MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

Perhaps the most challenging experience of my day is walking past the Aboriginal people who are always begging for money outside the IGA supermarket in King Street Newtown. I've been walking past that supermarket most days for the past 23 years, and they've been there for as long as I can remember.

They present as very needy but I have never ever given them money. Sometimes I feel guilty and at other times I resent them for exploiting the guilt of passers by. I speculate that they're probably doing quite well out of it. I reason that they're getting their own back on white Australians, as collectively responsible for their continuing displacement. In a small but enterprising way, they're managing to turn our guilt to to their advantage. Good on them, kind of.

But my money goes to a small organisation called Life for Koori Kids (LFKK), in the form of a modest but regular monthly donation. It does makes me feel good, but more importantly it helps an organisation that has a defined purpose, which is to help ensure indigenous children go to school and get the education they need to build more prosperous and fulfilling lives for themselves.

LFKK buys provisions such as shoes, uniforms and books to help convince indigenous families that there are no excuses for not sending their kids to school. There is also help for placing indigenous young people in universities and TAFE, and for those entering the workforce.

Ailsa Gillett founded LFKK in 2001. Her vision is that 'education is a key priority in bringing confidence and pride of heritage to young people's lives'.

Ailsa knows well the importance of confidence, also to the lives of non-indigenous young adults. In the 80s I was a young Jesuit assigned to teach secondary school students at St Aloysius College in Milson's Point, without any teacher training or aptitude for the job.

Unsurprisingly the experience knocked out most of my self confidence. Ailsa, who was there as the headmaster's secretary, did a great deal to encourage me to think that my life had a value and meaning beyond the chaos of my inability to control unruly teenagers.

This year I received my best Christmas present in a long time. Ailsa sent me a copy of Gnamoroo, a professionally produced and beautiful coffee table book LFKK volunteers have just released. The volunteers include Mitchell Library Indigenous Services Librarian Melissa Jackson, who chose the title because it means 'compass'.

She explains how the title encapsulates LFKK's purpose: 'Gnamoroo [pronounced with a silent 'g'] is broken up into "gna" meaning "to see" and "mo-roo" meaning "a path"'.

The book, which was produced for LFKK's families and supporters, has a simple but mesmerising format that depicts its young people by name, photograph, nation, age, totem, quotation and artwork. It has been artfully presented in a way that is carefully thought out to reflect LFKK's people-centred ethos that focuses on the kids' talents.

Maybe Ailsa can enlist King Street's enterprising beggars to raise funds for LFKK.

Christmas is a celebration that I can take or leave, and it is one that I am free to take or leave. It is optional in that I have family available to me but no family obligations. I count that as my particular Christmas blessing.

Over the past 20 years, I've had some wonderful Christmas celebrations with parts of my family, and they've made it clear that I am welcome to join them any time but not expected. More often than not over the past decade, I've chosen to spend Christmas travelling, mainly because I was employed and required to take annual leave at the end of the year.

I've spent Christmas Days in cities such as Hanoi, Toronto, Tainan (Taiwan), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Bandung (Indonesia), and Asunción (Paraguay). Sometimes with my travelling companion, sometimes alone.

My strangest experience of Christmas was in Latin America in 2009. Christmas there is understated because it is purely a religious celebration and not at all a commercial event. The absence of Christmas from public consciousness has nothing at all to do with the kind of political correctness in the US that Donald Trump is currently vowing to overturn.

In shopping malls, December is like any other month of the year. Decorations are only in churches and the homes of devout Christians. Paradoxically Christmas appears to be more prominent in some ostensibly atheist Communist countries such as China (though it is pointedly banned in North Korea).

While there were no signs of Christmas in the streets in Argentina and Uruguay, in Paraguay I saw nativity scenes (also called cribs or creches) in some public places. It's the particular tradition there, where the nativity scene is known as the pesebre. I took the photo above outside a bus station in the border city of Encarnación.

The nativity scenes there were obviously an indication of the exclusively religious nature of Christmas. But elsewhere it was different. I was in Montevideo a week before Christmas, and came across an early mardi gras procession. It had nothing to do with Christmas but was apparently quite normal in Uruguay.

In the public mind in these countries, Christmas is relative to other Catholic religious feasts. In Argentina, 25 December is a public holiday but so is 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Is the birth of Jesus that much more significant than his conception? Probably not.

On Christmas Eve in Asunción, the streets were deserted and restaurants were closed. Families were at home preparing for their own Christmas celebration and going to midnight mass. Eventually I found a hotel that was open and enjoyed a meal in the company other travellers from different countries.

It turned out to be somewhat anticlimactic in that we had a meal and a few drinks and then headed back to our various accommodation houses rather than looking for a church to take part in the celebration of midnight mass.

On Christmas morning, I recall lying in the swimming pool at the back of my guest house, somewhat more fittingly experiencing the solemnity of the day attuned to a stillness in the air that was breached only by the sweet sound of a choir singing Christmas carols somewhere in the distance.

I was intrigued and then dismayed and then intrigued again after I read this week that 'surreal' had been named Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year. It's a word associated with the early 20th century intellectual movement that gave artistic expression to Freud's theory of the unconscious.

It turned out that the popularity was more about finding a word - any word - to describe the astonishing nature of Donald Trump's election win in November. 'Surreal', it seems, has been hijacked as a stronger alternative to words such as 'bizarre' or 'oddball' that were considered inadequate to describe the unprecedented nature of the Trump victory.

It's true that it has tended to be used in a grasping or dismissive manner that diminishes the precision of the original meaning. That was the source of my dismay. Also it is obviously a publicity stunt by the American dictionary company, based on nothing more than statistics of the volume of word lookups on its website.

But I was curious to explore further and went to The Conversation, where I found an excellent explainer article. It was from February and predated the spikes in lookups for 'surreal' on the dictionary website.

The article depicts surrealism as a 'revolution of the mind' that freed the mind from rational and utilitarian values and constraints, in favour of the 'transformative possibilities of the imagination'. It has surrealism 'reconciling the contradictory states of dream and reality into a more potent form of reality'.

This does ring true for me, and indeed it is very exciting. It could be used to introduce compassion into Australia's asylum seeker policy. But I am more disturbed that it is being exploited to affirm the Trump victory as a good thing.

According to the new logic, America and the world are freed from the odious system that Clinton represented and have entered an imaginative transformation that will reconcile the dream of 'making America great again' with the fearful reality of a civilisation that lost the War Against Terror instigated by Trumps opponents. That is surreal.

For a while Fairfax has made it clear that the days of its Monday to Friday print editions of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald are numbered. Yesterday I heard a rumour sourced from a Fairfax staff member that weekday print will end in February.

After a gap of a few years, I re-subscribed to the Herald print edition earlier this year because I wanted to be on board for the historic end of the paper's 186 year old tradition of daily print.

I've enjoyed printed newspaper delivery for most of my life. It was a childhood ritual to wake up early and race my brother to the front door. The one who was first to pick up the papers would be able to read his paper of choice.

We had two papers delivered - the Melbourne Sun (now The Herald-Sun) and the Albury Border Mail (owned by the one family for 103 years until it was bought by Fairfax in 2006).

The first to the door would always choose the Border Mail ahead of The Sun. We would have both papers read before our parents woke up and we had to hand them over. When there were fights, my mother reminded me that we were lucky to be able to read the papers before our parents.

When she was growing up in Ballarat and Bendigo, the children in her family were not allowed to read the paper before their father got to it. He had to have both papers together in mint condition, which hints that there might have been an element of almost religious ritual to the practice of reading the morning paper.

Living in various domestic situations and locations over the years, I remember there was always a dilemma about whether to separate pages of a single newspaper so that several household members sitting around the breakfast table can read it at once.

It would sacrilegiously break the integrity of the paper, but at the same time it would represent an act of solidarity. The other less satisfactory way of sharing the paper was to read it together in the hope that our interests and reading speed will converge.

Today it is less of a problem, as my breakfast companion reads the paper on his tablet while I read the print. As soon as this February, we will both be reading the paper on our tablets side by side.

I've always been an early adopter and a keen follower of media convergence. I remember back in the mid 90s when a Fairfax journalist friend laughed at me after I told him that I was reading Herald articles 'online' on my computer.

These days I'm keenly aware that both our print and electronic media consumption rituals can be very empty. The number of forms and outlets grows as fast as the quality evaporates and there is little point in continuing to subscribe, or even click on articles without paying.

We had a right to be impressed with the contribution of Herald investigative journalist Kate McClymont and her colleagues to the achievement of justice in this month's jailing of crooked politician Eddie Obeid. But sadly that kind of journalism is on the way out, and it has little to do with whether it appears in print or online.

Last week, blogger John Menadue - whom I assist - criticised journalists for showing little interest in exposing the debacle of the building of our next generation of submarines. Yesterday a Fairfax journalist emailed back saying that the specialist reporters needed for such tasks 'have become a breed nearing extinction'.

Today's reality is that even electronic forms of the old mastheads like the Sydney Morning Herald face extinction as most consumers source their news from Facebook. What is even more threatening to the health of our democracy - and indeed our entire civilisation - is the trend that has the emerging genre of fake news receiving equal billing alongside actual news.

Australia's major state art galleries have blockbuster exhibitions for the summer holiday season. In November I saw the David Hockney at the National Gallery of Victoria. Yesterday I went to 'Nude: Art from the Tate Collection' at the Art Gallery of NSW.

I'd found the Hockney quite mesmerising, as I did the Tatsuo Miyajima at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney last month. But there were no surprises at the 'Nude' exhibition. It was as if the Tate had tagged their nude paintings and sent them to Australia, and they were exhibited in chronological order.

Although it was predictable, I had quite an enjoyable afternoon. The two works I liked best were Pierre Bonnard's 'Nude in the Bath' 1925 (left), and Barkley L. Hendricks 'Family Jules: NNN (No Naked Niggahs)' 1974 (right). Unlike the exhibition as a whole, these works challenge our conventional attitudes to nudity - the Bonnard depicts a cropped woman who was not a beauty while the African American man in the Hendricks is.

I'd been intending to visit the exhibition since it opened six weeks ago and was reminded to do so when I read a news story in the Huffington Post on Saturday morning. It was about resisting the overturning of conventional attitudes towards nudity. It featured the comments of a Queensland father who was angered after spotting nudists having sex on a beach.

He could have been a One Nation voter who doesn't like foreign cultures influencing ours. He made the interesting point that nudity in Australia 'promotes promiscuity', while in Europe it is 'part of the culture'. I agree with his analysis but I disagree with his insistence that we should resist change.

In a conversation I had last week, I was recalling how I was very fearful of nudity as an eight year old, much more so that the other boys in my class at school. Before my class went swimming at the local pool, I remember asking my mother to write to the teacher to say I couldn't go swimming. I was afraid of being nude or semi-nude in front of my classmates in the change shed. Thankfully she said no.

Now I am thoroughly unselfconscious when it comes to nudity. When I go to Japan and Korea, I seek out the traditional community baths (sento and onsen in Japan and jjimjilbang in Korea), because they are very relaxing and an easy way to experience the cultures away from other tourists.

After attending 'Nude' yesterday, I was thinking that the very idea of gathering together the Tate's nude artworks for an exhibition reflects the old Australian and Anglo Saxon attitude of nudity as exotic and not part of normal everyday life such as it is with Japanese and Koreans routinely going to wash and relax in the local community bathhouse.

From my experience of normalised nudity in Japan and Korea, I would suggest to the Queensland father that it is the Australian attitude of nudity as exotic or 'other' that promotes promiscuity, and not nudity per se.

Last night an SBS TV news report on Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte triggered for me a difficult memory from my own stay in Davao City in 1983-84. Duterte was quoted telling business executives that he personally killed people while he was serving as mayor of Davao City several times from 1988.

The memory is consistent with Duterte's narrative about the lawlessness that existed in the city at the time and is now fostered by Duterte himself. It is from my stay with a poor family in a squatter area of the city as part of a three month exposure or immersion program that I did as part of my Jesuit formation.

The family lived in what I recall was a two room hut that was one of many built on a wooden platform over a swamp next the Jesuits' Ateneo de Davao University High School, the school Duterte had earlier been expelled from for misconduct. One of their sons had been killed days before in gun violence. I remember noting that he was about my age (23), or perhaps younger.

I vividly recall seeing the body laid out in a glass top coffin in one of the two rooms. I remember thinking that it looked peaceful and dignified even though he would have died in violent circumstances. It was only the second time I had seen a dead body (the other being my father four years earlier). For the duration of my two day stay, mourners would come by to pay their respects, as was the custom.

I guessed that the family must have agreed to having me stay, some time before this tragedy occurred, and felt that they could not withdraw from their commitment. But they did not seem particularly embarrassed or concerned about this circumstance of my visit. They played it down. I'm not sure if that was because they were embarrassed or in some kind of denial, or if - unthinkably - it was nothing out of the ordinary.

It could not have been true, but I couldn't help thinking that they regarded my visit as more important than the need to honour their own son in the wake if his killing. There was so much I did not know about what had happened. They did not give details and I did not ask.

In fact I was struck dumb by it and did not want to know any more. After saying goodbye to the family, I did not mention it to anyone. It was an experience unlike any I'd had before, and I could not process it. The Jesuits in the university community where I was based would have offered me good support, but my instinct was to repress it. It was something that I just put in a drawer like other souvenirs of my three month experience, and I have never spoken about it since.

There was another experience that I did talk about frequently because it involved a minor shock that I could handle much more easily. I even used it as an anecdote to report generally on my Philippines experience after my return to Australia. I was staying with somebody elsewhere in the country and observed a pistol in the drawer of his bedside table when he opened it. He saw that I noticed and was shocked, and explained that it was necessary to have a gun handy. That was a memory I could process and in fact dined out on it.

Both of these memories are consistent with the violence and lawlessness we are now hearing about during the Duterte presidency. I spent quite a lot of time visiting tribal peoples with the articulate and outspoken Irish Columban missionary Father Sean McDonagh, who would generously and helpfully interpret Philippine society and politics for me. Central to his narrative was the refrain 'life is cheap' in the Philippines.

Another socially aware figure who would share his analysis with me was a young Jesuit Joel Tabora. I noticed from a Google search this morning that he is now 69 and currently President of the Ateneo de Davao University. He has a long and very balanced interview from six months ago in a national newspaper, in which he goes a fair way towards justifying what Duterte is doing.

The interview does add some perspective to what is occuring in the Philippines. I took it as a suggestion that our rush to criticise Duterte's encouragement of extrajudicial killings requires more nuance than we as outsiders tend to give it. It helps me to begin to make sense of my freshly triggered memory of the slain son of my 1983 host family.

Just about every day, I walk past Moore College. It is the theological nerve centre of the Sydney Anglicans, prominently located at the beginning of King Street Newtown, across the road from the residential colleges of Sydney University.

I've been walking past it for nearly 25 years. The college has been housed in a forgettable 1960s style red brick building. However over the past two years, the site has undergone the most remarkable physical transformation. The old building was demolished and replaced with a much larger structure that must be regarded as a stunning piece of contemporary architecture. The builders handed the keys to the Principal just last month.

Even after 25 years, my stomach churns as I walk past Moore College. I don't expect that to change, no matter how much I like the building. The 'low church' theology and attitude reflected in the Sydney Diocese is the bête noire of almost the entire worldwide Anglican Communion, and personally I'm absolutely prejudiced against Sydney Anglicanism as I perceive it (the movement, not the people, I should stress).

Broadly speaking, it has a strident emphasis on reading and studying the Bible over a traditional Anglo Catholic-style 'high church' ornate liturgy or Mass celebration. Low church Anglicanism has always been at pains to stress its Protestant (and non- or anti-Catholic) identity. So I guess, as a Catholic - a 'Roman Catholic' - I'm hard wired to dislike it.

But that's not what really irks me. Rather it's the attitude that appears to exclude those who do not accept its teachings. Its exclusivity.

Over the years, I have also walked past and observed the other Anglican presence in my vicinity - St Stephen's Church, in Church Street Newtown.

When I moved here in 1993, the parish was at odds with most of the rest of the Sydney Diocese in that it was regarded as liberal. It had a sign at its gates: 'We Support the Ordination of Women'. Around 2000, there was some kind of regime change, and the sign was removed in a symbolic action that was seen by locals as a regrettable u-turn in the hitherto inclusive attitude of St Stephen's.

My guess it that head office decided that Newtown, with its large proportion of non-believers and GLBTIQ and various other alternative lifestyle types, was ripe for evangelisation, and it had to conform to the norms of the Diocese. But the locals had felt at one with the inclusive St Stephens and it seemed to me that they did not care for the perceived changes under the new regime.

The exclusive style of Christianity that I react against is reflected in the attitude that you're either a Christian or you're not. It's similar to that of George W. Bush after 9/11: 'Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists'. It is just as prevalent in the [Roman] Catholic Church as it is among evangelical Protestants, and also within other faiths, most notably Islam.

If somebody attempts to herd me into one of the two camps, I will go with those who are against the so-called Christians. But the truth is that most of my values come from Christianity and I cherish my Christian faith. But it's a Christian faith on my own terms and my community of believers are those who accept me for who I am and are not interested in bringing me into their particular religious fold.

Today is the one month anniversary of my almost daily TinyLetter and its publication as a blog at michaelmullins.org.

The first blog was written soon after the shock election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. I criticised those protesting against the election result as doing exactly what Trump vowed to do if he'd lost, which is to cry foul at the 'rigged' election.

My blog had been passed on to a friend in the US, who reluctantly admitted Trump had been democratically elected, 'like many despots'. But he defended the protestors, suggesting that Americans would be 'in deep trouble ... If [they didn't] resist [Trump's] behaviour and someone who does not respect the constitution'.

Today I look at it a little differently. The protestors are not so much sore losers as engaged citizens who honour the nation's democratic conventions and are not willing to tolerate anyone riding roughshod over them, even if that person is the democratically elected president-elect.

Every day we are seeing evidence that this is exactly what Trump is doing. Overnight we had confirmation that the new secretary of state will be oil chief executive Rex Tillerson, who has no government experience and is compromised by his close personal ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin. A few days ago he named climate skeptic Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency.

So the question is whether to fight or despair.

My American friend, who is a priest, mentioned that he'd just presided over a liturgy for the Thanksgiving holiday and had led the congregation in singing 'We Shall Overcome'. This followed the recitation of a prayer written by Sister Joan Chittister that pointed to 'deep commitment to the common good' and praised leadership that respected the 'unity of differences' that eludes the nation at this moment.

Yesterday I was speaking to another friend in Australia who was disappointed with the cynical attitude to politics of a former colleague who'd proudly voted 'donkey' at this year's Federal Election as a sign of his despair.

I now consider that such donkey voters are unwittingly doing more harm to democracy than the protestors who cried foul at Trump's democratically legitimate victory. In ceasing their engagement with the political process, they are lending support to the unworthy candidates they despise.

Earlier this week, I had another conversation in which I reflected upon my own engagement with politics, in the sense that I have recently started to spend less time listening to audio podcasts about politics and more time listening to music. I would like to think that this is a sign not of my own despair with politics but an introduction of more perspective in my life that might lead to less one-eyed and more creative ways of engaging with politics. It will hopefully make me more curious about the 'unity of differences' that Sister Joan Chittister refers to.

The other day somebody asked me about how 'my Feldenkrais' was going. It might seem like an odd question, but it was actually a good one, especially the way they put it.

They'd remembered that I was doing weekly Feldenkrais classes over six weeks at this time last year. Part of me thought the question was a bit odd because I did Feldenkrais a year ago and now I'm on to other things.

Feldenkrais is a method of improving the dignity of human body movement, and our psychological state, through focus on connections between the brain and body.

My friend was wondering about the lasting impact of my Feldenkrais classes on my life. Whether I'd made it my own and it had in fact become 'my' Feldenkrais.

I'd like to think that the answer was 'yes', but I'd have to admit that it is half way between 'yes' and 'no'.

It's curious that, unlike dieting to reduce weight, all you need to do to enjoy the benefits of Feldenkrais is to bring it to mind. That's because Feldenkrais is essentially mindful movement. If you're able to make a habit of bringing it to mind - effortlesslesly, of course - there's essentially nothing more to do. It helps if you've done the course and can recollect what you did in at least some of the classes.

As if it's exercise for the lazy, Feldenkrais involves no special effort or anything that resembles pain. In fact my teacher Margaret would say that if what you're doing hurts, it doesn't heal (perhaps a subtle dig at other body wellness methods such as yoga that some people find 'punishing').

I have not heard it pitched like this to the lazy, but I'm fairly sure that Margaret would not entirely disagree with me, even though I think she would baulk at my suggestion that it's for lazy people.

She used to encourage us to think about it in our own way in order to make us conscious of our own movement. I remember she approved when I described Feldenkrais as 'artful movement', which is a phrase that meant something to me. While sitting in a chair, I sometimes ask myself whether I'm sitting 'artfully', or if I am slouching like an out of shape rag doll.

I remember that I was about to take a long distance flight to Europe and had the idea that I could turn my 25 hour captivity in my economy class seat into something more blissful and at the same time improve my bodily and psychological wellbeing. So I downloaded Margaret's audio recordings of her Feldenkrais meditation about sitting and, while inflight, listened to it on a loop for as long as I felt it was working for me.

My point about making Feldenkrais my own is that many people do dozens or more wellness or self-improvement courses during their lives and then promptly move on after each one of them. But if we're able to bring to mind some of the insights we gained, it's likely that we will enjoy their benefits all over again.

On Saturday evening I went to a musical, Nick Enright's Summer Rain at the New Theatre in Newtown. It's about a travelling family tent show and drought breaking rains breathing new life into a depressed NSW country town in 1945.

Lots of song and dance and emotion, with a little intrigue and enmity. I rarely go to musicals. I'm lucky enough to have a reality that I don't feel the need to escape from. But I'm very pleased I went, and so is the friend whom I dragged along.

A musical is a happiness pill, and happiness is something that none of us can get enough of. It's about the quality of our life.

The New Theatre is a small theatre and we were in the second row. At times the members of the cast would gaze into my eyes as they sang their melodies. They were hard at work attempting to instil in me a transfer of pathos and happiness and hope for a brighter future.

On Sunday morning I had in my consciousness the afterglow of the harmonies of the beautiful singing and the positive energy radiating from the expressive faces and gestures. I picked up the Sunday paper to find columnist Peter FitzSimons congratulating Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews for his push to legalise euthanasia in the new year.

I'm usually a supporter of progressive law reform, but euthanasia is a notable exception. My view might change if I or somebody close to me arrives in a place of utter physical and mental debilitation. But for now, what prevails is my strong and possibly fundamentalist religious belief that it is God that is the giver and taker of life, not our parliamentarians.

Of course I don't seek to impose my religious belief on others. But I fear that the utilitarian views of the majority will be imposed on me when the legal right to die becomes the (unlegislated) duty to die.

What I mean is that I can see that the time will come when the usefulness of my life is exhausted according to the measure of some form of economic rationalism. It's a form of eugenics. There will be a subtle moral pressure for me to take a pill to end my life, not unlike the moral imperative to offer our seat on the bus to a fellow passenger who needs it more than we do.

I would prefer to take a happiness pill, and to receive the community's moral support in my choice to do this.

Euthanasia advocates maintain there is absolutely no logical progression from the right to die to the duty to die. They are right. But what concerns me is the utilitarian moral duty to die, and that this will prevail against my own values concerning the beginning and end of life.

I may be naive in thinking that I will never get to the point at which I will want to choose to end my life. But I think it is also naive to assume that legal approval for 'voluntary' euthanasia will include the community's moral approval of the voluntary aspect of the legislation.