The Beaconsfield mine disaster in Tasmania grabbed the imagination of Australians and in the process exposed just what a shallow people we are.

What was Beaconsfield? A miracle? A media freak show? A triumph of science and technology? An answer to prayer? A victory for mateship? A win for human endurance?

A Net surf of the hundreds of Beaconsfield stories comes up with three main interpretations - prayer/miracle, mateship, and heroism.

Forgive the big term, but it's needed and will be given a simple explanation, Beaconsfield was really an existential metaphor.

Any number of Christian commentators was happy to call the rescue of Todd Russell and Brant Webb a miracle, an answer to prayer, or both. For example, Beaconsfield Uniting Church minister, Frances Seen said, 'The miracle came. We've known it right through, the miracle was there.' and '.all our prayers have been answered.' Sister Frances McShane of Beaconsfield Catholic Church said, '.finding the two men alive was definitely the result of Masses and prayers offered for them.' Sydney Evangelist Richard Fortune, who runs the Out Of The Pit ministry to Australian miners, said the rescue was an 'absolute (sic) miracle'.

Such shallow theologising and spiritualising ignores the fact that Russell and Webb were rescued not by God, but by the courage and hard work of their fellow miners, and by the mining science and technology that plotted their underground location and carved out an escape tunnel to them. And it ignores the death of Larry Knight, the third miner. Didn't God care about Knight? It also begs the question of the nature of God's relation to the world; is it really magical, as these interpretations suggest?

Both Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kim Beasley interpreted Beaconsfield as a victory for mateship. 'Overall it has been a wonderful demonstration of Australian mateship and perseverance', said Howard.

Murdoch Press columnist Andrew Bolt said that Beaconsfield could have been a symbol of 'the courage of miners, the greed of bosses, the earth's treachery, the love of families, the skill of rescuers, the power of faith, or the will to survive.But we settled on mateship. Our Story was Russell and Webb keeping each other going in their cage almost 1km below the surface. It was their mates frantically tunnelling towards them, day and night.'

Mateship sentimentalism has long been a cheap Australian substitute for a hard won, tough spirituality. From convict origins and pioneer days, with their excess of men over women, to the footy and rugger scene of today, Australia has always been a blokey culture. With a will to dominate and always to avoid asking the deeper questions about tragedy, of which the Anzac myth is a prime example, the masculine spirit mistakenly believes it can extract deep meaning from mateship. As with Anzac day, the escape at Beaconsfield for the two who survived was celebrated by mates boozing it up at the pub.

'Rex Johnson' is probably not a name that rings a bell, it hasn't exactly been up in lights lately, and no one has offered Johnson a couple of million bucks to appear on Channel Nine. But in a bizarre twist of logic - not so bizarre when you consider that we live in a media culture that routinely mistakes celebrities for heroes - it is the passive victims, Russell and Webb, not the active rescuer, Johnson, who have been designated the heroes of Beaconsfield.

Rex Johnson was the rescue coordinator at Beaconsfield, the man who led the team of miners who, day after day, night after night, in constant danger from unstable rock or another seismic event, risked their lives blasting and boring an escape tunnel to rescue the victims Russell and Webb. Turning victims into celebrities and heroes into nobodies is just another example of Australian shallowness exposed by Beaconsfield.

What was really going on with Beaconsfield, and why it seduced and captivated our collective imagination is that we were the victims. We were, each of us, a Todd Russell and a Brant Webb, entombed down in the earth, expecting to die, hoping against hope that we might be rescued alive. This, of course, is the actual condition of us all, spiritually speaking, and is why we swallowed the 'heroes' interpretation so easily.

In other words, the Beaconsfield disaster is best understood as an existential metaphor i.e. as a symbolic parallel to our own situation as creatures with great zest for life but very conscious of our coming, eventual death. When Russell and Webb were saved we, too, were resurrected, which is why, from the Prime Minister down, we rejoiced.

It is unlikely that the angels in heaven rejoiced the way we did, for they would remember - what our rejoicing was partly an attempt to forget - that Todd Russell and Brant Webb, like the raised Lazarus of the story in John's gospel, will one day die permanently into the earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

What Beaconsfield should make us ask is not about miracles or even prayer, not about mateship and heroes but questions such as - What is life? What is death? What is God? What is God's relation to the world? After death, anything?

The gospel story about Jesus and Lazarus is, to say the least, intriguing. Jesus is portrayed as deliberately delaying his visit to the sick Lazarus until he is sure that he is actually dead. When Jesus finally arrives and asks for the stone at the entrance to Lazarus's tomb to be rolled away his sister, Martha, objects saying he has been dead for four days and will stink from putrefaction. This is not to be a rescue of the merely sick or of the entombed but of the dead.

Lazarus is a friend, a mate, of Jesus, but the storyteller makes it clear that this is not why Jesus rescues him, even though Jesus is sad and weeps. Nor does the author of John's gospel want us to see the raising of Lazarus as miracle mongering, as some kind of magical event merely to be gawked at or amazed about. Rather, as Jesus says in John's story, it is done 'for God's glory' and is a sign.

God's 'glory' in the Bible is God's Being-ness, God's Shining-ness, God's Living-ness, God's Energising-ness, God's Present-ness in the world. John wants his readers to understand that this is what can be seen in Jesus and is the real source of his power and love.

Tellingly, Martha in the story calls Jesus 'the one coming into the world'. In this story, as in the whole of John's gospel, God's relation to the world is mystical not magical.

Its mysticism is primal, evolutionary and historical. John wants us to see that in Jesus - genetically human, ethnically Jewish and heir to the ancient history and religion of Israel - God's glory is revealed, revealed in signs and sayings. Revealed in the very person of Jesus who is the Word of Universal Creation made flesh.

Of course John's gospel goes on to tell of Jesus' own death and resurrection. For John this is the sign of signs. Jesus is rescued from his tomb not to an extension of his life on earth, with permanent death to follow in due course - as with the case of Todd Russell, Brant Webb and Lazarus - but to life in God, eternal life.

Jesus' revelation of God's glory, John wants his readers to understand, is an invitation to us also to see God's glory, to cease from being wilfully and wickedly blind, to open our eyes, to receive eternal life now, to know death and putrefaction as mere sleep before the eternal dawn.

Is this sort of thing true? If Beaconsfield provokes us to ask such a question, regardless of any eventual answer, then we Australians could no longer be criticised as shallow.

Market Place

June 2006