Annette McHugh lives in the Blue Mountains near Sydney with her husband Rohan and their two boys. With extensive experience of working in and around government, she currently works in the not-for-profit sector. Here she talks with John about learning, faith and wrestling with difficult questions; about the importance of public and political engagement, and about seeing the light of God in unexpected places.
Field Notes: Annette McHugh
Tell me about your family and your early life.
I grew up in the Blue Mountains, just outside Sydney. I had a Mum and Dad and a brother who’s a couple of years older than me. It was a really safe and secure home environment. Both my parents were involved in people professions: Dad became a church minister when I was in my early years of schooling, and Mum was a school teacher. It meant that we had a lot of connections and relationships in the community that I grew up in. One of my reflections as I’ve gotten older has been that, because they were in roles that brought them—and by extension, us—into contact with so many different people, from a young age I had an awareness of human frailty. My parents had a marriage that was quite beautiful: they really functioned as a team. Mum has always had enormous capacity to solve problems, manage situations, and Dad had a deep ability to have a lot of compassion for people. I think his example helped me over the years: we would see him operate with different kind of eyes for people. I had a lot of relationships with older people—some elderly people from the church—and other people who just cared about us. We had a quite a wide network of support growing up. So, it was a really beautiful childhood in many ways.
I lived away for many years, but interestingly at the moment we’re back in that community again—my boys had the first couple of years of their life in the same house I grew up in (for my husband Rohan, it’s a new place; he grew up elsewhere). My immediate family is still nearby: my brother lives nearby; my mum is here. My Dad passed away about 10 years ago. Rohan and I were married six years ago. We’ve got two little boys and another one due in February. I found it hard to leave here when I did so in my mid-twenties. I loved it, but once left I didn’t think I would return. After a couple of years away, I found it really refreshing to be in other places and I found it quite hard to come back. I wouldn’t have, were it not for Dad’s sickness. But now that we’ve got kids, there’s something quite amazing about the legacy of people who care about us because they’ve known me since I was born.
It’s pretty rare to have such stability of community.
I think so. When you live somewhere for a long time and you know people for a long time, through hard patches, things aren’t hidden. You know each other well and have weathered years.
What about your early life of faith? How did you come to be a follower of Jesus?
For as long as I can remember, I had a sense of God’s presence; of God being part of the world and part of our lives. Family, church, and a Christian School—all those contexts were instructive. It’s where I learned the faith. I also remember, in my early years, kids’ Bible books. There’s one that I’ve ended up getting a copy of for my boys which is very old-fashioned looking. It’s basically artworks that have a bit of narrative around them, telling various stories from the Bible—often stories that aren’t regularly told in Sunday school—I used to really love it. So, things like that were quite formative in my thinking.
At a young age I always had a sense both of God’s presence and of there being puzzling things and mystery. My parents were quite comfortable with the idea of a wrestle and weren’t troubled by questions. I always had a sense from a pretty young age that there’s a lot of depth to a life of faith that I probably won’t ever fully know. Certainly, as I got older, I had significant periods of wondering whether this is all a joke or something I’ve just convinced myself is true. I think particularly in my adult years I’ve let myself wrestle with those questions a bit more—and had lots of helpful guides along the way. It’s meant that faith really remains much like it was: you know, hopefully with more maturity and with more depth, but in some ways not unlike it was as a child. There’s a lot I still don’t understand, but it’s also incredibly beautiful, and an anchor for my life.
One of my teachers used to remark: it’s one thing to give your assent that the good news about Jesus is true; it’s another thing to put your life in the hands of the one whom the story speaks about. How has your faith has grown over time?
I spoke about being part of a close-knit community. There were things that were beautiful about that; but there were also moments of real failing and real sadness. I wasn’t uniquely privy to that as a minister’s daughter—people everywhere in the community knew about some pretty awful things that happened in churches. When I was 20, I went to L’Abri in England, and I found myself wrestling and asking: Is this even a good thing? Like, is church more damaging than good? Being in a different context, and hearing beauty, truth, goodness spoken about—it became compelling and beautiful, not just convictions to hold on to. Over the years, I think I also just discovered that there’s no other great answer—I saw the frailty of other belief systems.
Did you find that the way you prayed or engaged with Scripture changed?
For me, things I’ve learned have influenced me a lot. Looking back, I had a couple of really excellent teachers in high school who, to some extent, prepared us for what was going to come: they pushed us to ask difficult questions of text and context. Uni certainly raised a lot of questions for me. I studied Cultural Studies and Writing at Uni, and I loved text. I always felt like I didn’t know how to deal with the Bible with any kind of rigour. What changed this for me was my years in New Zealand. I was able to have a long, extended period of time being taught and mentored by people like Rod Thompson and Paul Henderson and Mark Strom. I came to love the Bible and really feel like I could handle it in a way that didn’t close off every question, but that illuminated it in a way it hadn’t been. I look back at those early adult years, and I think: Man, I benefited from so many different contexts where I had a chance to learn and to ask questions! I did a couple of summer schools at Regent College. All of that has given me a lot.
C.S. Lewis’s story of his own awakening to faith, and his description of the world being changed by faith—that resonates a lot with me. If I was to actually ever have walked away, I think there would have been a sense in which life lost a lot of its beauty. You know, there’s no such thing as a mere mortal. People are incredible; “The world is charged with the grandeur of God”. And although I haven’t always known how to make sense of that, I can’t imagine walking away from it.
Tell us about your working life. You’ve done so many things! When you look back, what comes to mind?
In my early working life, I had some really great input through think tank work that built in me a strong set of convictions—a sense of vocation—around engaging in the public square and in the formation of policy. Over a number of years, I’ve worked between not-for-profits and government. I don’t think I would do the work I do if it wasn’t for my faith. It’s not a personality driven thing: I’m quite private; I don’t like a fight. But I have a really strong sense that we’re responsible for the time we’re in and for the decisions we make. Probably a sense, too, of having to steward the opportunities that have been given to me and the input I’ve had. I would have been quite happy to do things that didn’t put me in contentious situations or that didn’t require any form of public leadership at all. But I found myself feeling compelled by the task. I am also aware of how human our institutions are, and the need for people to engage in them. The not-for-profit world particularly is in a really interesting time in Australia—probably in New Zealand and other places too. Most of it began in a different era; we’ve now got massive drops in volunteering and huge challenges for those institutions, many of which are now largely government-funded, particularly the larger players. They still have a real conviction about what they’re trying to do, but they’re under all sorts of pressure. I’ve really enjoyed thinking about how to play a part in looking at what the future of those institutions is and what they can contribute to the broader community. And in the government context, I do feel like we’re at a crossroads in a lot of decisions that are being made. It’s very uncomfortable at times to be involved in those debates, but it feels essential to me. In my work there has been some sense of just taking the next faithful step—that’s what I’ve done with most of my jobs.
Has there been a learning journey for you around being a Christian working in public institutions, not-for-profits or government?
I’ve been really lucky in the context I’ve been in that I’ve had a lot of permission to be me, and I haven’t ever felt like I’ve had to pretend that my faith isn’t what it is. I think it’s very challenging if you have a large media presence—it’s very hard for people to actually understand what your faith means. There’s a sense in which for people [in such roles] it does often have to become very private, because it’s so hard to make sense of faith in very short sound bites. My work has not been like that, there hasn’t been that pressure.
I think my faith is fundamentally what has prompted me to care about the world around us. I don’t feel like my faith gives me a whole set of rules and prescriptions that I have to make sure we implement—the genuine wrestle of it is there. There are things that it tells me about the way the world is that are non-negotiable; but that doesn’t mean that there’s some set of easy solutions to the challenges of today that I need to just try and get implemented. I’m interested in the wisdom of a wide range of people and what they can contribute. I’ve found the perceptions and the realities of politics to be quite different. In some ways, it’s as depressing as people think, and in other ways there interesting people from all the different tribes who have different convictions which are actually really interesting to wrestle with and nut through. Some of those convictions, I think, are very damaging! So, I’m not just up for finding some neat compromise. But I find the debate substantial and worthwhile, because I think it’s reflective of the community.
I have seen Christians engage in politics in such a way as to basically try and take over institutions and make sure that only people who hold the same convictions have the opportunity to make decisions. I found that really ugly to watch happen. At the same time, I get frustrated by the Church sometimes not wanting even to engage in issues that are going to affect our children and our grandchildren. This doesn’t just have to be the ones people expect the Church to be involved in–it’s also our tax policies, our migration policies—all these things are really important for where things head.
There’s also, I think, a lot of futility in political and policy work. A lot of hard work that comes to nothing. That can be pretty disappointing if you don’t have a sense that ultimately, the world’s not dependent on me. In recent years, becoming a parent, I don’t actually have much time anymore for the interesting debates over things that are going on in a political context—so much of my time is spent on Duplo. But I think this puts things in perspective. Even in the last week or so, I’ve been struck by the way sometimes what we think God’s calling us to and what we’re actually being called to aren’t the same thing. We can think that what we’re doing is influencing a particular area of society, and it turns out that what we’re being called to is to influence something very small, or our call involves being continually humbled. I realise more the need for that, and the gift of that too. You have to choose holiness. You have to let the Spirit do its work. I’ve got no idea where my work life is heading anymore and whether or not there’ll be any interesting opportunities in the future. It’s a real sense of just doing whatever’s in front of you now.
I’m really struck in what you’ve said, Annette, by the ways in which faith in Jesus opens up reality to show that it is so much bigger than our ambition, so much bigger than our ability to shape society after our own image. So, I’d love just to look at that big picture now. Your life has been reshaped quite dramatically in the last six years—getting married, becoming a mum. Such things change your perspective, open your life to the big picture.
We’ve got three-year-old twins, and we had a really scary pregnancy, where from 24 weeks I was in hospital and we were told that any day one of them was likely to die. They were born at 32 weeks, and they’re healthy and fine now. But in that period of time, before they were even born, I had to let go of being able to do anything really. Their life was not in my hands. In some ways, it made parenting very difficult for us, but in other ways, it was a real gift to me to have to let go of a lot of things.
I was delighted when you suggested that we do this interview at six in the morning, because in this edition of Common Ground we’re reflecting on the Church as a morning people—an Advent people. When you think about God’s light coming to a darkened world, what comes to mind?
In my earlier years of faith, I was always much more drawn to [the doctrine of] the incarnation than anything else, because of the upside-down nature of the Kingdom of God and this sense that it turns all our expectations about life and about power upside down. I still find the Christmas story and the sense of God being genuinely with us deeply comforting. The most encouraging moments for me over the years have come from really unexpected places. I was working in the UK in Westminster, but spent a lot of time out in communities around Britain that were quite troubled, looking at charities that were doing work in those communities. And one week, I was at some function in Westminster with people who were very well educated and in privileged positions, and a [Gerard Manley] Hopkins poem, “God’s Grandeur” got quoted. Later that week, I was at a homeless shelter in the Midlands, and the same poem was quoted by a recovering drug addict. Those moments of light breaking in all over the place have been really striking for me. It’s often very unexpected things that wake me up and make me see with new eyes that there’s much more going on than I’m aware of. As time has gone on, I’ve learned not to unravel and piece together everything to make sense of what was confusing (because I never really get anywhere with it anyway!), but just to wait for those moments.
