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Showing posts from 2011

Home Sweet Home

 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

The Reason for the Season

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

A Sweet Little Chap

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

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 conseque

Red Billed Gulls

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

Soup for the soul

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

A Failure of Nerve

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 wh

Baby Photos

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

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

Surprised by Jane

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

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 incompatible formats

Changing The Pattern

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 sec

Distant Light

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 an

Grandfather

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 co

Blest Are The Pure In Heart

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

The Week That Was

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 anyt

Silence

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 retrac

The Gift of God

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 beginn

The Wages of Sin...

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 p

A Nice Little Drive In The Country

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

The Naked Now

"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 de

A Little Bit of Chaos

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 C

Common Sense Is What Tells Us The World Is Flat

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 circ

Arianna Savall: L'Amor

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

Te Kotahitanga Forum

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 c

Turn Sideways Into The Light

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

Empties

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

Old Churches

 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

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 Direc