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Showing posts from 2010

The Christmas Story

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

Sunday Driving

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 power

Holy Name

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. I

Brockville Community Church

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 en

Wasting Time

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 s

Ron Mueck

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 pro

The Living Church

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 thi

Day Off

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 u

Amusement

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 entertai

Decently and in Order

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 pro

The Ayes Have It

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 ma

Procrastination

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 d

Home Again

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 ch

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

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

Beginnings

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 reme

The Day Thou Gavest Lord has Ended

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 dail

Atheist Delusions: Another book review

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

A 30 Day Retreat: Book Review

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

A Tale Of Three Cities

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 Vil

Wadi Rum

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

  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 see

Arabian Evenings

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

Water

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 a