Skip to main content

Eucharist in the Sun

I am not sure how many people were at the Eucharist yesterday morning, but there were several hundred people in their teens and early twenties seated in the aisles and ranged around the back and sides of the congregation. We bishops sat on a pedestal at the front in our layers of red and white 17th century clothing while the Fijian sun beat down on us. The rest of the people, apart from the young people at the sides and back that is, were shaded under the several peaks of a marquee. About half an hour into the service a merciful breeze sprang up and I could see the thunderheads gathering in the sky behind us. I waited for the rain but apart from a few very unenthusiastic and half hearted grumbles of thunder it failed entirely to show. Bishop Gabriel Sharma told me later that he had prayed that the rain would stay off until after 1 pm, and it seems that, as in pretty much everything else in the planning and conduct of the service, The Lord was listening to him. It was one of the most powerful and moving services of worship I have ever attended.

The music, led by the Suva Cathedral choir, a music group and a brass band, was very polished and very energetic. The sermon preached by Sepi Haliapiapi was intelligent, well ordered, entertaining and challenging. Sepi has many of her father's gifts of leadership and organization and is fast acquiring a measure of his mana. She is very much a watch this space kind of young woman. The Eucharist was, on the face of it, a quite conventional New Zealand Prayer Book service, albeit one moving with the relaxed sense of order of Tikanga Pasifika and awash with that particularly haunting timbre of Pacific Island singing. What made it so special was that three times in the service that great throng of young people stood, filling the aisles and completely encircling the congregation, seeming to baptism us with their hope and energy and commitment. After the sermon they sang a song about light; about God's creation of light and of us responding to Jesus' call to be light to the world. During the Lord's prayer they performed an astonishingly- given the size of the group- well coordinated piece of liturgical dance. Then at they end they rose to pledge themselves to mission, in response to the call of their archbishop.

We finished, naturally, with a gargantuan morning tea; or more accurately, morning coconut. The various youth groups then performed items of amazing energy and inventiveness before farewelling us. We walked to our buses through the crowd who then walked with us and waved us off. If a 700 voice choir singing Isa lei to you can't bring on goosebumps and a lump in your throat, then nothing can.

Everything had to be anticlimax after that. The archbishops did a tag team routine reading their charge. We accepted reports, including that of the social justice commission. At the last General Synod in 2010 the report of that commission had been refused adoption, and the commissioner had pulled out all stops to make sure the experience wasn't repeated. The report was very slickly produced and supported by examples of the resources the commission has gleaned from various sources during the past year. There were also several speeches in support, including one from Tiki Raumati who spoke with all the verve and style he has developed over several decades as one of the most compelling orators in our church. So, the General Synod began and will occupy my days and nights until late on Thursday.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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

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

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old