Obama's coming

Obama will be in town this weekend.  It will be a big show feting a big world leader who comes to visit on his way to Myanmar.  There will be lots of people, lots of security, lots of excitement, lots of activity in Bangkok for his visit.  It will be an exciting and colourful event but it will also be chaotic as there will be the inevitable, and much more so, traffic chaos at play. 

I guess that reflects life.  Amid all of its excitement and happinees and successes, there is the other side, the chaos and messiness that we only know so well.  It is as if the two sides go together.  Maybe one side sustains us, while the other teaches us.

I have been reading a lot this week about the horrific child sexual abuse issue in Australia.  As I follow a side presented by the Australian Catholic Church, I have come to name that the 'powers that be' in the Church have set up over the last 30 years a 'medieval bubble' which has become so divorced from our reality of the 21st century.  It is a bubble from which you tell people what to do, while not listening to them.  It is a bubble from which one appears princely and arrogant and just so above people's everyday reality.  It does not seem to allow for an understanding of the chaos and messiness within which people live and have to cope. 

There is still that other side in the same Church that I also saw this past week, screaming to be free of this bubble, living in the 21st century, listening rather than telling and helping rather than controlling. 

I am sure there is a connection between these two big stories of this week.  The chaos of a Bangkok will cope with the glory of an Obama visit and will continue to go on after all the glory and excitement of his visit have subsided.  Such is life and its power to keep on moving!  Let's enjoy it!