He still uses the sign to communicate his beliefs, only with a little less spit and vinegar. Last Sunday, one side of the board read ‘keep Gosford nuclear free’, a position that is unlikely to provoke much controversy. The other side, however, has shown that he still does not like to throw a biased fist: ‘sit right on the terror list’.
“You’re trapped in the vortex,” he said of his time in the spotlight. “People appreciate what you say and you become one of the voices.”
“The middle ground is hard,” he adds, leaning back in his chair, exposing red socks under his black and white robe. “We only hear the extremes.”
With his short, prickly hair and tightly trimmed beard, Father Bower, 58, has something of the womb to him – another, or often sweet Australian by nature. He is not afraid to swear, make jokes about old hangovers or deliver a sermon barefoot. He is a priest at home in the mess of existence.
He grew up in an agricultural area north of Sydney, adopted and raised by livestock farmers. His adoptive father died when father Bower was 13, and his teens mostly worked on the land and as a butcher. It is a history he has never completely left behind; “The Ethical Omnivore” sits next to religious texts on his office shelf.
The disruption of adoption, a fact he said he always knew but only began to fully process in his twenties, motivated him to seek God and the priesthood.
“It was part of my search for identity,” he said. “It has a title and a uniform.”
Many of his congregation found Father Bower and the church where he has served as rector for more than two decades by seeing the messages on the sign outside – not by passing on the road, but by touching it on Facebook see.