used in Christianity of the Holy Spirit of Wisdom. (And of the Goddesses Macha and Bride in pagan Eire) The communion was far more tasty than the pallid wafer used for Christian communion but it carried the same meaning of uniting us to the God or Goddess.

We later found that there were others here also wondering about the reality of the division between the religions. Among them were Jesuits studying mediation - and a Christian Argentinean woman who took food to the hermits in the mountains and who was regarded as very saintly by the Hindu monks.

We spent some three months in India. We went south by train, sleeping on luggage racks, amid clucking chickens and a thousand families, to Madras and the southern Temples. We were served "one yard" coffee poured from one cup to another held at arms length to aerate it. We went to Brahmin restaurants where we each ate at separate one person marble tables from food put onto carefully washed disposable banana leaf plates.

One morning , after spending the night Indian style sleeping on the floor of a waiting room to make sure we caught the early train and having used the shower provided in each carriage on our train to clean up, two elderly ladies started to chat to us. After a while, one of them very politely inquired where we would stay when we reached our destination.

I replied " At an Indian hotel (i.e. not one for white people or the rich) in Bangalore"

A little while later, after some discussion between them, the same women said. "You are strangers here and we feel like mothers towards you. We would like to look after you when we arrive in Bangalore. Would you please consider coming to stay with me?

So we stayed for a few days in one of their homes, where I remember watching spices being ground ("You eat them stale!" one woman exclaimed when I said we bought them ready ground and keep them for weeks in our kitchen cupboards.) We were then invited for dinner to the home of the other women. During this we were asked "What have you not seen in India that you expected to see?"

"Elephants" I replied.

"What! You haven't seen elephants. We will put that right."

A day later we found ourselves on a two day bus journey across the south with these two ladies. The first night we slept like them (but not as easily) on benches in a school they knew in Mysore. Then, after admiring their fruit market, incredibly tidy, with many stalls specialising in just varieties of one fruit, we travelled deep into the forested hills of the Western Ghats.

That afternoon we arrived at the small town where one of the women had been the matron of the hospital until she retired. She knew everyone. We were put up in the club house where Indians spoke in the stilted style of the Raj, served brandy in full tumblers and explained to us very carefully how they circumvented Kerala government regulations that said they must give some land to long-term labourers as if they were sure we would approve their evasions. Next day a bus had been diverted from its normal route to take us to a private government game reserve.

A day later an elephant awaited us at our bungalow door. The driver, the ranger, the two elderly ladies and ourselves all climbed aboard and out we went into the jungle. For two hours we explored, sitting above the shrub on a large saddle that felt more like a wooden boat. The only sign that we had an elephant underneath us was the occasional sight of a trunk grabbing at a branch.

Eventually we reached patch of very tall grass in which I noticed some very large ant hills. Then one ant hill lifted a trunk... and we found we were in the midst of a herd of wild elephants. We were safe from their attack because we were on a female elephant, or so the ranger told us. We travelled in great excitement and wonder for an hour with this herd. There were several baby elephants. When the herd eventually seemed to get tired of our company, raised ears and trunks and began to throw vegetation into the air while staring at us, the ranger said it was time to go while slipping a blank cartridge into his shot gun.

On returning to the camp, a small hairy caterpillar fell from a tree and landed inside the neck of my shirt. The ranger looked at it, said it was poisonous and then rubbed his crew cut on my chest to draw the poison. The rash soon went. Thus I went out with wild elephants and was poisoned by a caterpillar.

We stayed at one point in the South with a Catholic Anglo-Indian family and spoke with them about their very European way of celebrating their faith. They said this was the proper way for them to do it - and that Hindus would not like them adopting Indian customs as those customs were Hindu. I had seen their Western ways as inappropriate to India but found they were right in that Hindus did protest when the Catholic Monk Bede Griffiths, whom we also visited, set up an Indian style temple as his sacred place and altar in which he worshipped Jesus. Many Indians were proud of having a land that tolerated many religions -and did not see a need for them to converge. They tolerated Western Christianity - but wanted it kept in its place. After some weeks in south India we travelled north towards Calcutta to do some work among the poorest with Mother Teresa's people. The day before our train reached there, we stopped to visit a famed Orissa temple, shaped as a great chariot of white stone, covered with carvings of embracing couples in a thousand different postures. It was set next to a small village, a dream of love in a community of fishermen.

After marvelling at its glorious celebration of sexuality, Jackie and I settled for the night on the sandy shore near to fishing boats drawn up out of the water. I will never forget that night. The power of the Goddess of the temple, of the land and the seas of India was with us. It may have been that night that our first daughter, Karina, was conceived.

And the assexual me vanished in the delights of male sexuality. I lost myself in the deep pool that was my lover.. I surrendered and was drowned. I gave myself as deeply as I was capable (ignoring considerable pain from skinless knees scraping on sand!). I rested, waited until the tide of male hormones lifted me again, went again down, deep into a sea that lay between us, a sea of creation. I played the fiddle, the delight of the bow thrilled me. The response of the fiddle delighted me. I caressed her, loved her, lifted again, swam, exploded. I was in wonder.

I was thrilled that my confusion (and sore knees) had not stopped me. The dream of being a girl was irrelevant. Jackie I loved and I gave to her as my body permitted. My confusion I ignored. With deliberation I enjoyed what the God had given me, a sharing in this male rite. Sometimes after the emptying, I wanted to yield, sleep - but this I felt would not fair to Jackie for she never seemed to need to sleep. So I would again lift, close eyes, go with the tide, enjoy the tide, on our beach be the tide, be the lover, love the seeding. When we could we slowed it, allowing a spring of romancing, a summer of feasting and an autumn of giving. Then we both enjoyed a winter's sleep before the re-awakening. There were many such years in that night.

And thus I gave my part to the creation of a child. A typical male fruiting is a quick spring's flowering, then a sudden harvest explosion followed by a winter's rest - a year's cycle in perhaps 20 minutes. This explosion may be an excellent image of the "big bang' theory of creation but any act that lasts seconds and creates a teaspoon of seed is a shallow claim to human parenthood. It cannot make him the equal of the mother. I think fathers can be made only by nurturing and protecting children over years

The male can also be both the protector and partner of the mother. Patriarchy only happens when the protector mistakes his role and becomes the governor, an over zealous protector that knows what a women wants better than she does.

The father in a family needs to be one with the Father's steady creating energy that maintains our earth, constant in loving, one too with the androgynous Father who does not neglect the anima within. Then there will be between his partner and himself a giving and a receiving, a bonding, that will always create a small Garden of Eden full of new life.

Male creativity is not fulfilled through love making. They cannot form the babies so they are destined to fulfil their creative destiny otherwise than through sex. They are to transform nature while respecting it, by infusing it with their inspiration, engineering and of course by child nurturing.

Unfortunately the prevalent view of God as a power outside the earth gives men a lousy model for their creativity. It inspires men to see themselves as powers apart from nature. They thus may think their role is to have power over a female nature that they are not part of, a power of dominion, of subjection , of changing nature according to their will. And this in turn leads to the most unfortunate and sad examples of male parenting.

The God of the Patriarchy was capable of being hard and merciless as is witnessed in the Old Testament. Divorced from Nature, living in a world of Supernature created by intellect alone, God had lost his anima, his gentleness, his soul. Neither can men take many pagan Gods as role models - for many pagan myths were composed after men took dominion over women and enshrine a justification for this. This is partly true of the Grecian Illiad and the Celtic Tam.

In the Irish epic, The Tain, the only time the hero Cuchulainn was offered by a woman her support in battle he turns it down scornfully, forgetting it was a woman Scathlach who taught him his fighting skills, and said: "It wasn't for a woman's backside that I took on this ordeal." He then had to face the shape shifting magical skills of this woman in battle for she was the Goddess Morrigan. He wins using the skills taught him by another women, but Morrigan tricks him afterwards into curing her wounds.

Many tales of Gods were told to justify the male taking of women's rights or privileges. Certain Australian Aboriginal tribes have tales of how men first gained fire by stealing it from women. If the tales of a matriarchy that preceded patriarchy were true, perhaps this would have been justified - but I do not think matriarchy happened in most parts of the world (see Sat). Q

Irish myths of this period are full of accounts of Goddesses that have been tamed - and even raped. The Goddess Tlachtga was pack raped - and she then died giving birth to male warriors. The Goddesses had descended from being those of Sovereignty to being described as the wives or sisters of Gods and as inferior to them. In one story Macha is demoted to being the wife of Nemed and is powerless to prevent the slaughter that she has foreseen. As part of the Morrigan she is of even lower status as a daughter of the son of the god Neid rather than his consort. This demotion probably went along with the lower social status of women of this time. Much later on, the fall of the Abbess that kept the fires of Macha burning in Kildare was marked in the horrid ancient fashion by her being raped by a soldier in 1132 to render her unfit for office.

Later as a woman I would experience some of this violence and fear. In a cave in the mountains of Crete I was forced to flee the advances of the cave's guardian for fear he would rape me. The cave was said to be the one where Zeus as a boy was hidden by Gaia, the goddess of the earth, when his mother Rhea put him into Gaia's care. Later on Zeus seemingly forgot that he had been born of woman and protected by woman. When he emerged from this cave, he came to represent a male power than had no need of women and thus could birth

But no matter how males constructed their patriarchal world, they needed nature if they were to survive. Within their scheme, females came to represent part of this nature. She was thus used but also confined, circumscribed and veiled. The role she was allowed carried a minimal power to reshape her world.

At this time, I was still on the male pedestal and so in social life I remained superior in power to females. When men chose to treat me as the authority rather than Jackie as they often did, I felt very awkward. Their prejudices seemed to bind me. I feared their rejection so did not express my reservations as freely as I needed.

At this time I took monogamy for granted - and still prefer it, but for St Augustine, the founder of much of the modern Church, monogamy was an unnecessary limitation to the power of men. He believed that in some circumstances men could take several wives. He wrote that if a nation needed children, "I rather approve using the fertility of many women for an unselfish purpose than the flesh of a single woman for her own sake. .. for in the latter case we are dealing with the satisfaction of a lust aimed at earthly pleasure." De Doctrina Christiana 3/18

But many women had quite a different practice in the ancient hunter-gatherer societies of the Amazon river valley and probably in similar societies elsewhere ,(Nature? Article reported in The Independent on Sunday, 24th Jan 99) The women of at least 18 Amazonian tribes believed that every child can have many fathers. A woman who chose to have a child would select one man to give her child strong limbs, another to give the child quick wits, that man to give the child a gentle heart, another man to give her child great sex - and then she slept with all of them. The degree of fatherhood a male may possess depends on how often she slept with him. If she has a regular partner, that person becomes the primary father, the others secondary.

When the child is born she tells all four that they have shared in the making of her child. They surround her. Look the child has my eyes! Look the child has my nose! Look the child has my hair? Look the child has my laugh! And they all happily protect the mother and her child - and protect the children they also share in fathering for other mothers.

Some of our scientists today think she is wrong because only one sperm fertilised her egg. But if they told her this, she would probably think them stupid and say:. "Can't they see that fatherhood is much more, much much more, than any sperm?"

"Their fatherhood is expressed in love and in protection, in nourishment and in caring. They loved her didn't they, as she conceived this child? Their love has flowed into her egg, their spirit has joined with her, become one with her in creating this child"

She might add: "The child can only have one mother so why limit a child to one father - when many make it so much richer?"

But - if a real "man" was present, he might protest against losing his right to own a child. I imagine he might say: "I want a child I can own, that I can discipline, that I can train, that I can boast of - that carries ME into the next generation. Where I live we don't look with favour on women sleeping around. What man with any self respect could do so? No, I will support my wife, will clothe her, give her station and respect - if and only if she sleeps only with me. How else can I know if a child is mine?"

To this I would protest: "But - you are treating her as if you owned her. How can you own another person?"

And being a reasonable man he might answer: "Of course, I agree, I do not own her. But marriage is a contract we both freely entered. She bears my children. I look after her. We keep our love-making for each other."

The Amazon woman might then ask him in some perplexity: "But don't you think if would be nicer if you could share your love-making and your child-making with many others? Why limit something so very good?"

"He is right" -might come a stern voice from a dark still corner. Then into the light came a priest, "Marriage reflects the unity between God and the Church. Christ taught it is as indissoluble as the union is between my church and God. It therefore can be only between one man and one woman. Sex is given to us solely for the procreation of children and seed spent uselessly is sinfully wasted"

A passing woman on the arm of her lover could then protest "I don't believe in religion - but I do believe in loving one person and in being faithful to that one person."

And laughter then would come from the woman of the Amazon." So what is wrong with the woman weaving with her thighs many men into one? Does not your god love many?"

"Two shall become one flesh" quoted the priest, with satisfaction. His bible gives him surety.

The Amazon woman stood up. She had done enough teaching for now - but before she goes she says: "Would it not be more wonderful to give several fathers to one child, for four or five lovers to become one flesh, if families can intertwine?"

And she looks with pride at her child, a symbol of the unity of her clan.

And there are many truths that weave into one, many ways of expressing the wonder of creative love. Many ways that are not on any map. Today some scientists argue that she is right, that a child can be influenced by love-making during gestation - that the initial fertilisation is not the only way for males to influence the unborn child.

But enough of this reflection on the meaning of life for a while (yes I know it is "47"!). Back to the story of our travels. I was last telling of making love on an Indian beach by an erotic temple. Next morning, we travelled on to a very different world. We went to stay with a priest and community working alongside Mother Teresa in the slums of Calcutta. They found us a private room with a double bed in a room within a children's home. The children lived in one great room in a separate house, a laughing melee of eager faces happy to eat plain flat bread spread with the great treat of condensed milk provided by Western aid agencies. Washing up dishes was done with sand - a way that I too will now use when camping as sand removes grease far cheaper and more effectively than does detergent. I have a sharp clear memory of Jackie in her sari helping to feed babies brought to the home every morning. One task that I helped with was removing the propaganda covered sacks which contained the American grain given as humanitarian aid. It was explained to me that this was very necessary as otherwise they would be accused by Naxalites, local revolutionaries, of trying to buy support for America

When we left two weeks later, we had been in India three months. It was now time to finish our journey to Australia. From here we flew to Burma and visited a wonderful golden pagoda in Rangoon where people prayed holding flowers between their hands. The royal pagodas of Bangkok that we next visited were much less impressive for they felt corrupted by a hunger for money, with American dollars requested for even looking after shoes by temple doors. This was evidence that we were near to the ongoing war in Vietnam.

Then we went by train to Malayasia, through richly forested hills, thence, as floods were covering the line, by a remarkably cheap luxury taxi all the way to the skyscrapers of Singapore. After this modern city, it was a relief to discover that Indonesia was still a home of a much more ancient Asian culture. Java and Bali were delights of rich street theatre and music everywhere - a society where TV has not forced the people to stay indoors. Thence we went by Portuguese Timor, where street markets were greatly impoverished, to Darwin in Australia where we arrived with about 100 dollars left out of the 1000 we had possessed between us when we left England six months earlier.

My first memories of Australia included seeing on a hotel door a notice saying that no men would be admitted who were not wearing socks and shoes - a direction mostly aimed at excluding Aborigines although it also excluded me. I had not worn socks for many months. My other memory was of a single man saluting the Australian flag in a rather singular display of nationalism. But the best of all events was finding here a letter from a friend asking if we would like a large room she had spare in a large house she was renting near the centre of Melbourne. We immediately set out, hitching the endless stretches of The Track that led us down to Alice Springs on a road train - a truck pulling many trailers. We then relaxed in amazing comfort on the Ghan, the train that goes south from Alice. When we boarded this a courteous attendant saw us to a private cabin with its own toilet mounted on a wall as if it were a wall safe.

Melbourne was somewhat of a let down as the goal of such a wonderful long trip. Its grid of American like skyscrapers seemed soulless. When we arrived at Jackie 's parents home they gave us what they described as a "typical Australian meal". I imagined this would be a steak but it was a pie containing a meat flavoured liquid that oozed over the entire plate.

It was scarcely a month later on March 1st 1971 that Jackie had confirmed that she was indeed present. Our gynaecologist, Dr Ian McDonald, whose services were gained for us by Jackie 's parents and who was supposed to be Melbourne's best, told us the baby was due on September 8th. This meant that she was conceived in our last weeks in India.

The diary I kept at the time records that; "what we've suspected since Thailand is true. We've brought in a secret immigrant from India! Sept. 8th is the tenth anniversary of my First Religious Profession and Mary O'Christ's birthday in the Church's calendar. Anyway we are fab. Happy . We buy beer and go to celebrate with Chris and Jan, buy cake and go afterwards to celebrate with Mary, Val and Brian and co.. we make immediately good friends at their old house in Fitzroy where they are living with about 6 blokes of the road. " ( My maths was poor. It was actually my twelfth anniversary.)

The friends of Jackie that we had come to work with in Australia were Mary, her partner Val, a former Catholic priest, and his brother Brian, who lived together in their nearby house of hospitality. Jackie had been part of the planning of this house for the people of the street before she came back to England to marry me.

The next day we went to see Lesley, the friend who had written to us in Darwin offering us a room. My diary records "we go around to visit Leslie White and her kid Emily who's much taller (than when we last met them in London). They show us a large room in their beaut house in the heart of N Fitzroy for 5 dollars and 25 cents a week. Jackie was a bit hesitant especially because of the lack of a private kitchen but there's a lot to be said for communal kitchens. Anyway it's an incredible Godsend... but Roma (Jackie 's mother) is a bit upset about our plans to live in a "slum"" It was in fact a beautiful large clean house opposite a park and a tramway which would get us into town in 10 minutes - but Jackie 's parents had worked hard to escape from the inner suburbs at a time when they were run down and dilapidated.

I wrote to my parents telling them about our expected child, hoping that the news of a grandchild, their first, would help them overcome their anger at my marriage. My diary said their answer was "their first letter [to us] since they heard we were married. We had told them that we were expecting a baby. They addressed the letter to Miss Craig! - said we could telegram them if we decided to get our wedding put right with the church - otherwise they wouldn't read our letters. Mum said she had hoped - but this proved I had really fallen!!! (I.e. we must have really made love! ) Alas! God take care of them and bring us together. I can do no more it seems." We both found this very distressing even if understandable given our knowledge of Catholic thinking.

We soon set up home in Alfred Crescent with Lesley and Emily - and a short time later the new man in her life, Peter, moved in followed soon after by a concert musician, a celloist. The house had seven rooms plus a large living area so there was plenty of room for friends to stay. A constant stream of people came to briefly rent the two or three rooms we still had spare. The total house rent was only $21 a week - even then minuscule. The lodgers quickly became friends too as we tended to cook and eat together. Eddy Ryan, a blind activist and teacher, came to stay as did Justin Moloney, Race Relations officer to the Australian Union of Students, as did many other active creative people. There was a sand pit in the back and we faced a park of European trees - for Melbourne's cities were planted with European trees - thus driving native parrots and humming birds out.

Jackie's friends were using a large stone house in King William Street as home that could be shared with alcoholics and others among the street men and women - their inspiration coming from the similar Catholic worker communities of the US as I have mentioned. They were also, like these American communities, politically active and constantly engaged in non-violent protests against the Vietnam war.

For me, the mystic wedding was no divorce from nature but a commitment to her defence. (This was also true of the Islamic Sufi mystics) A few weeks after moving into Alfred Crescent, on April 3rd 1971. I was at a demonstration against the Vietnam war when I saw a large policeman savagely beating a protester. Not knowing what else to do, I called out asking for his number. He swung around without hesitation and knocked me to the ground. He then seized me in a throat lock and when I reach down to try to pick up my glasses, another policeman coshed my imprisoned head then deliberately stood on my glasses. I was subsequently both arrested and taken to hospital with concussion. As it happened it was a Catholic hospital. I remember Catholic young medics being thrilled to discover that I was a Catholic priest for they had heard rumours of priests such as Dan Berrigan, a Jesuit, who in the States carried out anti-war actions such as pouring a bottle of his blood onto the nose of nuclear missiles. Like him I was now an underground priest for there was little room for us within the asexual and politically conservative church although I still saw myself as committed to the priesthood and still carried on saying Mass.

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Our political work went alongside preparation for childbirth. On May 6th Jackie felt the baby move for the first time, just a slight flutter, and, on May 29th, while she was leafleting against the Vietnam war, she called me so I could feel for the first time the movement of our child..

Val Noone and Mary Doyle within a year or two lost the King William Street house and moved to Gore Street. Here they continued to run an open house and sometimes to hold political soirees to which a wide group of people from the churches, the unions and many other organisations or none would come to generate ideas, argue , resolve and publish. They were for me a rich source of friends, a community that welcomed me.

These meetings helped generate a magazine called "Retrieval". I was soon working with Val and others as a co-editor of this anti-war magazine that set itself the task of summarising the vast amount of information on different struggles for human rights or the environment that were not otherwise distributed in Australia. We particularly covered the Vietnam war and to a more limited extent, the Aboriginal struggle for justice within Australia.

This work soon led me into trouble. I summarised an article from "The Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars" that documented how American and Australian academics were recruited to help the US and Australia with their war effort in SE Asia. One person mentioned was a Professor Geddes of Sydney University's anthropological faculty. I was amazed when he wrote with heavy threats, saying it was libellous to say he was "helping the war effort" and that he had been working for civilian agencies when he set up the Tribal Research Centre in Chang Mai to study the hill tribes.

I went to a university library to find out what else he had written and found papers he had delivered to US military funded gatherings in which he said he was working for quite different organisations than those he had mentioned to us. These other organisations were all linked to the US military and intelligence establishment. I spoke on this at Sydney University and the Professor grew silent.

One day, June 30th 1971, all the members of our household marched with banners into the centre of Melbourne. Next day the major evening broadsheet newspaper, The Herald, covered its front page with a photo of 90,000 marchers with posters packed into the city square. One poster was blanked out by the paper. This was my own. It should have said "McMahon proves his virility in Vietnam." - McMahon being then Australia's Prime Minister.

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A few days later, on 13 July, my diary recorded: " Can feel the arms and legs and back of our baby in Jackie 's womb - as hard slender limbs inside her." Next day I went to the Diocesan Priests Conference. My diary read: "I am the only married priest there. We got through a resolution next day recommending working in small groups with married worker priests - the only bit of radicalism in any resolution." At this stage I had not yet realised that my work is to be outside the church. Next month Jackie and I attended a talk by the radical German Catholic Theologian, Hans Kung, on Christ as a revolutionary ... and shortly after this I found myself accepted by LaTrobe University to do a Master's sociology thesis on the influence of military models of organisation on the institutions of the Roman Catholic church . I had also found work teaching social studies to working class students at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology..

Gradually I found I had to develop my own way of working, for I felt something of an outsider even in the Retrieval circle - a feeling to which I was no stranger. For me these meetings and "Retrieval" seemed to be very much Val and Mary's thing. This was not surprising. I had only just arrived in Australia. I instead started to set up a library of alternative magazines and information sources in our front room. Some of the information in these magazines we recycled into a news service..

There was another group household that greatly influenced us. Val Noone's brother Brian, an innocent looking blonde Barbara Russell and Michael Cardin, who loved to camp it up, and Bill the Pole, a friend made on the streets, were some of the members of this house. This was to become a sister house to our own, working on shared projects. All our households were in Fitzroy, an inner suburban area of tree lined streets, detached and terraced houses of brick and bluestone, with verandas and balconies dressed in wrought iron work, all built in the early days of Melbourne.

On the 30th July 1971 most of the members of our household and our sister house were arrested for giving out leaflets saying "Don't register for National Service." I was ill at home but took on the task of printing the leaflets. We argued in this leaflet that "if one considers a law to be immoral, it is immoral to obey it - and to say this publicly should not be illegal.".

However the police would not arrest one member of our household who was giving out these same leaflets. Eddie Ryan had been blinded and seriously disfigured in an explosion in a quarry. When he realised that everyone around him was being arrested but him (perhaps because the police feared he was a wounded veteran), he asked someone to lead him to a policeman whom he then leafleted demanding his civic right to be arrested. He was later absolutely and rightly furious when the government dropped the charges against him, saying that he was being manipulated by the antiwar movement. He made public that the government were not allowing him the right to have his own conscience simply because he was blind.

Among our friends were a group of four draft "dodgers" who lived in hiding from the police, constantly planning surprise appearances at rallies to keep up pressure on the government. The wives and girl friends of these resistors lived an hellish life. They were constantly being followed by the police, phoned and threatened. One of these was a Fran Newell who worked as the National Director of a third world education group called International Development Action, I.D.A., funded by Australian aid agencies We learnt from her and friends that she was constantly followed when she left her fairly isolated office and had been receiving death threats over the phone. As I remember it, a protester had fallen from the window of a police station onto a fire hydrant. Fran was afterwards phoned and asked would she like this to happen to her? We therefore offered to protect her. She could use as her office our front room, our third world resource centre. She took up our offer.

From then on the police sat outside in cars reading newspapers, watching our front door, believing Fran to be permanently resident at our house and waiting for her to lead them to her husband, Michael Hamil-Greene. But our home had a very convenient nest of lanes at its back with several exits off back roads. Fran used them to enter every morning undetected by the police.

This was the household into which our first child was born. We were happy about bringing her into a place that was so full of creativity. Lesley's young daughter Emily eagerly awaited another child's arrival. The sand pit at the back was ready. But the date we had been given as the likely time for our child's arrival, September 8th, passed without any sign of the baby wanting to get born. On September 22nd my diary records: " today Jackie went to the Gyno and he said he'll "bring on' our baby tomorrow. Jackie came home in tears as he was so uncommunicative, snobbish and without a trace of real interest in her as a person."

But a child is about to be born so we partied. We put the suitcase and dri-tots in the boot of the car, went to celebrate with a dinner - and then dropped Jackie off at the St Vincent's Catholic hospital. We were told nothing would happen till next day. When I returned to the hospital at 9 am , Jackie was already in the delivery room, really high and happy on a pethodin trip. An hour later her waters were artificially broken and then started a slow process. My diary records: "Her contractions are coming every two minutes by 1pm, by 5.30 p.m. her contractions are every 4 minutes and getting painful. She is vomiting and getting really bad back ache."

"I sit on the only chair available, a broken stool I have to keep upright by hooking my foot under the bed. The nurse's efforts to make me wait at home have failed. I offer to massage Jackie 's painful back but at this stage she did not want to be touched. At 10 p.m. a nurse says that there are signs the baby is coming in an hours time. but at 11pm she is put to sleep. Three and a half hours later a nurse gives me a proper chair.

"Near dawn, at 5.30 am, a sister shows me how to back massage on he base of her spine, pushing hard and rhythmically whenever a contraction comes. This takes away most of the pain. I wish I had been able to do this earlier. Just over an hour later, at 6.45 am, Jackie suddenly exclaimed "I am pushing". A nurse heard her, quickly moved to her and looked. The vagina is really open and the nurse says, - "yes, the baby is coming"

"Jackie 's face lit up. She rolled over onto her back. Now the nurses were racing around and asking her not to push too hard as the doctor needs time to get here. The oxygen cup and suction tube was put in the baby's cot. The instrument trolley was got ready. The four and a half feet long light above the table is switched on.

"At the contractions, the whole skin below the pelvis begins to lift. The head of our child, instead of vanishing back inside between pushes, is now constantly in view. I was standing beside Jackie holding her hand and now I lifted up her head and shoulders so she can see the top of her baby's head. "Then there was an ear and then a forehead and then a face, a beautiful serene face - very still as if in deep yoga, or contemplation, rising up out of Jackie .

"A doctor we do not know arrives. He slips the whole of his hands into the vagina to lift the child and Jackie murmurs "umm that felt good". The doctor chuckles and says "That's a new one." He took our child by the shoulders and lifted one relaxed short arm out an then another - then the whole child slides easily out - arms and legs flopping in all directions - very relaxed and Indian rubber like. He said: " Well you've got a girl."

"As he moved to cut the cord "our baby girl flexes her leg. She moves one of her feet - her first movement outside the womb. She then opens her mouth a little to breath - her chest moves - then she opens her eyes. The whites of the eyes are not visible and two very dark pupils peep from her narrowly open lids (she looks a bit Chinese - slit eyed) The doctor gave her to the nurse who carried her over to the small cot. As she arrived at the cot she gave a soft lad-like cry a "eheuer" - "all systems go' apparently. Jackie looked at her with a dazed, happy and contented look - and so did I. And then as an afterthought Jackie sat up and asked to see the placenta.

"We did not want to think of any other subject - but then came a surprise. Our daughter weighted only 5Lbs and 10.5 oz.. This surprised the doctor - as did her thick covering of a kind of grease - and so too does her need to go into a humidicrib because she had little flesh on her limbs. It did not fit in with her being an overdue child. Rather it suggested that she was a bit premature and thus was reluctant to be born. It seemed that our expensive top gynaecologist got it badly wrong when he insisted to Jackie that the child was overdue and must be induced. (An opinion not shared by our family doctor) In any case he was not there for the birth. Because our daughter took so long to be born, he had to go off to a conference leaving us to the care of a strange doctor. We were so sorry that our child was forced to be born early. I was also angry that Jackie was made to suffer so much unnecessarily. We were powerless in the hands of this male specialist in the female art of birthing."

The day after Karina's birth, I was stopped for speeding by the cops. I protested. "I've just had a baby daughter born." The cop, tall, in dark goggles, looked at me. He said "I know you. You live in the grey house in Alfred Crescent". He let me go. He was one of the police that used to park opposite us, watching the house.

I was not able to have any private time with Jackie until the following Thursday - so it was only then that we finally named her Karina Susan. Karina because - "we like K sounds and one night about 2 weeks ago the name Karina came out of the blue to me and we both thought it a pretty name for our child if we were to have a girl. "

My diary continued: "Since then I found out it is Danish for Catherine and we like St Catherine of Sienna so she becomes our child's patron saint. She was a women who learnt from visions as well as study and who spoke out fearlessly even to the Pope while living a hospitable and poor life."(and suffering from anorexia as I later learnt). Catherine wrote:. "Christ has chosen me a weak woman to confound the pride of the strong". P 224 gos. " I have determined that those men who are wise in their own conceits should be made ashamed by seeing weak and frail women, whom they account as things vile and abject, understand the mysteries of God, not by human study, but only by infused grace..." (Drane, p 56) She was in the gnostic tradition in finding wisdom within her rather than accepting it from authorities.

I also noted at the time: "Karina is also similar to the Italian for Dear Little One (Carina) and that is appropriate at least right now. Catherine too means pure - and that is good as long as it is not used in a puritanical sense."

""Susan" became her second name because we thought it gave her a more ordinary name to use if she chose. It is pretty too. It was also chosen because a friend of ours, John Davidson, had nick-named her while she was still in the womb "Susi" (Smash US Imperialism)." But I added then: "She will probably react against us and turn out a die-hard reactionary conservative."

But what we were sure of from the very first, was that a holy being had entered our world, capable of doing her own dreaming, her own shaping. A being who we could only protect, nourish, teach the lesser things of life, make it easier for her to find her own path.

No nonsense about "original sin" entered our minds. We knew her as a possessor of an original blessing . We knew she had no "original sin." Oh, how words have got twisted! The original meaning of the word "demon" was an "indwelling spirit or soul" put into a child by its mother. Sick men had turned this spirit, this "demon" into a devil. They said that only through their birth ritual of baptism would the child gain a pure spirit. A man that the Catholic Church called a saint, Augustine, had pioneered this doctrine. He declared: "Even Infants, When Unbaptised, are in the Power of the Devil". Ch 22 On Marriage and Concupiscence

They followed through this truly evil doctrine in medieval days to such an extent that some churchmen forbade the burying of a pregnant woman in consecrated ground - unless the unbaptised and dammed embryo or foetus was first removed by a post mortum caesarian. But at that time, such thoughts could not have been further from our minds. We were instead trembling with wonder at the marvels of this daughter, totally falling in love with her and under her own spell .

Thank God Augustine did not have it completely his own way. Around the year 390 he was contradicted by Pelagius, a British monk who lived in Rome and had a reputation of sanctity. Pelagius maintained that children come into the world blessed and are not born sinners, that we are born with all the gifts from God we need and that infant baptism was a consecration of a child, not a rite to remove the stain of sin. He denounced Augustine for cruelly teaching that God sends unbaptised infants to hell.

The resulting controversy rocked the Christian world. Augustine insisted that that hell was the unbaptised child's fate. Augustine's party only finally won by bringing in the Imperial Emperor to banish Pelagius and all his supporters. Many bishops were then deposed before what became known as the "Pelagian Heresy" was officially suppressed - but the ideas of Pelagius never completely died for most p arents instinctively know their children are blessed.

By Christmas 1971 Karina was working her own magic on my parents. They wrote to us wishing us all a very happy and blessed Christmas, despite all their earlier threats to disown any child of ours because we were not married with the permission of the Church. As Christmas is a Summer festival in Australia, we then went away camping with Karina in the wilds of the Grampian mountains of Western Victoria. This is a region of peaks and cliffs, deep valleys, waterfalls and forest rich in wildlife. "We pace an emu that is effortlessly running along and beside a road at 25mph." I found that white cockatoos had the most violent screech and watched red and grey kangaroos box in the evening light. Echidnas, spiny ant-eaters, shuffled through our camp. We saw Aboriginal cave paintings of fish and hands. We camped under 380 feet high mountain ash trees, in moist tree fern graced valleys. I began to fall in love with this country of brilliant light, silvers and grey trees rather than green."

When camping and at home, I was still exploring the priesthood. At this time Jackie and I frequently but privately celebrated the sacred meal with wine and bread remembering God's gift to us of food and life. I did not miss going to church although I missed very much having a wider group of soul friends with which to celebrate the gift of life, the divine lover and the grace of inner knowledge. I noted in my diary that on Maundy Thursday I went to the local church and was "appalled" by the lack of lay participation. It was for me "completely dead". It had nothing more to give me

But one ritual Jackie and I really wanted to celebrate. We picked Easter Sunday in 1972, the 2nd April, for our community of friends to welcome the arrival of Karina. We did not know it then, but it was about this same day that we conceived her sister.

The welcoming was to be in our front room. It was festooned with balloons and streamers with flowers massed everywhere.. Ample food was piled on tables. About fifty people came to welcome her. There were men of the road from the open house in King William Street, Bill the Pole, Tassie the (who loved Karina much and who always had presents for her) and amiable Paddy. There was Trish McGrath with a violin, Brian Noone with a guitar and Justin Moloney with a diggeridoo. There was Peter, the secretary of the draft resisters' union, Lesley, Peter and Emily, Graham and Rhonda Marshall, teachers who brought much food. Several Catholic priests came, some single, some married, some inside, some outside, the official church. There was Eddie, Lesley and her mate Peter, Rowan Ireland, my tutor from La Trobe University,, Mary Doyle and Val Noone of the open house, Charlie Davis, a former potato digger and too many others to mention them all here

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Jackie and I had printed copies of the ritual we had composed at the DMZ (De-Militarised Zone), a radical education centre. I've dug up the leaflet. This is it's content.

THE WELCOMING AND CHRISTENING OF KARINA.

Karina thanks you for coming to celebrate her birth and for giving her such a big family of uncles and aunts. To welcome her we'll begin by singing

I can see a new day,

A new day soon to be

when storm clouds are all past

And the sun shines on a world that is free.

I can see a new world,

A new world coming fast,

When all men are brothers

And hatred forgotten at last.

I can see a new man,

A new man standing tall,

With his head high and his heart proud

And afraid of nothing at all.

The first verse is then repeated.

Then one of the gathering (it was Charlie Davis, one of the men of the road who had come to live in the open houses, who decided to do this and did it well) says:-

"God has entrusted Karina particularly into your care -

Will you love Karina, serve her and cherish her, whenever she needs you?

R/ We will.

Will you respect her - allow her freedom to be herself - a new and different person?

R/ We will.

Not force her into your own patterns?

R/ We will not.

But share with her all you find beautiful and good.

R/ We will.

And listen to her, sharing with her whatever she finds good.

R/ We will.

Trust her and put her into God's hands?

R/We will.

ALL. And we in our turn, will respect, love and cherish

Karina, and share with her all that we find beautiful and true.

And then we all feasted.

Our group home at 21 Alfred Crescent had a rich life of its own. It was a rabbit warren of people and an enormously exciting and exhausting place. But we came to feel it was not good for little Karina to live among a kaleidoscope of human feet. Many were too busy in their own lives to relate seriously to her. They tended to speak over her head and to forget that she was underneath. But that was not true of all. Lesley, her daughter Emily and Lesley's friend Peter, had much time for her. Everyone loved this quiet child that lay there closely observing before she decided to do anything. I was happy that Jackie was expecting another child. We had decided to have a second child soon so that Karina would have a companion near to her own age.

One thing for sure. We had no intention to be possessive parents. This determination was partly the result of the hammering my parents gave me to try to bring me back to what they regarded as the true and good way. She was a real battler, my Mother. She left no screw unturned in her efforts to reclaim me. One of her letters said I had taken Christ down from the cross and put Jackie up instead. She meant I was worshipping Jackie, not that I was torturing her.

Sometimes it seemed that my Mother was mellowing and would make a grandparent yet - such as when we received the very welcomed letter from her the Christmas after Karina was born. But such lulls in the parental storm did not last for long. It was a very tough time. I came to dread her letters. I wrote back earnestly, lovingly, without recrimination, hoping against hope to end this cruel division between us. But my mother continued to try to save my soul. It seemed that to her I was guilty of bigamy and that my real wife was the Church.

The king hit was when I stumbled to the door at seven thirty one morning to find two short nuns standing there. "Good Morning", said the older one with the sunburnt wrinkled face. "I am Mother Teresa from Calcutta. I have come in the name of your mother. Please think of me as your mother".

I gaped. It was a double hit. She was Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the living saint. Why on earth was she here, at our door??? Wild speculation went through my mind. She might have come because we worked briefly with their order in Calcutta. Or maybe she had come because we had signed a petition saying their convent should be allowed to stay in Fitzroy because it did not attract undesirables, such "undesirables" being already in Fitzroy. But her words about my Mother did not fit these theories. And, thinking of her as my mother also just did not fit. Not that my Mother isn't a living saint; she just had seemed recently more like a living menace.

"Come in." I eventually managed to say. I escorted the two black ones down the corridor and sat them at the kitchen table.

"Would you want a cup of tea?"

"No thank you," Mother Teresa said, hands folded before her. "Our rule does not permit us to take refreshments on visits."

I abandoned them briefly to give Jackie the startling news. She bounded from bed. I threw on some more respectable clothes, grabbed baby Karina and went back to the kitchen. I dumped Karina in her lap - not dreaming she could be thinking that Karina was the forbidden fruit of a broken priestly vow.

Mother Teresa explained that my Mother had heard she was going to Australia for a Eucharistic Conference and had asked her to come to persuade me to do the right thing by the Church and Christ.

Well, we spent the next two hours explaining to her at our kitchen table that we felt we had a vocation to be together and that did not contradict my commitment to the priesthood. I told her that I felt called to both the priesthood and marriage and explained that in all this we had followed our conscience and been honest with the church. Meanwhile we were dying for our morning tea. We did not feel comfortable drinking when they were not.

Well, eventually it seemed they understood that we had married in good conscience. They gave Karina back and we processed out to the front garden. But on the way to the garden gate, Mother Teresa turned and said "I am very sorry but I must say that, in my opinion, you are sinning in pride. You have set your own opinion against that of Holy Mother the Church".

And then, leaving us stunned, they diminished down the street. I still have the wooden chair she sat in. I am keeping it to sell its splinters as relics of this living saint!

The Archbishop's Secretary, a tall gentle priest, also turned up on our doorstop to try to save me. He was quite apologetic. It was clear that my mother did not believe in doing things by halves! But as far as I was concerned, Jackie and I were married before humankind and before God and we were very blessed in this. I had no intention of deserting my family for penance in a monastery as happened to other priests who cracked under the strain and went back into the church's fold.

I knew my beliefs were in accord with the tradition of the Gnostic Christians and of much mystical teaching - and that tradition rested uneasy within the Church. A dichotomy ran through all official Catholic theology. It taught both that conscience was truly free and that we must accept truth from authority. I felt I was treading a path that grew before me. The tree of my life was growing branches that seemed entirely natural and predictable when they appeared but which could never be foreseen.

As for my work life, I had thought to look for trade union jobs but jobs teaching adults were also very attractive and easier for me to find with my academic record. I decided to first study how to teach since I had long thought it strange that academic teachers were presumed not to need teacher training. There were no courses in tertiary teaching so I had to study secondary. I thus enrolled for a course at a Technical Teachers College in teaching English and Social Studies. This involved spending half of every week teaching in a school and the rest of the week at the college.

But to my dismay, I immediately discovered that I had utterly no skill in performing in any kind of authoritative manner. I had never learnt to command children. I had much to learn. When I first tried to take a class, my efforts were interrupted by showers of sandwiches and papers thrown across the room. They enjoyed their quick and accurate assessment that they had power over me. Consequently they were delighted to find that I was ineffective with punishment.

Because of this near riot, the head of my department ordered me to give out text books immediately classes started - and to keep my students' noses firmly in these books. When she later found that I was asking students what topics were their favourites so I could engage them more effectively, she ordered me back into textbooks. She was dominating of teachers as well as students. I decided this was not a school where I could learn - so I secured a transfer on the grounds of personal incompatibility with the department head.

The next school was far better but inevitably my efforts become controversial. It all started quite innocently - as it always did. Our teachers' union was planing a strike so I discussed strikes in my social studies class with my 4th year students. I explained they were a tactic that protected individuals but which only should be employed for very serious reasons. One student said they had no union. I then gave them the address of the only secondary students union that I knew of. I then spent the next few days away from this school studying at the college.

When I next returned to the school, I was met in the corridor by an excited crowd of my most able students. They told me they had joined their union and were on strike!. Perplexed, I asked them over what issue? They told me: "compulsory school uniforms". I then looked over their heads and saw at the far end of the corridor the conservatively suited Headmaster and Deputy Head - glaring at me standing among the strike's ring leaders. Clearly they thought I must have instigated it. Later that day my cleverest student won the right to call off the strike over the school loudspeaker system. The students were happy, excited, felt empowered. Just what I wanted for them. But my own future at the school began to be in doubt.

My department head began to take a very personal interest in my tuition. He invited me to sit in on his classes. When he heard a boy whisper, he would immediately bark "Silence" and then would turn to me to see if I had understood this was how it was to be done. I said silencing the child depended on the purpose of the whisper and on whether other children were disturbed. This exasperated him.

One of the boys in my class then came to visit me. I was not at home but a friend welcomed him and lent him Jerry Rubin's book "Do It", the inspiration of the 1960s Yippee movement in the US. I did not then know anything of this but a few days later I received an urgent summons from the Head. When I went to his office the boy was there with his parents, all waiting mystified to find out why they had been summoned. The Head then produced this book and apologised to the parents for their child obtaining this book from me. The parents looked at the book and said, to the Head's dismay, that they had utterly no objection to their son reading it. I survived.

One of the final straws was when a tutor came out from the college to watch me teach. By this stage I had quieted the rebellious students by finding ways to engage their attention without need for punishment. They were all working in small groups on their chosen projects. An open book on my desk contained all my comments on their work, one page per student. I marked according to effort not talent. Students would come up to check how they and their friends were doing, and discuss each others marks. Quiet talking pervaded the room but work was being done. The tutor gave me his assessment. It began "This is no mere lip service to the ideals of teaching..." but when I left the classroom with this in my hand, I was met by a furious department head. He had been watching the class through the window. He ordered me never to teach like this again. A few days later I was told to report to the Education Department to be given another school. When I change the time of the appointment so I can consult the union, I was told by the Department Head that if I do not leave immediately, he will order the police to evict me!

My next school thanks to the intervention of the union was one that prided itself on innovation. I was given the wildest 3rd year form - and a class of senior students in their final year. Again there was chaos while they get to know me but after a while these 3rd years were waiting for me before school to try to get out of other classes to get into mine. They made radio plays, wrote stories, researched in the library.

My older students were given the task by me of writing a paper on what made a worker happy at work. They were encouraged to draw on the experiences of older friends and family members. We visited factories that might be soon employing them. They saw this as so relevant that they produced thesis length reports. The Department Head then asked me to team teach next year. the Firth Form students with him. But my fate was already sealed. I was sacked by the Education Department on the afternoon of the last day of the school year . This decision was not reversed despite a petition from most of the school's teachers. There were consequently graduation day protests by my fellow students. The reason given to me by the Education Department was that I had not demonstrated that I could teach conventionally. My problem was that I was absolutely no good at being a male authority figure and not much good at protecting my career. On their criteria, they were right in sacking me. If being a teacher meant being able to be authoritarian, I did not have what it took.

But I did get what I wanted from this year. I had learnt something of how to teach. I had previously decided that I would move on to teaching adults - and an opportunity to do this now grew out of the fertile soil of our shared home and sister households.

Fran, the wife of a draft resister, had decided that now the draft has been abolished by the incoming Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, she wanted to relax and be with her so long fugitive husband. So she resigned as National Director of IDA, an educational organisation working on Third World issues funded by organisations like Freedom from Hunger, and I was appointed to succeed her. As her office was in our house, this meant I could work from home.

Meanwhile our second child was growing within Jackie. She was born, easily and naturally, on the 5th of January 1973. This time no gynaecologist was there to guide us. We were listening more to our instincts. We had decided against a home birth as this was difficult to organise and Jackie thought a hospital safer. We arrived at the hospital at 8.30pm. The second stage of childbirth, the pushing, started just over an hour later and by 10.15 p.m. on the 5th of January. Katie was born.

It was a marvellously easy birth. She came out remarkably active. She pushed and cried at the same time. She wasn't covered with the white cream that Karina had on her as a premature baby. She was a normal red-pink colour and had light auburn hair. She opened her eyes almost immediately. She weighted 6 pounds 5 ounces. Jackie, Karina and I brought her home a week later on the 13th.

Her name also came out of our love of the sound K. She was not given a name so much as a sound, - a Kay with a gentle ending, a "Katie".. To avoid confusion, we officially give her a different initial from her sister. Her name formally became Catherine. We thought Catherine of Sienna could also be her exemplar although we knew that children inevitably shape the meaning of their name to suit themselves. Two weeks after her birth, I started work with IDA .A few days later, on January 27th I saw Karina taking her first few careful steps after a thoughtful 15 month study of the art of walking.

As soon as we could we went off on a wonderful celibratory camping holiday in Tasmania to enjoy the richness of its wild life, seeing Tasmanian devils, poteroos, bandicoots and many more creatures. We did not give Katie the same kind of welcoming ceremony as we had Karina. Karina's blessing had been very much a public dedication by us to a certain way of bringing up children that respected their precious individuality and imagination . This was also valid for Katie so we felt no need to repeat it.

We had also changed. I was now further from the ritual centred life of a Catholic priest for I was missing more than ever a community with which I could share the sacred centre of my beliefs. So instead Katie would have a very different thanking ritual. She later was given a welcoming ritual devised for her in a mountain stream when she was about 4 years of age. We would bless our red-haired transparent skinned Irish looking child, thank her Creator for sharing her, in the waters of a running, bubbling stream on a Welsh hillside. We were aware of the presence of the spirits of the Celtic ancestors that Jackie and I shared. We called on them and on God to help her be creative and to live in tune with Nature.

Katie was a very different child to her sister. Katie would look at things, grasp them, throw them away. Karina would look at them for longer until she seemed to have absorbed their very essence. Katie did not hesitate about walking. She tried it before she was ready, not minding the falls. By about November 73 Katie was walking at 10 months of age..

Our lives were wound around those of our friends rather than of relatives. I was not comfortable with most of my more conventional in-laws although they were most considerate and generous. I did however feel at home with Jackie 's sister and with her aunt Eve, her Dad's sister. I was deeply grateful to them as I felt quite relation-less in Australia.

I was very aware of the political atrocities that continued to surround us. Nixon was re-elected President of the United States despite all the stories that were surfacing about his campaign's use of criminals and spooks to retain power. Much more serious was the murderous bombing he inflicted on Indochina but his downfall seemed more likely to happen because of Watergate than Hanoi. So I co-wrote and published with a friend, John Davidson, a leaflet on Nixon. We documented the people involved in Watergate, the arms merchants, FBI agents, former Mafia lawyers, the paymaster for the Bay of Pigs invasion and the links to the Teamsters Union and the Mafia. This leaflet came out the month after Katie was born.

Over the next months Nixon continued to bomb the hell out of Vietnam. Two months later, in April 1973, we joined with a Roman Catholic youth Organisation, the Catholic Workers Movement (YCW), to organise an all night vigil in Melbourne's City Square to publicise the plight of political prisoners in South Vietnam. We built out of wooden car-crates mock-ups of President Thieu's infamous "tiger cages" in which he held his prisoners in South Vietnam. We felt that it was outrageous that the Americans should still be supporting him as a figurehead for democracy. The terrible war in Vietnam overshadowed us. We were constantly hearing of the bombing of villages by an airforce that blanketed the land with death. The war they waged to "save" Vietnam was like an antibiotic that killed humans as if they were germs.

We held a Service for Peace outside the War Museum in Canberra with Jan Madigan, a National President of the YCW, and Peter Calliman, the National Chaplain of the YCW. Jan and I presided over the ritual. Jan and Peter later asked me to be the priest for their wedding in January 1974 - a wonderful invitation. They knew that all that I did still came out of that dedication of myself as a priest no matter how the official church regarded me.

The year of Katie's birth continued to be most hectic. Brian Noone of our sister house wrote a leaflet on Australia's economic links with South Africa which I helped publish as national director of IDA. It was aimed at making more effective the Australian sanctions against apartheid and thus to increase pressure on the South African Government to end that cruel system.

Another IDA project I inherited was to research and publicise the Australian economic role in Fiji. This resulted in the distribution of five thousand copies of a booklet called "Fiji, a Developing Australian Colony." and in a tour around Australia by a team of Fijian speakers. We found that Australian government policies had led to Fiji effectively supporting the Australian economy rather than us supporting them. I found out later that this made the Fijian government ask Australia for an Intelligence Report on me.

Then Justin Moloney, a friend and the race relations officer for the Australian Union of Students, asked us if we had a spare room in our commodious house for an Aboriginal activist, Cheryl Buchanon, who was coming down from Queensland to campaign against the treatment of her people.

Her arrival changed the focus of my work dramatically. We learnt from her what life was like on Aboriginal reserves, how the police and missions worked and about the oppressive Queensland legislation. She challenged us while living with us to apply the same methods that we used to research and publicise third world problems to the treatment of Aborigines in Australia.

Her friends came to stay. This included a band made up by New South Wales Aborigines. They came with their guitars. Sly-grog came in the early hours. Aboriginal political refugees came from the north. We came back from a trip away to find about 20-30 Aborigines had moved into our home, all sleeping in one room! There were just seven Whites. Aboriginal militant Bobby McLeod was among those staying. He had become famous for walking into the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra with a revolver to demand some justice for his people. The climate of ideas and spirituality in the house changed. I found Cheryl's wise grandmother appearing in my dreams.

The first month of the stay by the Aboriginal mob was exhilarating and exhausting. We learnt much from them but we grew concerned as the children seemed to be disturbed by such a crowd. Most of the housework fell on Jackie. We became increasingly annoyed with Bobby McLeod saying housework was women's work..

One day we heard that Paulo Freire was coming to Australia to speak to a church gathering. We knew him as the author of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed". He had built a reputation based on his work to free the minds and spirits of the downtrodden in Latin America. The Aboriginal people of the household decided that they should have first rights to learn from such a man. Through me, they told the churches that middle-class church folk did not need him as much as the Aborigine. After some pressuring, the Churches agreed to lend him to us for an afternoon. He came and sat in the bay of our front window before an expectant crowd mostly of Aborigines. He told us that the way to liberation for Aboriginal people was to join with the working class to fight a common battle.

Bobby McLeod disagreed. He told Paulo that this tactic would make them just currants in a white cake. He said his people had first to unite themselves as a people. Then, as a proud people, they would join with the working class.

It was not always easy being such a disparate community. I remember getting highly annoyed when we came into the kitchen and found our Aboriginal friends cooking themselves steaks and not including us in their plans. I exploded. "We always cook for you when we cook. How can you exclude us. Thought you said Aborigines believed in sharing!" I stormed off Half an hour later, Bobby came to see me. "You are right. We should be sharing. We are not used to Whites wanting to be part of our meals."

But I was growing tenser for another reason. Under the surface of our hectic life, my gender problems were growing. I was finding it harder to take on the male sexual role. I would cry secretly after making love. I was scared to mention my pent up feelings to Jackie. The pressures were showing in the strain between us as well as in the reoccurrence of asthma.

My diary records that around Easter 1973, only 3 months after Katie's birth, I first confessed to Jackie that constantly acting as if male was increasingly difficult for me. I found this confession humiliating for I had absorbed the Stoical and Augustinian teaching that men should be always in rational control over all their desires. I wrote in my diary:. " during the past year (1973) , Jackie and I have come to terms with each other, especially with me being transsexual - so at last I don't feel scared to record it in the diary. " This admission was an enormous step for me. But I was still hoping that some private cross-dressing might be all I needed to relieve my pain. I thought that it might help me relax if I could pretend occasionally that I was living as a woman.

My diary continued: "Although I told Jackie I loved dressing up in female clothes before we married - neither of us made much of it. To me it was merely my Achilles heel, my weak spot. It was an Easter, when we were at Jackie 's parents, staying in the bungalow at the back, that I brought myself to confess to her that I desperately needed to relax by being free with her to wear female clothes. I'd been scared to mention my pent up feelings, fearing the consequences of relaxing my self-control, fearing to upset Jackie , not being sure of how she would take it... I felt I had a duty to fulfil my male role for her sake as well as for the children's sake. But the pressure of feeling had become just too much. I had been increasingly tense. But Jackie 's reaction was marvellous. First she assured me that this was no danger to us as a family, then she put her poncho coat on me."

She put her woman's coat on me to show she accepted even this aspect of me. It made me feel better. I kept this very secret. Men in our culture see female clothes on a male as symbolising either fun or a humiliating weakness so I had violently mixed emotions. I fought shame at giving in to these innate desires. I feared ridicule. Yet there seemed no choice. I had dreams, escapist fantasies, where I was forcibly made to wear female clothes, forcibly made to live as a woman. Thank God those fantasies are now redundant and have long since ceased.

In 1974, I went to Niugini to reconnoitre a new IDA educational project. This involved travelling in a light plane over the wildest of chasms above the beehive huts of roadless remote villages into the highlands where I met beautiful people coming to town to shop in their full tribal regalia. But the turmoil inside me made this trip a nightmare. I was terribly afraid of losing our one and two year old children if I acknowledge the rights of my own body and mind to live in the gender they seemed to be assigning to me. I was scared this would wreck the dream that Jackie and I pursued.

On the way back I stopped at the home of Jan Madigan in Brisbane , and managed to relax when she lent me some female clothes to wear in her house. In those days my female friends helped keep me functioning with their acceptance of me. My wish to live as a woman seemed so crazy an obsession yet it would not go away and would not be denied.

But soon all cross dressing compromises failed for me. The clothes were a comfort but they were not reality. I was sick and tired of being a male in the eyes of the public. I loved Jackie - but not as a husband should. I would bury my feelings again and again for fear of losing my family. I could understand that Jackie should want to leave me but I did not want to lose her. Even more, I could not bear losing the children. They were only one and two years old and seemed unaware of the crisis we was going through.

Our big house did not last much longer.. One day our landlady came and apologised. She had been pressured by members of her family into selling the house. Lesley Whyte and her daughter Emily were the first to leave. They went to live in Tasmania on a farmlet on the edge of the wilderness with Peter, her lover. When we went to visit them latter we saw in the car headlights on the dirt track to their new home every night a parade of animals now practically extinct on the mainland such as the mini-Kangaroo, the poteroo. Their place was a haven.

When we moved from our big house, we went to a much smaller wooden place in Dunstan Avenue in Brunswick, just off a tram route. It "s veranda front was spider web shrouded. It had stained glass windows and was surrounded by many kinds of fruit trees. Our Aboriginal friends followed us to this new house. Cheryl, Lionel, Harry, all came to stay at one time or another. The IDA office moved into its backroom. However we noted that the children showed signs of disliking their space being invaded by more strangers. My diary note says they were "real scared of strangers". We worried if this was a legacy of having too many young adults around at Alfred Crescent who were unused to dealing with kids and disregarded them.

We had earlier looked to buy a house but only half-heartedly. We set our maximum at $16,000 (for that was twenty years ago) so when a house in fashionable Gore Street came up, with blue stone walls , large front and back gardens and kitchen, four bedrooms, for $17,000, we rejected it. The plea of the estate agent who pointed out we would only have to repay at $25 a week met tempted but finally deaf ears.

I rued this decision for years later as life became tougher - and the price of houses in that street went up by twenty times within 15 years. But we had elected to keep in rented houses. The principal reason for our decision not to buy was that Jackie told me that owning a house would oppress and depress her. We instead kept our deposit money towards going back to England. We had agreed to come out to Australia just for three years and that time had passed.

It was good that our new home was not so large. It kept down the number of guests. It gave us more opportunity to relax with our children, our chooks, our kittens and our trees. We often went away camping in the bush and exploring nearly all the back roads of Victoria. I felt most at home when surrounded by the untamed denizens of our world. I have always needed wilderness.

It also gave us more time to talk out my gender identity crisis. Eventually Jackie assured me that come what may, I would not lose the children. This amazing assurance freed me. For the first time I felt free to seek a remedy to my gender problems. Her words were immensely valued by me.

It was now obvious that I needed professional help. I went to the one doctor I could find in Melbourne who "specialised" in transsexuals. I told him one of my problems was that I knew no one else like me. I simply did not understand what had happened to me and would appreciate recommendations of relevant reading matter. But he refused to recommend any reading and instead loftily said; "Reading on this subject would spoil our assessment of you."

He also refused to treat me medically unless I left my children. He said that if I changed my gender role while living with them, I might spoil their gender-typing! He did not see the insanity of his insistence that I first desert my children before he assess whether or not I should live as a woman. Surely such an act would prove that I was less female. I did not see that doctor again. Instead I researched and read, assiduously trying to understand myself, ordering books from America or from Blackwell's, a bookshop in Oxford that sent books out to me in Australia wrapped as if to resist monsoon s.

Soon I had to seek help elsewhere. I found a clinic that specialised in sexual problems where I was assigned to a woman psychiatrist, Elizabeth Bakewell, who had never anyone like me before.

It was then a stop and go affair for I still did not fully accept or know myself. Despite Jackie 's brave words I feared we would not survive together if she were no longer to have a male in her life, or at least the apology for a male that I was.. Late in 1974 I decided again that cross-dressing would probably suffice. I hoped female clothes would help me sufficiently to relax and express suppressed feelings. I wanted this to be so and was determined to make it so - and even stopped going to the clinic to see Dr Bakewell.

During these years of maledom, a persistent dream had dogged my sleep. In this I was visiting a large college that was training priests. I thought somewhere in this building I must have my own room and so set out to find it. This always proved extremely difficult. It seemed it was hidden high up in the attics, in a warren of staircases and corridors. I was to have this same dream persistently - until I resolved my gender crisis.

Meanwhile I was continuing to plan educational projects on Third World issues for the Aid Agencies. Our Aboriginal friends had educated us on how "third world" was the plight of their own people within Australia and on how few white groups were helping them, so we decided that it was about time we took on this issue. We persuaded Australian Aid Agencies to sponsor our "White Colonialism in Australia Project." Our idea was to do a case history of some Aboriginal communities to show how they had been treated by government, church missions and private enterprise. Other members of our sister houses joined forces in this. These included Barbara Russell and Mike Parsons.

But before we could put this project into operation, we had to make sure we were not repeating the mistakes others had made in the past. We had to seek Aboriginal approval beforehand - and to seek their help in finding us communities that would not mind us studying them and using their stories.

An Aboriginal friend in Canberra, Harry Penrith (who later took the name of Birnum Birnum) arranged for us a meeting with a group of Aborigines from all around Australia. They really put us through the hoop. "What wages are you going to make out of studying us?" "Have you ever had contact with ASIO (the Australian FBI)?" "How can we know to trust you". "Will this study further your academic careers?".

At the end of the grilling, one of the Aborigines present, Mike Miller from Cairns, said that there was a community that had been crying out for outside support and that what this community had experienced at the hands of the Missions, Government and private companies would make it ideal for our purposes. This was the Mapoon people of Cape York. Their settlement had been burnt down by the police just 11 years earlier. They had then been moved in irons to another settlement and their tribal lands of virgin forest given to major mining companies that wanted to strip it for bauxite clay, the raw material of aluminium.

But this project then took unexpected directions, reshaped by the people we had set out to study. We found the Mapoon people had other priorities to our own. The planned publication to educate white Australians had to take back stage. The Mapoon people first wanted to re-occupy their own land so they could care for it and its sacred places so this too became our own priority

The Mapoon people had lived for thousands of years on the Western coast of the Cape York peninsula, on the finger of Australia that points the way the Australian continent is physically drifting, towards Niugini and Asia. They had remained in possession of their lands until fairly recently. They had fought off the colonisers in many a skirmish. They had eventually won the right from the Whites to have their lands reserved to them as part of the largest continuous strip of Aboriginal Reserves in Eastern Australia. Other communities on these reserve lands were the people of Weipa, 80 k south of Mapoon, and Aurukun, 160k south.

When I went to visit Mapoon, it was wonderful to see that it had not yet been mined but was still in much the same condition as when it was managed by Aborigines over thousands of years. It was a spacious monsoonal forest, rich in plants, kangaroo, possum, goanna - and crocodile. The coastal inlets were home to the great barramundi fish. Coral sealed the coast. The Weipa bauxite mine has only just started to encroach on their tribal lands and still was some 40 miles away. The reason that the mining was not yet close to them was that the miners had been given a thousand square miles of this Aboriginal Reserve to strip for bauxite. The company involved was Comalco, then half owned and managed by CRA, a subsidiary of RTZ of London. (It is still there - but now is wholly owned by CRA)

The Government when engaged in the process of setting up this mine, decided in 1963 to evict the Mapoon community - but became alarmed when the community refused to go. the police were sent in. They arrested the community and burnt their settlement to the ground, including their homes, church and store. Next morning the police took the Aborigines in chains to Bamaga 100 miles north where they were told they must learn to live like the white folk.

We raised funds from various charities and in 1974 the Mapoon people set out in a caravan of old trucks, a bus. vehicles of all kinds, from Weipa past the vast red earth mines, up under the open forest trees to Mapoon and reoccupied their land. The Mapoon people are still there today. When I last saw them they had planted flourishing gardens, rebuilt houses and were catching large barramundi. We video-taped their own story.

An elder told us that in their eyes the most terrible thing that happened when their settlement was burnt down was "when they burnt our houses, they burnt our clothes and when they burnt the clothes they burnt the smell from under our arms." For them their smell was part of their very essence. I know that elsewhere in Australia it is used by elders in a healing ritual to convey energy from the healthy to the sick so it may well have had the same use at Mapoon . (cross- ref sat).

The people of Mapoon, many of whom are of the Tjuntgundji tribe, then told us of how they fed the elderly. "Now about the emu. You must have grey hairs or you will not get any. If any of the young fellows find a nest with eggs they cannot eat them. They must go and report their find to the old people." (M1-3) Every food source was under the care of female or male elders who were responsible for maintaining it. Harry Toeboy of Mapoon told us: "the yams have bosses who look after them. There is a man or woman who has to look after them."

The hunts were always controlled by elders. Harry Toeboy was in charge of the hunt at Pine River as his father was before him. They used fire at the appropriate time to drive game into a trap. "When the time comes to burn, they get messengers and send them to different tribes ... They carve on these message sticks how many moons until they meet ... they count by how many days before full moon or no moon. When they all get together the boss of the land gives them the time to begin burning... you would be surprised by how much they catch that day. They never waste. They can keep meat for nearly a week underground (in earth ovens) . They heat it up when needed and when the last bit is eaten they say goodbye and travel back to their own territory." Likewise when the yams are ready to dig. This is a happy day. "Everyone dances and claps." What they cannot eat they bury again.

The bauxite mines at Weipa are now vast. They stretch to the horizon when you fly in. Some say it is the only mine that can be seen from space. Hundreds of square miles have been affected, including Mapoon tribal land although fortunately not land close to their new settlement. No royalties have been paid by the mining companies to the Aborigines whose lands they took and whose lives they devastated.

Once the Mapoon people had returned, we set out to complete a three volume case study of Mapoon. The first volume recorded their story in their words. The revenues from this book went to supporting their community. The Second Volume drew on official records to give their history. It included much of the correspondence between the government, mission and mining company. The 3rd Volume documented the impact these aluminium companies had on Aboriginal lands at Aurukun, south of Weipa, and around the world.

I also attended the mining company Annual General Meetings to protest against the taking of these tribal lands. This had the consequence that major companies got to know me when I was still working in my male role. When I did change gender roles, their knowledge of my background would one day prove dangerous to me.

By October 1974 Katie and Karina seemed to have recovered from the stress of the last days of the communal house of Alfred Crescent and we were mightily relieved. But while the Mapoon project was getting under way, the gender issue had again re-emerged. It just would not go away. Every time it returned it seemed stronger. I was finding it harder and harder to bury it - although at the same time I wanted to believe that my wish to live as a woman was highly dangerous nonsense that I could learn to ignore.

I also wondered what would happen if I went onto female hormones. I hoped I would not lose my drive and sink into a languorous castrati soup. Behind this thought lay church teachings that women were the passive principle, male the active. But my inner soul laughed at this male prejudice. I reminded myself of Joan d'Arc, Boudiccia and many a female warrior. I knew I was within both warrior and female and so I hoped to stay.

I loved Jackie and wanted to make her happy as a woman, but I again started to cry after we had made love. A dark, not understood, suspicion emerged within me that making love as a male was very wrong for me and I should cease doing it. Jackie wondered if I was still suffering from sexual repression from my religious order days. I feared it was something much more primordial than that.

Rejecting Maledom

in the pain of making love -

its pleasure taken while

my soul was elsewhere.

A fantasy it seems

becoming obsessive.

Humiliating not to be able to repress -

Jackie puts this down to Catholic church repression

but loving as a male serves only as a catalyst for change.

attempts at therapy only make it stronger

clothes are hollow

- it is not the trappings -

therapy fails to arrest

what is this

a gift?

Whence go I?

At that time I sometimes wore in public a sexually neutral caftan in order to get some relief. With Jackie's support, I was also cross dressing in private in our room, looking for any answer short of the drastically changing my sexual identity, seeking any answer that would not wreck our life as a family. I was encouraged by the acceptance I found when open with members of sister households, especially with gay outrageous Mike Cardin and outgoing Barbara Russell who was our field officer on the Mapoon project. Their acceptance made me feel relaxed, not crazy. I stopped keeping the subject of my sexual identity taboo, Other friends helped too. In writing this book now I am answering a challenge from Mike Cardin of twenty years ago. He said only by individuals coming out would people learn and society change.

It soon became evident, much to my regret, that I was in the grip of a crisis that could never be resolved through cross-dressing. By now my external male being was but a shadow of my reality. I lived - but not where others saw me. My inner self thought the clothes an irrelevancy. I became increasingly convinced that I might have to change my social reality to match a female inner self if I were to end the tensions that were now tearing at me. The alternative was to grimly strive to master and suppress. This second choice was then my preferred option if it were the only way for us to stay together as a family - but I did not know how feasible it would be. It seemed that I had no control over the changes that were happening in me. It was as if my attempt to become a normal sexually active male had back-fired on me, that it had triggered my psyche and my body to move as rapidly as possible in the opposite direction.

We were both now having to cope by taking tranquillisers. We had come together with a strong sense of being fated to be together, of having a sacred work to do together. Was all this about to fall apart? I did not know what the future might bring.

END