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Showing posts from 2013

Transitional

I've had quite a hectic December, what with one thing and another, and one of the another things was a trip to Christchurch last weekend to preach at the installation of Lynda Patterson as Dean of the Transitional Cathedral . I flew up, booked into my accommodation, had a meal and drove to the Cathedral through once familiar streets. Suburban Christchurch, though battle-scarred, still looks much as it did when I lived there and knew it. Once inside the four avenues however it's a different story. All of the familiar way-points are gone and in their place are broken walls, piles of rubble and, here and there, the foundations of the  way-points which are not yet. The layout of the streets is unchanged of course, but many of them are closed or are obstructed by containers and chain-link fences. I picked my way through  in the general direction of where I thought St. John's Latimer Square used to stand, hoping I was heading the right way and then I saw it: a blazing triangle

Come to the Waters

I took this picture with my phone on my walk through the streets of Galdstone this morning. about the only thing this river has in common with the one in what follows is that they're both wet. When I was Vicar of Sumner in Christchurch, with a very large congregation of young people, we held baptisms at least five or six times a year on Sumner beach. I and the people professing their faith would wade out into the waves or stand in a small perfectly sized pool which formed under Cave Rock if the tides were right. Dates were set in advance and we went ahead regardless of weather, so that the first one of these I ever performed was in August with snow covering the Port Hills. Others were on fine clear days with an audience of the curious licking their icecreams and puzzling. Some of those baptised were new converts and some were people who were reaffirming their faith, which meant that often enough the ones walking bravely into the sea with me had been baptised as babies; but not

Come To The Quiet

St. Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin. Nikon D300 and a Nikkor 28-200 lens A minimal amount of post processing - levels tweaked, desaturation and a couple of small objects removed. Nothing to do with what follows but I quite like the picture. I spent much of last week conducting a five day Centering Prayer retreat. I have taught meditation before, and I've led retreats but I've never done both at the same time. We held it at Holy Cross where the food is superb and the bedrooms adequate and the old chapel is lovely. There weren't a lot of people. I gave nine addresses over the 4 1/2 days, led worship and had some fairly significant conversations. The development of spirituality is central to all we are trying to do here in the South. About a year ago, I wrote to the diocese telling them of the fragile state we are in. Since then, things have changed. It's not that there has been a radical revival of our fortunes but rather a growing determination to change and grow,

Week's end

I've just got back from a meeting in Wellington where the best bit was the chance to catch up with friends. We met at the Sisters of Compassion in Island Bay and every morning I walked for an hour under a dull heavy Wellington sky through unfamiliar streets. I'm walking more and more now, as I get my body sorted for my walk through the Diocese early next year. Over the weekend I had been in Invercargill. On Saturday, Richard Johnson and Richard Aitken had laid on a day for vestry members and I was invited to speak. We met at the Ascot Hotel, in an impressive room laid on for us by the Invercargill licensing trust, and ate a very good lunch also courtesy of the trust. I'm not sure why other towns in New Zealand don't have a licensing trust, but I guess they just don't know about the astonishing benefits it brings to Invercargill. On Sunday I preached at the patronal festival of All Saints Gladstone to a comfortably large congregation and in between events attend

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

It happens sometimes. I have a question or am pondering some conundrum or other and the right book arrives at pretty much the right time. In a session with my supervisor a few months back Paul mentioned an article by Rene Girard, whom I had never heard of. I read the article and over the past month have read two of his books, The Scapegoat and this one. I have another couple sitting on my shelf and they have elbowed all others in my to be read pile out of the way and sit firmly on the top. Girard has pulled a number of threads together for me: he has enabled me to rethink the atonement in a way which is consistent with an evolving Universe: he presents a view of scripture which is again consistent with what I know of science but is also faithful to the Bible as the Word of God; he has given me, for the first time in my life a theology (if that is the right word) of Satan which makes sense to me. Most importantly for me, he is consistent with my own lived experience of God's s

Order of St. Luke

Part of the farm attached to Living Springs campsite. I brought a camera but didn't use it for any of the more typical bits of the week's activities. This shot will have to do.  This past week was spent at Totara Springs, near Matamata, attending the international conference of The Order of St. Luke . I was there to deliver a keynote address and lead a workshop on meditation. The OSL has as its raison d'etre the promotion of the ministry of healing, an aim with which I have developed a considerable sympathy over the past few years. I had been a member many years ago, but let my membership lapse. Back then, in my thirties, I had found my fellow members to be a decade or two older than me and their ways of doing things a little too highly regulated for my taste. When Archbishop David Moxon moved to Rome and could no longer attend the international conference I agreed to take his place in the programme. Coincidentally, the invitation to attend and speak came at about the

Baptism

Photo (c) Nick Wright 2013 Lately our little house has been bursting at the seams, with five extra adults and two infants. My daughter Bridget and her husband Scott returned from Doha so that I could baptise 19 week old Noah. Nick, Charmayne and Naomi came over from Sydney for the event as did Clemency's sister and some of Scott's family. We had borrowed folding cots and high chairs and car seats. There was an airbed in my study and people sleeping in the caravan, and the house had the sort of pleasantly chaotic holiday feel of lots of people in a small space that I remember so fondly from childhood Christmases. We had decided that the most appropriate place for the baptism was our local parish church - this was not a Diocesan occasion , so the other logical choice, the Cathedral, was reluctantly set aside - and the people at St. Michael's and All Angels Anderson's Bay did us proud. This was St. Michael's Day, their patronal festival, so there was a beautiful

The Auld Mug

Photo (c) TVNZ 2013 1.5 million of us Kiwis watched the America's Cup, which is pretty impressive in a country of a little over 4 million. Even as I turned on my TV at 8 every morning and waited impatiently to see if the winds would be right in San Francisco Bay I wondered why. After all, the America's Cup must be as far from the mythical Kiwi image we all try and project as it's possible to get. For a start, two syndicates spending more than a quarter of a billion between them on yachts that would have no use whatsoever once one of them crossed the final line seems to give a pretty big two fingered salute to our clean and green self talk, even if they are wind powered. And then there's the whole cup ethos. Ever since the schooner America beat the field in the Isle of Wight race in 1851 to claim the cup for the first time, it has been a contest of egos between extremely rich men for a prize with no real intrinsic value. What with sailing being probably the most

Rainbow

I drove home late this afternoon with a rainbow spanning the whole sky, moving ahead of me the way rainbows do. I stopped about a kilometre from home to take a picture and thought of a couple of times recently when I have heard the rainbow used as a metaphor for the way consciousness and reality interact.   For example, " For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them… But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the ‘internalists’ who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrop

The Language of God

A number of people recommended this book to me recently and I'm glad they did. I interrupted my reading schedule and knocked it off in a couple of sittings. It is a thorough book but not a difficult one. Francis S Collins is a scientist of impeccable credentials. He has studied physics and biochemistry and is one of the world's leading geneticists. He is also an evangelical Christian. The book is in part his testimony of faith but mostly it is a defence of science for those who are sceptical about science and an apologetic for God for those who are sceptical about religion. He includes a brief history of the years he spent as leader of the team which produced the first map of the human genome, one of the most significant scientific achievements of the last Century. It is a book whose emphasis I found a little surprising. For me, it is axiomatic that the universe and everything in it is evolving. It has been about 40 years now since the issue of reconciling evolution to f

All Fixed

On Monday the computer crashed. On Wednesday I got it back, pretty much fixed and ready to go; it was only only a couple of days, but it was a revelation. During Tuesday I lived with the possibility that I wasn't going to get any data off the hard drive, and found that I was not actually all that bothered. There is a pile of old sermon notes but I hardly ever refer to them any more. There are a few hundred Power Point presentations, made to go with the sermons and they also don't get looked at much. There are countless folders of word processing files, copied from computer to computer all the way back to the Atari ST I owned in the 1980s and they are of interest sometimes - old letters and plans and notes and essays. There is a book I sporadically work on, but I'm not optimistic about finishing it. And there are the photos, thousands of the things. Most of them have been seen only by me and most of them are junk. There are, admittedly, a few that I am quite fond of but i

Data

This last weekend I was in Queenstown attending the 150th anniversary celebrations  for St. Peter's church. It was a very full programme, with a walk around the historic sites of the still rumbustious mining town, talks on some of the interesting pioneers, including the founder of the parish, W.G. Rees and music led for the most part by the incomparable Mark Wilson  whose gob smacking jazz improvisations on Happy Birthday enlivened Saturday evening and whose lovely hymn ( Mark on piano, his wife Emma on trumpet) did the same on Sunday morning.  Clemency wore a light blue Victorian  gown with a bustle and frills and I wore a top hat and a wing collar, well some of the time anyway. There was a meal at the Vicarage attended by, obviously, David Coles the Vicar and also five previous vicars all with their respective spouses. A sumptuous lunch after church finished things off very nicely indeed. It was a great start to the week. Then on Monday my new computer crashed. As it was o

Faith

One of the confusions to which we Christians are prone is that between Faith and Belief. We have so identified faith with belief that we use them as synonyms: we speak of believer's baptism when we talk of the sacrament which marks someones start on the journey of faith and ask " what do you believe in " when really we mean " what do you have faith in ?" My supervisor, Paul, was very helpful today when I talked with him about the reaction of some people to the last few posts I had written on here. I thought I had been talking about my progress on the path of faith but found that I had caused some angst in others over matters of belief; and when people tried to engage me on matters of belief, of course the inevitable happened: we talked past each other to the mystification of both, because we were entirely missing the point. Or at least, I was. Faith is a verb. You don't have it, you do it. It  has more to do with trust than it does with belief, altho

Fall

 This is one of my shots of a Snowfall, which so damaged some of our high country farmers. Snow is neither good or bad, except in the eyes of those who perceive it to be so. Your body and mine are made from atoms that are so heavy that in all the universe there is only one place where they could have been formed: the interior of a star is the only place with sufficiently high temperature and pressure to construct an atom heavier than helium. The fact that we are here at all testifies to the life and then extinction of a star (or stars) somewhere, someplace, some unimaginably vast time ago. The universe is a terrifyingly violent place. It proceeds by the operation of vast forces manifesting in the gathering of matter and explosions and collisions and births and deaths. Things, and I mean all things without exception, in our universe come into existence, have a presence for a while and die. The matter from which they are constructed is redistributed and reused by other parts of th

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Anniversary: Part 2

Stained glass window in the recently deconsecrated church in Millers Flat About a month after the night in Lower Hutt I was baptised in the New Life Centre in Christchurch by Pastor Peter Morrow. It was a Wednesday night, and there were about a dozen of us, all young men. The women were baptised on a different night because of the effect of water on 70s clothing and the need for decency. Together, we constituted that month's crop of converts, and we all shared a common experience. All of us had known what it was to be born again, which I now see was a conglomerate of a number of things all experienced in close proximity. There was a sense of release and freedom from guilt and anxiety There was an affirmation of us as individuals and, for me, the cessation of crippling lack of self esteem. The Lord of the universe loved, astonishingly,  even me! There was, for most of us,  one overwhelming experience of being immersed in the presence of God; of having senses and boundaries

Anniversary

40 years ago today, when I was 21, I sat in a back room at the Assembly of God, Lower Hutt, and was coached through the Sinners Prayer by a glittery eyed young man. I was raised a Methodist but from the time I could express my own opinion I was a fervent little atheist. My atheism was my metaphorical way of addressing my father issues, and was therefore keenly held and virulently expressed, but since about the beginning of 1972 , I became less and less certain about my professed worldview. I met some fairly impressive people who held alternative views and who were able to meet, absorb and gently return my materialist certainties. Like many in my generation I had the occasional experiment with chemically altering my consciousness and in the cold light of the day after, these experiences caused me some philosophical doubts: what,  exactly,  was the nature of this sense experience which I ardently argued to be the only source of knowledge? And, crucially,  I had a pivotal conversation

Te Harinui

For most of Lent next year I'm going to go for a bit of a road trip, and you might like to come on some of it with me. Or all of it, if you like. Beginning on Thursday March 13, I'm going to start at one end of our diocese, on Stewart Island and travel by foot (mostly), boat, train and bicycle to Kurow and the Waitaki River at the other end,  arriving on Saturday April 13. I'm doing this because 2014 will mark the bicentenary of Samuel Marsden's landing in the Bay of Islands and the first proclamation, by Marsden and Ruatara, of the Gospel in Aotearoa. The Church throughout New Zealand is planning various events to mark this anniversary, and this will be one of ours. In keeping with Ruatara's and Marsden's original Christmas day message of "Good News of Great Joy" this Hikoi through the length of Otago and Southland will be a proclamation event. At each daily stopping point I anticipate holding some small, local event at which the Good