Skip to main content

Anticipating

So I fill my pack. The buckles snap shut with a familiar click. The textures of clothing and folding metal; the rounded shape of the top pocket; the light press of the straps on my shoulders ; the weight of it; they are all so known and so redolent with the feel of senda under my shoes and the heat of the Spanish sun on my back.

I am longing to be there, where each step is a simultaneous welcome and farewell. To hear a dozen different languages everyday and have my English met with uncomprehending stares.  Where everything I encounter will be seen for the first and for the last time. Where I am surrounded with antiquities and walking with familiar strangers.

This time I wish to enter as fully as I can into the path. I have a deep sense of call to this journey. I don't know what it is going to mean but I know that it is something about endings and that will be significant.  So I don't intend to blog or tweet or facebook. It was difficult deciding whether or not to take a camera: in the end I decided I would ( a little waterproof Panasonic) but not so much as a way of making a record or sharing the experience as a way of helping me to look and see.  Unless you share DNA or office space with me you won't have contact details. My children will have them, as will Debbie, but for anybody else I will drop off the planet on July 5 and reappear virtually in August sometime and in early September in corporeal form.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hello Bishop Kelvin,
I don't know whether you ever think back to our conversations of last year or not, but here is an update.
Last Friday Jacob and Cristy's baby was born. A boy. Hamish William. They are very proud and slightly bemused first-time parents.
Hamish is a fine baby. He doesn't look like our side of the family at all and their is nothing of the look of the family gift about him.
Geoff an I will endeavour to support Jake and Cristy in any way we can, and, in particular, I will try to re-build a relationship with Jacob (which has never been entirely lost)
So...the best laid plans and all that.
It's not the first time that my plans and desires have taken over my mind. And, as ever, I have been firmly put in my place and shown that it is not I who is in control.
My faith is unwavering and I have peace.
I wish you and Clemency well on your pilgrimage.
LC
Wynston said…
Go well, go safely. I'll miss a commentary along your way but look forward to hearing all about after you return.
Elaine Dent said…
Not posting on my blog or on Facebook was an important decision for me during the latest pilgrimage. It helped me stay open to the moment and open to what God was doing without trying to analyze it or squeeze it into some polished form of communication to others. I could more easily be present to God with my true self without all the roles and masks I inevitably put on. I am finished the walk now, but not officially back until the 13th, and I am only just beginning to understand what the pilgrimage was all about. It is not what I thought it would be about. Now writing can be an important part of my processing. Blessings and God's peace on your journey. .

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...

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...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months  I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it.  Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...