Skip to main content

Cough! Hack! Cough! Splutter

It's been a while since I posted. For the last week I've had the heavy chest cold which seems to have taken a real shine to Dunedin lately, and decided to stick around and make the acquaintance of half the city. This waking up all night to hack and cough and splutter is the dull bit of winter, which is generally my favourite season. I've been tired of it and with it, but there is a lot happening, so I haven't felt able - or willing for that matter - to just sit around home sipping whisky and lemon and looking pale and interesting. At long last though, the malaise has receded to a level that is only mildly annoying and today was a good one: I had some fruitful conversations; the chapter meeting this evening seemed to flow well and get through its business with good humour and efficiency; I had a funeral visit with a truly remarkable family who even in their grief were whole and self aware and grounded -together in every sense; a seemingly intractable problem looks like it has moved a long way toward resolution much to the relief of everyone involved. It does seem like a good news day.

In fact, despite my lungs wanting to turn themselves inside out, it's been a good news week. On Sunday I visited St. Matthews in the city which was full and energetic and robustly holy, and later, the builders arrived and started making me a study, which means that in a short while I will be able to unpack my books. There are times when I get a bit daunted by the sheer size of the task which lies ahead, but this week I think I can see movement. I think churches -and probably dioceses - are like giant blocks of ice that need moving across a flat surface. If they stop moving, they freeze to the ground and it is a rare old task to get them going again: it takes pushing and shoving and pleading and cajoling and encouraging and kidding and bribing and threatening and reasoning and lots and lots of examining and thinking and listening and talking and all manner of ingenious softening and breaking of the connection between block and ground. But once they are moving, it's comparatively easy to keep them going and provided you've done your homework and got them moving in the right direction, they'll keep right on trucking all under their own inertia for the most part. And today I think I can see movement.

"Cough! Hack! Cough! Splutter!" might be the signature tune of winter but even at this time when I and a lot of other folk are not firing on all four, the life of God starts to show. The timing isn't accidental. Things look up when I feel down precisely as a timely reminder of who is actually responsible for all those promising little creaks and groans and cracks and shifts.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Elaine Dent said…
Loved the post. Of course, my empathy runs high; a couple of posts past on my blog, I was bemoaning my summer cold on may week's vacation to Colorado to a nephew's wedding...(Actually it was worse than a summer cold. See "distractions"). Slowly I realized though that God was acting and making it one of the best of family weeks in spite of my feeling absolutely lousy and my hacking through the festivities. Loved your winter photo.
11 June 2010 at 06:09
Lee said…
I hope you're feeling back to normal soon. These winter nasties have plenty of bite but not much stamina. I'd suggest lots of garlic, but that might just keep everyone away :-) Honey and lemon in hot water works a treat, and is less...confrontational.

Take care. I'm sure you'll be up and running again soon. And that photo is breathtaking.
11 June 2010 at 11:21
Kate said…
Well, sorry to hear you've had a lurgy... but I'm pleased things are going well in other areas. And that pic of yours is a real treat. Did you stop for it?
30 June 2010 at 11:09
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Kindle

 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 incomp...
10 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more