Our Pentecostal PM's busy prayer patellas

In this acclaimed series we imagine journalists at last asking Prime Minister Scott Morrison questions that seek to discover who and what this mysterious Pentecostal person really is.

Are you sitting expectantly, your fantasy antennae up and twitchingly tuned? Then well begin.

Imagine this. It is next Tuesday's ABC TV current affairs program 7.30. The Prime Minister is the guest of the probing, fearless Leigh Sales. Leigh, understandably influenced by this columnist, has something up her sleeve.

Prime Minister, she begins, we know that you are energetically Christian.

And you've just told parliament that with Coronavirus monstering us I can assure you, my prayer knees are getting a good workout.

So Prime Minister I'm sure the nation would love to know what you are praying for. Do you believe, as literal believers like you tend to do of pestilences, that COVID-19 is God's punishment of mankind? If that is what you think, are you, in your prayers, asking God what it is we've done wrong and what we can do to appease Him?

Are you asking Him why (not being impertinent but just seeking clarification) He is administering a punishment that is unusually punishing for the frail elderly?

Leigh presses on, probing Do you pray to God for the quick invention of a life-saving vaccine?

And if you do, why do you imagine God would do anything to help medical science defeat a virus that (believers like you believe) He has created and spread to achieve His mysterious (but unquestionably right and righteous) purposes?

There is a suspenseful pause as the Prime Minister makes up his mind whether to as usual speak from his artful marketing-trained mind or whether, at last, to tell the nation (perhaps speaking in Tongues, the hallmark of Pentecostalists gripped by spiritual sincerity) exactly what is going on his very Christian heart of hearts.

The nation sits, quivering, its pulse quickened, on the edge of the national couch. The Prime Minister begins to speak.

And there, as is the necessarily teasing way with this series, we must leave the fantasy, hoping that it has given ideas to the nation's journalists.

Meanwhile, required to wonder what is going on in the Prime Minister's simple, Bible-stoked mind in these pestilential times, it wouldn't surprise if it resembles what is going on in the mind of Father Ananias. He is a Benedictine monk who practices his monkery in Patton, Pennsylvania, in the USA.

The online American Conservative (an Australian radical myself I read The American Conservative because I enjoy an intellectual challenge) had the good idea of interviewing a celebrity monk since of course monks routinely practice, all of the time, just the sorts of solitary lives that are suddenly being forced on billions of us. What useful advice might he have for us?

You might like to read Teresa Mulls whole long-form piece A Monk's Guide To Quarantine - but this is how it ends.

Teresa Mull asks "What might God be teaching us by allowing these present hardships and future ones?"

Father Ananias trills that "a monk's [schedule] rarely changes. I understand that people are upset that their schedules are being interrupted, but you need to just think God is asking that these interruptions be accepted by us as crosses. He asks that we look at them as opportunities for deaths to self [our selfishness], to accept serenely the current chaos and work through this by God's grace. This situation should cause us to be more dependent on God".

Should Scott Morrison ever pipe up about God's coronavirus policy it wouldn't surprise if he, the Prime Minister, thinks and says something similarly slippery.

This columnist has a proud history of taking on Canberra's world-class NIMBYs, shirtfronting them for their entitlement-driven bourgeois pettiness, their wildly-imaginative (We'll all be murdered in our beds! Our property values will be devastated!) unchristian unkindness.

When they haven't been shamed into silence by me, the NIMBYs' first comeback is always that if any threats to my own mini-world ever loomed in my own backyard I'd be quick to be as agitated as they are.

That was never true and now a new proof of its untruthfulness emerges in my joyful welcoming, to my backyard, of the pop-up coronavirus emergency hospital popping-up on Garran Oval, just a Frisbee's toss from my home.

Rapture! How wonderful it feels to have my suburb (usually so alienated and uncommitted) contributing in some meaningful way to the protection of our brothers and sisters from disease and death.

I knew that Garran's elite NIMBYs (some of Canberra's best, although of course Yarralumla's and Bonython's are the current champions) would seethe about this. Sure enough there is already some audible gnashing of Garran NIMBY dentures.

The complaint in one Letter to the Editor that the lost oval is Garran's only green space is not only not true but overlooks the fact that just across the road from Garran there is the immense green space (it is the size of Belgium) of Eddison Park. Then, a short drive or a bracing walk from Garran there is spacious Hughes Oval (the size of Lichtenstein).

For NIMBYs a slight inconvenience always seems a catastrophe. The inconvenience given anyone by the temporary unavailability of Garran Oval is the kind of inconvenience suffered by the bourgeoisie when they can't get exactly their preferred kind of caviar.