Woven: A Faith for the Dissatisfied

By Joel Mckerrow

‘This book is about Jesus. It is about my journey toward Jesus. Which may sound strange to some of you, but it is true. It is a journey of losing a Jesus that was too small and looked way too much like me, to a Jesus that began to mesmerise me. A Jesus calling me to something much grander and more holistic and more inclusive than I had thought possible. A Jesus who was drawing me into the true and into the beautiful.’
This is not a book of cookie-cut spirituality. It is not a book of answers, nor programmable spiritual growth. This book is a question. An invitation. A beckoning toward movement and a faith that can weather the storms of life.
In Woven, Joel McKerrow dares to put forth that our questions, struggles and doubts are not something to be feared, but may actually provide us with the path toward a vibrant faith. Joel takes us on a pilgrimage, from childhood belief to grief over a lost religion, to a richer, more sustaining faith that was previously unimaginable to him.
This is a demanding and compelling account of what it means to rethink our Christian beliefs and find both a restoration and a reconstruction into the expansiveness of God’s story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acorn Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780647530337

Joel Mckerrow

Joel McKerrow is one of Australia’s most successful spoken word poets. He has spent the past seventeen years in youth centres, youth groups, schools, creative and justice communities, churches and theological colleges, walking alongside thousands of young people, from many different religious traditions, in their quest for spiritual and identity formation. Joel is also the artist ambassador for TEAR Australia and a key speaker at The Justice Conference. He has toured extensively, establishing himself as a well-known spokesperson within justice-oriented and creativity-focused communities.

Book preview

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Part 1:

The Sculpted Self

A Boat Story

The boy was given a boat. A wooden boat. A small boat for a small boy. The perfect fit. He could reach the oars and the tiller and the ropes all from where he sat.

His father made him the boat, and each day he would look on from the nearby shore telling his son what to do. How to paddle. How to hoist the sail. How to tie the knots. The boy learned it all, and so began to manoeuvre around the harbour by himself.

Occasionally the wind would pick up and the waves would rock the boat, and the boy would be scared. But he knew that the harbour walls would protect him, and his dad was near enough to rescue him. So he kept on sailing. Every day. Around and around that little harbour.

He learned every part of it. Memorised the rocks and the sand dunes and where the coral rose up beneath the water, and where the rip could take you out of the mouth of the harbour and out to sea. And he knew all the boats tied up to the docks. Those old and falling apart that hadn’t left the harbour since he was born. Those that would go out and not return for days or weeks or months. Those that never came back.

The boy wondered what was out there. He would stare at the horizon beyond the harbour wall and something would swell inside. But his dad would call out and warn him not to stray too near the mouth of the breakwater wall.

So he would turn back and continue his sailing. Around and around and around.

Sculpted

We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

John Archibald Wheeler³

Side-by-side

Chipped purple fingernails sank slowly into tepid water. Glistening soap suds. Fingers that scrubbed away the food. They mingled there, her fingers, washed clean with the saucers and the cups.

‘The years don’t clean away so easily now, do they?’

Her comment floated out into the space between us. We were standing side-by-side washing dishes at the kitchen sink of a drop-in centre for street workers. Side-by-side. The good Christian boy and the street worker. Side-by-side. Before this day, she didn’t have a name. She was just a prostitute. She lived in a world that may as well have belonged on another planet. Side-by-side. My sheltered teenage existence and her fight-to-survive reality. Side-by-side.

Among my schoolmates she would have been called ‘the whore on the corner’. Such are the harsh judgements we make of what we do not understand. They are always born of our ignorance.

Ignorant. We were certainly that.

I smiled awkwardly at her poignant half-joke. Her flaking nail polish speckled purple on the white soap suds. She passed me the plates and I wrapped a towel around each one. My hands shook slightly. I was nervous and I was not sure why.

As she gave me the cutlery, I stole a quick glance at the side of her face. Studied the lines. Lost myself wondering at the stories they held. Ever inquisitive, I was hooked on the stories that lay behind people’s faces. She turned her head slightly towards me and I looked away, hoping she hadn’t seen me staring.

This was the first day I had ever spent time with a street worker. It had been an awkward lunchtime meal. This was her place, not mine. I had come to her territory, her neighbourhood, her street, her corner. A world I had gladly not been a part of, until now. Side-by-side. I felt as out of place as I am sure I looked. Straight-laced, clean-cut, short red hair, button-down shirt boy, standing next to short skirt, torn leggings, thick make-up, ageing lady from the corner. Side-by-side.

As I dried dishes, I remembered how not that long before I had come down this same street in a car with my mates. All laughing and joking and calling out names at the girls on the street. Perhaps at this very lady I was now washing dishes with. I had mocked and I had laughed.

I just did not realise they were human – the girls, that is. Not my mates; their humanity is still debatable.

I did not realise they were human, so I treated them as foreign, as alien, as something other than human. It was easier that way. To either ignore or dehumanise. Had I given any sense of credence to their reality, their story, it would have resulted in questions for myself too hard to answer. Instead I cast them in the harsh light of judgement and saw them as something less. I chose to ignore, to mock, to erect a wall and declare them outside. A fence to hide behind.

Walls and fences. I have built many during my life. To keep uncomfortable people out. To keep unfamiliar ideas out. To stay safe inside.

But I must tell you, I have come to dislike fences.

The first fence I ever hated was the electric fence that I peed on as a child. It was not a fun day. There are, after all, only two types of people in this world: those who learn from the others who go before them and those who just have to go and pee on the fence themselves. I was always the latter.

The second fence I came to hate was when I was a teenager, a few years before grave digging and standing side-by-side at the kitchen sink. It was a corrugated-iron fence that stood tall behind my hotel in Vanuatu. A boy’s face peeked over the top and I wondered who he was. So I walked from hotel room past swimming pool and across lush green grass and stood on tiptoe to glance over the fence.

There I saw a boy and his sister. They stood knee-high in rubbish and the scrimmage of desperation.

I leaned on the fence. It was a demarcation – where manicured green abruptly stopped and the dirt of an ugly city began. A separation of two worlds. The grass is never greener on the other side when we keep all the water to ourselves. I wanted to tear the fence down. I was not yet brave enough in myself to even call out to them. My life was so far removed from theirs. I was scared of their difference, their desperation. The flimsy corrugated-iron fence was suddenly impassable, and I turned back to the hotel.

This was where my dislike of fences began. The walls that divide us. Corrugated iron or white picket palings. They both separate us. Built high to keep them out, to hold us in. Yet ‘holding’ is not the right word. Fences do not hold us; they scare us into rigidity, into security, into a small space.

I have stood on the Palestinian side of the border and placed hands like a prayer on the mortar where a boy showed me Banksy, but he could not show me his girlfriend because she lived on the other side of the wall. A fence he was not allowed to cross. I have walked in Berlin by the wall that was torn down. Twenty-five years of separation of mother from daughter, father from son. I have kneeled in Dachau prison camp, hands torn by the barbed wire of genocide. I have stood in Belfast at the Peace Wall. I do not know why we would ever call it a ‘peace wall’. No wall has ever been about peace.

Sorry, Mr Trump, but I have never liked walls or fences. I do not like their demarcation and their prejudice. Yet though I may not like them, I have let myself be trapped by them again and again. Many times, closed. Many times, secure. Many times, scared. And most often without realising it.

And then there are the fences we can’t see. Glass fences. Transparent fences. Fences that surround us though we do not even recognise them. We swim inside their holding like little fishes in glass bowls. Swimming around in circles.

Little fishes, every one of us

My favourite saying ever is this: A fish in a bowl doesn’t know it is wet.

It has been surrounded by its water environment for as long as it has been a fish. Swimming around and around, blind to the way the water shapes its reality. It has not known the existence of dryness, so how could it know its own wetness? The water is both its habitat and its master. The entirety of its world.

I too have swum in many fishbowls throughout my lifetime. Swimming circles within glass walls. The fishbowls of family, school, media, church, whiteness, middle-class culture, friends, masculinity. All fishbowls. All filled with water that immersed me, infilled me and entrapped me. The glass walls held the substance of my life. How could I know there was anything