Easter 2006

It’s Sunday night and I’m half watching a program on ABC television called “Who Wrote The Bible”. After watching thirty or forty episodes of “Frasier” in a row, it’s a welcome break.
That said, I do like “Frasier”. In fact, since subscribing to Foxtel, I’ve discovered programs like “Just Shoot Me”, “Will & Grace” and more recently, “Frasier”, are actually quite good. Ignored the first time around, these are now programs which I truly look forward to seeing on the schedule and can watch for several hours at a time. All of that said, I’m not sure if I could ever develop an interest in “Friends”.

Aside from television watching it’s been a reasonably quiet Easter. The weather’s been great, I’ve only had a couple of work-related phone calls, and I haven’t wandered too far from home, so I feel reasonably rested.

On Friday afternoon, however, Kate and I went to the Royal Easter Show. Although I’d been to the show earlier in the week, Kate was on her way to see her son Tom (a member of the band, Combat Wombat) play at a nearby music festival, I agreed to come along to fill in a few hours with her. Actually, three hours was probably enough to wander around, check out the livestock, see the district exhibits and to eat some yummy food (including a snow cone and a vegetarian pizza made by members of “The Community”).

I’ve seen “The Community” at the Easter Show before, and apparently they also regularly appear at folk festivals too. As you watch them making, baking and serving pizzas and barramundu burgers, you can’t help but wonder who or what they are. Although they have a brochure which you can take away, it doesn’t really tell you all that much. So I hopped online to discover they’re a socially conservative Christian community (though Christ is referred to as “Yashua” the Hebrew name), and they refer to themselves as “The Twelve Tribes”.

All of the men grow beards “because men were created with facial hair” and all of the women wear head scarves and modest clothing “because of their desire to be modest”. Clothing shouldn’t matter, but it obviously does in helping with the identification (including self-identification) of various religious communities. For that reason, I wonder why so many Christian communities have found themselves stuck in the lifestyle and clothing of the nineteenth century? Is it because that period of time has often marked the formation of those communities? Is it because that period marks the time before “the modern world”? I wonder if, in 100 years time, members of modern Christian communities will be dressing as they do now…?