Title: Re: Does “Christian Atheism” Really Exist?
Post by Lisa Jones on Oct 8th, 2023 at 11:35am
From the previous link :
Charming and unapologetic: Sydney’s Anglican archbishop isn’t afraid to be out of step with the times
Kanishka Raffel’s election as Archbishop of Sydney broke the mould. His predecessors are all of European descent; his heritage is Sri Lankan. Many of those who went before him were sons of Sydney’s Anglican dynasties, and attended its sandstone schools; he moved to Australia as a boy and went to Carlingford High.
But the most unusual thing about Raffel, in the annals of Christian archbishops, is that for the first 21 years of his life he was a Buddhist. He meditated, chanted Buddhist prayers, and went to the temple. He watched his mother – a doctor, who was widowed young – perform acts of charity to accrue merit for her late husband.
Anglican Archbishop Kanishka Raffel was born a Buddhist. But that all changed one hot, sleepless summer night, when he picked up a gospel given to him by a friend. By dawn, he was a Christian. “In a sense, it was kind of unavoidable,” he says. “I couldn’t do anything else.”
We meet at Spiced by Billu’s in Barangaroo, the closest we could find to Sri Lankan cuisine in the city on a Tuesday. Raffel orders curries, dhal and chutneys, toning down the heat after I sheepishly admit to being a spice sook. Raffel lifts his foot above the table and hoicks up his trouser leg to reveal a sock decorated with red chillies. “I wore them for you.”
The 57-year-old is accustomed to heat, both in his food and in his job. He was elected as Sydney’s Anglican leader a little over a year ago, and is presiding over a diocese that is increasingly at odds with the views held by many in the city, and even the views of its fellow Australian Anglicans, when it comes to women, divorce and same-sex relationships.
Parents at Anglican schools are fighting an edict from Sydney’s synod – a kind of Anglican parliament – requiring principals to affirm that marriage is between a man and a woman. Due to its view that men and women are designed for different roles in life, Sydney also remains one of the few English-speaking dioceses to refuse to ordain women as priests. Divorce is bad, too. A few years ago, a popular rector had to resign from his parish because his marriage ended.
Raffel is funny, charming and diplomatic. He has been described, even by some who disagree with him, as a nice chap. But he is also, ever so politely, unapologetic. Sydney’s Anglicans won’t be changing their interpretation of the bible to suit the times. “There’s no doubt we are at the counter-cultural end, rather than culturally accommodating,” he says. “This isn’t a matter of pigheadedness. We’re trying to follow Jesus.”
As the papadams crackle, we delve into Raffel’s family history. His father, Lorenz, was a supervisor on a tea plantation, whose parents were Christian and whose European surname was brought to the subcontinent by the Dutch East India Company. His mother, Lilamani, was a Sinhalese Buddhist doctor, whose upper-class father, also a doctor, played bridge with the country’s first prime minister.
Their parents did not approve of the match, so the young couple moved first to England, where Raffel and one of his two sisters were born, then to Canada, which was too cold for a family from the tropics.
In 1972, they moved to Sydney. Six months after they arrived, his father died of a heart attack. Raffel’s mother was alone in a foreign land with three children.
They lived in Carlingford, in the city’s north-west, where Raffel attended the local high school. “After my sister left, I was the only non-white person in the whole school,” he remembers. On the school’s debating team, he argued against his future wife, Cailey. The children would say their Buddhist prayers at night, and when Wat Buddharangsee opened in the inner west in 1975, they would attend on special days, such the anniversary of his father’s death.
Raffel was elected as Sydney’s Anglican leader a little over a year ago,
He remembers his mother as a woman of deep integrity, compassion and independence. “[She had] a Buddhist sense of caring for the poor,” he says. She would throw parties for children at what was then known as the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children, an act of charity that would accrue merit for her late husband. “The Buddhist idea is that you can do good acts, and then commit the good karma to that person,” Raffel says. “That was her expression of her faith.”
When Raffel was in his third year of an arts-law degree at Sydney University he decided to deepen his understanding of his faith. He pored over books in the temple library. He meditated. And he pondered the metaphysics of rebirth. “I was very committed to the program, as it were ... the shape of the ethics around wisdom and compassion and the eightfold path.”
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