Letters & Stories
Extracts from the Morning Star
PRIEST PROFILE – FR MICHAEL GODREY – Feb/March 1997 Issue
I’m the scruffy looking one of the plethora of priests who float around this parish – and the new kid on the block. People asked me where I come from and I have no satisfactory answer: I was born in England, baptised in Kenya, began school in Ghana, ended it in New Zealand, and have now lived in three states in Australia. Check out the word ‘peripatetic’ next time you’re playing scrabble.
I’m married to Anne Penman and we have six daughters. Theology and literature are my two great loves. Put a book in front of me and I’ll disappear – God willing – into a happy trance. Yet I manage to mix it all with the non-booky people. My challenge in life is to take those wonderfully heady things that academics write volume after volume about and somehow make them accessible to the person in the street – or pew – or pub. And I make no value distinction between the three: street, pew and pub are all encompassed by the goodness of God.
God seems like a good thing to me. I do my best to keep alive what Bishop Bruce Wilson calls ‘the rumour of god’ in all the ambiguities of my life and to hear other’s stories about God, too. Perhaps that’s why I work at the religious department of the ABC – it’s all so diverse, this God thing. I love music, primarily Bob Dylan the folk-rock tradition, but really everything (except rap) from plain song to heavy metal. I can’t sing to save myself. I love netball – I have to with six daughters – cricket, and rugby union. I loathe rugby league. But most of all I loathe aerial ping pong – what kind of game can you play on an oval field with a spherical ball and eight goal posts?