Red Balloon

(c)bhmpics.com

When we lived in Hamilton, we went, one Pentecost Sunday to the morning Eucharist at St. Peter's Cathedral. The dean, Keith Lightfoot, gave us all red, helium filled balloons on a piece of string. Catherine, who was about 4 at the time, thought this was about the coolest thing that had happened in church, EVER. At some appropriate point in the service, we all trooped outside, and on schedule all released our balloons, 200 Pentecost prayers for the life of our city, streaming upwards into the sky in a gloriously colourful symbolic statement. Well, let's be accurate here. 199 balloons streamed up into the sky, but one remained firmly clasped in a four year old's unyielding fist. Catherine was adamant. No amount of coaxing could persuade her to relinquish this treasure for such a hare brained reason. So, we drove home with the red balloon gently bobbing against the headlining of the car.

All this was too much for Bridget, who was 10, and already endowed with the passion for justice that would lead her to a career in law. Later, at home, when her inexplicably lax parents weren't looking, she frogmarched Catherine into our back yard, prised open her fingers, and enforced the sacrifice which she herself had already made. She returned the balloon to its intended purpose, and I can still remember Catherine's wail of grief and impotent chagrin.

Catherine was right to grieve of course, at the loss of so great a prize. But Bridget was right too. There are some things which are not meant to be held onto. There are some things which attract and entice and which we would dearly love to hold near us, but our benefit and theirs is best served by relinquishing them. Sometimes my life seems filled with red balloons and what is required of me is so tiny, and yet so all consumingly difficult: to open my hand. To release. To watch as what was once precious drifts skyward and away, to where it can do its real, its intended task: blessing somebody who isn't me.

Comments

Elaine Dent said…

Oh my goodness! I have been reading about "letting go" this week as written by Richard Rohr and Anthony de Mello. I have been thinking about how letting go is integral to contemplative breath prayer. And indeed I have been praying about the situations where I need to let go. But your story is a gift---riveting, powerful and piercing---and I will carry its image with me in the weeks and months to come. Thank you for writing about and illustrating this spiritual practice so beautifully.

11 September 2016 at 03:13

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...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

Available Light

Search This Blog