Dear Rowland, you may like to use this book review for your website or other discussion forums, regards, Mark

“Waterhole of Hope: A story of Sue Gordon Woods and St Joseph’s House of Prayer” presented and written by Annie Patterson. Spectrum Publications, Melbourne, September 2001. RRP $26.95.

Brisbane journalist, Annie Patterson, resigned her job in 1995 and joined with friends in a pilgrimage around Australia to explore her vocation in writing. Nine months later, she visited the House of Prayer in Goulburn, NSW, with a yearning to record Australian faith stories. What a story of faith she found there! The founder of St Joseph’s House of Prayer, Sue Gordon Woods, had felt inspired to share her story but needed a trained voice to project it far and wide. “Waterhole of Hope” is the resulting collaboration between Annie and Sue – an oral history of the community and its founder. Lovingly written and collated over four years, this book is a gift to the church as it strives to weave together timeless threads of community, spirituality and mission.

Like the Gospels, the story of the House of Prayer has touched many people’s lives, at times unknowingly. Set on the semi-rural outskirts of Australia’s oldest inland town, the former Catholic orphanage sits between a prison and a psychiatric hospital on the banks of the Wollondilly River. Over 25 years, the ‘converted’ building has become a place of cultivation and hospitality for pilgrims, lost souls, troubadours and ‘accompaniers’. People have brought their gifts with them to this lay community in the Catholic archdiocese of Canberra & Goulburn, drawing on traditions of other communities, such as L’Arche and Taize, other denominations, as well as creative talents in the arts, permaculture and hospitality. I especially appreciated how the book chronicles the relationship with successive Catholic Archbishops regarding such issues as leadership, vision and commitment. Living within the shifting gears of institutional change is, I know from my own experience, fraught with peril. The House of Prayer, however, was able to negotiate its way through difficult transitions as a tangible expression of post-Vatican II reform as well as a forerunner to what ‘church’ will inevitably need to become in the 21st century that is, a people’s way of relating and working together.

“Waterhole of Hope” also identifies the conflicts within community life emanating from differences in leadership, vision, worship and vocation. These are tactfully handled in the book, neither avoided nor glossed over. Shared history and vision can bind a core group and, inadvertently at times, turn an ethos of inclusion into one of fortress. The fresh air of creativity always, it seems, blew its way through the House, providing nourishment and hope. The disciplines of work, prayer and hospitality are also chronicled in “Waterhole”, as is the quest for an Australian spirituality grounded in the land, the weather, its peoples and its cultures.

Sue’s story of caring for her siblings after the death of their parents, the formation of her faith and her vision of Christian community is recorded faithfully alongside a ‘what happened next’ narrative that has become a signature way for participants to tell the story of the House of Prayer, individually and together. “Waterhole” gives an insight into how individuals are transformed by their stories of vulnerability and a compelling vision of healing into a community beyond themselves. You can’t ask much more than that.

Reviewed by Mark Young (Mark is a member of the House of Freedom community in Brisbane and attended three annual gatherings of Christian communities at the House of Prayer between 1987 and 1998).