Reverence.

I often dream of this strange little chapel. We'd pass it daily when we were working out at Blayney a couple of years ago. We had to stand in the fields around it for hours on end ensuring the bovines, ovines and equines didn't chew our transmission lines.

I would look at this shed and try to imagine the local farmers and miners who might worship here in all manner of weather. And the pastor who might have been tasked to tend the disparate flock, with their irreconcilable differences, generally resolved by a punch up at the Saturday night pissups in Orange or Bathurst and sheepishly absolved the next morning in this small sanctum.

I know nothing of worship outside my own selfish pursuits but this rusting corrugated shed took me back to possibly the only time I got 'it'. A mud brick and lime affair in Azille in France. I was staying with a friend who insisted on showing me what Catholicism meant to him. From the outside, that strange church looked like another of any one of hundreds of buildings in the fortress town that had been partially destroyed and mostly rebuilt for generation after generation through over a millennium of conflict.

Yet inside, you could look at the cracked walls and the hand-hewn pews and the rafters above, blackened by over a thousand years of locally crafted thuribles and you could SEE the hopes and desires and prayers - both answered and unanswered - of those remarkably ordinary and courageous people.

Later we walked to the outskirts of the town where my friend showed me the earthen remains of the wide moat and looked at me and said with a smile, "Now we'll let any barbarian in."

Who needs friends.

Of worship...