Then I remembered my nine year old daughter beside me telling me of her hurt.... let me emphasise that.... her hurt, when her school principal, had invited the girls to alter some words of a hymn at school assembly, and it seemed to Debbie that only she had.  Debbie had felt it an important thing to do and was hurt that no one else had.  

Nine year old girls understand the issue of Careful Language, and feel the hurt of exclusion.  Even my five year old son can come home from school with an important letter, telling Mum she has to read it tonight, and say apologetically, "I know it says Mrs. and not Ms. on the outside, but just ignore that."  

So as we stood to sing the hymn I abandoned the angels and sang "women and men rejoice."  And Debbie talked to me on he way home about "silly hymns" that leave women out.  Careful language is not complicated and theoretical feminist whinging, which we can ignore because it really isn't important.  Even a child can understand it, and feel the hurt.

I came to an appreciation of the need for careful language through four main areas on my life.  I can't get the story in strict sequence and order as it happened, but it goes something like this.

After only a few days at school, I learned the power of words, and remember crying to my parents about the two big girls who were calling me names at the bus stop.  As a farmer's kid on a school bus full of army kids, I learned the cost of being different.  It didn't help in our school to be the child of a church going family either, and being clever, while it won me some grudging respect, also separated me out.  Well before I reached high school, I knew what alienation and exclusion were all about, even if I'd not met the actual words.  In a lot of ways school was a pretty miserable experience.

The second thing I learned about was the relativity of social conventions.  I went to Ernabella to work for an aboriginal community of people who saw life in vastly different ways to me.  I saw workers giving things to their relatives in the store.  I had been taught to call that stealing. I learned that there it was fulfilling a social obligation, and wrong not to.  Going in the other direction, I learned that Pitjantjatjara people were scandalised by the idea of such caring and respected institutions as Resthaven.   Fancy locking up your old people!

When Wendy's parents came to visit accompanied by her younger sister and 86 year old grandfather, the parents slept in on the first day.  But grandfather and sister went for a mid morning walk, and our friends all told Wendy, "We saw your Mother and Father!"  In that society, so different from our own, it was a fairly logical conclusion on their part ‑‑.... (we never told her sister.) 

The relativity of it all was summed up for me by Bible translator Anne Eckert, who grew up in North Carolina, a tobacco  growing state.  "I can't help notice," she said, "that back home it's a sin to drink, but OK to smoke.  But for my husband's relatives in the Barossa, it's OK to drink, and a sin to smoke."  At Ernabella I learned that much of what is right and wrong, even in theology,  is mostly just cultural definition which we create.  I became very suspicious of absolutes.

In Ernabella I also learned about oppression.   (This is the third area.)  I met some of the survivors of the white massacres.  I learned the devastating effects of the desecration of sacred sites.  I found the stock yards of the white cattlemen five and ten miles inside aboriginal land.  I walked the miles of boundary fence where it had been shifted away from the state border arbitrarily annexing aboriginal waterholes.   I met thieving, racist whites who were supposedly helping aboriginal people, and was confronted by my own racism.  In Alice Springs,  I met a deep and bitter racism, and saw aboriginal and white alike living in fear. 

And when I came home on holidays I found I needed to be a missionary for aboriginal people in our own churches, which are often deeply racist.  These people sincerely espouse the same oppressive attitudes as the cattlemen, and the townspeople of Alice Springs.   Starting from its culturally derived theology, and giving it divine status,  instead looking first at what is really happening, the church itself can be oppressive.

The fourth significant area is this:  Paradoxically, in the midst of the Ernabella experience, I was also a thorough-going Fundamentalist.  It was a theology which had promised answers I needed in life, although I soon found it was in deep contradiction to  the way I thought Christians should live out their faith.