New Beginnings

Although ours is, geographically at least, a big diocese, it is traversed by only a few main routes and by now I am pretty familiar with all of them. I began this year driving on roads I know very well, into Central Otago and Southland; but while the scenery and the way into it might have held few surprises, the destinations had plenty. There is change in the air. All over the place, people are realising that what we have been talking about for years in the Anglican Church - the necessity for new ways of doing things - is now a matter of inevitable necessity rather than a conversation filler for church discussion groups.

It's been a while since I wrote the above paragraph. In the time since I have:

-Helped to choose a new warden for Selwyn College.
-Agreed to the ordination to the diaconate of two people
-Ordained Richard Aitken to the diaconate and inducted him into a new ministry in Invercargill
-Met with four people newly interested in the possibility of ordination
-Inducted Hugh Bowron as Vicar of St. Peter's Caversham
-Agreed to the appointment of Stephen White as the new vicar of Taieri
-Had meetings with 4 parishes to discuss future options for ministry
-Held the first meeting of the trust board for the proposed new community house in Wanaka
-Met with a couple of visitors checking out possibilities for ministry in our diocese
-Had significant conversations with several of our clergy
-Begun, with the leaders of our diocese, to think through the implications for us of the Christchurch earthquakes and the subsequent rocketing insurance costs and the need for seismic strengthening; made arrangements to talk with the Dunedin City Council and leaders of other denominations about the same
-Had the usual round of meetings with all the usual bodies, committees and boards
-Had input into several quite significant pastoral matters
-Read not a few emails and sheets of closely typed A4 paper
-Maintained my reading, meditation, physical exercise, spiritual direction and supervision; managed some very good quality time with my family; managed at least one day off a week.
-Rearranged my office and done a myriad other things which now slip my mind
-Failed miserably at maintaining my blog. Sorry about that. I'll try to do better.

There is, as you can see, a lot going on in our little diocese, what with one thing and another, and this brings with it both excitement and anxiety, sometimes at the same time.Some of the anxiety, naturally enough, gets directed my way or towards the Diocesan Office, but that doesn't faze me too much, as both the anxiety and the excitement are inevitable when change occurs. Both are inevitable, also, when we follow Jesus on the path of crucifixion and resurrection; and walking that path and inviting others onto it is, after all, the sole reason for our Diocese's existence.

Comments

Cynthya said…

I think there is a constant necessity for new ways of doing things, not just in a religious setting but in society in general:

In keeping open minds in regards to our beliefs about nature, about nurture, about all the things that make up our lives.

Do you agree?

24 February 2012 at 07:54

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

Available Light

Search This Blog