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Going to the Movies

2012-01-20T10:09:00.002+13:00

We went to a couple of movies this week. First up was Tintin, about which there is not much to say. It is a wonderful rollicking escapist flick. It is great fun and thankfully doesn't try to be anything other than it is. The animation is superb, and all the little Herge details are there -f'rinstance: as a thwarted petrol head I have always enjoyed the fact that the cars, motorbikes and planes in the books are real ones, drawn with such draughtsmanlike accuracy that you can tell their make, model and year. And here, parked in the streets of Peter Jackson/Herge 's Paris were wonderful examples of classic Peugeots and Citroens and Rolls Royces, a small example of how perfectly the film captures the look and, more impotantly, "feel" of the books

Then, last night, seeing as we had the 3-D glasses, we went to Hugo, Martin Scorcese's adaptation of the book The Inventions of Hugo. Like Tintin, it is largely computer generated, and it is set in Paris, but there the comparison ends. This might be based on a children's book but it is anything but a children's film. It is a demanding work of art, which, like all great art, requires the engagement of the viewer's emotional, intellectual and aesthetic capacities. The story is about a young orphan boy living in a strange world built inside the walls of a Paris railway station. It is a beautiful film in every sense of the word and I found it profoundly stimulating and moving. There is a superb cast, and the acting is as good as you will ever see: look, for example, at the pathos and vulnerability Sacha Baron Cohen brings to the character of the villainous station inspector; or, the reaction shots of Asa Butterfield in the title role in the last minutes of the film. How does a child portray such subtle and complex emotions with such precision and skill? By being directed by a genius, that's how.

For this is a work of one of the greats of the modern cinema, who, through the application of modern technology, is able to surpass limits and make precisely the film he wanted to. It's a much overused word, but I suspect this film may well prove to be Scorcese's masterpiece. Part of the film is about the changes wrought by a new art form, the movies, and here Scorcese has used a new development in the art form, 3-D, not just to enhance the sort of films he has made before, but to move the medium in a whole new direction.

It is a film about
- Loneliness and the transforming power of love. Every single one of the characters we encounter in the film is lonely; each in their own way isolated by events outside of their control. Each ends the film transformed by giving and/or receiving love
-The movies. This is a loving tribute by Scorcese to the art form he has given his life to. Embedded within it is a small potted history of the invention of cinema and a biopic of Georges Melie, pioneer filmmaker and the father of special effects. There are tributes too numerous to mention to classic silent films.
-Our relationship to machinery and the idea of the universe as a machine.
-Dreams and their ability to transform us and the world we live in

Hugo has a dreamlike quality to it, and it is laden with imagery and allegory, some of it screaming for attention, some of it subtle, all of it intelligently and masterfully done. f'rinstance: trains are a recurring theme. They are huge and powerful and move us from place to place, and are thus are symbols of the great forces which animate our lives. There is also the historical fact that the first movie ever made was of a train, so trains and dreams of trains and the fact that the movie is set in a station all saturate the film. Machinery, and more specifically clocks are another symbol. There is a breathtaking opening tracking shot, an amazing implementation of 3-D and utterly impossible without CG, down along the railway platform and up to the station clock, where Hugo's eye is peeping out from behind the numbers. So, we have this clock face: a face which everyone in the station looks at, but no-one sees the face behind the face looking back, appraisingly, at them. At the heart of the film is an automaton; a mechanical man who is only activated by a heart shaped key: an icon of the whole film, really.

This is not just a good film; I think history will show that it is a great film. Certainly I shall see it again, if only to catch up on the thousand details I must have missed. Sure it will be out on DVD before too long, but really, unless you have a very big screen at home with the ability to show 3-D, this is one you should only ever see from a big cinema seat with a decent coffee to hand and a pair of ridiculous spectacles perched on your nose.

Karitane

2012-01-01T17:45:00.002+13:00

First day of the new year. First walk. First photos.

We walk up and across the almost familiar track to where the clay was dug for kokowai, the blood-ochre for decorating and protecting important places. The air is sticky warm under the gray sky. We climb the sharp ridge and stand where blood was spilt, not gathered. Here, many have met their deaths: this was once a pa and the battlements ran past where our feet are planted high above the surf. In ancient times justice was meted by throwing people from here; and now a bunch of flowers marks another, more recent grief. We look for gannets falling from the sky but see none. Instead, I feel the old sad ones, the fallen, around me. I have no fear of them, nor they of me.

We walk back.

There are wildflowers.

The signs sing.

Home Sweet Home

2011-12-31T15:13:00.004+13:00

Otago beaches. We're not short of 'em.

I have driven 40,000 km this year, and sat in far too many aircraft seats. In the end, the thought of yet another flight followed by a week or two in some rented room or other and days of eating commercially prepared food seemed more of a burden than a relaxation. So, we have been at home and Dunedin has co-operated very generously indeed: this is the warmest, calmest, driest summer that Dunedin has delivered since we arrived thirteen years ago. We have a comfortable house and a lovely garden. There are a score of beaches within a quarter of an hour's drive and a few, in fact, within a quarter of an hour's walk. We have a pile of DVDs, books and classy magazines. A few minutes away there is a vast shallow harbour and a boat shed containing a nice little sunburst. There is a jigsaw puzzle waiting for the rainy day which has, so far, failed to obey the forecaster's instructions and arrive. There is beer in the fridge and whisky in the jar. We walk or read or skype or pray or watch classy British TV or work in the garden or sit on the deck and admire the view. And I am so very glad that I am nowhere else.

The Reason for the Season

2011-12-21T17:21:00.002+13:00

I must say I am heartily sick of the whole Jesus is the reason for the season routine that I am supposed to be spouting at the moment. Let's get real! In solidarity with my distant pagan ancestors, I have a decorated tree in the corner of my living room and over the next few days fully intend to indulge in the ancient, pre-Christian practices of feasting, giving gifts and singing carols. What's more, I will be doing the whole darned thing on the Saturnalia, December 25. We humans had been celebrating in this way for centuries before we Christians wandered into the festivities, looked around, liked what we saw and surreptitiously forged our name on the bottom of the ownership papers. Of course it is all a load of pagan nonsense, but that's the point really.

Emmanuel. God with us. God fully present in the human condition, as much in the raucous celebration of the Saturnalia as in the witness of a peaceful sunset. As much in the worried crowds on Christmas Eve combing through the bargain racks on George St. as in the half hour of silent prayer. God is not, cannot be absent. Although, of course, our perception of whether God is present or not may change, that is about us and not about God.

When our Christian ancestors first observed our pagan ancestors making plum puddings and putting holly branches in their homes, and were told that all of this was a celebration of the great cycles of nature in which the new life of Spring invariably triumphs over the death of winter, their reaction was not to try and stamp all that stuff out. It was rather, to recognise that the pattern expressed mistily in the cycles of the seasons derived ultimately from the God who made the Heavens and the Earth; and that it was expressed in its fullness and with crystal clarity in the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is responsible for the patterns of the planet he made, and therefore can be discerned in the celebrations of those patterns. The bit our Christian ancestors added was the flabbergasting insight that God is willing to come and be present with us in both pattern and celebration.

Emmanuel. God with us.

I suppose also, our Christian forbears added one thing more important. That is that God is always Emmanuel. Always with us. The purpose of a celebration is not so much to elevate one day above all others but to remind us that every day is an occasion for God to be present with us. "What separates us from God," says Thomas Keating, "Is the idea that we are separated." The celebration of a sacred day is one more small hammer chipping away at that most foolish and most obstinate of ideas.

A Sweet Little Chap

2011-12-19T21:57:00.003+13:00

Last Sunday I preached and celebrated the Eucharist at St. Nicholas' Waverley. As is their custom (they have done this for all the bishops in recent history), they presented me with this: a little sugar bishop who looks remarkably like the old bloke in the mirror. He is, apparently, fashioned around a chocolate rugby ball, so the shape is very authentic indeed. My daughter in law makes beautiful cakes but I am absolutely certain she has never made a bishop. I will ask her how I can preserve it, as for a number of reasons, even though we are entering the sugar ingesting season, I don't want to eat it.

I am continually astonished at the kindness and generosity of the people of the Diocese of Dunedin, and last Sunday in particular, of the Otago parish and of St. Nicholas.

Swimming

2011-12-12T12:55:00.001+13:00

Yes I know that if you've had much to do with me over the past couple of months I've shown you a thousand pictures of my grand daughter, but just before you nod off, here's one more. This one was taken about 6 weeks ago when she was two months old, and she is, as you can see, underwater. Her eyes are open, she is holding her breath and, so I have read, if her mum were to let her go she would be able to swim to the surface in a completely co-ordinated fashion. Of all the photos I have of her this one maybe doesn't show off her cuteness as well as many others, but it fascinates me.

How is she able to do this?

She goes weekly, along with about a dozen or so other children of her age to swimming lessons, but nobody taught her the necessary skills to survive underwater; she was born with them. And this is the fascinating bit. Somewhere in the long evolutionary history of our species it was necessary for new born babies to be able to survive in the water and consequently a whole suite of related behaviours became genetically imprinted: holding breath, opening eyes, moving in a rudimentary dog paddle, seeking the surface, grasping. Desmond Morris theorises that our species was, for a period of its development, aquatic; that our lack of body hair, the distribution of our sub cutaneous fat and these particular instincts point to a time when we spent much or even most of our time wading or swimming. Other palaeontologists note the behaviour of the great apes when they are in water and speculate that the necessity to wade in some ancient time of great climate change led to the development of our upright stance. Who knows? but it makes sense to me. At only a few weeks old Naomi (and of course other babies) will startle and splutter and look concerned if water is splashed in her face, but will emerge from complete immersion without the slightest trace of concern but with, to the contrary, every sign of enjoyment.

Whatever their specific genesis, these instincts are a remnant of the long path trodden by our species through goodness knows what difficulties and obstacles, from the trees of the African forest to Beethoven and iPhones and heated indoor swimming pools. Naomi's swimming lessons will help keep her safe in the water and perhaps help her also, one day, to develop her mother's prowess as a competitive swimmer. Be that as it may. She swims for fun but her long forgotten ancestors did it to survive. Her retention of their skills is an awe inspiring reminder that we are in process: individually and as a species. We come from a forgotten but still present past and the path from then to now can be intelligently guessed giving a sense of the direction and trajectory of our as yet incomplete evolution.

Red Billed Gulls

2011-12-05T16:02:00.001+13:00

A few weeks ago I was sitting in a cafe in Sumner, idly looking out through the window at a flock of red billed gulls. Amongst the group of a couple of dozen or so there were two who were in the process of hooking up for the upcoming breeding season, and I thought of some lines from a song by Crash Test Dummies: How does a duck know what direction north is? And how to tell his wife from all the other ducks? Two pretty much identical gulls had decided that the other was the one they had been waiting for all their life and they were setting up the pre nuptial contract. To a non gull such as myself it was a bit mystifying how they had made their choice, and how they were going to maintain it for long enough to get the eggs laid; and indeed, which of them was going to do the laying and which of them the other bit. But they knew what they were doing.

The first thing they did was to clear a circle of about two or three metres across of any other gulls, and they both policed their little vacant dance floor with noisy rigour. Then, once they were clear of distractions they played a little game of Simon Says: racing about with their heads at funny angles, fluffing their feathers, squawking, running back and forth. One would start and the other would copy exactly;I think they had turns at being leader, but who can tell?

As I was watching them another pair of gulls landed. They soared in side by side and dropped neatly down onto the runway from about a foot in the air in a swift, perfectly executed little landing manoeuvre, the two of them absolutely in sync. And then they stood there, side by side, still absolutely in sync. One of them stood on one foot and instantly, so did the other one. One picked at a chest feather and so did the other. One looked left and both heads turned. One ran a little to the right and they both moved together.It seemed that the bond between them was not based on the particularly attractive curve of a jawline, or the length of a thigh but on something more ephemeral: some sort of psychological, psychic even, linking. The formation of such a bond makes sense of the little pairing up dances, and the clearing away of other gulls who might interfere with the linking process, and it is not so spooky-action-at-a-distance-ish as we more brainy bipeds might assume.

When we humans are in rapport with one another we mirror one another. When we are deeply engaged with one another, we will walk in pace, and speak with the same rhythms and using similar vocabularies. We will breath at similar rates and our body languages will be similar. This is something taught in counselling classes, but unless you are actively looking for it, it is completely unconscious: we do it quite naturally and unselfconsciously, and we use it to bond together in ways that are only slightly more sophisticated than the seagulls. When we want to increase the efficiencies of a team doing hard physical work we sing shanties or spirituals or we chant; and to build a sense of communion with one another we do things in sync: we sing in choirs and engage in the inanities of ballroom dancing.

How does the duck know... how to tell his wife from all the other ducks? the same way I guess that two friends silently know to turn left at this corner when they are walking beside the river or the alto knows that the overall sound will be improved if she sings just a fraction softer. The beauties and power of deep communion go further down the psyche than mere logic, and further down the ladder of creation than we civilised beings might have assumed.

Soup for the soul

2011-12-03T18:28:00.001+13:00

The more astute amongst you will have noticed nothing: ie the sum total of activity on here for a few weeks. Over the past month or so I have discovered new depths of meaning to the word "busy" which has meant that on my weekly sabbath I have been able to muster the energy to wander alone down an empty beach and drink in the strange quality of light as the weather shifts from insistent Northwest to sulking Southerly but not for anything else. It's nothing to complain about. I want things to change and many of the things I am involved about are because of present or imminent change, and it's all starting to ease back a little as the holiday season approaches.

Yesterday I had a gentlerday. I drove to Invercargill, had a chat with a prospective ordinand, talked to a parish about a prospective new ministry arrangement, talked to a techie about a prospective change to the diocesan website and drove home again. In between chats I visited the soup kitchen at St. Johns.

Every Friday between 11 am and about 1 pm over 100 people drop into the old hall at St. John's Church in the main street of Invercargill. They are seated comfortably and given a free bowl of very good soup (yesterday: vegetable or pea and ham) a couple of bits of toast and a cup of tea. A small group of parishioners make the soup, serve it and clean up afterwards and some of them are, not to put too fine a point on it, not exactly spring chickens. They do it because, as in any other city, Invercargill has its share of vulnerable people and the regular as clockwork ration of nutritious food and a comfy place to sit for a while provides a little anchor point in the day for them. It is a safe place. A harbour for those who are more than usually storm whipped. I sat and ate my vegetable soup and toast with a young woman who could not make eye contact with me. There was a group of aged bikers covered in tats and a young man I guessed to be the victim of brain injury. A friendly bloke about my age seemed to be there as much for the company as the food. The staff seemed to know them all, and engaged in familiar banter as well as the occasional more significant conversation. It was hard work for them as they served these fellow children of God. "go forth from this place and preach the Gospel, and if necessary use words" is a quote whose provenance I don't know but whose fulfillment I saw being lived out yesterday.

A Failure of Nerve

2011-11-09T09:56:00.002+13:00

The two books which have shaped my ministry more than any other are James W Fowler's Stages of Faith and Edwin H Friedman's Generation to Generation. So, when Stu Crossan mentioned in passing that he was reading the book that Friedman was working on at the time of his death ten years ago, I immediately hotfooted it off to Amazon.com and got myself a copy. I read it quickly and am writing this without the book in front of me because I have already lent it to someone. It's that good.

A Failure of Nerve is about leadership and Friedman's thesis is quite simple: good leadership, he says depends less on expertise and data than it does on the maturity of the leader. He defines maturity as development on two parameters, a) self differentiation and b) the ability to take responsibility for one's own emotions. He argues that many organisations are profoundly anxious and, of course, provides analysis of the characteristics of an anxious organisation and the factors which keep them that way. His penetrating assessment lays bare the workings of many of the families, parishes, dioceses,local bodies, governments and corporations I am familiar with. His assessment of the leadership models which anxious organisations gravitate towards, with their overarching concerns for safety and empathy and their endemic antipathy to risk, I found illuminating and reassuring.

Particularly helpful is the analysis of the role of leadership in an anxious system as one of being rather than doing. I'm not sure if the phrase "The non anxious presence" originated with Friedman but it certainly sums up his thesis. Able to own her own reactions and assured of her differentiation from the the organisation she leads, the leader is able to set and maintain direction, and her equanimity will have a profound effect not just on those with whom she immediately deals, but, through the working of systemic process, on the whole organisation.

This is quite a flawed book. The final few chapters were written after Friedman's death by close colleagues working from his notes. These last pages tend to repeat material better expressed elsewhere in the book, and which are found more fully and cogently argued in Generation to Generation. The whole book reads like an early draft but the ideas are profound and in the early 20th Century quite radical and counter cultural. It is a powerful and potentially life forming book that after a fortnight I am still working hard to process.

Baby Photos

2011-10-20T21:58:00.003+13:00

My son Nick is shaping up as a pretty good photographer, as these portraits of Naomi testify. And yes, he did take the one with him in it.

But my personal favourite is this one of Charmaynes:

Grand Daughter

2011-10-20T17:58:00.005+13:00

I know it's been a while since I posted, and I'm sorry about that, well, sort of, but I've been away: on the West Island. Sydney is a beautiful city, especially at this time of year, what with the flowers and birds and harbour and lack of heat and everything, but the real reason for nipping over there was not the prospect of time in one of the world's great cities. It was rather, the company of someone I had never met before, yet who has as strong a call on my time and affections as anyone else on the planet: my new grand daughter, Naomi.

Clemency and I were only gone a week, but somehow it felt like a month and for all the right reasons. For the first time in a year or more I felt I could let go of my role and forget about emails and just be. We stayed in the Australian club, which was very nice in a buttoned leather, chandelier, stripy wallpaper, tasteful paintings on the wall kind of way. They let me in, no doubt much against their better judgement, because I am a member of an affiliated club here in Dunedin. It was a pleasant ten minute walk from Nick's apartment, and within a few yards of the botanic gardens and art gallery and downtown, so it was all quite convenient and lovely. We did the usual sort of stuff, wandered about taking photos of things, rode the ferry to Manly, had picnics and held our baby. Which was also all quite convenient and lovely.

Naomi has sharp, intelligent eyes whose shape echoes her mother's Asian heritage and whose colour echoes her father's Celtic one. She has a well defined rosebud mouth, pale skin and auburn hair and her mother's fine, long, beautiful hands. She is set, in other words, to capture quite a few hearts in a couple of decades time as she has already done to her grand fathers' and yes I have put the apostrophe in the right place. She is growing up in the middle of a multi generational family; amongst people who will give her a gift beyond reckoning: the certain knowledge that she is loved.

I did my bit. I held her and talked to her and reacquainted myself with the duty of changing soiled nappies. And for a brief time, perhaps a quarter of an hour, I was rewarded with an amazing treasure: she looked at me and smiled and wordlessly enquired who I was. It is an affirming thing to be seen and known, but especially by someone so utterly undefended and pure.

I came home via Hamilton where I was scheduled to speak at the Waikato Diocesan synod dinner, and it seemed I had been away for months. I flew back into a sunny and crisp and green Otago feeling somehow older and bigger and more in tune with my context. It's amazing the way the world can shift in just one glance.

Surprised by Jane

2011-10-01T17:42:00.004+13:00

I went to see Jane Eyre a few nights ago. I've never much liked the book, but obviously some people do as there seems to be a new and improved version of it on TV about every other month. So, I was a reluctant attender, but I didn't stay reluctant for long. The film is superb, with everything in place that the Brits usually do so well: casting, cinematography, editing, costumes, lighting, production values. Mia Waskowska was a tour de force as Jane:believably repressed and timorous and magnetically enthralling all at the same time. It was in fact, so gripping that I was prepared to reconsider my long standing prejudice against the book. I came home, downloaded a (free) copy onto my shiny new Kindle and reread the thing for the first time since (I think) 1971.

I found it hadn't improved much as a novel in the intervening 40 years; the sifty, devious, manipulative Mr. Rochester was never someone who appealed, and neither, for that matter, was stoical, unsmiling little plain Jane, and the melodramatic plot didn't even try to be believable. But none of that really mattered because, as I read, it slowly began to dawn on me what the book was all about. In some senses, the book isn't really a novel at all; it is, rather, an extended thought experiment on the nature of marriage. The book moves along its convoluted course driven not by plot and not by character but rather by the need to set up a precise scenario within which certain philosophical/ moral/ theological questions could be explored.

Think of Mr. Rochester's predicament: he is tricked into wedlock by his scheming father and finds himself in a marriage which is not actually a marriage in any sense at all except that of custom and law. His homicidal wife is portrayed without any single redeeming feature: debauched, crazed, bloated; she is in fact barely human. Then he meets and falls in love with Jane. The relationship with Jane is not based on any of the baser things which often draw people together: money, convenience, position, mutual attractiveness; it is rather a relationship of the deepest and purest love. It is a union of soul friendship between partners of absolute equality. Rochester has enough money for them to do as they wish. Neither of them has any family to hurt or offend. There is an idyllic house in the South of France where they can dwell together in privacy and peace. So! Should they catch the Dover ferry and live in sin happily ever after? Or act according to the letter of the law and expire separately in lonely misery?

Of course, this being one of the original pieces of chicklit, in the end they have their cake and eat it too as the crazy wife is conveniently killed off and Mr. Rochester stops running around in Gypsy frocks and becomes a hero and Jane inherits a convenient stack of money, but not before the intelligent Miss Bronte has done what she set out to do.

This is the heart of the book: after the scenario has been set up in all its improbable and intricate detail, she explores the nature of marriage and morality and love by way of a long and equally improbable and intricate dialogue between Jane and Rochester.

I had picked up this book, partially as a little escape from some of the business which presses in on me on every hand, and in the forefront of that business is the issue of human relationships with which the church is currently, slowly disemboweling itself. I read this odd old book, and to my surprise found myself being addressed on these very issues by an extraordinarily perceptive and intelligent woman whose world view was utterly, profoundly Christian. I was blindsided by God. Gifted with depth of analysis and a strangely contemporary applicability where I least expected it.Thank you Charlotte. Thank you God.

Of course most of this was missing from the film. The surface details of Charlotte Bronte's thought experiment were instead dressed up in mid nineteenth century costumes and shot in available light on the wild English moorland and turned into an engaging drama. And it's well worth the price of the ticket, even if you don't want to bother yourself with all that other stuff as well.

Kindle

2011-09-26T21:45:00.014+13:00

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.

I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats was always a problem and, convenient though they were, the 3.5" screens were never ideal. When I got an iPad a year or so ago, I quickly downloaded the free Kindle app, and tried out a couple of books. It was great! The purchase and selection system at amazon.com worked flawlessly, the software interface ditto, and there was that superb screen. But there were still issues. The iPad screen might be clear and bright enough for webpages or lengthy games of Angry Birds but an hour of reading close set text on it still left my eyes itching and watering; and while the iPad might be small and light when compared to a laptop, it is certainly not when compared to the average paperback book.

So a couple of weeks ago I got a Kindle, and so far, so good.

I ordered it online, $US139 for the wifi only version ( I couldn't see that the advantages of the 3G model were worth the extra $US50) I also got a nifty little cover with a built in reading light which means it landed, less than a week later, in my letterbox for a little over $NZ240 including postage. It was well packed and came with a USB cable for syncing and charging (There is an optional extra wall charger available on the Amazon site, but I can plug the Kindle's cable into my idevice charger, so it's not necessary). There was a small instruction booklet and a much more extensive guide included as an ebook on the Kindle itself. The device is made of sturdy plastic with a nice non slip, non marking surface and fits nicely in the hand. After an initial charge it took me about 5 minutes to learn pretty much everything about its operations.

It is very light, and inside its nice red leather cover is about the same size, shape and weight as an average paperback. The monochrome screen with no electronic backlight has a clear white surface covered in some sort of non reflective coating and in use it looks for all the world like a page of printed paper. It is easily visible in bright light, although in dull light a reading lamp is necessary, a bit like a book I suppose. I found that after about a week of fairly heavy use the battery had used about half its charge - excellent compared to the iPad but not quite as frugal as Amazon had indicated, but then again, the reading light built into the cover draws its power from the Kindle, and that also had had a fair bit of use.

The user interface is simple and looks a bit like the ones you used to get on Palm devices from the late 90s, but it works and it is very easy to use. I find myself using the thing more and more, and wonder how many paper books I will buy from this point on.

The pluses of the Kindle are:
* Cost. On one of my last purchases of normal books from amazon.com I paid $US39.59 for two books, and $US14.97 shipping, for a total of $US54.56. If I had bought them in Kindle format the cost would have been a total of $US19.98. Many books are available for very low cost or no cost at all. I should be able to halve my annual book bill (or, more likely,lets be frank about this, buy twice as many books).
* Convenience. The Kindle store is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and can be accessed wherever you have a wireless internet connection. With the 3G model it can be accessed wherever you have a cellphone connection. Order a book for the Kindle and less than a minute later you are reading it. Twice now I have followed a footnote to a reference that looked pretty darned interesting. I just needed to press a couple of buttons and the referenced book was sitting in my electronic library waiting its turn in the spotlight.
*Storage. The Kindle can store about 3,500 books. I can carry a whole library round with me.
*It's quite easy to highlight and make notes.
*No trees get chopped down to make ebooks, and no jet fuel is used up carting them about the place.

The minuses are:
*It manages to mimic the experience of reading a paper book fairly well, but it is still not the same thing. It's hard to glance ahead and see how many pages are left in the chapter or flick through to find that really interesting sentence you remembered from somewhere about a quarter of the way through.
*That wonderful black and white screen is...well... black and white. Books with colour photos don't do so well. (though of course they look great if you have the Kindle app on your iPad)
*The editing of some ebooks leaves a little to be desired. A book of poems by Walt Whitman for example was formatted in paragraphs like a novel, rather than in the lines Whitman intended. Mind you, it was a free book.
*For reasons of international copyright some books are not available in New Zealand - about 800,000 titles as opposed to over a million in the States.
*I will own and have access to the books for as long as I've got a Kindle reader, which, given the way technology changes is not likely to be forever. Mind you, given fading, worms and the indifference of my descendants, the same is true of my paper books as well, but with more cost to the environment.

Changing The Pattern

2011-09-18T21:03:00.001+12:00

From Friday night until today I wore a purple cassock and sat in front of those who have entrusted me with the guidance of their diocese as we shared together in the business of our annual synod. We met in the Invercargill Working Men's club and the local parishes hosted us and made sure we were undo another notch in the belt well fed.We listened as Bronwyn Miller delivered some not very encouraging news about parish finances, the likely effects of the Christchurch earthquakes on insurances and the implications of new earthquake strengthening requirements. We are, after all, the inheritors of many historic and beautiful buildings, often made of unreinforced masonry and often with other parties (local bodies, the Historic Places Trust) wanting a say in what we do with them. Many are a struggle to maintain even now, and their future utility will exercise our imaginations considerably.

For all that, the synod wasn't negative; not even a little bit. For myself, I am perfectly secure in the knowledge that we will be led into God's future, but of course we are not there yet, and we may well have to undergo a period of ambiguity and paradox as our old ways of being church gradually fade away while the new ways are not yet quite apparent. Our diocese seems to understand this, for which I am profoundly grateful.

We talked about some important things. Trevor James, the Dean, reminded us of the need to preserve the Trinitarian theology of our worship, and although his motion did not engender much debate it was timely, and in keeping with the new emphasis on the Trinity appearing in much modern theology. Perhaps the debate was muted because it came after we had discussed, with some candour two other pressing issues.

We discussed the Anglican Covenant and agreed with the suspicion of clause 4 which seems to be current in most of the New Zealand Anglican Church. By a reasonably large majority we do not want our church to subscribe to it.

We also discussed an issue that has been exercising us for many years now, the ordination of people in same sex relationships. Tony Fitchett introduced a motion asking us to accept that people in such relationships should not be denied ordination because of those relationships. The debate was lengthy, honest and at times illuminating. It was conducted in a spirit which was, for the most part deeply respectful; I had a real sense of people on both sides of the issue listening carefully to each other. In the end, an amendment was proposed which affirmed that sexual orientation was not a barrier to ordination, but which removed any reference to relationships. That is, the amended motion served to affirm the situation which has been the case in the Anglican Church for many years. The result was not unexpected, and while it was immediately disappointing for some, I think there was a lesson for me: namely that we have been going about this debate in entirely the wrong way. The argument over sexual orientation is in itself unresolvable, given its basis, on both sides of the issue, in deeply held attitudes to scriptural interpretation, human sexuality, the family, the origins of sexual orientation and a thousand other things besides. So, if the argument is unresolvable, let's stop trying to resolve it. Let's work instead on something that is achievable: learning to live with difference. We have, after all, been living, in real terms, with this particular difference for many many years now.

Distant Light

2011-09-03T17:52:00.004+12:00

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and St. John of the Cross writing of The Dark Night of the Soul allude to the same reality: that is, that God is unknowable and all our ideas about God, all our feelings about God, all our intuitions of God can only ever give us the vaguest knowledge of who and what God is. Whatever image of God it is that we hold between our ears is therefore largely the product of our rational, intuitive and affective imaginations. Paradoxically however, God calls us ever Godward and seeks us out. We are called, drawn to God and we make steady progress along the path to God and our knowledge of God, imperfect and fragmentary though it may be gets steadily clearer. As we progress along the narrow road that leads to life, there comes a point when we draw close enough to God that we must finally leave whatever it is we think we know of God behind. Like Reepicheep in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, we get to the point where the ship of all our theology and concepts and experience of God will take us no further and we must leave them behind and go on all alone towards the utter East. We then enter the cloud of unknowing or the dark night of the soul. At first this place is frightening. It is a blank place where there seems to be no direction or way points, but if we persevere long enough we recognise it as the darkness of that death without which resurrection is impossible. The cloud of unknowing can never lift, at least not in this life, but it does prove to be filled with life and subtlety and light that becomes, paradoxically, more knowable as we learn to let go of all knowing.

Which all sounds very high falutin' and spiritual I am sure. The dark night of the soul sooner or later becomes the lived experience and the great blessing of anyone who follows the way of silence, but it is a spiritual principle which has far wider application than just silent prayer. The dark night of the soul, or something like it, will need to be traversed whenever we seriously seek God's will. Often we will go to God in prayer, seeking God's approval for some scheme or other we have dreamed up, and come away from our prayer time buoyed up with the enthusiasm which generally precedes the disappointment of our plan's eventual failure. Invariably, if we are truly listening, we will need to enter a space that seems full of confusion and doubt and uncertainty. This is inevitable when you think about it: before we can be empty enough to receive God's ideas we have first got to let go of all our own old ones.

This dark night of the soul is seldom comfortable. We will often describe it to ourselves as a lack of vision or of imagination; as writer's block or confusion; perhaps as doubt or lack of faith; and it is usually at this point that we chicken out and dash back to the familiar comforts of our own reason and to things that we have tried or read about or dreamed up before.

I think the church in general is poised on the brink of such a dark night. Trusting that God is leading us onward into whatever it is that lies ahead of us, perhaps the prayer of our hearts needs to be not so much for certainty and direction, as for the trust (i.e. faith) to face and enter the darkness which must always precede the dawning of the distant light.

Grandfather

2011-08-24T23:16:00.005+12:00

Last night I became a grandfather. Naomi Yin-Leng was born to my daughter in law Charmayne and son Nick in Sydney at around 11 pm our time, and suddenly the world is no longer the same.

Thirty something years ago Nick was born in Christchurch, the first of our three, and the world changed then, too. Up until the moment he came blue and reluctant into the world he had been a possibility: a squirming bulge in Clemency's body. He had been imagined and read about and even viewed as a grey fuzzy blob using the steam and treadle powered ultrasound scanning machines of the 1980s; but nothing, absolutely nothing had prepared me for the experience of holding my first born, and looking into his eyes and having a person look back. In that instant the whole miracle of Being presented itself; in the space of nine months the exquisite machinery of a human body had been formed, but more astonishingly still, a consciousness was now present within it. In that instant the boundaries of my self collapsed in the delicious uncertainties of love in order that they might reform again around him. All the intelligence and inquisitiveness and inner strength which have marked his life since were present in St. George's hospital that early morning. They didn't grow, he arrived with them.

And so with Naomi. She too has been a possibility: an exciting secret last Christmas then a series of reports from the obstetrician then some ultrasound pictures, albeit of an infinitely higher quality than Nick's, then a growing bulge above Charmayne's belt line. We have known her name for some weeks now, and even known something of the contours of her face; but then last night she was suddenly a very present person, as much to be considered and with as much right to command my love and attention as any other member of my family. Again I was unprepared for the reality of her. In the middle of last night, the boundaries of my world shifted to accommodate her, as I moved up a row in the generational hierarchy, one more tier further from youth, one more tier closer to infinity.

So now it is shuffle around time. I need to see how my timetable can be fiddled with, like one of those puzzles where you move the numbers on the little sliding plastic squares into their proper order, so that the blank space falls on a couple of days where I might be able to nip over to Sydney. I have seen her, even if it is only Skype but I do have an urgent need to know the touch of her skin, and the tightness of her grip on my finger and the exact weight of her tiny but determined little body in the crook of my arm.

Blest Are The Pure In Heart

2011-08-19T22:44:00.002+12:00

It snowed on Monday and Dunedin shut down. It wasn't the sort of snow you can go outside and frolic in, but rather the sort that comes in sideways in the face of a southerly like a cold, wet, sandblaster. We stoked up the fire and read and watched DVDs. It all calmed down a bit on Tuesday, and I was able to go about the things that seemed to be stacked into this week.

On Wednesday I presided at the induction of my successor at St. John's Roslyn. Eric Kyte is an Englishman, born in the same town as Clemency, but a decade later. He arrived to face the worst weather we have had for a good long while, and there were a few local foibles to come to terms with, such as the peculiar little coal burner in the family room of the vicarage and a different way we work hot water systems over here, but by and large he seems to have settled in well and the service was wonderful. The church was full, and the optimism and good humour were palpable. It was good to again be amongst people with whom I have shared so much, but there was for me a definite sense of closure as I gave Eric his license, and placed, quite literally, all my responsibility for that beloved congregation into his capable hands.

On Thursday, with considerably less formality I inducted Gillian Townsley, the new chaplain at St. Hilda's Collegiate, our local Anglican Girl's secondary school. The school in a phase of robustly high morale due in no small part to having an extremely able young principal, Melissa Bell, who will now be teamed with an extremely able young chaplain. The girls listened to the bishop banging on, and read some prayers and sang the school hymn, John Keble's 1866 masterpiece Blest Are The Pure In Heart. The hymn, in a nice little piece of personal synchronicity, voiced something of what had been going on just below the surface for me.

I have been reading the American Episcopal Priest and Spiritual writer Cynthia Bourgeault lately, and, while driving, listening to MP3s of her talking. As I drove to Invercargill and back on Thursday afternoon, she talked about the Beatitudes and, particularly about the 6th one, the one included in John Keble's hymn. She said that the concept of heart in the first century was not quite what we mean by the term today. We speak of heart, as opposed to mind meaning the emotions; so when we read Jesus' words we tend to think he is enjoining us to have pure emotions or good intentions or a lack of guile. In the first century, says Cynthia Bourgeault, it was the liver that was thought to be the seat of emotions. The heart was the seat of intuition and spiritual perception, so, the heart's perception back then meant more like what we would mean when we speak of gut reactions. That means that the beatitude should be paraphrased as Blessed are you when your intuitions are clear, for you shall see God; which suddenly made a lot more sense than the namby pamby puritanical sense in which I had always read the verse.

Cynthia Bourgeault's interpretation was particularly apposite for me because of the way my spiritual practice has been developing over the last month or so. Spiritual growth happens in a pattern like a flight of stairs: steep and sudden climbs are followed by long flat periods of consolidation before the next step upwards, and I have made one of those vertical ascents of late. The silence which brackets each day has become longer and fuller and richer, and the practice of Centering Prayer, taught by Cynthia and her teacher Thomas Keating is helping me get my intuitions just a little more ordered.

So I sang the Victorian words and followed the principal and her new chaplain out of the chapel and into the wintry sunshine. Someone took some photos and I headed off to the next appointment. Things are solid and hopeful, or so my heart tells me.

The Week That Was

2011-08-13T18:03:00.002+12:00

For most of the past week I attended the Anglican Schools conference in Christchurch. This was a gathering of, largely, the principals and chaplains of Anglican schools, but there were a few also rans, such as myself, along to make up the numbers. What with it being a conference attended by the principals of some of the country's better schools and everything, we staying a a much classier hotel than we would have if it had been any other sort of churchy conference, so I was well fed and had a nice room, but that wasn't the good bit about being there.

What made the four hour drive North more than worth it was two things: the conference speakers and the company I kept. The Anglican Schools office is run, in this country, by the extraordinary and wonderful Ali Ballantyne. Despite being shaken out of her Christchurch office and being forced to run things on a patchwork system she has cobbled together in the garage of her home, she put together a program that was as good as anything I have been to for years. The chief speaker was Lat Blaylock, a Christian Education theorist from the UK with a profound understanding of the spiritual needs of children and a passion for enabling them to talk about the big questions in life. I came away from the conference with the process I will use in this year's Diocesan Synod to help us address issues of commitment and allocation of resources. I came away also with knowledge of an extraordinary resource I will share later: a collection of spiritual poems written by British children.

I knew many of the people at the conference, although, poor dears, some of them had aged so much they didn't recognise me. It is interesting to see someone after a long separation because the progress in that person's life (or the lack of it) will be dramatically apparent; and in the case of the many with whom I had conversations it was quite inspiring to see where the Spirit had led them and what the Spirit was making of them. Many have devoted most of their working lives to the spiritual nurture and education of young people, and they are pretty darned good at it. Without exception they are becoming whole, grounded, self aware people. I met some others as well, for the first time, largely principals of Anglican schools, and again these were very impressive people. In particular, Gillian Simpson, the Principal of St. Margaret's College in Christchurch, spoke at the conference dinner. She spoke simply but powerfully about surviving the earthquake: about the devastation of her school and the loss of life in her school community; and of the faith and practical support from her Anglican community which has sustained her. I found her address profoundly moving and inspiring.

Before driving home after the conference I went out to Sumner for lunch with an old friend. I had a sandwich in his devastated house, and looked out over the wreckage of his neighbourhood. I'll write of that later, also.

Silence

2011-08-08T22:58:00.010+12:00

There was a 40 knot southerly blowing when I went for a walk on the beach today, so I wasn't bothered by the crowds. About halfway between St. Clair and St. Kilda three young women in wetsuits were pulling their surfboards out of the waves, trying to control them in the gale as they stumbled and shrieked their way into the comparative shelter of the dunes. Their faces and hands and feet were scarlet with cold and they caught my eye as I passed and smiled in mute acknowledgement of the absurdity of their situation. It rained, and the sand blew in a small drifting mist at about ankle height above the firm beach. It was high tide and the waves just reached the six foot high cliff caused by the scouring away of the sand during the recent storms. After half an hour I turned and faced back into the wind, pushing against it and against the softness of my footing, glad of my Gore-Tex and gloves and snow cap, and straining on the flat beach as though I was walking steadily uphill. I retraced my own footsteps, the only ones in the sand. There was no one else about: the surfer girls had retreated somewhere; the seals had realised that the sea was warmer than the land today; and even the seagulls had found somewhere calmer. The wind howled and rattled the little fittings on my hood, so they sounded like the tackle of a yacht at sea, but there was, nonetheless, a silence.

It was the silence of aloneness; the silence of being in a place where there was no-one to talk to and nothing happening that required much thinking about so my mind was free to wander about like a pet dog let loose, sniffing here and there with all the semblance but none of the reality of purposefulness. This was a silence that was nevertheless full of words. I mused over the ever shifting balance of sand, and on the patterns of it flying around my ankles. I looked at the olive green sea with its millions of tons of shifting water, and the millions more tons of water sitting above me in the gray clouds, sucked up into the air by the sun, only to fall back down around me and move the sand some more. I thought about impermanence and change, and Heraclitus who made a philosophy out of that, and a line from a song by Jewel in which she says that everything is temporary if you give it enough time. I felt the sand give beneath my shoes and looked at the dunes and the dense packed surface beneath me and remembered that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth and thought briefly of that immensity of which I was currently traversing some tiny pin prick sized corner. My head was filled with words the whole while. There was silence, in other words, only because in all that extravagance of wind, there was none that happened to be blowing across my vocal cords.

This seeming silence is the silence of aloneness; it is the silence of long drives and times spent sitting on the deck watching the sunset. It is the silence of retreats and of the lengthy pauses in church which we sometimes, but only sometimes, slip into the slopping over the sides bucketsfull of words in our liturgies. It is a silence that is better than no silence at all, in that it does open us to that range of possibilities we usually drown out with our own speaking.

It is absolutely impossible to listen while we are talking, and almost impossible to listen while we are thinking, so the almost of this silence is an improvement, as far as exposing ourselves to the great gifts which the Universe is continually proffering us goes. But there is another silence: the deeper, intentional silence which only comes when it is willed and worked at. I couldn't find that deeper silence in this afternoon's wildness, and neither did I try to. I was content enough to let my mind run free and muse my way back to the warmth of my car and the promise of hot tea and a log fire waiting for me at home.

The Gift of God

2011-07-30T17:19:00.010+12:00

The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. - Romans 6:23

The central point of Christianity is that in the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ we have the clearest picture anyone is going to get of that from which all things derive. What is at the heart of all things? Why is there something rather than nothing? The answer is not a concept or a principle or an idea or a law but a person. And the overarching theme of that person's life is continuous, unconditional love. The universe is formed in Love. We are formed in Love. Which all sounds a bit syrupy and naff unless we are careful about what we mean by "Love". Scott Peck uses a definition which seems accurate to me: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth. We seem to be formed to grow and develop; and the movement towards us from the universe itself ( and from the Great One who is the beginning and cause and end of the universe) to bring about that growth is what we Christians call Grace. Our tendency to try and evade that growth is what we call sin.

Well, so far so good. The trouble is, we in the Church tend ceaselessly to separate these two things which make no sense without each other, and in doing so, make a travesty of the message we are supposed to be proclaiming. It is the tendency of some parts of the church, for example, to emphasise sin and forget about grace; so the horrors of human weakness are emphasised, and formulaic appeasement is made to a vengeful, intractable, irascible God. The overcoming of sin depends less on God's unconditional love for all people (that is, God's movement towards us) than on our making some clearly defined set of commitments or on our keeping of some set of rules or other (that is, our movement towards God). In contrast other parts of the church stress grace but seem to have forgotten why Grace might be needed. The universal human tendency to evade what is actually in our own best interests is ignored and the life giving impulses in our personalities are accepted as limply as our viciousness is excused. Both are explained as accidental variance in the human condition, to be understood and valued with even handed acceptance

If I have no conception of Grace, I will forget that the tendency I so acutely observe in others to vigorously evade the light is an unconquerable characteristic of my own soul as well. If I have no clear perception of sin, I will not understand the seriousness of my own or anyone else's behaviour. In either case, I have lost all sense of Paul's powerful words. My actions matter, says Paul, and if I get them wrong, as I invariably do, they can be deadly to myself and to others, but, he continues, in the same sentence, without pausing for breath, God's movement towards me is ceaseless and powerful and restorative. To find life, all I need to do is to stop running for long enough to recognise who I am, and who God is..

The Wages of Sin...

2011-07-26T21:05:00.003+12:00

Lately I have been thinking of the almost abandoned Christian concept of sin. Sin is not a popular term anymore. In a society whose greatest good seems to be the right of anybody to do just as they jolly well please, uttering the word "sin" conjures up all the adjectives which are most despised in liberal Western democracies: judgemental, narrow minded, uninclusive, self righteous. Sin is a term which seems, to many, to come from some lesser, undeveloped, unreflective religion, and is not to be taken too seriously by more advanced spiritual people, (such as whoever is saying this stuff, for example). But I don't think you can get very far along a path of spiritual development without a concept of sin. Not sin as some sort of arbitrarily drawn up list of prohibitions, mind you; but sin as a description of a propensity or an attitude of mind. At a certain point in any regime of spiritual practice you will have to face your own humanity and become aware of those bits and pieces of yourself which are hindering your progress: the bits of you which would subvert, distract, argue, seduce, tempt and betray you away from wholeness. The pieces which prefer the dark warm comforts of illusion to the hard edged clarity of Truth. A basic working definition of Sin is: Anything which keeps me from God. So, for example, as I struggle in the early morning to settle in the half light and present myself silently to the Divine presence my overwhelming desire to get up instead and make some coffee and browse Google is sinful - or at least, it is a temptation to sin.

Whatever keeps me from God.

Now this may seem a little too introverted and esoteric and precious and hardly worth bothering about, if sin is just about whatever keeps Kelvin from his prayers; and so it may seem until we remember the terrible events in Norway this past week. What makes an intelligent young man commit such an abominable and atrocious act? He sits in court, looking smug and calm, seemingly perfectly at ease with the pain he has inflicted on the 98 people he killed, on the many others he wounded, on their families and indeed on a whole nation. Who knows? To say that he is mad is a truism, and doesn't help our understanding one bit. No doubt the psychologists will pore over the whys and wherefores for years to come, but my guess is that somewhere sometime long in his past he has made choices; and continued to make choices which have subverted, distracted, argued, seduced, tempted and betrayed him away from wholeness. He has adopted patterns of thought which have wrapped him in the dark warm comforts of illusion and he has grown so used to them that the hard edged truth of the humanity of of his victims is beyond his knowing - or at least it was on Friday July 22. He has progressively chosen darkness and illusion instead of light and truth. He has, in other words, sinned and moved progressively further into sin.

We would, all of us, be justly offended if any comparison was drawn between our own petty misdemeanours and the monstrous acts of Anders Behring Breivik, but while differing in scale and effect, all sins are essentially of the same species, which is, I think Jesus' point in Matthew 5:21-22. Sin is not so much about the individual acts as about the attitude of mind which lies behind those acts; the attitude which sees the truth as an affront to our own self determination and which would do anything to mask the truth. The Christian tradition is unequivocal about the corrosive and destructive power of sin. Just as rust may show in a small pimple on your car door or in a hole in your chassis which causes the whole car to be towed to the junkyard, so sin may show in seemingly innocuous or in catastrophic ways. Like rust, sin needs to be assiduously watched for, taken seriously, and treated early at each and every appearance.

A Nice Little Drive In The Country

2011-07-20T05:47:00.001+12:00

It is the school holidays and with the encouragement of those who watch over me I have taken a break. My Sunday schedule being what it is, I could only take a few days, so rather than take a real holiday we have gone for a bit of a drive in the country. On Sunday, after a service at St. John's Milton we drove north to Rangiora and stayed with Clemency's sister Bridget. The inland route is longer but going that way, the roads are deserted, there is snow on the mountains and they are very close. Then early on Monday we drove up through the Lewis Pass to Nelson. There was enough fog to make the early sunlight picturesque and once it had cleared, an absolutely cloudless sky all the way. Patches of black ice. A wonderful little cafe in Maruia selling vegan meals and little items for our imminently new grand daughter. Outside temperatures wavering between -1 and 7. Mountains and winding blacktop. Chatting. Then my brother Alistair's house and a quick tour of the new Jag and the latest additions to the motorcycle collection and a long evening drinking good red wine and laughing and more chatting.

We have just a couple of days here. There is time with my mother in her new apartment in a (pause for irony, let the one who has ears listen) Ryman's rest home, time to visit the new Gompa being built on Stuart and Roz's property, time with my Sister Val and then back home to see if I can artfully catch the dozen or so balls I currently have in the air.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

The Naked Now

2011-07-16T21:30:00.001+12:00

"The enlightenment you seek in other religions has been present in Christianity from the beginning." So states the bit on the back cover of Richard Rohr's The Naked Now which seeks to move the book store browser towards the till. Rohr presents a very good explanation for the disappearance of mysticism from mainstream Western Christianity and an equally convincing case for its presence in the New Testament and in the writings of the church from the earliest days. He also gives a cogent psychology for contemplative prayer, speaks helpfully of method, and contains it within a robust theological framework. All this in a mere 180 pages. This is some book. It manages the rare double of being readable and profound.

Mostly for me though, Richard Rohr has given me one more way by which I can connect the view of the universe which is slowly emerging, like a photograph in a tray of developer, from my meditation practice to the Christianity which has nurtured me for nearly four decades now. More than any book I have read for a while, this one ended up filled with underlinings and highlightings because he keeps on presenting views which surprise by their innovation and which give voice to misgivings, half insights, questions and observations I have been mulling over for years. Consider this for example:

"Theism believes there is a God. Christianity believes that God and humanity can coexist in the same place! These are two utterly different proclamations about the nature of the universe. In my experience, most Christians are very good theists who just happen to have named their God Jesus...
Christian revelation was precisely that you are already spiritual ("in God"), and your difficult and necessary task is to learn to become human...
it is in our humanity that we are still so wounded, so needy, so unloving, so self hating, and so in need of enlightenment."

And also:

"Prayer [in our extroverted, "can do" culture] too easily became an attempt to change God and aggrandize ourselves instead of what it was meant to be - an interior practice to change the one who is praying, which will always happen if stand calmly before this uncanny and utterly safe presence..."

I heard an interview with Richard Rohr some weeks ago in which he said that all religions are systems for personal transformation. When they cease to be about personal transformation they become instead systems of belonging. He says this has happened to Christianity, and in this book not only makes a plea for us to return to the heart of our faith but offers a way in which we might do so. It would be well worth your while moving from the bookstoore shelf to the till if The Naked Now was in your hand

A Little Bit of Chaos

2011-07-06T18:14:00.003+12:00

It's a bit chaotic down at the office at the moment. At Peter Mann house on our groundfloor are the administrative staff, and upstairs we have a library and offices for our ministry educators.While those who administer are performing a vital ministry without which none of the rest of us could function properly, I think the present arrangement gives the wrong signal. When most of our people utter the phrase "Diocese of Dunedin", I think they think of administration and desks and bits of paper. I have long hoped for something else. So we are moving the downstairs folk upstairs and the upstairs folk down.

It looks a bit of a mess at the moment, but in a few weeks, what people will see when they enter the Diocesan Office is a library, comfy chairs and small tables around which people may sit and gather and meet. There will be a retractable screen and an unobtrusive data projector and access to the vast collection of excellent resources built up over many years by Alec Clark. We will have a daily program of worship, open to those who work in the building and whoever else wants to join us. I hope that between Alec, Benjamin Brock Smith, John Franklin, Bronwyn Miller and myself we can produce a program of ministry enhancing events that people will wish to take advantage of. I intend that Peter Mann House will be a place where people will feel welcome to sit for a while if they are visiting Dunedin (or, for that matter, if they live here) and have a cup of coffee and chat. I hope it will be a relaxed and friendly and invigorating environment for our truly superb administrative staff to spend their days in.

There will be a little period of chaos while we sort it all out, and I hope that no-one will be much inconvenienced; Mostly I hope that the chaos will resolve into enhanced ministry in the Office and throughout the Diocese. Why not drop by and have a look next time you are passing?

Common Sense Is What Tells Us The World Is Flat

2011-07-04T22:15:00.005+12:00

Galileo got into trouble in 1632 for writing a book which a) insulted the Pope and b) suggested that the Sun, and not the Earth was the centre of the universe. He was sort of right about both points, but not everyone saw it that way, especially the Pope, and Galileo ended up spending the rest of his life under house arrest. Galileo's problem was that the theory he was propounding, heliocentrism, seriously undermined the status quo and ran counter to common sense (everybody could see that the sun was smaller than the earth and rose on one side of the world, set on the other, and presumably nipped around the back during the night). Further, Galileo's theory depended on some rather arcane mathematics which very, very few people could understand. Those who could understand the maths, and this group included the guys who advised the Pope, could see something else: that Galileo's sums did not quite stack up.Galileo believed that the earth and other planets moved in perfect circles, but observations did not quite confirm this. Rather than agree with the theory of Kepler, now recognised as more accurate, that the planets move in ellipses not circles, Galileo adjusted his geometry.

Galileo's theories were hard to accommodate to the plain reading of scripture but that wasn't the only problem most of his contemporaries had with him. His idea that matter was composed of atoms and behaved according to immutable laws was hard to reconcile with the doctrine of transubstantiation, and his idea that the Moon and was covered in craters and mountains - and were thus made of stuff pretty similar to ordinary earthly matter - ran counter to the prevailing idea that the heavens were some sort of perfect realm where things were made of perfect materials.

So Galileo got into trouble not so much because of people's reluctance to adopt new ideas as because of their inability to let go of old ones. The ideas he ran up against: that the Earth was the centre of the universe; that matter is of four kinds (earth, air, fire and water) and has two forms (heavy and light); that the heavenly bodies are perfect in all respects; all these ideas were false, but were popularly and firmly held because people could clearly "see" that they were true. We have a compelling need to make sense of things; to form the disparate facts of our existence into some sort of coherent whole. From the time we are born we do this, making up a world from the information presented to our senses, and from the ideas presented to us by our family, friends and culture. Even Galileo himself did this, allowing his preconceived ideas of planetary motion to blind him to the truth presented by Johannes Kepler. We all do this. All of us. We make a world that is "common sense", and scorn those who see things differently, failing to see either the provisional nature of our own worldview or the way we have cobbled it together out of the guesses and assumptions of those we live amongst. So when we look back on the Galileo controversy with the perfect view afforded by 400 years of hindsight it's pretty easy to forget that if we had been alive at the time, probably 99.9% of us would have sided with the inquisition. It's pretty easy to overlook the painful lesson that all of us, every last man Jack and woman Jill of us, glimpses the truth dimly and only through the fog of our self imposed falsehoods. It's easy to forget that the path to truth involves as much unlearning as it does learning.

Arianna Savall: L'Amor

2011-07-01T16:53:00.001+12:00

Last time we were in the car together driving from one bit of the diocese to another, Clemency and I started thinking in earnest about the second half of the Camino Santiago. Northern Hemisphere Autumn next year would be a good time. We will walk from Sahagun to Santiago and maybe, if we have time, onto the coast. Of course for P personalities such as us, the planning and the gathering of information is the best bit, and there are many happy hours ahead picking the right alberges to stay in, and finding new packs and new shoes for Clemency and just the right sort of polyprops for wearing when walking among all those fields of ripe barley and mature grapes and falling olives.

This morningI woke with images of the long walk across half the Meseta still to come and the prospect of the hill country beyonbd Astorga and as I was just emerging from sleep, the Concert program played this song: L'Amor, written and sung by Arianna Savall. She sings in Catalan, and if you want to know what that part of Spain is like, just listen.

It seemed auspicious. And if not auspicious, at least beautiful

Te Kotahitanga Forum

2011-06-30T20:19:00.003+12:00

For most of this week I spent my nights in one of those travel hotels in the industrial park near Auckland airport and my days on Te Manukanuka o Hoturoa Marae. The days were better. Of course this was in part becaue of the contrast in venues. On the one hand there was soulless straight edged built to a budget mediocrity and on the other the fluid graceful power of carvings, the delicate flowing of paint and the striking, deceptively simple geometric counterpoints of woven flax, together hinting the whakapapa of every tribe in New Zealand. As soon as I walked onto the marae, I was struck by the rich ruby red of the house, deeper, more bloody than the more customary ochre and particularly powerful when backed by a flannel gray Auckland winter sky. I didn't bring a camera, darn it, but managed a few shots with my iPhone. As we sat during the day I could fill in the (I hasten to assure you very rare) dull bits in the proceedings by admiring the extraordinary workmanship of the carvings all around me.

I was there for the Te Kotahitanga forum, a little talkfest in which the three strands of our church - Maori, Pakeha, Polynesia - came together to discuss the future of our most valuable shared asset, St. John's College. The decisions as to the shape and role of St. John's belong to Te Kotahitanga, the body where our three tikanga church meets, and this forum was an information and idea sharing meeting with a wider membership than TK itself.

The conversation was facilited by people I have admired for a long time: The convener was Caroline Leys with whom I worked in a group setting up the Seed training programme for spiritual directors about 20 years ago. Caroline is a fairly commanding presence. She is as tall as I am, and has a way of fixing people with an unwavering gaze, smiling winningly and talking sense to them all at the same time. The keynote speaker was Roger Herft. Soon after I arrived in the Diocese of Waikato in 1986, Roger was elected, at the age of 37 as our bishop. He was a great bishop then, and has gone on to be an even better one since, and is now Archbishop of Perth. He speaks with his Sri Lankan accent and a very still, engaging demeanour, and wins people with gentle, self deprecating humour, with the depth and utter common sense of what he says, but more importantly, by the sense you always get of a person with a risch and deep personal spirituality. It's easy to feel safe and comfortable when the leadership of a group is strong and knows what it is doing, and people at the forum felt safe and comfortable enough to relate with a great deal of grace.

In a few months TK will have made decisions which will affect the way St. Johns will develop over the years ahead and it would be inappropriate for me to preempt those decisions here, but I was impressed by the graciousness of the conversation this week past. Each of the strands of our church had prepared thoroughly and thoughfully. Each deliverred their position with integrity and with a genuine desire to safeguard not only their own particular needs, but also with respect to those of their partners. Much of the time was spent in small group discussions, and we bishops were segregated off into a group all of our own, out of concern I think, that we might lower the tone of the dabate if we were spread around amongst the other groups. That was fine by me. The discussion in my group was intelligent and robust, and I have a very profound, and growing respect for the diverse group of people which the Holy Spirit has placed on to the bench of bishops in Aotearoa New Zealand. I must confess that at the end of the forum there were no great surprises: the things said and and the views aired were much as I expected them to be. What did surprise me though was the warmth, honesty, intelligence, respect and deep listening we accorded each other. This is what will enable us, more than any set of decisions could ever do, to live together with authenticity as the church in this place.

Turn Sideways Into The Light

2011-06-22T12:51:00.001+12:00

David Whyte speaks in his audio series What To Remember When Waking of the myth of the Tuatha De Danann. They were a mythical race from Ireland's past who were tall, magical, mystical people devoted to beauty and artistry. When another more brutal people, the Milesians invaded Ireland the Tuatha De Danann fought them off in two battles, but were faced with a third, decisive battle against overwhelming odds. So, lined up in battle formation and facing almost certain defeat, the Tuatha De Danann turned sideways into the light and disappeared.

Whyte's retelling is, to put it mildly, a gloss, but I am quite taken with the phrase and with the phenomenon it describes. Turning sideways into the light is the realisation that there are some encounters that are damaging to all involved in them: no one wins a war. Faced with such an exchange, to turn sideways into the light is to seek another, more whole form of relationship. It is to reject the ground rules of the conversation as they have been laid out by your antagonist and choose another path which will extend, not diminish your integrity. Turning sideways into the light is a way of re framing Jesus' teaching in Matthew 5:38 ff: But I say to you, do not resist the evildoer... love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. When faced with an act of cruelty and aggression which seeks to define us in the terms laid down by the aggressor, Jesus tells us to change the terms. When the Roman soldier bullies us into carrying his pack, turn the oppression into an act of camaraderie.

Turning sideways into the light is not retreat and it is not cowardice. As Gandhi demonstrated on the salt marches,this is a shift in consciousness which requires considerable courage and integrity. As Te Whiti showed at Parihaka, this is not necessarily a strategy whereby we will "win"in the immediate tactical sense, but it is the only strategy by which we can retain our sense of values, and, as history has shown in both of these examples, it is the way by which righteousness will ultimately triumph.

TOBAR PHADRAIC

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear into the originality
of it all. Be impatient with explanations
and discipline the mind not to begin
questions it cannot answer. Walk the green road
above the bay and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun. Let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you,
until you catch, down on your left,
the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadow
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.
Now you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask,

and remember how as a child
your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to bless the world.

~ David Whyte ~

Empties

2011-06-20T16:35:00.002+12:00

Over the past couple of weeks I have been taking pictures of old churches. Not the usual scenic, picturesque shots of lovely old buildings with quaint towers and pretty churchyards, but of dead churches: buildings that once were home to vibrant congregations, but which are now used for other purposes. Some have become lovely little homes; some are restaurants or bars or shops; some are sitting derelict and vandalised. There are a lot of them.

Some of them are small, wooden chapels built to a budget; others are large and ornate and expensive; all of them represent the end of end of a particular dream. Once there was a fundraising campaign and pledges and cake stalls and a large billboard with a thermometer drawn on it. Once there were people who gave sacrificially to erect the building and others who spent countless hours tending and decorating it. Once there was the murmur of prayers and the sound of massed voices singing along to an organ or a harmonium. Once there was a youth group and a women's guild and a man with a clerical collar, and processions with the Bible or with a brass cross, but no more. Now there are beds or a till or birds nests.

I have been wondering a bit why I am wondering about these old buildings. One reason is because they are the sign of social change on a grand scale, and of course there are other buildings scattered around the countryside which tell the same or a similar tale: old post offices and banks and factories and rows of empty shops and whole streets of decaying houses which speak of shifts in mobility and economics and community relationships. These old churches though are saying something else to me. The old regional banks have been replaced by bigger banks in the cities and the factories have moved to Auckland or (more likely) Beijing. The stuff sold in the wrecked shops is now bought online or at The Warehouse. The old churches have not been replaced by anything. Some of those which once housed a congregation of one of the traditional denominations may well have had a short spell as home to one of the "newer" church groups, but now the activities for which the building was first erected have disappeared entirely.

These empty worship shells scattered around the countryside are the signs of the death of a particular religious infrastructure. I look at them with such fascination, I think, because they represent a process which is still continuing. A particular way of meeting the spiritual needs of our society is disappearing because it no longer meets the needs of our society, and still we are preoccupied with preserving it: keeping our buildings open and making sure our functionaries are paid and making sure the committee structures which kept the whole system turning over are filled with the fewer and older and wearier people who still give us allegiance. I think we have missed -are missing - the point.

The role of the church is to introduce people to the Living God and open them to the transforming power of the presence of God. Gradually we have forgotten to do this. We have forgotten how to do this. We have forgotten, even, that we are supposed to do this. And quite naturally, and quite rightly, the infrastructure we have created precisely to help us to do this crumbles and dies.

The old churches tell me one thing and they tell it to me clearly and loudly: The church must facilitate personal transformation or it must cease to exist. It is time to forget the infrastructure except to the extent that it facilitates the one essential task of the Church. As my Lord tells me, "seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all the rest will be added to you as well."

Old Churches

2011-06-20T15:58:00.001+12:00

These are pictures for which I pretend no great artistic merit. They are pictures of buildings in Otago and Southland which once served as the spiritual homes of various congregations, but which are now used for other purposes or no purpose at all.

Week of Guided Prayer

2011-06-13T11:33:00.002+12:00

I am in Southland this week with John Franklin, my chaplain. We are conducting a Week of Guided Prayer, which is also known in some circles as a Retreat In Daily Life. The WGP is a process I have used for many year now. It derives, ultimately, from the Ignatian spiritual exercises, and is, in essence a fairly simple thing. Participants gathered yesterday at Holy Trinity Gore and together we used a fairly simple prayer exercise. Then, after an initial conversation, each of the retreatants has covenanted to spend half an hour a day in prayer, and another half hour a day in conversation with a prayer guide, ie John or me. I recognise that for most people, the prospect of half an hour in prayer is a bit daunting, so every day I will suggest a way of prayer, and if necessary provide the resources that are needed for it. Next Saturday morning we will gather again for eucharist and a final group exercise and the process will have ended.

I know that someone as experienced in Spiritual Direction as John could lead this week by himself, and that we have several other people in the diocese capable of assisting him, but I am here in the deep South leading this week personally for two reasons. One is that I have a great deal of respect for this process, having witnessed the profound transformation it has wrought in peoples' lives in the past, and I want to show by my participation just how important I believe it is for our diocese. Secondly, I wish to show something of what i believe the role of Bishop should be about. The church has, over the millennia, done a wonderful job of making an institution oif itslef, and of definging the role of bishop as a functionary within that institution. I guess I'm not a very instituional sort of person and I'd like to do things differently. Sitting with people and walking with them as the Holy Spirit makes profound changes in their lives seems to me to be just the sort of difference I would most like.

So John and I are camped in the Gore Vicarage, and travelling to various points around town and further South. We are early in the week yet, but early indications are that this WGP is going to be just as transformative, healing and inspiring as have been all the other ones I have participated in. It's looking good for Southland and for the rest of our diocese.

Mary's Room

2011-06-07T15:52:00.007+12:00

Lately I have been thinking about Frank Jackson's thought experiment, variously called Mary the super-scientist or Mary's Room. I have even preached about it a couple of times, and a recording of the last time, at St. Matthew's Dunedin, is here. The thought experiment goes something like this:

Mary is the world's most brilliant neurophysiologist. her specialty is the perception of colour. She knows absolutely everything there is to know about colour: how the retina is affected by light, how the brain processes the information etc. When it comes to colour perception, there is not one fact that it is possible to know that she does not know. By a huge irony, however, Mary is herself only able to see monochromatically. That is, though she knows all it is possible to know about colour, she has never experienced colour vision herself. One day, due to some freak happenstance, her monochromatism is ended, and she is able to see colours. The question is: does she know anything after the happenstance that she didn't know before?

Jackson's experiment is part of his knowledge argument against Physicalism: the belief that the universe is entirely physical; Jackson's argument is that if Mary knows something after her monochomatism is ended that she didn't know before, then there are things in the universe, most notably various mental states, that are not physical. Personally I find Jackson's argument overwhelming, and the counterarguments I have seen, at least to date, rather less than convincing. As another example of one of these non physical realities, you could give an exhaustive description of a piece of music by describing everything physical about it: the way the vibrations of wood or brass or catgut are produced, how they travel in the air, how they affect the eardrum and the intricate mechanism behind it, how the resulting nerve impulses are processed by the brain - but you would not have mentioned anything of importance about the piece of music as MUSIC.

So what is it that Mary knows now, that she didn't know before? Well, it's almost impossible to say, precisely because what is known is not physical: it is subjective rather than objective and to describe it in objective terms is impossible. A physicalist might, of course agree with this, and reply that because only physical things exist, the subjectively discerned thing, that cannot be described in objective terms, do not in fact exist and are some kind of illusion. Which is impossible to answer, except by looking at the purple of a thistle or the yellow of a Swiss dandelion meadow or the red of blood and knowing that what you are seeing and are so moved by is real enough to need no evidence other than its own witness. Richard Rohr sums it up quite well, here.

Of course our knowledge of the divine is of the same sort as our knowledge of colour, or of music, or of beauty, or of our own existence for that matter: it is subjective. Such knowledge is no less important for not being objective and perhaps we should abandon the futile attempt to make it so but rather "be still and know..."

Portraits

2011-06-04T10:02:00.005+12:00

Generally speaking, sunsets and seagulls and so forth don't need to be asked before you photograph them. They do their momentary aurora impersonation or flap idly by unaware (I assume) of any concept of photography or of beauty for that matter. People are another issue entirely. For me photography is, as I have said on another occasion, about awareness. I go out with a camera and immediately I am disciplined to be aware; to leave self behind and try to be present to what is around me. It is a personal thing, and a spiritual exercise. As soon as you take a photograph of another person, however, there are at least two people involved: the one in front of the camera and the one behind it, and both have an investment in whatever results from pushing the shutter. My interest in taking photographs is to try and capture what I see. The interest of most of the people being photographed most of the time is not what I see, but how they wish other people to see them.

Sometimes these interests coincide. I took the photograph above, of Catherine and Bridget at my nephew Hamish's wedding in 2007: In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters (Job 42:17) but I think I could give Job a pretty fair run for his money. The picture captures something I see in both my girls: not just their beauty, but also their intelligence, poise, self assurance, openness and I could go on and on but I am their father after all and you don't need my bragging. Further, it captures something of the very special relationship they have with each other and I know that both of them like the picture because they have both displayed it and used it from time to time. But making such a pleasing portrait is a rare thing, and again I think the issue is essentially spiritual.

The persona: the self I project to the world is something I have a huge investment in. My persona is, after all, all that stands beween the me that I work so hard to keep hidden and the prying eyes of all those around me whose opinions of me matter so desperately. I have read a few books and articles about portrait photography in the last week or two and it seems to me that for most people, most of the time, portrait photography is abpout the persona. Taking a portrait usually starts with the question, "Why are you wanting this picture? To display on the wall of the family home? for a CV? For a lover? For a grandmother? In other words, what is the sittter hoping to project and to whom? The photographer's role is to help in this harmless - maybe even therapeutic - deception. A skilled portrait photographer can of course manage at the same time to convey something of the true nature of the subject, as in this famous portrait of Alfried Krupp by Arnold Newman, or pretty much anything by Annie Liebowitz Portraiture is perhaps the most technically demanding form of photography. Lighting is crucial and requires a certain amount of manipulation. This requires equipment and a level of expertise that I don't currently possess, though I am quite confident I could come by it if I put my mind to it.

In the end, I suppose it is about relationships. I take a photo of a row of pilings on a summer's evening with Green Island just visible on the horizon and the picture is a capture of what I see , but more importantly, a capture of how I relate to what I see. I take a picture of my daughters and what is on display is not just my lovely girls, but how I feel about them and relate to them. I sometimes take passport photos for people. Like anybody else, I make the whanau line up and grin inanely on Christmas and birthdays. But to capture what I really see in people; to capture how I relate to what I see in people is not quite so easy; but seeing as I am surrounded on every hand by wonderful and photogenic people, I am becoming more and more interested in giving it a go.

Photos

2011-05-30T22:03:00.004+12:00

I have been taking some photographs of late and I'll share a few here.

This is a detail of the Balclutha Presbyterian Church. I liked the way the red brick contrasted so strongly with the green of the shrub, and the way the little blue shapes in the window seemed, quite accidentally, to give a nice counterpoint to the rounded shrub.

This is a detail from a boatshed near my home. The harbour was still and clear this morning, and I strolled along the shoreline looking for just this sort of shot.

The sun was reflecting of the buildings on the other other side making these dramatic stripey lines

Last week I went to Doctor's Point, just North of Dunedin on another still clear Monday. This is a bit of a huckery old boat, but I liked the way thediagonals of the ropes interacted with the diagonal of the bow.

I was very taken with this little group of trees and took several shots

By and large, I prefer this one with its invitation to the wide open horizon.

These are quite typical of the shots I am coming home with lately, but I've been wondering why so few of my photographs contain people, and, whether or not I should do something about that.

Balclutha

2011-05-23T14:48:00.002+12:00

A lamp on the Cluth River bridge, Balclutha. Photograph taken during the creative spirituality session led by Cushla McMillan, Ministry School 2011

I spent most of last week in Balclutha with some of our Diocese's leaders at our bienniel ministry school. Balclutha is a no nonsense little working town plonked down on the banks of the Clutha river. It's the sort of place where people come to live for a while and move on, so the St. Mark's Anglican church faces the constant problem of losing its leadership. Not the Vicar, you understand. Graham Langley has been priest of the parish of Balclutha since he arrived from South Africa in 1989, but the lay leadership displays a propensity to move on which is probably unparalleled in our diocese. Despite this, Graham and his wife Rose have built a vibrant, enthusiastic, energetic community of faith whose robustness is reflected in the St. Mark's parish buildings. The church and its adjoining hall is comfortably and tastefully furnished in a modern style. It is well fitted out with AV equipment which is well chosen, discretely placed and, unusual for this sort of stuff, works. So, what with the nice carpet on the floor, and the pots of coffee and the comfy chairs, Balclutha was a great place for Ministry School. And it was a great ministry school.

The general theme was spirituality, and we began on the first evening with a presentation on journaling from Karlina Brock-Smith. Karlina is a young mother who has worked out her own system of spiritual journaling, so she had a fair bit of wisdom on the subject. But it wasn't what she said so much as how she said it that set the tone for the whole school. She spoke from a position of convinced faith, where she expected the Spirit to be moving and where she expected to be able to hear the Spirit's voice on a regular basis.

And so it continued. I spoke for most of the second day, on Christian meditation. John Franklin shared his deep insight into Centering Prayer. Cushla McMillan talked of the way her passion for botanical drawing has become for her a method of contemplation and a way of prayer. We had a visit from Chris Holmes of the theology department of the University of Otago who gave us a theology of the Holy Spirit, shared again from a position of unapologetic Christian conviction. We finished on Saturday with a presentation from Jan Clark on a method of intercession based on Leslie Weatherhead's A Private House of Prayer.

As at the beginning, the ending was revelatory for me. I have known Jan well for almost 30 years, but never guessed at the depth and beauty of her inner life. To listen as she described it was profoundly moving, and not just for what it revealed about an old friend. I was struck with force by the fact that all around me were people who were also, all of them, deep wells of insight and grace. The pearl of great price is lying on the market tables all around us. The treasure is buried in every field.

Be Quiet For A Change

2011-05-16T22:11:00.001+12:00

Today I started a new blog, about Christian meditation, and you can find it here

Amoebas

2011-05-16T16:23:00.002+12:00

This picture doesnt have anything to do with what follows. Its an old one and I like it.

Last time I was in supervision, about a week or so ago, Paul gave me a metaphor that I have been carrying with me and thinking about ever since. He said that organisations - all of them, marriages, families, parishes, dioceses, companies, nations, whatever - were like giant jig saw puzzles, each member being a piece and each member fitting into the space that is most suited for it. Each member meshes with the pieces all around and makes a contribution to the whole pattern of the organisation. But the pieces are fluid; they are plastic; they are capable of taking on an infinite variety of shapes, like amoebas. So an organisation is like a giant jig saw puzzle made of amoebas. Change the shape of one amoeba piece and all the other pieces around it must change to accommodate the change, and the pieces that touch the newly changed pieces must in their turn change, with changes being transmitted right across the puzzle to the very edges. Of course influence goes both ways: the pieces shape and influence the puzzle and the puzzle shapes the pieces. And when a new piece is introduced there will be enormous pressure on that new piece to change to fit the space that is allocated to it. There will also be enormous pressure to resist the change of shape that a new piece must necessarily bring.

Of course the picture is made all the more complex when we realise that we, all of us, are simultaneously pieces in a large number of different, seemingly independent puzzles; so our family picture changes, we consequently change, and this brings a resulting change to our church or our classroom or our social club.

The astute amongst you, and I know that is all of you, will realise that this is a metaphor illustrating the basic tenets of family systems theory, and for many years the insights of Edwin Friedman's Generation To Generation: Family Process In Church and Synagogue have been foundational in the way I have dealt with parishes. But Paul's metaphor simplified it for me and helped me understand some of the dynamics of our diocese and the way I have related to it over this first year or so of episcopacy.

There's nowhere I really want to go with this, other than to share it. I left Portobello, last week, to drive home through a Westerly gale and drenching sprays of salt water enlightened and reflective: the expected result of all good supervision.

Pilgrimage 2: Gold rush

2011-05-02T12:31:00.002+12:00

We have an uncanny power in our diocese. Wherever and whenever we hold our annual synod, it snows. And now, we have discovered, wherever and whenever we hold a leg of our pilgrimage, the weather is perfect. I am still investigating the obvious marketing opportunities this presents us, but until the deals with farmers, wedding planners, ski fields and umbrella manufacturers are finalised we put these powers to our own use. Such as this last weekend, when a few of us journeyed on pilgrimage from Milton to Lawrence, retracing the steps of those who in their quest for riches left such an imprint on the geography, architecture, culture and spirituality of New Zealand. There weren't a lot of us this time, as one of the Queen's grandsons had, apparently, chosen that Friday to get married and there were a couple of important sporting fixtures that needed monitoring. But thirteen of us sat down to dinner in St. John's Milton and seventeen of us took a little yellow bus up the road the next day.

This was a trip through territory I am very familiar with; I travel through it at least once a week, usually more, but to be driven, and have it described by those who live there was a revelation. As we traversed the back streets of Milton, I couldn't help noticing how often our guide used the phrase "this used to be". It was once a service centre for miners, and a place of employment for millers and sawyers and weavers and all the vast array of supporters they needed. Now it hosts a prison and a lot of shops looking for a new life, and it is therefore typical of many small towns in our diocese, and, indeed throughout rural New Zealand. It is served by a vicar whose energy, ability and indefatigable good humour have cemented her an essential place in the social structure and affections of the town. Vivienne seems to be near the centre of pretty much everything that is going on in the district, as far as social services and community development are concerned. She is also a deep well of information about the local area, and it was a privilige to listen to her describe it to us.

Lawrence is pretty. The countryside around it is varied, and covered with the flora bought by the hordes who swarmed there in the 1860s in search of gold. Because they found so much of it, many of the houses and other buildings are ornately and expensively built. Being just the right distance from Dunedin, it is a natural place to stop en route to Wanaka or Queenstown, and thus there are a number of very good cafes. It is picturesque enough to attract people with an eye for beauty and a few shops are stocked with the wares of local artists and artisans. I was surprised however, when walking around town, to see how many houses and shops are for sale, some of them very attractive indeed. Lawrence seems to be poised on the cusp of something: waiting for that one new thing which will allow it to become once again, a centre of economic activity once again. Our Anglican church in Lawrence is small. Beautifully built. Steeped in history. Full of potential. Like the town. Like our diocese. Waiting to be called to new life once more.

About a kilometre out of town is Gabriel's Gully. It was here in 1860 that Gabriel Reid is credited with finding the lode which began the Otago goldrush. More gold was taken from Otago than was taken from California whose gold rush preceded ours by a couple of years. The landscape still bears the marks of men and women from every corner of the globe who worked individually but increasingly in co-operation to perform the most astonishing feats of amateur engineering. Water was carried for over 40km in an ingenious system of channels to sluice away a hill and turn it into a valley and a small lake. Where their tents were pitched and where their shacks were built are the remnants of their gardens: blackberry, apple and pears for food; California pines for lumber; rowan as a mark of their ancient spirituality. It is all quiet now, sitting in the golden Central Otago light, turning dry and brown in the summer and freezing solid in the winter. It holds the whisper of those thousands long gone and it waits for the few now who can recognise and be entranced by its beauty.

Gabriel's Gully

2011-05-02T11:35:00.003+12:00

This is the place where the Otago goldrush started. There's still some gold there, but not enough to give up your day job for. Nowdays it's a secluded place at the end of a short track. There is a pond created by the frenzied search for instant riches, walking tracks and everywhere the descendants of the plants carried along as baggage by the miners for food, as raw materials and as reminders of home.

Podcasts

2011-04-12T15:39:00.006+12:00

David Whyte recites his poem The Opening of Eyes

No matter how much you like a particular song there are only so many times you can listen to it before it begins to grate a bit. I've found this to be true of the almost 2000 tracks on my iPod; they were OK for the first 30,000km of driving, but after that.. well... So lately I've made the switch to podcasts. It's wonderful to drive through some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet listening to some of the most interesting and intelligent and wise people on the planet. Richard Rohr, Robert Johnson and Father Thomas Keating have been profound of late, but the one who has really inspired and moved me is the English/American poet David Whyte. Perhaps it's because he is a fellow admirer of Meister Eckhart. Mostly its because he manages to wrap words around things I have been struggling to articulate for years now. Anyway, if you're interested, log into iTunes, search the podcast section and see what you can find. Otherwise, follow this link.

Don't be put off by the breathy new age voice of the host. She's actually an astute and intelligent interviewer, and David Whyte is well worth the 50 minutes or so of your time, as he talks of the conversational nature of reality and... well....just listen.

Pilgrimage 1: Ruapuke and Rakiura

2011-03-13T20:47:00.003+13:00

After a brief liturgy in the Cathedral, the twenty or so pilgrims from Dunedin drove to Bluff, arriving in time to be welcomed onto Te Rau Aroha marae at about 7:00 pm. We were joined there by another twenty or so from Southland and we spent the night in a building which is undoubtedly one of the great artistic treasures of New Zealand. Opened in 2003, Te Rau Aroha was designed by Cliff Whiting, who designed the marae at Te Papa. The wharenui is octagonal, evoking the shape of the small whare puni used by Maori in this part of the world as they pursued a semi nomadic hunter- gatherer life in pre European times. The traditional design motifs are worked in a variety of materials and are brightly coloured, intricate and complex. Although it was not possible to take photographs inside the wharenui, this detail from the wall of the wharekai (also beautifully ornamented, although not as lavishly as the wharenui) gives some idea of the style and type of decoration.

The most striking feature of the interior of the meeting house is the circle of giant effigies of women tupuna: they are tall, stately, and marvellously executed. They represent the women who married Pakeha in the very early days of European contact and thus acted as conduits for the three things which revolutionised Ngai Tahu society: literacy, agicultural innovation and iron.

Our group was fairly typical of the diocese as a whole. We were predominantly women and mostly of a certain age. Some had never been to Stewart Island before, most had never been to Ruapuke and some had never slept on a marae. Some had done all of these things, and some had connections with the marae and with the strong, dignified watching women . So we gathered, prayed, ate, placed the mattresses in convenient spots and got ready for the night when we were told that Sir Tipene O'Reagan was also on the marae and wanted to meet us. He gave us an impromptu though erudite, eloquent and immensely entertaining local history.

The morning was gray and still. We found our ship, a large diesel powered catamaran at the Bluff wharf and boarded. The nervousness of the poorer sailors amongst us was allayed by swallowing various patented anti seasickness concoctions, and by the fact that today was the day when Foveaux Strait decided, against all precedent, to do an impersonation of a billiard table. Flat. Stable. Gray as slate. Our big launch glided out into it, picked up speed and zizzed over the top with hardly a tremor. We all arrived at Ruapuke, 40 minutes later with breakfast intact.

Ruapuke is an island about 13 km by 6 km, low lying, rocky and looking for all the world like one of the Hebrides. It is now almost uninhabited but was once home to a population of about 200 Maori, and was the site of the first European Christian mission station in the Southern region. In 1844 the Lutheran pastor J.F.H. Wohlers built a house, school and church there and ministered to the local people for the following 40 years. We stood on the site of his church, and visited the graveyards of the local people, guided by three members of the several families with continuing links to the island.

From Ruapuke our bonnie boat sped like a bird on the wing to Stewart Island. Lunch on board was consumed in security as the sea continued flat but the clouds rolled away. Albatrosses obligingly flew beside the boat. Seals and dolphins popped by the see what we were doing. Titi and gulls and petrels flapped past on the way to important appointments.

We had only a couple of hours on Stewart Island, but it was long enough to stroll up to the recently restored St. Andrews Anglican Church and meet some of the local people. Airdrey Leask, the priest talked about the local Christian presence and we planted a tree in the gardens. We were treated to an afternoon tea for which the phrase groaning board had been invented and too soon, we were heading back for Bluff and the drive to Dunedin.

This first section of the pilgrimage which will, over the next couple of years, take us right round our diocese went faultlessly. The careful and intelligent preparation b the organising committee and the hospitality of the local people made it work, but the whole day had a sense about it of God's blessing. The weather was perfect. We had the unexpected company of some wonderful people. Nothing went wrong. For me, and I expect for all who went it was one of those days I will remember for the rest of my life. I look forward to the next leg at the end of April, when we commemorate our gold rush history with a trip from Milton to Arrowtown via Gabriel's Gully.

An album of some of my photos from the trip may be found here.

The Truth Shall Set You Free.

2011-03-10T23:54:00.008+13:00

When Jesus stood before Pontius Pilate he was given a few brief minutes to explain himself to the man who had it within his power to inflict enormous pain and, eventually death. Jesus summed up his life and ministry in these words: "I have come to bear witness to the truth", which is a statement I have always thought significant for what it doesn't say. Pilate responds by asking "what is truth?" - a question steeped in, soaked, boiled and deep tissue injected with agnosticism. I don't think that Pilate saw anything beyond doubt. All claims to truth, he seems to be saying, were ephemeral and personal and tentative, including the claim being made by this odd Galilean whom he was being badgered into crucifying. What he couldn't quite get was that the truth he was doubting, but who knows? - quite genuinely and ardently seeking - was standing right in front of him. He didn't get it for the same reason we don't get things: growing in our grasp of the truth is not about learning things, it is about unlearning things. In Pilate's case, what he had to unlearn was the idea that truth is an idea. He had to get rid of that before he could grasp that the truth was -IS - a person.

God sets us here in fragile, breakable bodies, swamped at every turn by real and present danger and God does this in order that we become whatever it is that only existence in time and space can make us. But we are not treated in this like so many lab experiments. God doesn't seem to have set the equipment up, chucked us into the middle of it all and then nipped out for a pie and a Fanta and left us to get on with it. God seems rather to have taken a passionate interest in how we manage. God's interest in this small corner of the project is so intense, in fact that God has taken form and participated in it personally. I have come to bear witness to the truth.

If we want to know what is at the heart of the universe we need to make the same journey of unlearning that Pilate was invited to take. The truth is witnessed to by the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The only trouble is of course, knowing where to look for Jesus Christ.

Given what I said yesterday, most of us have an instinct of where to look, and this instinct is one of the things which must be unlearned. "Knowing" as we do that God only likes the nice bits of life we look where we expect God to be found. So God is present in the acts of kindness and bravery but definitely not in the earthquake that makes them necessary. But there is another image of Jesus that I have been thinking about quite a bit lately: Jesus walking on the water. This incident happened when the disciples got impatient with Jesus' tardiness and took off in the boat without him. So impatient were they, in fact that they didn't even take the time to check out the weather reports and it cost them. Alone on the open lake, blown about by a gale and with the safe shore lost behind the sheets of driving rain, they were unable to sail or row or steer or do anything except hope that their wives would know where the latest version of the will was kept. And then Jesus was there: not on the safe shore; not in the very approximately safe boat; but walking on the face of the great deep, right in the middle of the raging, howling, threatening death and damnation storm. Whatever you accept about the literal truth of the story, the metaphorical import of the story is astounding. Jesus wasn't trying to fix or chase away or mend or explain the storm; he was in it, just as, later, he was in the calm and the amazed questioning of afterwards.

We have some unlearning to do. When faced with our own metaphorical storms, our approach is usually therapeutic. That is, we want to fix and heal, or at the very least to give a soothing explanation. So I sit in the office of a kind and intelligent man who explains to me with the candour born of his Hindu faith that I am going to die, and all the statistics give a reasonable idea of when. My instinct is to cry to God to take me to the safe shore; to heal, to restore, to fix it up. But for what? So that I can die of something else a little bit later?

Jesus is in the storm.

God's presence in my disease isn't found in the cure which may or may not come, or in my bravely and nobly enduring it, but in the disease itself. You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, said Jesus, and as much as anything I have ever experienced, my cancer has brought me to truth and thus accomplished the purposes for which God placed me on the planet in the first place. In this experience I have unlearned the fact that I am permanent. I have unlearned the hope that pain is avoidable and the belief that it is unendurable. I have unlearned my dependence on many things I once thought were essential to my sense of self. I have unlearned the nonsense that I am limitless and am master of my own destiny. I have unlearned my independence of other people.

We all die of something and for many people, that something first knocks on their door and leaves its calling card sometime in their late 50s. So I'm normal. Of course from the point of my diagnosis onwards I have had no intention of curling up and meekly waiting for the skinny guy with the hood and the sickle: life is far too wonderful for me not to put every ounce of effort into wrestling back as many years from him as I possibly can. But looking at my own storm, and trying to see it as truthfully as I can has set me free. I know that what has happened to me is not karma or the Judgement of God. It is the inevitable result of accepting the gift of humanity: a gift which is, in fact, only ours on loan and never for quite as long as we want it but a gift for which I am nonetheless utterly, profoundly grateful. .

Acts of God

2011-03-09T23:56:00.010+13:00

I am told that in Christchurch a clergyman went into a shop and was asked by the shopkeeper why the clergyman's boss had sent the earthquake. The clergyman replied that earthquakes are of the earth, but that the acts of bravery and kindness apparent all over the city are the acts of God. It's an answer that got the reverend gentleman off the hook, temporarily at least, but I don't think it would have been a satisfactory answer for the shopkeeper, at least, not when he went home and thought about it later.

I suppose my unknown colleague was defending his boss, not that his boss ever needs defending, and was falling for a trap common to us religious people; namely, thinking that God is only in the good bits of life, and therefore, that the not so good bits come from somewhere else: from Not God. We have an example of this thinking in our own much admired New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book. In our psalter, the committee which put the book together saw fit to go through and take out all the naughty bits: anything that was too "negative" was deemed unsuitable for worship and was replaced by a discreet series of dots. Of course this bowdlerising runs counter to the genius of the Book of Psalms, in which there is nothing, but nothing, but absolutely nothing which you cannot bring before God and have it received with compassion and understanding and healing. I think it also runs counter to a central tenet of the Gospel, but more of that in another post, later.

When I look down from lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook and feel the gentle breeze:
Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

So if God is in the lofty mountain grandeur how come he is not in the earthquakes which formed the lofty mountains?

The shopkeeper's question and the clergyman's answer both seem to assume a sort of static world in which there are things like the Southern Alps and the Canterbury Plains and the Pacific Ocean and the City of Christchurch. These entities are just sort of there, admittedly changing a bit over the years, but for all intents and purposes remaining the same since God and/or the Universe made them that way at the beginning of time and we all live happily amongst them. God set all this up but exists somehow outside of the system. He (yes, He) looks down on it all more or less kindly and makes the sun come up and the rain fall down and he finds us parking spaces if we ask him nicely, but every so often he seems to get in a snit with us, perhaps because too many of us are attending the Masonic Lodge, or maybe too few of us are thinking about him in the approved fashion, so he punishes us by shaking the place up a bit, causing buildings to fall down on babies and cliffs to crush godly old men.

And yes of course I am caricaturing, but not much, as this sort of worldview is the only one in which the question "why did God send the earthquake?" makes any sense. When earthquakes and tsunamis and floods and pestilence are visitations from outside the system, there must be a reason why they were visited on us. Further, because God is only interested in the nice bits of life, and these events are definitely not nice, the reason must be that the divine knickers are well and truly in a twist over something we or, more likely, some other people, have been doing lately.

I don't think it works like that, but you knew I was going to say that, didn't you?

I don't think that the universe is a collection of static things; it is a process. Every thing that is and ever was and ever will be had a beginning, when it came into existence and has an end, when it ceases to exist; everything, including mountains and cakes and cities and paintings and atoms and species and civilisations and Christchurch Cathedral never used to exist, and one day will not exist again. In between the beginning and the ending whatever it is we can think of is in a constant process of changing from one state to another. And in the middle of this astoundingly complex, huge beyond our capacity to imagine process we are given the extraordinary gift of life and the astonishing privilege of consciousness.The universe in which we temporarily find ourselves is beautiful and terrifying. It is filled on every hand with wonderful blessings and dangers threatening life and limb. Why do earthquakes happen? because it is the nature of the earth to move as much as it is the nature of a cat to move. Why do earthquakes happen? Why on earth do we imagine that they would NOT happen?

So why did God put us, poor temporary fragile creatures into such a scary place? Well, that's the question I hope the shopkeeper was really asking. There is an answer which should be seen immediately as a non starter. We are obviously not here to enjoy a permanent state of blessedness and safety, even though most of the statements of the problem of theodicy seem to assume we are. Most of the worlds religions do promise such felicity in some form or another, but not here, not now. For us now, in this place, we are here precisely because

I realise that I have bitten off more than I can chew in trying to wrestle with the question of theodicy in the space of a blog post. I realise also that I have no business addressing the evils of the earthquake from the safety of a stable little city where the walls still stand and the bogs still flush and and the earth doesn't belch up foetid grey sludge at every turn, but I do want to think for a bit about the actual experience of life threatening events; so I will do it by talking about the events which threaten me.

Next time.

Landmarks

2011-03-03T21:34:00.009+13:00

When I met Clemency in my English 3 class at the University of Canterbury I found that her father was the Dean of Christchurch, and didn't know what that meant; something to do with the University or some church or other, I assumed. Soon after I went to her home at 80 Bealey Avenue for the first time. I am a boy from the Eastern suburbs, where small, low, close together houses were built by the state. I had never, ever, in my life set foot in a house that large and couldn't quite imagine why one family would need all that space. It was a little overwhelming, and was not made any easier by Dean Underhill who hoped, for the first three or four years of my relationship with Clemency that I was a passing fad like the paisley shirt and would soon go away. Clemency's mother was another story. She and I found an instant rapport and established a very deep friendship that lasted until her death in 1985 and, I hope, lasts still. It was in this house that she shared the Gospel of Jesus Christ with me. The Deanery was a gracious, welcoming house, always a little ragged around the edges but always full of people and music. It was a place for Christmas days and long, long evenings spent around a fire happily talking theology with Valerie and or/one of the many young people who temporarily found shelter there.

It was here we held our wedding reception in December 1976. It was on that day, giving my groom's speech underneath the enormous chestnut tree in the front garden, that many people, myself and Clemency included, discovered I had a gift for public speaking.

I could never pass that place, even after it was vandalised by developers without a pang of love and regret.

All that ended on Tuesday week ago.

Of course before the reception there had been a wedding.

Clemency and I were the thirteenth couple married in Christchurch cathedral in it's long history. We needed to be married because a month after the wedding we were headed for Auckland, to St. John's Theological College and living together without benefit of license wasn't going to be a good look. Some years previously I had gone into the cathedral to pick up Clemency's brother Jonathan from choir practice and happened upon an evensong, my first exposure to this beautiful but puzzling phenomenon. During the service some young men paraded in wearing cassocks: that year's crop of new ordinands. Watching them, I suddenly knew with depth and power that I wanted to be one of them. My call to priesthood. So, a few years, many interviews and a time as a youth worker in Avonside parish later, I was standing in the Cathedral getting married. Bishop Alan Pyatt, My Father in Law, Bob Lowe and John Barker all played a part, and I don't recall having much say in things like liturgy and music. Ever since, I have loved this old building and I must say that I was especially delighted with the enormous angels hanging from the roof last time I was there. Now angels, and for all I know the roof they hung from are no more.

Many years and much reading later I was Vicar of Sumner, a time of mixed blessing, but my very little daughter Catherine was very happy there. Every time we drove in or out of Sumner we passed Shag Rock

(note: this picture is not mine, but I wish it was) As we passed the rock, going in or out it would speak to Catherine. Being as cunning as a row of foxes, the ancient rock would assume the voice of one of her parents so as not to alarm the little girl
"Catherine! Where are you off to today?"
"I'm going to Grandpa's and then we're going to buy NEW SHOES!"
"What's wrong with your old ones?"
"They're too small. See."
"Oh. OK. Hurry back Catherine, I'll miss you."
"Bye, Shag Rock."
"Bye."

The rock was the last remnant of a headland that once made Sumner beach even more of the sheltered bay that it now is. During the earthquake, like so much else, it too fell to earth and is no more.

There are other landmarks all gone now. Other repositories of memory and signposts to the past gone, like I suppose the events they are associated with; leaving traces now only in the way they have shaped and formed the living who remain.

Bye Shag Rock.

Bye. See you around.

No. Not this time.

Baxter Poem

2011-03-02T15:49:00.001+13:00

A couple of times recently I have used this poem in a sermon, and some people have asked me for the text. So here it is:

Song: My Love Came Through The City

My love came through the city
And they did not know him
With his beard and his eyes and his gentle hands
For he was a working man

My love stood on the lakeshore

And spoke to the people there
And the fish in the water forgot to swim
And the birds were quiet in the air.

‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said,
But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ -
And the fishermen left their boats and came
To share his poverty.

My love was taken before the judge
And they nailed him on a tree
With his strong face and his long brown hair
And the whiteness of his body.

‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said,
But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ -
And the blood ran down and the sun grew dark
For the lack of his company.

My love was only a working man
And now he is God on high;
I have left my books and my bed and my house,
To follow him till I die.

‘Truth’ - he said, and - ‘Love’ - he said,
But his purest word was - ‘Mercy’ -
Flowers and candles I bring to him
And no man is kinder than he.

- James K Baxter
From Collected Poems
Oxford University press, 1979
p. 477

Breakable

2011-03-01T15:12:00.009+13:00

I was in my office a week ago when the venetian blinds began to sway and the desk I was leaning on began to move in time with my heartbeat. By the time I walked through the door to say to Debbie, my PA, "Hey, we've just had an earthquake", David the accountant was fielding a phone call from his relatives in Christchurch, 350 km away and telling us that it was bigger than September and that the Cathedral had fallen over. So for the last week, news has been constant. An app on my iPhone tells me whenever there is an aftershock greater than 4 on the Richter scale and another one delivers the news from Stuff.co.nz. Against the habits of a lifetime, our TV is now turned on when we get up and stays on during dinner.

I see the images of the city where I went to school and university. I look at the grey stone buildings where I first met Clemency and took her out for coffee a lifetime - well, three lifetimes, actually - ago. I see the familiar streets and the cathedral tower beside which I waited for the bus to take me home from that first date and near which I first heard the call to ordination and beneath which I was ordained. Ruined. All ruined and broken and smashed to bits. I look at the people, many of whom I recognise and see their shock and know that some of them may still be lying beneath the familiar stones. One of the first of the dead to have his name released was Don Cowie, who mentored me when I was a new Christian in the New Life Centre. Last Tuesday lunchtime, at his home in Redcliffs, he went outside to pick strawberries and the quake struck and the cliff fell.

I don't find myself asking "why?" for that's a silly question. There is no great theological answer to that; well, there is, but it's subtle and deep and I can hardly see it myself, so I won't try to unravel it here. The simple truth is, Christchurch was made by earthquakes. Two unimaginably big slabs of rock, the Pacific and the Indo-Australian tectonic plates are floating on the top of a vast ball of boiling iron. They move as the currents shove them about: in our perspective they move slowly, but they move with determined and unstoppable force in a great, slow, pirouetting dance that has gone on for tens of millions of years and will go on for tens of millions more. At the place where they meet they push and grind together and force up a crumpled edge which we now call the southern alps. Rain and sun break up the alps and wash them down to the sea where the little bits of used mountain form the flat bit where we built Christchurch, in geological time, a few heartbeats ago. The plates continue to push, move, stick and move again, as they did a week ago, in their perpetual grinding, stumbling dance. And into this ever changing, never fixed movement we humans are born and we live as islands of consciousness in fragile, temporary, breakable bodies.

Over the last couple of years I have had my own impermanence and fragility sheeted home to me, but last Tuesday we, all of us, shared a reminder that we are not here forever and that the stuff we assemble around us to give us the illusion of permanence is as temporary and as fragile as we are. As I look at the images, I must confess that this time, it's not the scriptures or the great poets that have been running through my head, but a song by Ingrid Michaelson.

Have you ever thought about what protects our hearts?
Just a cage of rib bones and other various parts
So it's fairly simple to cut right through the mess,
And to stop the muscle that makes us confess

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys

And you fasten my seat belt because it is the law
In your two ton death trap I finally saw
A piece of love in your face that bathed me in regret
Then you drove me to places I'll never forget

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys

And we are so fragile,
And our cracking bones make noise,
And we are just,
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls-
Breakable, breakable, breakable girls and boys

There is something else. Something Ingrid Michaelson may not know or believe and I will talk about it later, but I want to just signal it here. Our fragility and impermanence isn't the end of the story. There is an immense mind whose designs resulted in the great globe of molten iron and the plates floating on it and the thin veneer of civilisation clustered in small, temporary camps on the plates. And that mind knows our impermanence and the pain of it. And that mind has shared in our impermanence and the pain of it and shares in it still.

Edinburgh

2011-02-16T23:53:00.006+13:00

A Scotland supporter obligingly takes a pic for some Wales fans beside the statue of Greyfriars Bobby a few hours before the Welsh walloped the Scots at Murrayfield.

What can I say about Edinburgh, other than that if I was ten years younger and/or a little less anchored where I am I would move there like a shot. The weather was not much while I was there and I know from past experience and present observation that the parking wardens are feral, but I simply love this majestic, gray, quirky, noble, self assured, cultured, elegant, ancient and trendy city. It is a little disconcerting that the street names are all the ones I know from back home and that they run off each other in quite a different order than I am used to. It is disconcerting also that despite the disparity in age and size there is something of the feel of Dunedin about Edinburgh. It is not just that we colonials have aped Edinburgh in trivial details of naming and aesthetics, but rather that somehow the values which inform this great city, also informed those who moved from Scotland to Otago all those years ago.

I was hosted during my stay by Bishop Brian Smith and his wife Lissa. On Saturday morning Brian gave me a brief tour, and his love of the city and his deep knowledge of it were conveyed with elegance, eloquence and understated humor. Every five minutes we stopped our stroll so he could point out some detail of architecture or geography or history that whetted my appetite for further exploration. I was taken to the city chambers and shown the Dunedin room, lined with rimu and hung with a couple of superb taiaha, a very old waka hoe and several paintings of my little city.

Later in the day Anne Pankhurst drove me to the Borders where I looked at some churches in rural towns who were coping pretty well with the problems faced by many of our our own congregations. On Sunday I preached in the large, late Victorian cathedral which was pleasingly full. I had conversations with a few of the urban Clergy and went to a quite innovative contemplative service in St. Peter's. Edinburgh Diocese is growing. There are a few charismatic/evangelical congregations doing very nicely indeed but the growth is not confined to them. There us vigor, innovation and modest but steady numerical growth in ordinary suburban congregations, in rural churches and in the inner city. I was not there long enough to make any sort of analysis of this, but there were a couple of impressions I took away with me. One was the quality of leadership exercised by the clergy I met. Another was the willingness, in some places at least, to experiment and to make some quite bold innovations. Yet another was the depth of theological understanding I encountered amongst the (admittedly small number of) clergy and lay leaders that I met. I guess that the positive and attractive culture of the Diocese had a lot to do with the gentle, encouraging but shrewd pastoring of Bishop Brian.

I left on Monday with regret. I would have liked to stay longer; much longer: I was aware that there were several parishes vacant in the diocese and that this is a diocese that would be interesting, challenging and enjoyable to be part of. Perhaps though, my reason for being there was not to reverse the century old pattern of migration, but to be shown yet one more area where we in the south might profitably ape our big sister in the North.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Dereham Rd,,United Kingdom

Highlands

2011-02-16T08:25:00.003+13:00

The journey from London to Inverness doesn't seem so far if you sleep most of the way, which I did. I had checked my bag into the left luggage place at Victoria, had lunch with Alastair Cutting, walked to the Tate Modern, saw the artworks, got lost walking back, found a tube station and thus my way again, had dinner, got my bag again and boarded the Caledonian Sleeper, so it had been tiring afternoon. I was glad to have a wee dram in the dining car before retiring to my rocking swaying little cell to sleep. At about 2 in the morning I awoke and peered out my window at a station with an unpronounceable Gaelic name and saw that there was about a foot of snow on the platform. At about 7 I got dressed, and raised my blind to watch the gray dawn rising on countryside that seemed at once familiar and utterly other.

At Inverness I was met by Bishop Mark Strange, who appeared, reassuringly large, talkative and casual, a minute or two after the train disgorged its passengers into the frosty morning air. He drove me to his home, and then with astonishing generosity, around a fair proportion of his diocese.

The Diocese of Moray Ross and Caithness is in many ways very like Dunedin. geographically it is about the same size and has a similar number of parishes. There are familiar issues of ministering to small and scattered communities and of finding models of ministry which make the best possible use of the limited numbers of stipendiary positions available. The diocese has developed collaborative ministry- mutual shared ministry to us- and is now considering the evolution of the model.

In some ways the landscape is reminiscent of home, but there are some very distinct differences. The hills have the same rolling contour, but there are not the steep sharp, high mountains that we in the South Island expect to be always in the background. The forests look unfamiliar, as do the birds and other fauna. The architecture is very different as are the apparent land use patterns, which draw attention to the biggest difference of all: the towns, the buildings, the stone fences, the abandoned or gentrified crofts, the vast deer pastures, the stone churches, the new forests all speak of the long and fraught history of the Highlands. This is a country whose past tensions still shape the society in which the Episcopal Church of Scotland still ministers.

As I was driven there was a strong sense of being at home. Some of my own ancestors came from here or hereabouts, and the values which shaped this culture have also shaped me. My ancestors, however, had been so anxious to leave that they never gave the Highlands a backward glance. There was no fiddling about with tartan or bagpipes or sporrans for my lot, they were keen instead to acquire a sense of security not vouchsafed by their fatherland and to build a new life in the antipodes. I am, in fact I'm not sure exactly where it was they left, but after a day learning a little of the history of this beautiful place, I could understand what it was they left.

The sky was blue. The lochs were mirror like and there was a dusting of snow on the higher peaks. The churches may be small but they seem to be energetic and innovative, and I finished the day convinced that we in Dunedin have much to learn from and much to share with this Anglican family from the other end of the globe. For instance, many in our diocese would be interested to learn that they run pretty much the same size operation out of an office in a small converted stables in the bishop's back yard with a paid staff of two.

That evening I was treated to a superb Highland meal cooked by Jane Strange for me, and for some other clergy of the diocese including David and Loma Balfour who have known me for years and Clemency for decades. I would have liked to have stayed longer. In the morning I caught the train for Edinburgh but hope that one day I might make the return journey.
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Farewell Augustine

2011-02-09T19:11:00.007+13:00

I'm not sure what I expected from this course, but whatever it was, it's not what I am taking away. I'm used to being on courses: we're very fond of them in the Anglican church, and for some years my job was to devise them, construct them and run them. This one followed the usual (sorry) course of events. We had a timetabled structure to the day, we ate we sat round in chairs, we took notes as various people winged in for the event, gave us their opinions and winged away again. For me the highlights of the content were Jane Williams, wife of the archbishop and, surprisingly, John Rees, an English Canon lawyer. The content was good, but as far as courses go, this was just another one. What made being here worth the cost of a round the world air ticket were those things that money can't buy.

One of these was the company I kept. I was with thirty other people who have recently been through an electoral synod. In other words, thirty other people with long and varied careers in the church and who, for better or worse, have been seen by their dioceses as worthy pinning places for hope and aspiration. About half of my fellow bishops were African, and the rest came from Canada, the USA, Australia, Ireland, The Pacific and India. Amongst them were some remarkable people. I have been in the Anglican church for decades now, and for me "the Anglican Communion" has never been quite real; it is a bunch of committees that other people go to; it is a plethora of wordy and unreadable statements on various things; it is an amorphous organisation like the British Commonwealth which I know is a jolly good thing, but I've never really figured out why. But here, with this diverse group of very human men and women struggling to advance the Kingdom against often overwhelming odds, it suddenly all made sense.

Another was the place. For a week I was part of the community life of a great Cathedral. With a million visitors a year, a paid staff of over 300 and a volunteer staff of twice that, Canterbury Cathedral is one of the world's most important holy places. Just through the wall from the place I sat for evensong was the spot where Thomas A' Becket was murdered. The shrine is no longer there, removed like so many other precious things by the reformers, but the tiles worn smooth by the knees of praying pilgrims remain. The stones tower skyward and are steeped in the prayers of millions of people, so that although there is evidence of conflict and death all around, this is a beneficent place. Several times a day I sat in the warm embrace of centuries of my ancestors to pray and think and be.

So my days filled out and the week passed and seemed months long. I thought, listened, prayed, walked in the picturesque little city, drank good English beer, joked and discussed and listened thought and prayed some more. I will go home a better bishop for being here, which was the whole point I suppose and is all too valuable. But even more valuable is the sense I carry of having been gifted with enormous process in my walk as a Christian and a man.

Pictures From Canterbury

2011-02-09T18:30:00.003+13:00

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Location:Pictures from Canterbury

George and the Dragon.

2011-02-08T19:18:00.003+13:00

A couple of you have asked me privately to tell you the legend of St. George and the dragon. OK. Can do. But I know several versions of the story and am at a bit of a loss as to which one to tell, so I will divide the story up into sections, and for each section put down both of the two major variants I know of, one variant being written in normal typeface, the other in italics. Then you can choose the bits you like and construct the legend that you like best.

1. Once upon a time there was city ruled by a king who had a beautiful daughter. Near the city lived a dragon ( or in some versions a crocodile, but we'll stick with a dragon. They look better on flags and coins and such)

2. The dragon was very wealthy
the dragon built it's nest beside the town's only water supply

3. One day the king got into debt. With no other sources of revenue the king borrowed the money he needed from the dragon, taking out a mortgage on his daughter as surety.
in order to stop the dragon eating folk when they went to fetch water, the townsfolk used to feed it goats. If there were no goats handy they would use the next best thing, ie a damsel. The unlucky damsel was chosen from the supply of available village virgins by casting lots

4. A year and a day after the loan was taken out, it fell due, both capital and accrued interest. And I suppose, GST. The dragon came to collect what was rightfully his but the king's financial acumen had not improved any in the intervening 12 months and he couldn't meet his commitment. So the dragon foreclosed on the princess.
one day, as luck would have it, the lot fell to the kings daughter and she was given to the dragon.

5. The dragon took the princess away and tied her to a tree, intending to eat her later.

6. "Eek! Eek! Eeeeek!" Squealed the princess! "who will save me?"

7. George appeared, slew the dragon and saved her.
George appeared, fought the dragon and subdued it. He tied the princess's girdle around the dragon's neck and led it back into the city.

8. The townsfolk were mightily impressed and became Christians on the spot.

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Bishop's Crook

2011-02-08T11:46:00.003+13:00

On display in a glass case in the treasury of Canterbury Cathedral is a bishop's episcopal staff called The Canterbury Crozier. Made in mid Victorian times by William Burgess, it is an exquisite piece, worked in silver and ivory and encrusted with semi precious stones. The curve of the staff is carved to depict St. George fighting the dragon, with the dragon's intended princessly victim tied to the handle. The detail, in for example, St. George's armour and the ropes tying the princess Is astonishingly realistic. When this beautiful and valuable thing is not in a glass case being oohed and aahed over by tourists, it is used by the Bishop of Dover as he goes about his episcopal duties.

What interested me in it enough to ask the obliging cathedral verger to unlock the treasury and let me see it, is the fact that the first owner of this remarkable object was Henry Lascelles Jenner. In 1866 Jenner was selected by the Archbishop of Canterbury as the first Bishop of Dunedin and was duly consecrated as the same. He then spent a few years touring England raising funds to buy necessary stuff for his new see, such as, for example, a really nice crozier. While Jenner ticked all the boxes as far as the authorities in England were concerned, no one had thought to ask the people of Dunedin, and they were not so sure. Jenner was Anglo Catholic, and they were not. A period of negotiation and argument dragged on for about 5 years, at the end of which the Diocesan Synod formally rejected Jenner's claim to the kathedra, and Bishop Samuel Tarrant Neville was consecrated and installed instead.

In one of those nice little pieces of synchronicity, I found Bishop Neville's crozier just a week or two before I left for England, propped in the corner of the dean's office, looking a bit loose and dusty but nevertheless in not bad nick, all things considered, and certainly worth a trip to the cleaner's. Notwithstanding the fact that it is solid brass and weights almost as much as I do, I intend to use it. But looking at this gorgeous piece in the Canterbury treasury, I did for a moment think I might have preferred it instead. But only for a moment. The legend of St. George and the dragon is one of the silliest stories in the literary history of the church: it is, shall we say, blatantly Freudian and, although of course the symbolic links to the Gospel story are there, they do require some sophisticated ability in non literal thought to see them.

Looking at the Canterbury Crozier, I had two thoughts. Firstly, on the durability of culture. The independence of spirit and disregard for authority are characteristic of my city, my province and my diocese to this very day. Secondly, while it might be a fitting symbol in an English church ( patron saint and all that), I would be hard pressed to think of an object which could less symbolise my diocese than a piece of elephant ivory depicting a bloke fighting a dragon and a woman tied to a tree. It must have been tough on poor old Jenner but perhaps, if things had gone as originally planned, there would have been some very unhappy people in the fledgling Dunedin colony, including Henry Lascelles Jenner.

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Canterbury

2011-02-03T11:39:00.003+13:00

From my room in the Cathedral Lodge I look out at the immense bulk of the Cathedral itself. Surrounding it are the various buildings of the close which house the Cathedral school and in which live some of the 300 paid staff of this busy and ancient society. People have lived in intentional Christian community on this site continuously for 1,400 years. Surrounding the close is the town of Canterbury, bustling with students and a few, hardy, out of season tourists. All of it, Cathedral, Close and City wear the patina of age. Houses are crooked and streets are narrow. Ancient fortifications sit jammed against ancient places of worship and ancient dwelling places. There are half timbered houses and walls made of stone or flint and panes of runny distorted glass. And yet there is a strong sense, not of being in a museum, but in an energetic, vibrant modern town.

It is a bit incongruous for someone like me, used to the Historic places trust getting twitchy over minor changes to an 80 year old building, to see 500 year old ones housing pizza joints or tattoo shops or estate agents. This afternoon I went to a pub with David Rice and Ross Bay. From the dozens of cutesy ye olde English alehouses available, we chose, naturally, The Bishop's Finger. It is tiny, it glows suitably with the oak which lines it and which last photosynthesized around the time of the first Queen Elizabeth. It has little tables made from old barrels and a range of good English beers, and a row of pokie machines lined up against one of the walls. It is, like the rest of the town, a functioning, living place which participates in the 21st Century as much as the 16th.

And so, although abbey and it's priory are only metres away I am staying in a very modern, very comfortable room in a very modern, very well designed conference centre whose existence is a sign of the continuing life of this, one of the most significant holy places in the world. There is a pattern of life here, of daily worship, reflection and community life which I have been assimilated into and for which I feel a peculiar sense of ownership. Here is the central point of my tradition. I am very thankful to be here.

London

2011-02-01T18:20:00.003+13:00

It was -1 degrees when I landed, but the sky was a clear bright blue, and with just as much to fear from nutters bearing gelignite as the yanks, the Brits processed us visitors with infinitely more grace, efficiency and friendliness. I had forgotten, until I was sitting on the tube, how much I love this place. There is a feel to it which is utterly other - there is no amount of imagining that could convince me I might be somewhere in New Zealand - but at the same time it is comfortable and familiar and deeply, deeply known. The tube zims speedily through the dark tunnels and I am surrounded by that variation in humanity which makes London so unpredictable and so appealing. There is an elderly East Indian woman with bags of groceries at her feet, reading the Financial Times. A group of tiny schoolgirls in panama hats gather Madeleine style around a Miss Clavell. An achingly beautiful girl sits distractedly in a hippie costume of kaftan and brightly woven headband. Young men receive texts and talk to each other in Turkish. An old guy in a leather jacket and jeans reminisces silently about the days when he rode a Matchless wiv a bird upon 'is bike; his clothes have remained the same since 1964 though he has changed within them as has the world around him. An assured young man talks loudly to three assured young woman and a slightly more diffident older one.

There is congestion on the Circle line and some sort of repairs being made to the District line. I look at the tube map on the wall and recalculate my way to Victoria. I feel like one of the cognoscente.

I buy an English sim card and Google Map my way to the little hotel I have booked. I have a shower and find a pub for my first real beer since I was last here and have something to eat. I had intended to visit the Tate Modern, but instead am content to wander the streets. Near my hotel are streets lined with Maseratis and Porsches, but also ones containing a market, and guys with dreadlocks and Rasta caps, and there are racks of the new Boris Bikes, and theatres and cafes and famous buildings at every turn. I wear 4 layers,three of them woolen, two fairly thick but I am only just warm enough. I pop into Westminster Cathedral. It looks a bit like a railway station but feels inexpressibly holy. I am moved deeply at the sight of the fragile little body of St. John Southworth who, in 1654 suffered the inhuman fate of being hung drawn and quartered for the crime of ministering to his people as a Catholic priest. Oh my Lord. The things we have done in your name! Forgive us.

I walk out into the gathering dusk at 4:00 and back to my tiny room to sleep. I'm glad, as I walk, of the scarf and gloves but gladder still to be here.

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Fear and loathing in LA

2011-02-01T14:16:00.002+13:00

Long haul flights have a sameness about them. You sit, read, watch, toss, turn sleep, toss turn, stretch, queue, pee, toss, turn, eat, drink, read and watch some more, toss and turn. Every so often, after a long long interval, you disembark, sit in a viewless soulless joyless room for a while, reembark and continue as above. This every so often activity is 'the stopover', where all of the fuel, and some of the supplies, cargo and passengers get changed for fresh ones. Flight NZ2 had one in Los Angeles. Everywhere in the world, on stopovers, passengers are speedily ushered into an isolated part of the airport, left to their own devices, safely separate from all that is happening in the rest of the airport, and indeed the world, then speedily ushered onto the plane again. But no longer in the USA apparently. Since 9/11 the authorities have insisted on photographing us all and finger printing us all lest we do something dastardly, such as, I suppose, taking more than our fair share of the transit lounge instant coffee.

So we were taken into the joyless viewless etc as expected, but made to queue and were all given colored plastic tags. Then, after a while we were asked, by a young woman with a barely understandable Hispanic accent, to form ourselves into groups of ten and come forward for processing. Ten obliging souls did so, and after another very, very long while we were asked to form a second group. It was like that moment in a dull sermon where the preacher says 'point two', and you remember with horror that he confessed to having five points to make. Those of us still alert enough did the maths and groaned. Given the seating capacity of a 747 this process was going to take a little under 3 hours. Apparently, after 3 or 4 batches, this same thought occurred to the young woman with the accent, so as well as the batches of ten slowly making their way through the cameras at the far end of the room, we formed other groups who were led off like kids on a school trip to other parts of LAX terminal 2. I tagged along on one of these; up and down escalators and lifts, through corridors and passageways to another room much like the one we had left where we queued and were,at long last, scanned, digitized and stamped. Then in reverse, back to the original room we dutifully followed to where another young woman with another barely decipherable accent ticked us off on a good old fashioned paper list with a good old fashioned ball point pen, relieved us of our plastic tags and cajoled us to find the people that she had somehow misplaced. We were back on the plane about an hour and a half after getting off. I guess in truth it wasn't much longer than a stopover in a sane place, and it did give us something to do, but it didn't do a lot to reinforce the slogan emblazoned everywhere "Welcome to the USA!"

Los Angeles International airport is a big place. A jet lands from somewhere or other about every 90 seconds, so presumably this chaotic charade was being played out simultaneously in dozens of locations all over the airport. While it obviously keeps a number of people in gainful employment, I cannot imagine how it makes the USA one whit safer. Almost a decade after 9/11 the bombers still have the most powerful nation on earth running around like so many headless chickens, and leaving the impression in the minds of many thousands of brief visitors of an insecure nation governed by unnecessary fear and doubt.

So, my traveller's tip of the day? Unless you can absolutely not avoid it, take the other way.

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Over The Hills and Far Away

2011-01-30T21:36:00.002+13:00

The Koru Club is reassuringly empty with only half an hour to go until boarding. I hope this means an empty flight and a vacant seat or two beside me. I'm not flying business class this time and I have had some tedious flights in the past. For readers of my Facebook page, todays comment wasn't entirely fictitious. On a trip to Los Angeles once I mentioned my profession by way of conversation. For the next eleven hours I was held personally responsible for the crusades and for the various heinous crimes committed by various Christians against my seat mate, his family and his family's family even unto the seventh Generation. Next time I flew the same route I was less than honest. When asked what I did to put bread on the table I almost truthfully said that I was a teacher. Whereupon I found myself in an increasingly convoluted, decreasingly honest conversation about educational policy, pedagogy, Piaget and my views of the same. After that I scowled and mumbled. I'm good at that. So tonight I'm hoping for a lovely empty seat.

I'm not one of the worlds great travelers. Going to a place merely because it's a long way away and I've never been there before holds little appeal and I have no interest at all in getting my picture taken in front of famous bits of architecture. My iPad tells me it's -1 degrees in London at the moment and there are a lot of things back home clamoring for my attention; so I'm sitting here without a huge amount of enthusiasm. I'm going to England to learn how to be a bishop. St. John's College gave a very generous grant for me to educate myself in episcopacy and when I saw this course advertised about eight months ago, I jumped at it as a way of relieving myself of the burden of what to do with the money. Eight months rolls around pretty fast, and here I am, in the Auckland Koru lounge eating chickpea and coriander soup and hoping for a downturn in Air New Zealand's profit margin, at least for tonight.
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the Miracle of Being

2011-01-06T16:26:00.002+13:00

Christmas has come and gone and so has New Year. The family arrived, hugged played games, talked, ate, unwrapped presents and gave some, talked, ate, hugged and left. Resolutions got made, though why exactly is a bit beyond me: just because the Earth has reached some arbitrarily defined point in it's annual journey around the Sun seems to me to be no good reason to take up jogging or leave off eating chocolate.

As usually happens after the festive season I am briefly on holiday, sitting around in the house with the best view in New Zealand, taking photos, wandering around, thinking about swimming, wandering around a bit more and, mostly, reading books. One of the books I am reading is one I gave to Clemency as a joke on account of it's title. Marcus Chown certainly has a way with catchy monikers for his books. The last one of his I read was called The Never Ending Days of Being Dead, which seemed less like the title of a book about quantum physics, which it was, and more like that for a book of poetry, which in some ways also, it was. Quantum physics is about the little bits and pieces which make up the universe: things which are so mind bogglingly tiny that nothing on earth, or even beyond it can see them, and which behave in such bizarre ways that nothing on earth or even beyond it can adequately describe them. In talking about this stuff, as it is when we talk about anything beyond our normal comprehension, we have to rely on metaphor to make any sense of it. And Marcus Chown is a master of metaphor. He has an uncommon ability to make the intricacies of quantum physics understandable, well almost.

So I have been sitting here in this beautiful place savoring We Need To Talk About Kelvin, stopping every so often to marvel that at long last, I am understanding this stuff, but even more, to marvel at the stuff itself.

Like today. I have been reading about how carbon and oxygen form in the middle of stars. I have known for some time that the middle of stars is where, ultimately, we all came from, but Marcus Chown has described for me the process by which it happens; and not only the process but the detective story by which some of the planet's most ferociously intelligent men and women slowly untangled it. It all took some time to be discovered because the formation of heavy atoms is such a complex business, and it is so dependent on the Universe throwing up just the right sequence of highly unlikely numbers that only a very clever and very imaginative mind could ever begin to guess at it. In fact the only reasonable explanation for the formation of carbon is so dependent on the coming together of several seemingly random variables that there are only two possible explanations for its happening at all. Either it is the product of rational intention or it is the product of chance. If it is the product of chance, then the mind bogglingly huge improbability of the process means there is an inescapable inference: in order for our universe to have come up with this particular roll of the dice, there must be other universes where the dice have fallen differently. In other words, there must be many millions, billions or trillions of universes, each of which has different combinations of the dice, and of which only one, ours, can support life as we know it.

Marcus Chown rejects out of hand the creative intent option as unscientific. He says that the supposition of an intelligent creator is a theory which introduces more complexity than it answers, and therefore, from a scientific point of view needs to be dismissed. I can see his point, but it does seem to me that the invention of an almost ( or maybe not almost) infinite number of parallel universes is a theory even more complex that the theory of a creator. And it is a theory which still doesn't satisfactorily explain the improbabilities of our existence. There is of course, not one shred of evidence, and it is impossible that there would ever be so, for the existence of parallel universes, but the existence of a creator is evidenced by the lived experience of a substantial majority of the human race.

I don't want to argue with Marcus Chown; I wouldn't dare, and anyway I am too grateful for the understanding that his clever and accessible and entertaining books have given me; but while I have no doubt that the universe is, as the best brains in history have figured out, some 13.7 billion years old; and while I have no doubt at all that the little bits and pieces out of which I am composed had their genesis in the heart of some anciently exploded star, this knowledge doesn't so much make me doubt the existence of God as fall at his feet in awe and wonder.
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The Christmas Story

2010-12-23T08:59:00.000+13:00

This is the Christmas story as retold by the children of St. Paul's Symond's Street Auckland.

Sunday Driving

2010-12-13T14:54:00.002+13:00

Yesterday was a lightish sort of day as far as commitments go. I dedicated a new window in the magnificent St. Martin's church in Duntroon, attended a picnic afterwards and then sat in the congregation as four young men were ordained to the diaconate in Christchurch Cathedral. One of the new deacons was Jolyon White, who was once the youth worker in St. John's Roslyn and now works in the Diocese of Christchurch making sure that none of them forget about social action. Jolyon's effect on St. John's was enormous. He encouraged and taught and charmed the parish into a deeper commitment to ecological and social issues than anyone in the parish, prior to his arrival, including me, thought possible. He has a good theological degree, but more importantly, an instinct for making theological concepts practicable, and even more importantly, several sure fire ways of helping others to believe that this life changing stuff can be achieved. Yesterday's ordination marks a powerful, strategic step for Jolyon, but it marks an even more powerfully strategic step for the church when somebody so potentially revolutionary is recognised and set aside to lead.

Yes.

All in all it was an easy and invigorating day, except that it did involve about 9 hours driving and reinforced the fact that in increasing my effectiveness as a bishop, the wisest investment our diocese has made to date (after of course, the salary for my PA, Debbie ) has been in a really good car.

My Subaru Forester 2.0D has a common rail diesel engine and a six speed manual gearbox. It is, as are all cars with this configuration, somewhat light on horsepower but very heavy on torque. That is, while it might not beat the boy racers away from the lights and is somewhat easy to stall, it is very gutsy on the hills and when passing milk tankers. It has a low centre of gravity and if I am prepared to work the gearbox, can be made to twinkletoe its way around corners very nimbly indeed. For a big car (five adults and their luggage in reasonable comfort) it is amazingly frugal, returning 6.6 l/100km over the 35,000km I have travelled in it this year. Most importantly, I can sit in it for 3 or 4 hours and climb out at the other end with no undue fatigue; which meant that when I got home at midnight yesterday, the driving wasn't a factor in my weariness, not even a little bit.

So today I eased the Forester out of the garage, washed off the insects that had got too close to the windscreen and were as a result considerably short of breath and puttered down to the bay to sit for a bit and look at the seagulls and think about the goodness of God. Jolyon a Deacon. The Holy Spirit sure does khave his act together. I'm glad I was able to nip up to Christchurch in style and comfort to see it.

Holy Name

2010-11-27T11:24:00.006+13:00

For a good bit of this week I have been attending a conference for bishops (Anglican and Roman Catholic) at St. Margaret's College in Dunedin. It was my first attendance at such an event, and it far exceeded all my expectations, which I suppose doesn't really say much as I didn't know what to expect. Peter Norris, the warden of St. Margarets made a spectacular job of organising and running things. The venue was very comfortable, the food superb and the speakers challenging and entertaining. The company was very congenial and I particularly enoyed meeting, and getting to know the Catholics.

For several of the sessions, we were addressed by John Battle, cabinet minister in the Blair goverment who spoke largely about interfaith issues. He was enormously erudite, informed, innovative and rip roaringly funny. We had professor Harlene Hayne of Otago university, talking about the development of the adolescent brain, and the implications for things such as alcohol law reform. It was information that would have been very useful to me 10 years ago, or, even more usefully, 40.

For me, though, the Eureka moment came, as such moments always do, unexpectedly and from an unexpected source. We had a panel discussion on youth ministry, one member of which was Father Mark Chamberlain from Holy Name Catholic parish. Holy Name is, by a massive margin, the largest student church in the city. It is, I would think, the largest church in the city full stop. Many hundreds of young people attend, and a large proportion of them are involved in various forms of parish based Christian ministry. Many of them are Catholics, born and raised in Catholic homes and schools but many of them are not; they are of other denominations, other faiths, or none at all. Many are students at the nearby University, but many others come from all over the city.So what packs 'em in? Not the website, obviously. I have only been once on a Sunday, and it seemed to me to be a fairly standard Catholic Mass with modernish slighly hibrow music. It's not a "fresh expression", not even a little bit, and it defies all the usual church growth parameters for a young person's church -there is not a drum kit or chrome mike stand in sight. No, they come for one reason and one reason only: to participate in the very real sense of God that is present in the community and worship at Holy Name. And this sense of God is mediated, largely, through the parish priest.

Mark is spectacularly busy. he runs this huge parish, he is the University chaplain and he has significant responsibilities within his diocese: that is, he holds down three full time jobs, simultaneously. He also works as a spiritual director, counsellor and social worker and always seems to have an oversupply of houseguests in the Presbytry. He has given up, of late, his clinical psychology practice. Despite the sheer volume of stuff he packs into each day, whenever I meet him I am struck by two things: the sense of calm and stillness he emanates and the fact that when he talks to me he is focussed on me and absolutely present to me. The young people turn up to see him, talk to him and listen to his slightly quirky sermons where he relates in surprising and delightful ways, the events of everyday life and the eternal Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The panel talked around the question of why young people come to Holy Name, and then I had my Eureka moment. I asked Mark what his spiritual practice was. He turned his huge blue eyes to me, wide with surprise and looked a bit flummoxed. "What a question!" he said. Me? I do nothing special. Just the usual ordinary stuff. I get up at 5:30 and pray for an hour. I say the daily offices. I participate in the Mass. I try and take from 1-3 off every afternoon to read and refresh myself. I like to go outside late at night and look at the stars and pray. And I find the examen very helpful. But nothing out of the ordinary." Yeah, Mark.Exactly.

Here is a man whose love of Jesus shines through him, not occasionally but consistently. He spends serious amounts of time each day alone with God and it shows. He is as holy a person as I have ever met, and I've met a few, of varying faith persuasions. His life is rooted and grounded in prayer, and it is this which brings young people in their droves into Holy Name church week by week, month by month, year by year. I asked my question of Mark and was immediately humbled and challenged by his reply. We, the church have nothing to give the world but Jesus. If we don't have him we have... simply nothing.

I came back from St. Margarets to face immediately a long running dispute in our diocese in which people seem determined to treat each other with disrespect, discourtesy and unkindness. My heart sank when I saw how yet again we had managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and I looked ahead to yet another sleepless night. And then I did the only thing I could think of to try and make it better. I took my prayer stool and sat down. Thanks Mark.

Brockville Community Church

2010-11-18T16:26:00.002+13:00

The Joint Regional Committee is not my favourite institution. JRC is the body which administers co-operative ventures, which is the New Zealand term for interdemoninational churches. I have served in two such churches and have consequently attended many JRC meetings, which all seem to suffer from the same malaise: they take the most sluggish, bureaucratic bits of each of the participating denominations, mix 'em up and make a whole new brew whose complexity and turgidity is positively Byzantine. So you might imagine that I was not looking forward to last night which was my first attendance at a JRC as Bishop. I wasn't. But I was pleasantly surprised. Very pleasantly surprised in fact.

The purpose of the meeting was to receive a review of the Brockville Community Church, which is the small ecumenical church set in a suburb high on a hill on the outskirts of Dunedin. The church building is unprepossessing, to say the least. The people work in the sorts of places where at the end of the day something actually gets made, but some of their neighbours, and indeed some of the congregation, are not working at all for one reason or another and the suburb is not awash with cash. Neither is the church. For many years a small leadership group have struggled on, providing ministry from their own resources; doing it well but getting very tired in the process. Then a year or so ago they entered an arrangement with the local Methodist Synod and with the neighbouring Presbyterian congregation to share in the ministry of Andrew Scott and the development has been dramatic. The church now has two very healthy youth groups, a busy children's ministry, some quite innovative social outreach programmes and lively experimental worship. While the Sunday services are still not bursting at the seams there is a steady stream of new families joining the church as the congregation's profile is raised in the community. But all this stuff is not what impressed me. As I entered the room last night, the good will and community spirit were immediately obvious. In a way which I might have hoped to see elsewhere, people treated one another with affection and respect and were openly grateful for and enthusiastic about each other's giftings. Despite the fact that this was a JRC meeting, I had a sense of being part of the Body of Christ. It was a pleasure and a privilege to sit amongst them. So that's the good news.

Now for the bad news. All this energy and life has a very doubtful future. The funding from the Methodists will cease next year and Andrew will need to find ministry elsewhere unless the community can come up with sums which are, at the moment, well beyond them. I couldn't help but be aware of the ironies. Our diocese is in decline all over the place but here, where the Holy Spirit is making an obvious and dramatic statement of presence, we may not be able to continue. We have quite literally millions of dollars worth of land and buildings and cash assets scattered around the countryside between the Waitaki River and Stewart Island, but the work of the Gospel in this out on the edge suburb may founder for the want of one stipend.

I have until June next year to mull this one over. Believe me, between now and then, on behalf of the Brockville Community Church, I will be badgering the one who has at his disposal the cattle of a thousand hills.

Wasting Time

2010-11-11T18:36:00.002+13:00

In a previous life, when I was Vicar of Sumner in the Diocese of Christchurch, I went to an excellent ministry school at which somebody or other spoke about time management. At the time I was having problems fitting the required amount of activities into the requisite number of hours, so I paid close attention and did what the speaker suggested. I began keeping a log of how I spent my time, making notes every 15 minutes or so during the day recording as honestly as I could where the minutes went and I was horrified. At the end of a couple of weeks the number of hours I had spent doing nothing in particular, sitting, staring vacantly into space was truly astounding. No wonder I couldn't get everything done! Astonishing amounts of precious time were just being frittered away, which was alarming, but easily rectifiable using the useful second step provided by the ministry school. I began to schedule everything, including a 20 minute slot at the start of every day where I made up the schedule and there were two immediate and dramatic consequences of all my efforts: 1) I got a lot more things done. 2) The quality of my sermons plummeted and by plummeted I mean entered a vertical power dive with all engines running and the after burners on. Which was alarming as I then regarded the 20 minutes in the pulpit every week as the most important bits of my life. After a month or so of preaching drivel, I ditched the schedule and went back to daydreaming.

What I hadn't realised up until that point was the enormous benefits to be gained by a bit of stuffing around. I remember reading about somebody or other encountering Albert Einstein striding around Princeton barefoot and with his trousers rolled up to his knees. "Professor Einstein, what are you doing?" they asked. "Loafing," he replied, "just loafing." The mind is a wonderful thing and most of its workings are unconscious. We are aware of the surface of it, as we are aware of the surface of the sea, but the huge and powerful and beautiful mechanics of it all happen without our knowledge and certainly without our control, no matter how much we might kid ourselves to the contrary. A learning that Einstein had grasped and which I stumbled blindly into was that the times when we relax our pretences at control are crucially important. To maintain any form of creativity it is necessary to let the mind be fallow; to let it have its own way for a while without trying to cram it into objectives and prioritised lists and schedules.

This has all come back to me with a vengeance as I look back over my first year as Bishop. I"m glad to say that I have maintained, more or less, the discipline of sitting absolutely still every morning and letting the chattering machine gradually wind itself down. I'm aware of the compelling dictates of the stuff that MUST be done, but also increasingly aware of the need to be the sort of pastor described by Eugene H Peterson in his wonderful quaternity of books on pastoral ministry (The Contemplative Pastor, Working the Angles, Under the Unpredictable Plant, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work) : that is, unbusy, subversive and apocalyptic. Or, alternatively, I could succumb to the pressure to do stuff and become an executive in an ecclesiatical organisation, but I think, on reflection, I'd really rather not.

Ron Mueck

2010-11-09T16:34:00.011+13:00

In the half hour I had to wait for the Christchurch Art Gallery to open I went and had breakfast in the Art Centre. I had a bagel and coffee in the foyer leading to the room I used to go for psychology lectures when this set of old earthquake cracked buildings was the University of Canterbury and I was a lost and lonely student. I sat there remembering my time there: perhaps the unhappiest three years of my life, grateful for all the distance travelled since then and for all that had been given me since. Then I crossed the road and walked up the street to enter the exhibition of artworks which affected me more profoundly than any other I have seen, and I have seen some very old ones with some very famous foreign names written on them.

Ron Mueck makes hyper realist sculptures from fibreglass and resin. Almost all of them are of people, rendered in the most meticulous detail. The exhibition appealed to me on so many levels. The works themselves are all quite beautiful; wonderfully proportioned and balanced and coloured. They were well lit and intelligently exhibited, with bare white walls and skillfully placed screens and openings so that none of them unduly interfered with the others and so that they could be encountered at varying distances. Ron Mueck's craftsmanship is simply astounding. Every body hair and pore and crease has been exquisitely observed and rendered so that the humanity of the subjects is laid out with stiletto sharpness. They demonstrate an acuteness of observation which is the real gifting of the artist. These sculptures don't have the greasy, cross-eyed, bewigged sense of unreality of waxworks, but rather, demonstrate the shape and textures and colours and variety of people so authentically that I expected them to speak or move at any second. Except for one thing: scale. They are all very big or very small, and this gives them a sense of disjunction which allows them to speak so deeply. While the works are almost unbearably human, the size differential allows for a sort of objectivity; there is no sense of voyeurism or intrusion as they are studied and engaged with and admired. But perhaps more than that, the scale works with some deeply buried instincts and memories. The very large pieces are encountered much as small children must encounter adults: we see them and are unconsciously driven back to our own childhood relationships with the powerful, huge people in our lives; but now we are seeing through adult eyes and with the adult abilities to understand and to empathise. The very small figures usually speak of aging and death, but they diminish the fears associated with such terrifying prospects and invite us instead into compassion.

In the entrance to the exhibition, the corpse of a man lies on the floor. He is about my age, lying naked on his back, pallid with death. He is about three feet long, and his diminished size draws me into his vulnerability and fragility.

Near him is the head of the artist, just the head lying on it's side, sound asleep with the mouth slightly open and a tiny dribble of saliva escaping, and a few hours stubble covering the chin. The head is huge, and hollowed behind like a mask. Turn a corner and a heavily pregnant woman stands naked with her arms clasped above her head. Her face is wet with sweat and tears and shows the pain and terrible burden of pregnancy. Her expression encapsulates at once the great power and the great vulnerability of womanhood. She is eight feet tall and her pose evokes Atlas bearing the world but the great globe of the world is not above her, it is within her. She is a weight bearer, physically and metaphorically. Through a door is a newborn baby, umbilical cord still attached, the body still covered in blood and vernix and bearing the creases of the recent passage into life. The baby is about 3 or four metres long, and as she squints at the world with the perfectly captured, unfocused half gaze of the newborn, she is at once pathetically vulnerable and filled with enormous power and potential. Nearby a tiny man sits in a boat, personifying millennia of archetypes relating to journey and death. He quizzically peers past the bow, into life and death, adopting a pose and expression that is calm, and curious and appraising and intelligent and disconcertingly like mine as I encounter him.

Through another portal there is a giant, wild man, stating the power and vulnerabilities of masculinity as strikingly as the pregnant woman had done for femininity. And through yet another portal is the work which affected me most. A huge woman lies under a duvet, dressed in a simple cotton garment. Propped on two giant pillows she stares pensively into the distance with a perfectly executed hand resting lightly on her cheek. Every hair on her head, and the light down on her face and the slight imperfections of her skin have been knowingly and purposefully placed. The lines around her eyes and the texture of her skin tell me she is somewhere in her late thirties. She is thinking about something - who knows what? She is away in a reverie about the coming events of the day or her money worries or the dream she has just had or... I walk around her and manoeuvre myself into the position where she is looking directly at me and there is an electric jolt of connection. The uncertainties resolve themselves into a single thought: she is looking at me: suddenly I know her and I am known. And then I remember that this is not "she" but "it". There is no woman here, just a lump of fibreglass. This "woman' is a figment of Ron Mueck's imagination in just the same way that Elizabeth Bennett is a figment of Jane Austen's, and all that sense of connection and recognition has come from me; it is my invention and my projection onto this shaped piece of inanimate material. It is a powerful moment of self knowledge for me.

I drove home grateful to be alone; thinking about the woman in the bed, and about other relationships in my life; about the way I (and I assume all people) see connection because I have projected it there. About the way the unhappiness of my time at Canterbury University was my own creation, for which I had to take complete responsibility in order to overcome it. And, by implication, about the way in which the happiness of yesterday was also my own creation and my own responsibility.

I didn't stop and take any pictures. I thought instead about changes to be made. Ron Mueck's work has allowed me insight into myself and called me into change, as all great art should do.

(photographs are all taken from other sources. copyright is unknown)

The Living Church

2010-11-08T21:21:00.002+13:00

It was cloudy and cool when we left Dunedin just before 8 am yesterday and nothing much had changed, weather wise, when we finished the service in Roxburgh about 5 hours later. Not that it mattered. The little church of St James had been full and buzzing with life, a testament to the new energy and purpose accruing to the parish since Petra Barber joined the team a few months ago. Then after the usual parish lunch we headed for Wanaka and a mile out of town the climate changed: not just the weather, the climate. Get over the first hill out of Roxburgh and you are into that clear, strong Central Otago light with the tussock and the schist and the inky blue skies and the lazy summer heat.

We arrived in Wanaka with plenty of time to spare, checked with Denis Bartley, the vicar, on arrangements for the confirmation that was to follow at 5 pm and went to St. Columba's. It was dry and hot in the church, certainly not the weather for a cope and mitre but why drag all that drag all this way and not wear it? 5 pm rolled around, there was another full church, a serious young girl prepared to profess her faith before her friends and family, and a lovely moment or two in the service. After the confirmation Denis invited anybody who wanted to reaffirm their profession of faith in Christ to come up to the altar rail. And one by one, almost the entire congregation came up, to kneel and receive the laying on of hands. There, with the golden sunlight sifting into the old church and the warm air around us, the sense of peace and contentment and conviction was almost palpable. And in the middle of it I blessed a small greenstone taonga for Beth Griffith, our one time diocesan youth and children's worker, and gave it to her as she returns to renew her life in Canada. Moving? Yes. We drove home early, missing the pot luck dinner; but the parish, or at least a key member of it, Ngaire Bartley, had prepared a little picnic hamper which we ate sitting on a park bench overlooking Lake Dunstan as the sun sank into the mountains behind Cromwell. E te whanau we are the body of Christ! I knew that for certain last night.

And then early this morning I drove to Christchurch to attend the memorial service for my former Bishop, Maurice Goodall. The Cathedral in the heart of the shaken but not stirred Garden City is a lively place. It is full of energy and movement and people. In the Dean's vestry where the bishops gathered it was full of wit and laughter and good humor as well. The cathedral was almost full- 800 or so people, I'd guess- sombre but calm and grateful for the life of this good man. I remember him coming to see me when I was Vicar of Waihao. His mission at day was to convince me to become the chaplain of Christ's College. He arrived at our place and immediately took to bed and slept for 20 of the 30 minutes he had allowed himself for the task, so tired was he from the effort he was putting into pastoring his diocese. I found that experience quite moving: that he was prepared to be vulnerable and to be ministered to by the most junior of his clergy. He didn't succeed in that day's mission but he did succeed in his bigger one, of shifting Christchurch away from a very traditional style of ministry into a more contemporary one which, ultimately, allowed for the bustle and liveliness evident in his cathedral today.

It is easy sometimes to be tempted into despair and cynicism about the church. But not today.

I finished my day around 5 pm and GPSed my way to the motel Debbie had booked for me. I could have driven home, I suppose, but I've about had my fill of driving for today. Besides, I really want to see the Ron Mueck exhibition in the Christchurch Art Gallery, so tomorrow I'll have a day off, look at the sculptures and drive home in a leisurely fashion with my camera on the passengers seat, grateful for the life and energy of the Church of Christ.

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Location:Bartlett St,Christchurch,New Zealand

Day Off

2010-11-01T20:20:00.002+13:00

This weekend was like most of my weekends. Busy. Clemency and I were on the road before 8 am on Saturday, opened some new flats at the Parata home in Gore, spoke at a Dinner in Gladstone, took part in a service on Sunday morning and then drove back to a service and dinner at All Saints Dunedin. In between events, time was filled by pastoral visits and by driving. I got home a little after 10 pm on Sunday, fell into bed and didn't wake until nearly 9 am which was the first great thing about today.

The second was Paul Dyer ringing soon after I woke up to see if I wanted to go sailing. The sky was blue, the breeze was steady and the sea was calm. Did I want to go sailing? Is the Pope a conservative German? There is something meditative about sailing. There is the whole ritual of preparing the boat and then launching it, and at the end of the day, the ritual of taking it from the water and washing and derigging it. In between is a journey that is, essentially, pointless: we sailed up the harbour and across it and back, traveling a few kilometers to arrive back where we started from. The whole journey is conducted at a less than leisurely pace, except for those few moments of rush and tumble to rectify some error or other. There is a slow, measured, conversation conducted as a subsidiary activity to the main business of the day: watching the wind and the sea and the sail and the angle of the boat, keeping all in a harmonious balance. It is an exercise in awareness. Like motorcycling, to do it well requires being present in the now, accepting and embracing what is going on and avoiding the impulse to struggle and impose oneself upon it.

I got home in the middle of the afternoon, and set about making a meditation stool. I've made three in the past week, and I keep thinking of ways to improve my design. This one is a folding one legged model, designed so that it can be carried in a suitcase. I made it from some of the old cedar weatherboards removed from the house when my new study was built. The cedar is 20 years old, so is dry, light and strong and, once it was planed and sanded, a beautiful light golden colour. I have made it so that the height and angle of the seat are adjustable. The first of its several coats of varnish is drying as I write this, but when it is is finished and assembled, I'll put a picture on here. Who knows? You might like to make one yourself, or, if you ask nicely I might even give you one.

Today has been, like the weekend, measured in Kairos, not Chronos; that is, felt time rather than objectively measured time. With lots fitted in the days seem longer and they are deeply satisfying. The sun is sinking behind the trees and the harbor and the hills. I think I'm ready to face tomorrow.

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Location:Glenfinnan Pl,Dunedin,New Zealand

Amusement

2010-10-11T21:40:00.003+13:00

The past week or two have been so full that many things have gone undone, such as writing on here, for instance. The issues, both personal and diocesan, are not ones I can write about. Suffice it to say that they have been demanding, draining and time consuming. I am not complaining: this is what I knowingly let myself in for when I accepted nomination all those months ago and the busyness has been an occasion for learning and growth and has thus been oddly invigorating. There have been times though when I have needed an escape of sorts, so along with the full timetable that comes as an inescapable accessory to the pointy hat, I have been frantically reading and watching the occasional video.

There's a distinction I have sometimes used in sermons, between amusement and entertainment. I have taught that the word amuse consists of a negative prefix (a-) attached to the word muse meaning to inspire. Amusement is thus the negation of thinking, and it is contrasted with entertainment which is the adoption, consideration and enjoyment of ideas, aesthetic experiences or whatever. Just as we entertain a guest, the ejoyed thing is invited in, a relationship is built and we consider how far the entertained one will be a part of our future life. Entertainment invites growth. Amusement invites temporary anaesthesia. It's a useful distinction. So useful in fact that even now, when I have learned after the fact that this little piece of entymology is actually inaccurate, I have decided to retain it's valuable services nonetheless. I don't have a lot of time for amusement as I have previously and erroneously defined it. For me, reading blockbuster novels or films without anything to think about or be moved by is inexpressibly tedious. Watching a sporting match is fine as long as there is a sense of narrative - as for example in a cricket test match- but sports which are purely spectacle, such as competitive ballroom dancing, just don't do it for me, I'm afraid, skillful though they may well be. Contrary to my usual inclinations, I haven't been able to garner the slightest interest in the Commonwealth Games this time around, maybe because of lack of time, maybe because I can't see the venues without thinking about the folks whose homes were bulldozed to improve the view from them.

So, lately I been entertained in a feeling response tear jerking sort of way by Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side and in a stay awake thinking about the implications sort of way by the docudrama Bloodlines. Mostly, I have been entertained by a biography of JRR Tolkien and The Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart. I've found the odd spot of gardening and home improvement quite entertaining. But as far as amusement - switching off the brain completely in order to escape into some reality completely unconnected from this one- goes, the only thing that has happened this week has been Paul Henry. He's certainly been fairly amusing.

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Decently and in Order

2010-10-01T20:19:00.002+13:00

My study is built, the books are on the shelves in more or less their permanent positions and there is a desk which will do in the meantime. Just through the wall is a corner of the garage which will serve as my workshop, and those familiar with our garage at Highgate will be astounded by its tidiness: there are little spring clips on the walls to hold all the tools; there are little jars and colour coded plastic trays full of bolts and screws and thingumejigs; there is a lamp and a vice which is actually screwed down to the bench. This temporary attack of anal retentiveness is unusual in someone and by someone I mean me, with the Myers Briggs personality type INFP, for whom, normally, the mere mention of the words "sub clause" or "scheduled" is enough to bring on an attack of hives.

Partly, this orderliness is the result of having a smaller house than we used to and having to make best use of the space available. Partly it is because at my age the natural progression described by the MBTI means that my tertiary and inferior functions - borderline sensing and extroverted thinking- are coming out of their 50 year long apprenticeship and are starting to throw their weight around. Partly it is because even I now realize that tidiness is actually the easiest and least demanding way of doing things, and that some semblance of organisation is needed to move the big picture imaginings, which are my stock in trade, from lala land into the world of being. Or at least into my garage.

Which is why I spent some of this week in a room with colored stick it notes and highlighters and very large sheets of paper. Benjamin Brock Smith had come up with an ingenious system for scheduling our Diocesan plan and we spent a few happy hours sticking things on and coloring bits in. Now, attached to the wall of the Diocesan board room is an enormous diary, outlining the way we will implement our vision over the next five years. It is a work in progress, and in fact has only had the barest preliminary outlines put on it yet. I hope that people, after they have cadged a cup of coffee from Barbara, will feel free to wander up the stairs and have a look at it, and make any suggested comments or alterations to me or Alec, or Benjamin or Helen Wilderspin or Bronwyn, who will all have a hand in shaping it. Seeing the plan begin to be set down on paper in doable chunks encourages me to hope that we are going to do more than that thing the church usually restricts itself to: circulating bits of colored A4 paper.

The energy for the changes we are embarking on will come from the enthusiasm of the people of our Diocese; energy such as that in the room when I met the combined vestries of Gore and Waimea Plains just yesterday. We were talking of how we could cooperate across that part of Southland and work together for the Kingdom. The enthusiasm was so palpable you could have cut it up and sold it by the yard. Perhaps someone reading this might fancy a 1-2 year job ringing in the changes in that busy little corner of Middle Earth or perhaps, later, the longer job of acting as the regional leader. There are plans afoot. We have it down on paper and the dates and names are steadily being filled in. It's very exciting, intuition, feeling and perceiving notwithstanding.

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Location:Glenfinnan Pl,Dunedin,New Zealand

The Ayes Have It

2010-09-19T20:54:00.003+12:00

Our synod was short. After a Friday night start, we were all fnished by 3:30 pm on Saturday, and that included a presentation of my Strategic Plan, discussion of the same in small groups and a potentially divisive but in the end not so discussion on the ordination of folks in same gender relationships. We ended with a dinner hosted by the St Barnabas home at which Phil Clark of the Church Army spoke. Phil is the best public speaker I have heard in a very long while. He was thought provoking and eloquent and surprising and very funny - his table companions spent much of the meal fighting for composure as the liquid bits of their dinners ran out of their noses. He spoke of taking over the Church Army, an organisation which was formed a long time ago to evangelise the working classes. The methods and structures which proved so successful through the first half of the 20th Century have not proven durable however, and the Church Army has been in decline for a while. Phil Clark is not a man to be bound by either convention or expectations, so he is taking the organisation off in a whole new direction, basing its operations on an expression of urban community: same aims, different context, different methods.

Which was a providential thing for Phil to be saying, because I guess that is pretty much what I was trying to say in both my long sweated over charge * and the Strategic Plan. Bronwyn, our Diocesan Manager also said it when she delivered a brutally honest, very clear statement of our financial position. Now you might expect that being reminded that we were in significant decline and that we were pretty much broke into the bargain might have had a depressing effect on people, but if you expect that, then you're obviously not from around here. This synod was calm, reflective, hopeful and even, at the end, excited. It was also, despite the differences between mutually exclusive viewpoints, deeply respectful and united. We are, like Phil Clark and the Church Army, embarking on a process of profound change in almost every aspect of our Diocesan life. We have an agreed pathway to do that and we have the energy, and more importantly, the will to take that path to wherever it is that the Spirit is leading us.

*the charge as it is printed here is the official version which will go into the yearbook. I didn't use this script, however but extemporised to cover the same ground. On Friday night I desperately needed to speak to my diocese, and you all know how rude it is to speak to someone and read at the same time.

Procrastination

2010-09-13T19:29:00.014+12:00

I've taken better pictures than these, but I'm quite proud of this pair nonetheless. Today was my day off, the time when I rest and recuperate and get myself all charged up for the week ahead; which is not a bad choice of words, for this week I have to deliver a charge and today was the only clear space in my timetable in which to write it.

Pistols have charges. So do courts and batteries and schoolteachers and the Light Brigade. So do bishops. We have to give a long and interminable speech at the beginning of synod, it's all part of the tradition, you know, and these valiant attacks on insomnia are known as charges. Because it has to be printed out I had to write a full script, something I haven't done since I talked on the radio in 1992, and the time before that must have been one of the sermons I preached before Bob Lowe got on my case in about 1982. For me, scripting a sermon is like scripting a conversation; as I labour over the keyboard there is a little voice deep in the inner recesses of my inner recesses which whispers, speaks, shouts then screams that this is not the way it should be done. But I did it. Or most of it. In the bits of the day when I should have been writing the rest I procrastinated.

Procrastination is revelatory in terms of the Myers Briggs Personality Inventory. J personalities procrastinate by not starting things. P personalities proacrastinate by not finishing, and today I found a hundred excuses not to finish.... well.... two, anyway. My newly built study now has books on the shelf, but they (of course) need sorting. And more importantly, the wireless internet took the scenic route on the journey from the kitchen wall, where the router lives, to the new space under my old desk where my computer skulks, and although it no doubt enjoyed itself, the signal was all tuckered out when it got to my place. Of the two issues, the internet was the one to which my procrastination genes bonded. I looked on ebay (ipad, another room) and found a brand of parabolic dish antenna which might solve the problem - a good hour wasted there - but they were expensive and the post is slow, and who knows if it would live up to its hype when it got here? Then it occured to me that any hemispherical metal object should act as a dish antenna, and so I held my usb wifi thingummy in front of the the family colander and got an immediate jump in reception. So, it was off to The Warehouse to buy a shiny new colander ($9.95), and another happy couple of hours fitting it to a wall in the garage, drilling a hole between the study and the garage, running an extension lead from the computer and dangling the usb thingummy in various positions in front of the holey object. It worked! Woohoo! Speed jumped from 11 Mbps to 108 Mbps. Signal strength went from 12% to 68%. I was chuffed and immediately used my new found connectedness to google and see if anyone else had come up with this idea. They had. Of course they had. In their thousands. There is a whole subculture of using kitchen utensils as wifi aerials. They're called woktennas or wokfi or wifry. Well I never! There was another happy half hour reading all about this, and looking at the ingenious pictures of aerials made from chip scoops, pringles tins, soup ladles and sieves. And I found another wonderful timewaster.

Somebody had invented a thing called the Windsurfer signal booster, which is really just another little parabolic aerial. Basically, you download a pattern, print it on card, cut the thing out, glue tinfoil on the back surface, and fit it on the antennae of your wireless router. It took less than half an hour go to whoa to make two, put 'em on and boost the signal up to 80% and speed to 121.5 Mbps. Fantastic! Another boost in the figures, but of course, the increase was practicably unnoticeable. And then, oh happy day, it was time to cook dinner.

The charge is 3/4 written. Only a quarter to go, and I have the whole evening, unless I find some other atractive diversion, such as writing a blog post.

Home Again

2010-09-02T07:49:00.003+12:00

I missed the last session of Tuesday's program. An old friend had an issue to discuss and, seeing as I was in the neighborhood, I spent late Tuesday afternoon sitting in a bar drinking Speights and talking about life, the universe and everything instead of in the Kinder library discussing Augustine, life, the universe and everything. I would have got away with my wagging except that when I arrived back in school on Wednesday morning I discovered I had been appointed, in my absence, to a panel and my place was there, third to the left and we start in 5 minutes.

It was OK. The panel was comprised of people representative of various ministries, lay and ordained, who all spoke eloquently and powerfully about issues of power in the church. People spoke from contexts in which the power of the church to speak the Gospel was severely restricted, in the places where they lived, by governmental and social pressure. Some were students preparing for a future of full time service to the church. One was a newish bishop. There were many contributions from the floor, and the time rolled past too quickly as people sought to coalesce the historical and theological reflections of the past two days into the areas where they worked to make real the Gospel. After all, talking, thinking and reading stuff is only worthwhile if it affects the way we do stuff. I thought briefly about the mountain of books in my garage. We ended with a powerful and moving description from Hone Kaa about the work of his congregation with abused children in South Auckland. He told us that at the end of many decades of Christian ministry and very public leadership, this last chapter of his life has been the most rewarding.

Then it was kai. Then, because the hui had been hosted by Tikanga Maori, there were carefully constructed words of farewell to release us and enable us to return next year. Then it was back to the airport in the lugubrious Nissan and a flight down the whole length of the country. It was a fine clear day and we flew over the Abel Tasman national park, over my sisters house in Kaiteriteri and my mother's house in Motueka. Looking down at the bush and the golden sand I wondered if my tramping boots were in the garage and if I would have the books cleared sufficiently away to find a tent by January.

Then it was circling over the green paddocks of the Taieri and the crisp southern air and this widely scattered people needing new ways to hear the Gospel for which Perpetua died; and with which Augustine wrestled; and by which Constantine sought to rule.

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Aahhh... The Good Old Days....

2010-08-31T20:17:00.002+12:00

There is a myth so dear to most Christians that we have developed various versions of it to comfort ourselves with. It goes like this:
Once upon a time the Church was perfect. Unfortunately in [A] [B] happened and things have never been the same since. For [A] substitute some date in the dim and distant past. If you don't know the date, a vague nod in the general direction of some past century or other will do. For [B] substitute the name of whatever it was that ruined things. A helpful list follows:

* the fall of Jerusalem
* the end of the New Testament era
* the Apostle Paul
* the suppression of the Gospel of Thomas
* the Reformation
* Vatican 2
* Sunday sports
* Constantine
* St. Augustine

The last two are particularly popular as villains because they each mark significant turning points in the development of the Church, very few people are as knowledgeable about them as they give the impression of being, and it's not difficult to find incriminating proof texts. I spent today listening as Andrew McGowan tried, and in my view, succeeded, in putting each into their historical context, and discussed each as an exemplar of a particular strategy for relating temporal power to spiritual authority. As Andrew pointed out, the Church has been conflicted and ambiguous from day one, as is to be expected of those who gather round one whose strength is demonstrated principally in an act of vulnerability and weakness.

The implications of the lectures we have received here have been discussed in caucus groups; yesterday I talked to other bishops and today was in a men's group and a group of people in their fifties. Discussion has been warm, and occasionally profound. Talking has helped me assimilate the material from Andrew and relate it to the not unrelated stuff I had been serendipitously reading before coming here. One of the theses emerging is the resonance between issues emerging around the formation of Christendom, and those emerging around its ending; a resonance important not because it marks out some golden era to which we should all strive to return, but because it shows the sorts of struggles we are likely to encounter as we learn to be a different sort of church than has ever existed before.
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Location:Gladstone Rd,Auckland,New Zealand

Beginnings

2010-08-30T20:29:00.003+12:00

The flight from Dunedin left early so I was up at 5 and driving to the airport in the dark and wet. Wellington was cloudy and Auckland, when I arrived slightly misty and, by Dunedin standards, warm, but that doesn't seem to stop the wimpy locals banging on about how chilly it is. I picked up my bargain basement rental car- an aging Nissan Sunny with the performance and handling of a slug negotiating a plate of porridge- and navigated my way across the city with surprisingly little bother. With an hour to kill before the powhiriri I found a cafe near the Orakei basin and bought a large and good and inexpensive latte. I sat and looked out at the streets around which, 35 years ago, I had jogged with a pair of adidas on my feet and a pained but determined expression on my face. This was a neighbourhood near which I had lived during that period in my life when I had first been truly happy, and now it was at once familiar to me and as foreign as Honolulu or Beirut.

Through long remembered streets I drove to St John's College, where the theological hui is being held, parked the glutinous Nissan and entered the Wesley building. There are heat pumps and a data projector now, but otherwise, it was wall to wall Deja vu: same carpet, same curtains, same tutkutuku panels, and even some of the same people, although, poor old dears, they have aged so much they found it hard to recognize me.

This college is where so much began for me: theology, the Biblical languages, liturgy, more friendships than I can now recall, preaching, contemplation, snooker, a collection of books, diaconate and priesthood and even, in a way, episcopacy. After lunch I walked the kilometre or so down to Abraham Place and past the tiny flat where my marriage began and also my son Nicholas. I walked back up the hill over which I used to run and thus over the ground where my knee problems started. And I sat and listened to Andrew McGowan, who is one of the best lecturers I have heard in many a long year, speaking about Perpetua and the start of Christianity as we know it.

As Andrew pointed out, the 2nd 3rd and 4th centuries were when much of Christianity had its beginnings. The New Testament found its shape then as did the creeds, baptism as we understand it, and the eucharist and the form of ministry into which I was shaped, in this building, 35 years ago. He reminded me of the surprising relevance of the development of Christendom to us who are witnessing its unravelling.

Perpetua was a catechumen, that is, an apprentice Christian, who was martyred in 203 AD for her refusal to sacrifice and acknowledge the genius of the Emperor. It seems that the Romans were quite tolerant when it came to religion. You could believe in what you jolly well pleased and participate in any act of worship that took your fancy as long as you still paid homage to the official state cult. That is, you were fine as long as your faith was a private affair and didn't interfere in your duties as a citizen which included a public affirmation of the deity - that is the ultimate importance and authority - of the Emperor. Perpetua refused. For her, faith encompassed all her actions. For her, allegiance to Christ took precedence over all other allegiances. She was a citizen of the kingdom, and could not therefore pledge undying loyalty to something as limited and flawed as a mere earthly nation. For this conviction she was prepared to risk all, even her own life. "Jesus is Lord" was the first Christian creed: an allegiance so total and so exclusive that it crowded out all others.

Lately I have been reading Marilynne Robinson and Terry Eagleton and David Bentley Hart on the nature of modernity and of modernity's virtual deification of tolerance: of the tendency for contemporary people to regard the very act of acceptance as of supreme importance without giving more than passing thought to the content of that which they are tolerating. Modernity tends, by affirming everything, to affirm nothing, except the desirability of affirmation. Accordingly, who amongst us moderns has anything to which we hold so dearly that we would face the wild beasts rather than forsake it? Perpetua's defiant conviction at the start of Christendom raises an uncomfortable questions for us at its end: can we still proclaim "Jesus is Lord"? And if we can, what on earth do we mean by it?

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Location:St. John's College, Meadowbank, Auckland.

The Day Thou Gavest Lord has Ended

2010-08-27T22:05:00.011+12:00

I look at the date at the top of my last post and realize how long it was since I put anything on here. There's a reason for that. There are in fact a dozen reasons for that and I can't mention one of them. In the parish I dealt with people's life issues on a daily basis and was trusted to share their struggles and concerns and joys and pleasures. Once in a while, maybe once every couple of months or so, there would be something big; I would be invited into one of those issues which, when the narrative of that person's existence was told, that event would have a place in the story. Sharing those issues was both compelling and draining, requiring me to plumb the limits of my reserves of empathy and understanding, but also invigorating me with fresh insights into the workings of us, peculiar, sentient islands of consciousness that we are. Now, in this office into which the Holy Spirit has, for bizarre and obscure reasons called me, I share such moments on an almost daily basis. Today there were four of them.

I can not, will not speak of these things except, in a limited way, to my supervisor and those to whom the people involved have given me permission to speak. So for the most part I keep my trap shut and find ways other than gossip and conversation to earth the loose wires which such sharings discover within me. I have been reading a lot. I have been kneeling on a mat with an old cloak around my shoulders, keeping as still, inside and out, as I can manage. I have taken up my old regime of reading 4 chapters of the Bible every day. I have also, slowly, been shaping a plan for the diocese and trying to acquit myself well in the duties required of me. I have been slopping paint on the walls of my newly build study and looking forward to the time when I can fill it's shelves with the books that have been piled in the garage for months now. Unfortunately, the Lord hath not seen fit to comply with my special pleading and order the universe around my whims, so the day he giveth endeth after only 24 hours and some things which might have helped have gone undone. I haven't been taking any photos, and in fact haven't seen my camera's battery charger since it got lost, months ago, somewhere amongst the cartons of books. I haven't been fulfilling my obligations to Taonga magazine. And I haven't been posting on Available Light.

Today's duties ended at 8:30 this evening. Whew. The darkness falls at thy behest, and thanks for that.

Tomorrow it's a drive to Invercargill and an Ultreya and a conversation in a cafe and a drive to Dunedin and a party. Sunday it's Otago Peninsula and evensong with the girls from the Tolcarne boarding hostel. Then on Monday I head for the theological hui in Auckland which means three days of listening to learned discourse and intense discussion of the same: i.e. a rest cure. I' ll see if I can write about that. Really I will.

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Location:Glenfinnan Pl,Dunedin,New Zealand

Atheist Delusions: Another book review

2010-08-02T13:54:00.002+12:00

In Beirut airport there is a smallish bookstore containing a smallish English language section, containing a few John Grisham novels, some travelogues, a good number of books on Islam and this: Atheist Delusions, The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart. I bought it immediately, and discovered at this point that my Visa card was still in an ATM back in Ashrifiyeh, but that is another story. I started to read the book on the plane and discovered a new hero.

David Bentley Hart is an Orthodox (note the capital)theologian of immense erudition, intellectual capacity and wit. I have now ordered some of his other works, but this one proved to be a great way to fill the long hours drifting above the clouds. His way of dealing with the challenge of the new Atheism is one I warm to immensely. I have long known that the best way of dealing with Atheist splutter is to use their own non-arguments against them ( I used to be an atheist but in my early twenties found that I no longer needed the emotional crutch of atheism...) Hart does it better. He knows what many of us timid and polite and nice Christians simply don't: that most of the atheists who beset us with such assurance and confidence simply have no idea what they're talking about. So people with the skimpiest knowledge of history, and no understanding whatsoever of the history of science will regale us with absolutely confident and convinced opinions on, say, the trial of Galileo. People whose knowledge of the Middle Ages comes exclusively from some half baked TV documentary or from one or two badly researched best sellers will argue earnestly about the end of the Roman Empire and the theological and moral development of Europe. With style, panache, élan, learning and relentless logic David Bentley Hart demolishes... no, blends, powders and atomizes... the arguments raised not so much by the serious philosophical atheists (of whom, incidentally there are precious few about), but by the fashionable poseurs, the headline makers, the publishers of cheap and cheerful splentetic tomes, and the ABWFI (Adolescent Boys With Father Issues [my phrase]).

The style of the book is bold, confident and assured. It is a wonderful piece of Christian apologetic, but it is much more besides. It is an interesting potted history of Christianity and of the development of Scientific thinking, written by a man acknowledged as one of the world's foremost scholars of religion. It is a devastating critique of the West, and of Modernism as the prevailing philosophy of the West. It is a hope-full analysis of the Christian Gospel and a statement of its contribution to the intellectual and moral development of Europe and, indeed, of the world. The book is backed by impressive scholarship, properly footnotes and referenced, and all this presented in a readable, and even racy style.

Hart's analysis of Modernism as resting on a particular concept of freedom is an intriguing one, and this is an idea I have spent the last few weeks unpacking for myself. Hart describes the Modernist concept of freedom as being entirely about the individual: that is, MY development as an individual is the highest good, and anything which compromises MY right to do exactly as I please is to be resisted. I believe he is accurate in this, and I am alarmed to consider how far this particular view of freedom has infiltrated the church and influenced the way we organize ourselves and the way we think about life, the universe and everything. We have lost, in large measure the freedom described by Paul in Romans which is freedom from my own self absorption and from the impulses and half conscious powers and principalities which hold me locked down tight in bondage.

This is a book I am savoring until The Beauty of the Infinite arrives. It's one I recommend highly, but don't expect me to lend you my copy. Not just yet, anyway.

A 30 Day Retreat: Book Review

2010-07-26T22:18:00.001+12:00

Over the next couple of days I want to share a couple of books I have been reading lately, and found useful. Firstly, there is this gentle but engaging spiritual manual, A 30 Day Retreat by William C Mills.

Wiliam C Mills is an Eastern Orthodox priest, a university teacher and a pastor. This book of spiritual exercises reflects all of these aspects of his life, but particularly the last. While it draws from the depths of Orthodox theology and reflects an impressive depth of scholarship, it is aimed squarely at ordinary, everyday Christians seeking to deepen their spirituality. The format is one which is common enough: there are 30 chapters, each beginning with a brief passage from scripture. The heart of each chapter is a commentary on the passage, usually running to 3 or 4 pages, which is followed by a few questions, aimed at leading the reader into deeper reflection on the passage and on the points raised by the commentary. Each chapter ends with some suggestions for further Biblical reading. Very helpfully, there is an appendix which describes the Lectio Divina: a way of reading the Bible in order to maximise engagement with The Word of God contained within it, and this inclusion nicely indicates the tenor of the book. While the format is similar to more famous offerings from the likes of Oswald Chambers, C.S. Lewis and William Barclay, this is a book for a rigorous workout for the soul, rather than for ongoing day to day spiritual feeding.

That being said, the approach to spiritual growth is pastoral; the reflections in the book are couched in terms and filled with examples that everyone should find accessible. The language is gentle, and the reader is led calmly and logically through each of the 30 themes. The tone of each chapter is that of a well crafted sermon by an erudite but pastorally connected priest. To deal with each of the day's exercises properly : to read the passage prayerfully, read the reflection and spend some time with the questions takes at least half an hour, and again, this indicates the uses the book has been designed for. I imagine this would be a useful companion on a private individual retreat, or as a devotional manual for Lent, or as a study and devotional series for a housegroup; but there is another use I could see for it in my own Diocese of far flung, sometimes under resourced parishes. A congregation lacking a preacher could do a lot worse than reading a chapter of A 30 Day Retreat, and inviting the congregation to take the questions home for reflection during the week.

This is a useful, well written text. The theology is sound, the tone is gentle but, ultimately, challenging, and there are plenty of pithy little illustrations to keep the imagination up to speed. It would be a useful addition to any private or parish library

A Tale Of Three Cities

2010-07-21T02:42:00.006+12:00

I have been driving around Doha for the last couple of days, which was initially daunting because they drive on the wrong side of the road and almost every intersection is controlled by a roundabout. Roundabouts I generally regard as one of the more enlightened forms of traffic control: as long as everyone keeps cool and keeps moving the traffic slips on through with no problems at all. But add in the factors of having to remember to look the other way, and the standard of Qatari driving they can be a bit nerve wracking. We're all still alive, though, and I've gone a long way through the heat and dust with large 4X4s looming in the rear view mirror with the driver mouthing in Arabic unkind things about my parents .

Doha is about the size of Auckland, both in geographical and demographic terms. It is criss crossed by a network of new roads, often up to 8 lanes wide, which feed traffic into a maze of smaller and often older streets. Yesterday the wide roads took us to the Villagio, a shopping Mall dressed up as Venice, complete with a canal, gondolas and Rennaisance facades.This is just the place to go if you want a bit of a bargain on that new Porsche or you're sick of the old Rolex. It has a wonderful Dean and Delucca deli and lots of places where you can buy big brand name stuff for cheap. While Clemency and Bridget sought out the bargains, I paid 21 Riyal (about $8) for a glass of orange juice and wondered if they did test drives on the Porsches until I remembered the roundabouts.

Later in the day we went to another city. The old Doha: the Souk. Or at least, it's what people think the old Doha should have looked like if it had only got its act together. The Souk is a labyrinth of small shops selling Arabic stuff. There's no airconditioning. There are old guys with wheelbarrows who follow you around so you don't have to carry whatever it is you've bought. It has spices and colour and people smoking Shisha and a shop which sells falcons, the birds not the cars and accessories for the same. There's been a Souk here for a very long time but the old one was a bit tatty so they replaced it with a better one complete with authentic antique Islamic ATMs, I kid you not. We bought strange sweets and "pies" made from 30 second old flatbread stuffed with deliciousness and Arabic family baboushka dolls.

Then today another Doha. This is one the Emir, so rumour has it, has marked for demolition as soon as he's finished spending the trillions required for the massive up to the second hyper-city that is arising from nothing all around the shoreline. We visited the Islamic cultural centre, where we were received with great warmth and hospitality. We were given an expensive looking book on Islam, water, and Arabic tea and coffee. We were taken into the mosque and told why people never take the Koran into the toilet, or write in it, or place it on the ground, or carry it under their arm. We were given an object lesson on how to make a faith look hospitable and attractive that I only wish my own Diocese could observe and learn from. Then we went outside into the bit of Doha that the Emir is not so keen on. It is all flat, ugly 1960s modernist architecture and streets clogged with cars and battered airconditioners spewing hot air into the already 50 degree noontime. We went into a mall that sold nothing but Burkas: dozens and dozens of small shops displaying black frocks whose coloured cuffs and collars were the only distinguishing feature; and incongruously, all the tailors and salespeople seemed to be Indian men.

And incidentally there is lesson in here somewhere about the relationship of the genders in Islamic society, which is not quite as we Westerners have caricatured it. There is a story to be told that can only be told by Islamic women, and, obviously, they are hardly likely to tell it to me. But family life here is kinder, softer, richer, more finely nuanced, more balanced than I had imagined it to be. In the Souk I passed a man my own age. He was handsome and dignified in his thobe and kaffiyeh. He was holding hands with a very old man, obviously his father, and the old man, his powers well diminished, had slowed the flow of pedestrian traffic somewhat. The son looked at me and smiled, apologising in a glance for holding me up, but expressing not the slightest degree of embarrassment or regret. It was a 10 second vignette of love and belonging which spoke a depth of family life we have long lost, if ever we had it.

All this life and vitality and eclecticism and ability to get things done and openness to the future and good taste and style and history and goodness and generosity and decency are not what I expected of Arabia and I find it enormously attractive. At 1 am tomorrow we will drive to Doha airport and begin the long, albeit quite comfortable thank you ma'am trip back to the land of the long white cloud. From this perspective New Zealand looks very young and very cold. I will be happy to get back, but hope it won't be long before I'm here, where it all started, once again.

Wadi Rum

2010-07-20T04:19:00.002+12:00

Friday was our last full day in Jordan. We left Wadi Musa at Midday and headed for Lawrence of Arabia country. Wadi Rum, where we arrived in mid afternoon is a thousand square kilometres or so of sand, basalt and sandstone. It is the place where T.E. Lawrence did his bit for the Arab revolt and where the 1962 film about him was shot. We were taken for a hair raising ride through some of it in a beat up Nissan Patrol driven with consumate skill by a Bedouin driver who could not get his tongue around any of our names, except Scott's. "Ah," he said," like Saddam Hussein! Scud!" We spent the night in tents, albeit ones equipped with beds and mattresses, but sleep was scarce on account of the heat and of the Lebanese girls dancing to very loud Arab pop music.

Wadi Rum is a place of quiet and power and beauty. You know what they say about the relative worth of pictures and words so:

The Rose Red City

2010-07-16T07:05:00.006+12:00

It seems no work of Man's creative hand,
By labor wrought as wavering fancy planned;
But from the rock as if by magic grown,
Eternal, silent, beautiful, alone!
Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine,
Where erst Athena held her rites divine;
Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane,
That crowns the hill and consecrates the plain;
But rose-red as if the blush of dawn,
That first beheld them were not yet withdrawn;
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which Man deemed old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime,
A rose-red city half as old as time.
-John William Burgon

We woke early and left for Petra at 8 am. It was not quite early enough as the gates open at 6 am and by the time we had got tickets and linked up with Mahmoud, our guide, there were already people walking back and we weren't quite early enough to dodge the folks on bus tours. Not that there's anything wrong with people on bus tours, of course, but they do seem to have a penchant for standing in front of the pretty bits taking pictures of each other, and there are usually 40 of them. I had three expectations of Petra. 1. that it would be hot. 2. that it would be crowded and 3. that it would not live up to the exalted imaginings I had of the place. I was right about 1 and 2, but I was wonderfully wrong about number 3.

Nabatean tomb

We walked down the entrance path, past a few tombs hewn into the sandstone. Mahmoud, who had been raised in Petra pointed out the differences in Nabatean and Roman architecture. This city, situated to control the caravan routes through Arabia had been capital to the Biblical Edomites, then the Nabateans. It had fallen under the control of the Romans, the Ottomans and the Arabs. All had left their mark but it was the Nabateans who made it what it is. A kilometer down the path we entered the narrow canyon called the Siq which is Petra's front door, and it was here that I realised that nothing in my imagination could possibly prepare me for the experience of the place. The Siq is in some places a hundred metres wide, and in others five. As you walk down the gradual slope towards the city it curves and turns, shifting from cool passageways to open sunny plazas, all naturally formed, of course. The sandstone twists and turns skyward: pink, ochre, red, burgundy, tan, cream, white blending together or laid in stripes or fading one into the other. In the walls are small tombs and niches, stairways, dams and partitions. A water channel runs the length of it, and was once connected to an ingenious system of cisternsand reservoirs. There is Roman paving underfoot, and perhaps Nabatean paving under that. In places there are the remains of what must have once been huge and impressive statues, and all of it is carved out of the rock.

A dam and part of the water channel in the Siq

It is not hard to imagine what it must have been like: from the ferocious desert the traveller would have entered this cool pink alleyway; running water on both sides; pools and cisterns dotted regularly along the course; trees and gardens planted in terraces or in small side valleys; cool even paving underfoot. It must have seemed like paradise.Then nearly a mile in, there would be the sight which remains unchanged, 2,000 years later. Turn a corner, and through the slit which is the end of the Siq is "The Treasury," glowing pink in the sunlight. I had seen it in hundreds of pictures. It was the backdrop for an Indiana Jones movie. But nothing prepared me for its beauty nor for its grandeur. Seeing it is to be transported back to the time before this was a ruin.

A couple of tourists getting a snap in front of the Treasury

Emerging from the Siq the illusion of timelessness disappears in the bedlam of gawking tourists, stalls selling cold drinks and souvenirs, vendors flogging camel or donkey rides and children accosting us with armfuls of trinkets. 5 dinar sir, because I like you, but if you twist my arm who knows? I might go lower... The wide courtyard is full of movement, but there is nevertheless a sense of hushed quiet: Petra is bigger, older, more serene than the frantic pantomime of the courtyard in front of the treasury; and besides, the Nabateans were traders and would heartily approve of their descendents making a buck in this place. The valley opens up and in the walls around us are many tombs, homes and monuments carved into the rock. To make a cursory survey of the city would take, so they say, about three days. It is huge and we had one day. So we walked. It is possible not to walk. There are camels and donkeys for hire and you can, if you want, ride to even the highest points in the city, but walking, particularly with a knowledgable guide, connects you with a place in a way nothing else can.And thankfully, as we moved away from The Treasury out into the bright sunlight and the rest of this huge city, the crowds thinned.

Bridget and Scott look into the striped house

In about 3 hours we walked the length of the city and climbed up the 900 uneven, broken, steep steps to "the Monastary" (names are a bit arbitrary and bear no relationship to the original use of the buildings) and then further up to a place where the whole city and the deep rift valley containing the dead Sea lay before us and the mountains of Israel lay beyond. We dined in one of the two restaurants, the one housed in a large tent. We looked at the remains of the Roman collonaded street, and entered a house whose naturally striped walls and view out over the amphitheatre had once made it a guest house for VIPs.

The Monastery. The 2 people in front of it give a sense of scale

By the time we began the return journey up the Siq the temperature was well into the 30s, we had lready walked about 8-10 km, some of it almost vertically and my shirt was sodden. The sun was directly overhead as we walked back and the Siq took on a whole new character. An hour or so later we were back in the hotel with showers and a pool and beds. Petra is the reason I wanted to come to Jordan in the first place, and the trip has been worth it for today alone. I shall be back.

Arabian Evenings

2010-07-15T14:32:00.004+12:00

We drove a long way yesterday through the gray gritty Jordanian countryside. Every so often there would be a small business like town with its collection of shops and mosques, a bazaar and a church, and people for whom we were objects of mild curiosity. Near the towns were sometimes ragged Bedouin encampments: tents of brown camel hair or orange plastic; sheep; a few cows; camels; children; a mess of plastic litter. There was mile after mile of gently rolling hills, some of it well tended cropland baking in the post harvest sun, some of it bare gray desert.

At one stage we crested the brow of a hill and the Wadi Mujib opened out before us, about 1300 metres deep, a small version of the Grand Canyon. There was a slow winding descent and a winding slow slimb through its grandeur. We stopped at Madaba to see the ancient mosaic map on the floor of St George's (what else?) Orthodox church. We had a look at the magnificent Crusader castle at Kerak and arrived here, at Wadi Mussa (the Spring of Moses) around 5 pm.

We checked into our smallish but comfortable Arabian hotel, took a dip in the pool, and gathered on the roof terrace at 7pm for dinner. Us Europeans, dining as we do at the quaint time of 7 or 8 are bound to get a good table because we beat the Arabs to the smorgasboard by at least an hour. People here breakfast around 7, lunch - the main meal of the day- about 2 and dine about 9. Work and sleep fill the hours between.

Evenings are conducted in a very civilised fashion. Men gather for conversation (personal, and maybe some business), and perhaps to share a shisha and a cool drink between the office and home. Then around 9 the family gathers: men women and astonishingly well behaved children. All sit together as a nuclear unit or with friends or members of an extended family. The meal follows a well rehearsed pattern. First is salad, falafel, hummous, fresh flat bread, spices. Then meat dishes, usually lamb or beef but never, obviously, pork. Then there are sweets which are to European expectations mild and understated, usually centred on large plates of sliced melon, with jellies perhaps honey cake and a bland but refreshing junket. If someone told me I would have to eat Arabian cuisine every day for the rest of my life I would heartily thank them.

Then, after dinner, there is thick sweet coffee and shisha. Shisha is the traditional water pipe, shared by all adult members of the party, with smoke enjoyed for its flavour and aroma rather than for the buzz of nicotine, which it lacks anyway. Shisha is blended to give various flavours: apple, lemon, mint and so forth and in a culture with strong injunctions against alcohol, fills the same niche as wine in European cuisine.

So we sit. The familes begin to gather around us just as we finish and they are far too polite to stare. The waiters are attentive and the sun begins to sink behind the mountains of Petra to the West. Our food has been, as usual, delicious, and our pipe tonight is lemon and mint, which is regarded as more of a men's flavour than one for women; in any case Bridget doesn't like it as much as usual. As the sun sinks, the call to prayer sounds from the nearby mosque and is taken up by the other 4 mosques in town. Echoing, intertwining across what seems like a vast space in the twilight, there is a haunting, eerily beautiful challenge which no one in town can ignore:

God is greater than any description.
There is no deity but God and Muhummad is a messenger of God.
Make haste toward prayer.
Make haste towards success.
Prayer is better than sleep.
God is the greatest!
There is no deity but God,

The families pause their conversations. Within the hour the devout among them will respond but for now there are the gifts of God to share: fine food and shisha and shared words and each other

Water

2010-07-14T08:52:00.002+12:00

The Jordan River, looking towards the Orthodox Church of St. John The Baptist

Humanity had its beginnings in Africa, which means that in order for there to be people in the bits of the world that are not Africa, at some stage they had to pass through the narrow corridor we now call the Middle East. Unsurprisingly there are artefacts from every epoch of human history buried beneath Jordanian soil. We saw some of them this morning. There is a hill above Amman called the Citadel of Amman which has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years. There are very visible Roman and Ottoman ruins there, lots of archaeological diggings and the Jordanian Archaeological Museum. As far as exhibition space and facilities go, the JAM might best be described as basic, but it houses some amazing bits of kit. There are some Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance; real ones, not copies. There is the oldest statue ever discovered; and again, the actual statue is sitting there, not a copy of something out the back in an air conditioned vault.

The citadel is one of the high points of Amman, in every sense, so from here it was, literally, downhill all the way. In the space of about 30km we dropped from about 1100 metres above sea level to the Jordan valley about 480 metres below sea level. When we arrived at the site where Jesus was baptised by John, the temperature was in the low 40s. Because the site is in a military reserve, we travelled to it in an approved shuttle and by approved shuttle I mean the back of a truck. Before reaching the sacred site, we stopped to view the Jordan, and I must say Naaman sums it up pretty well. “there are a lot better rivers where I come from.” The Jordan, never a huge river, has been badly depleted by irrigation schemes and is now a narrow polluted muddy creek. At the site where, consensus has it, John worked and Jesus, in obedience, allowed John to minister to him, there is a shallow grey green puddle and the ruins of the 5 churches which have been built on top of the site and on top of one another. The River has changed course since John was here, and floods and earthquakes haven’t been kind to the buildings people have erected to try and preserve that holy moment from so long ago. There is now just an archaeological dig and a temporary wooden roof to keep the sun off the boffins’ heads. A hundred metres walk away there is the Eastern bank of the Jordan, from which we looked into Israel about 5 metres away. We visited the impressive little Orthodox Church of St. John the Baptist, ate some dates from a date palm (about as different from the dates we put in scones back home as a dried apricot is from a fresh one. Exactly as different) and headed south.

I crossed myself with water from the Jordan, and although a dove flapped down from a nearby tree, I was profoundly unmoved by it all. You can’t step into the same river twice, the old saying has it, and the river in which my Lord was immersed disappeared thousands of years ago. Now there is a wooden platform above a creek and Israeli and Jordanian soldiers nursing automatic weapons and glowering nonchalantly at each other across a line someone had arbitrarily drawn on a map. There are shops selling religious tat and coca cola. Not one bit of it spoke to me at any level of the Good News which Jesus was baptised to proclaim.

10km further South Ibraham dropped us off at a hotel – a very nice hotel – on the shores of the Dead Sea. We did the Dead Sea things. We floated uncannily atop the water. I couldn’t swim as my body was too far out of the water to execute any proper strokes. Instead I lay on my back and rowed myself along like a Phoenician trireme. Stately and noble and gracious, I thought I looked. The water looks like hydrochloric acid, and it has probably the strongest taste of anything thing I have ever had in my mouth. We all coated ourselves with the slimy black mud which is scooped from the bottom of the sea, waited until it dried and washed it off by swimming or rather bobbing in the sea once more; It made me feel a) very soft and slightly oily and b) itchy. Supposedly, I am now looking ten years younger, but only I and one other can verify that and the vote is inconclusive.

We had yet another wonderful meal, this time sitting on a broad terrace in the still hot and dry evening air with the flat, still sea before us and the lights of Jerusalem twinkling on the hillside beyond.

Middle East Day 6: Amman

2010-07-13T03:31:00.005+12:00

It's about 45 minutes as the Boeing flies from Beirut to Amman, but a bit further than that in terms of culture and politics. Jordan has no oil, so unlike other gulf countries the citizenry can't go importing folk from other lands to sneer at and make do all the work. Unlike Lebanon, Jordan has also enjoyed a long period of peaceful, benificent and generally level headed government.Just like Pepsodent you can feel the difference. Everything is brighter, whiter and cleaner. Whiter, certainly. The place is built on limestone. It shows in the soil and it is quarried for the buildings. All the houses, most of the shops and some of the public buildings are glistening white, straight edged and regular. There are 2 million people in Amman and the little white cubes stretch off to the horizon in every direction.

The cars are newer and shinier than Beirut, and the traffic behaves itself. Not that it used to. Jordan was once reknowned for the most reckless traffic in the Middle East, but a few years ago they had a massive motorway pileup in which many people were killed. It was too much for King Abdullah. He gave orders. Now there are undercover cameras, checkpoints, traffic patrols and lots of warning signs. And today the traffic flows in an ordered and restrained fashion.Whether or not Plato was right about benificent autocrats, this is a country with systems and order, and one in which the government, while it may not be by the people in quite the same way that we are used to, is by and large for the people.

We are travelling in Jordan with a guide. He is Ibrahim, drives a new Hyundai minivan, speaks excellent English, and for $100 a day each we get him, his Hyundai, all our accommodation and all our breakfasts. Last night we stayed in the Canyon Hotel, which is 3 star (* = Grotty ** = Basic *** = Comfortable **** = Hey! Not too shabby! ***** = Snap! Plump my cushion again, if you please, Fatima ). Today he took us south to Jerash, which is the Ancient city of Gerasa, one of the ten cities of the Decapolis mentioned in the New Testament. It is the largest and best preserved Roman city in the Middle East. Although only 15% of its 800,000 square metres have been excavated, it is impressive. The main street is all there with shops, ingenious sewage system, running water system and ancient stones piled together into temples, fountains and columns. With its mosaic pedestrian promenade running beside the chariotway it must have been a truly beautiful city.

On the way we passed over an insignificant river. I realised, later, that it was the Jabbok, beside which Jacob lay to wrestle with angels and dream of ladders and have his name changed, and I had the oddest sense of homecoming. This was the landscape of my faith. we were driving through the Kingdoms of Aram and Moab, traversing country once walked by Jacob and Rebekkah and all their wily clan. Personally, the Jabbok runs deeper in my imagination than does the Jordan, which we will see tomorrow, and I almost missed it.

We left there to go to the castle of Ajlun, one of several fortresses built by Salah ad-Din. It is in remarkable good shape considering its age and the purpose for which it was built. The interior was dark and cool and quirkily unpredictable. There were a number of people clambering about in it as we were, and amongst them was a party of Jordanian teachers. Clemency being Clemency, joined their group, sang their songs, played with their children and left the castle with maybe a dozen invitations to lunch and the promise of lots of new facebook links.

Ibrahim took us to a local Jordanian diner, where few travellers go, except the ones he takes there. Lunch was delicious. The system is that the food is put in the middle of the table with a basket of fresh, steaming hot Jordanian bread and a variety of relishes. The waiters hover, and when they see a dish is getting empty they replace it with a new one. This continues til no-one is left standing. The cost for as much as 5 people could eat was a little over 15 Dinar or about $NZ25. Later Ibrahim introduced us to Kanafeh, which seems to consist of equal parts of cheese, honey, olive oil and pastry. It needs a fairly reasonable scientific calculator to work out the calorific load per bite and it is absolutely impossible to leave any of it on the plate. The diet will start as soon as I return. Honest it will.

Wires

2010-07-11T20:53:00.005+12:00

In the older parts of town, ie most of it, you will see sights to quake the knees of even the most hardened New Zealand building inspector. Wires are draped everywhere. They run from lamposts in great thick braids, descending to head height or lower in places. They are attached, roughly, to the sides of buildings where they run off to flats and houses and workshops. Electricity, telephone and data cabling are randomly clumped into great rats nests which are nailed or taped to walls. Look closely and there is a logic to it all: the circuits are properly albeit untidily constructed; wiring seems appropriate to the load it needs to bear. Everything is properly insulated, although the methods are "ingenious. " They tell their own story.

From 1975 until 1990 this place tore itself apart. Groups of Christians and Muslims fought each other in alliances which shifted and changed with the month. Through it all was the rattle of kalashnikovs and the crump, crump, crump of rocket propelled grenades. There was the whine of fighters and the grumble of tank engines from whoever was trying to exact advantage at the moment: the USA and the USSR through their proxies the Syrians, the PLO and the Israelis. Between 130,000 and 250,000 civilians died. A quarter of the population was wounded. And ordinary, everyday Lebanese lived through this. Children grew up through this, and they picked up some remarkable skills. They learned to drive very quickly and deftly for example. You need to if your car is out in the open and/or you don't know if the guys in the car beside you might want to add you to their trophy list. And they learned to make running repairs to infrastructure. When a bazooka took out the water supply or knocked out the wiring, it was no use ringing the city council to complain. Instead, you found whatever wire or pipe or tape you could and made the darned thing work again. You did this on a daily basis. You became so good at it that some of the ugly solutions you came up with are still working perfectly, 20 years later. You became so good at it that when you needed to wire your apartment just last year you wouldn't think of calling an electrician.

The tangle of wires draped across the streets and tacked to the sides of buildings are badges of honour; they are tokens of the resilience and energy of the Lebanese, whose close proximity to death for so long has sharpened up people's ideas of what is really important; what the real dangers are. Us Kiwis pride ourselves on our number 8 wire self reliance and ingenuity. We ain't got nothin' on the Lebanese.

Today there was one last wistful stroll into downtown. Every time I have walked into the city I have seen a different Beirut. This morning it was hyper modern and trendy, cool, spacious, aesthetically sophisticated and interesting. We visited the Orthodox cathedral (St. George's) and the Marionite cathedral (St. George's) and a Capuchin chapel. There was a brief stop at the Kahlil Gibran gardens, set up in memory of those martyred in the civil war, and a walk through the souk. In other Arab cities the souk sells coriander and shisha. Here it sells Armani and Calvin Klein. Beirut has not quite finished its restoration. When it has, I think it will be the city to be in. Already I love it more than I love San Francisco and that's saying something. Give me another week here I might love it more than Dunedin, so perhaps it's just as well we're hopping on the plane to Amman this afternoon.

Strolling the Corniche

2010-07-11T02:09:00.007+12:00

We've had enough of long taxi trips for the meantime, so this morning we walked downtown. It's no big deal. The CBD is maybe 2 or 3 km away and the walk through narrow streets past tiny shops was intriguing. As we neared downtown, the evidence of the destruction of the civil war became more apparent in the buildings, until we arrived at the area near the docks which had been the frontline between opposing factions, and where all the buildings were gone. In their place a new Downtown Beirut is nearing completion. The buildings are of brown sandstone, and about 3 or 4 storeys high. They are seaparated by wide tiled walkways dotted here and there with refined, understated statuary. All has been designed to evoke the Beirut that was once called the Paris of the Middle East; not a copy but a 21st Century evocation of what once was. It's working.

Winding through the stores selling big name European goods we arrive at the waterfront, where the enormous glass towers of hotels rise above Porsche agencies and coffee shops with elegantly quirky names. This is the Corniche, which curves gently around the shoreline. It is Saturday, and Beirutis not at work are out to enjoy the bright clear day. Men fish using strange long rods with no reels. Men swim and sunbathe from the rocks. Women swim and sunbathe in a screened off section of the waterfront. I see a woman in a full abaya jogging. She has a water bottle strapped to her waist: it's about 35 degrees; she needs it. I see another swimming in a burka and yet another fishing from the rocks, the black fabric soaked to about waist level. A couple of girls in shorts and t shirts rollerblade past. Men older than me with impossibly muscled and chiselled bodies jog past in skimpy shorts, their naked backs glistening with sweat.

With a pang of recognition I see the old Intercontinental Hotel, the setting for ten thousand newsreels. It is now restored to its former glory and behind it, one of its contemporaries stands stark and empty, pockmarked with shellholes and rifle fire still after all these years. The yacht club is still damaged though not by the civil war but by the immense car bomb which killed ex President Rafik al-Hariri, probably at the behest of the Syrians, in 2005. The brutal past is not too far past.

We find a leafy, shady coffee shop and order an Arabian specialty: lime juice, slightly sweetened and served in a large glass of crushed ice. We turn and walk back through downtown, which looks for all the world like the downtown of any modern city. The signs are in French and Arabic but it doesn't take much imagination to think you might be in Auckland or Cincinnati or Manchester. Well, maybe not Manchester. We pass a sushi bar, one of the ones with the little train that zims on past with plates of deliciousness, and enjoy the airconditioned coolness and watch a replay of Germany thrashing the Ockers at the World Cup. We catch a taxi to the National Museum and look at the ancient bits and pieces and see a video of people restoring priceless artifacts after some local commander or other lobbed a few shells through the place in the bad old days. War stuffs everything up. Everything of value, anyway. Absolutely everything. We catch another taxi home: fare, 10,000 Lebanese pounds or about $NZ10 and sleep for the afternoon. Despite the recent tendency of the certain and the self righteous to park cars full of TNT about the place, this is a city I could really and truly fall in love with.

Our Lady of Lebanon

2010-07-10T06:43:00.011+12:00

Last night Bridget, Clemency and I walked through the old, strangely leafy, bustling, wonderful Ashrafiyeh district to a restaurant recommended to Bridget by a Lebanese friend. We found Abdal Wahab after a 15 minute walk and once the staff got their head around the idea that we didn't want to eat meat (You are vegetarian? Try this one it only has lamb....) were served what was, up to this point, the most delicious vegetarian meal of my life, no doubt about it, by a country mile. Just before 7 Bridget's phone rang. It was Scott from Doha airport. There had been a mix up in his bookings for the flight he had to board NOW and he desperately needed some information or he would be walking from Doha. The info was a mile away, and it was panic time. The waiters asked what was wrong, and in seconds, without question, gave us username and password to the restaurant's in house network so Bridget could access the net on her phone and get the info to Scott. Now think about this for a moment.This was a vibrant business and we were strangers. They trusted us with access to menus, accounting, staffing rosters, email.... It was humbling. Later, one of the waiters, not the one who was serving us, came to invite us to an art show in which he was exhibiting on Saturday.

These were Lebanese and Arabs. Muslims. The enemy. They were open, welcoming, charming, friendly, willing to put themselves out for us, willing to trust us strangers with valuable information, urbane, cultured, polite, decent men. And so it has proven, all day today.

It has been a long and wonderful day. We briefly considered hiring a car but after almost 5 seconds of in depth consideration opted for a taxi instead. A lovely guy in a fairly late model Mercedes estate arrived, and for $100 was at our service all day. He drove us first to the Jeita Grotto. There was an hour or so of dodging the heaviest, most chaotic traffic I have ever seen. - How many lanes is this road? How many will fit? - then a left turn and suddenly we were in another Lebanon. Steep hills. Winding roads. Blue sky. Forest. Then the grotto: think Waitomo Caves, multiply your thought by... Oh I don't know.... lets say 10, and you might have some approximation of it. They are huge limestone caves with astonishing formations and a lake in the lower one. Then, it was off to Biblos, another 45 minutes up the road to see the Roman ruins and have lunch. Biblos is some distance from Beirut but it is more or less built up all the way: this part of the country is a single, conjoined, enormous city, where one district seagues seamlessly into the next in a cacophany of colour and energy and variety.

Biblos is, so the locals say, the home of the first alphabet, hence the name. There is a market flogging souvenirs and fossils and "antiquities" and the oldest church in Lebanon (closed, unfortunately), extensive ruins and many restaurants at one of which I had the second most delicious vegetarian meal of my life before staggering bloated to the Merc for the trip to catch the cable car to Harissa.

In a district just a little south of Biblos called Jounieh we caught the Teleferique. It runs on a cable across the motorway and up through tower blocks of apartments, missing one by a matter of inches, then up the side of a very large hill to Harissa where there is the Basilica of Notre Dame de Liban - Our Lady of Lebanon. In 1908 the French gave a gigantic statue of the Blessed Virgin the the Lebanese people and she was mounted on the top of this hill. It is possible to walk up a circular stairway to the base of the statue, which we did, and the views are flabbergasting. We then walked into the nearby basilica which is an enormous modern church, seating about 5,000 people. Why do the Catholics do church architecture so much better than the Protestants? It is designed to mimic, depending on which way you look, the shape of the cedar of Lebanon, or a Phoenician trading ship, the Phoenicians being ancestors of the Lebanese. The roof soars perhaps 70 metres straight up and the light and sense of space is astounding. Through the enormous windows the statue is visible, and the volunteer guide told us about her, including a modern legend. It is said that she was built facing out to sea. During the civil war in the 1980s she slowly turned, and now looks instead towards Beirut. Is it true? I don't think so, but I found the story so profoundly moving I had to walk away for a while.

I suppose the statue of Our Lady represents all that is caring and motherly about God. She is the God who broods over her people as a mother hen over her chicks. The legend thus speaks of God's sorrow at the civil war, that God looked on, not in judgement or wrath but in profound sorrow and compassion and love for her foolish children. All day we had been meeting kind and generous people, relatives, friends, and who knows, participants in the terrible events of 30 years ago. And in that legend the utter tragedy and stupidity of the war - right up to the idiotic Israeli air raids of 2006- hit me with force. And the tragedy and stupidity of the current demonising of Muslims by the West.

We rode the cable car down the mountain. Then our driver: a kind and generous Lebanese, a Christian one, drove us to yet another restaurant. We were met and served by open and friendly Lebanese and Druse and Arabs. As a blood red sun sank into the Mediterranean, we had another delicious meal to celebrate Scott's 29th birthday before we were driven home by yet another good natured and bluff and humourous Arab.