Available Light

    A journey begins for a kotuku So how is it that Jesus is God? How come Jesus is wandering about on Earth, getting hungry, sleeping, only being in one place at a time, getting cross with some people, being kind to others, and all the while he is also the omnipotent, omnipresent, all seeing, all wise God who called the Earth and everything in it into being out of nothing? People have been arguing the toss on this one now for about 2,000 years, sometimes getting very twitchy indeed with those whose answer to that question differs from their own. People with long lists of titles before their names (such as me) or long lists of letters after them (ditto) sometimes pretend to the definitive answer. Let me assure you, as one who has a passing familiarity with all of the most popular answers, they're kidding you. Or sometimes they're kidding themselves, which is pretty much the same thing. My own experience is that the more vigorously people promote a particular answer the less li...

I have it on good authority that these flowers are primulas. They're actually very small. I was taken with their audacious colors.  Two young fish are swimming happily along when they pass an old fish. "Good morning," says the old fish, "lovely water today, isn't it?" Once the old fish was well out of earshot one young fish turns to the other and asks, "what the heck is water?"  **** There's a change which happens to every photographer at some stage. They begin to see light. Before that they see objects - people or hills or bees or birds -that are potential subject matter, and of course they still do that, but there is something else as well. They see the light: its direction and strength; its colour; whether it is direct or reflected or refracted or absorbed; the way it takes on the characteristics of whatever it has bounced off. They notice that when hitting film or a photographic sensor, reflected light  behaves differently than di...

I saw my spiritual director today. There were some significant things I wanted to share with him, and hoped he would help me find the voice of God. I wasn't disappointed. We talked about my photography as prayer: as a way of seeing the immeasurable beauty and diversity and inventiveness and elegance and irrepressible energy of the Universe, and of communicating something of that. Visual prayers. I left John's place grateful for being able to articulate a little better something which is taking up an increasing proportion of my life. On the way home I noticed that the tide was still low enough for the spoonbills to be feeding, so parked my car beside the Marne St. Hospital and walked along the shore of the Anderson's Bay Inlet. I have been watching a small colony of spoonbills there for some months, and although most had eaten their fill of mollusks and cockabullies and flounders, the adolescent female was still looking for a few morsels before the tide got higher. I ...

The sun rose this morning at 7:12 am so I made sure that's when I was on the end of the jetty at the Broad Bay yacht club. The wind was quiet enough to leave the surface of the harbour untroubled, and there were a few clouds, so I was hoping for a spectacular sunrise. It didn't happen. The sun rose thin and weak and pathetically pastel pink. There were no birds except a few welcome swallows - too small and fast to photograph in the available light. I gave it a few minutes and was about to walk back to my car but decided instead to follow my own advice to beginning meditators: wait; be still; don't mind if nothing happens; just be here. It was so quiet and beautiful, and who cared if I didn't get my trophy shot? It was healing and calming and enriching just to be. After a half hour or so I turned again, walked slowly back to my car and noticed the subtlety of the light on the clear still water. I got my shot. Not the one I had planned, but a better one. And another....

Through the window I watch the waxeyes flock around the ball of fat hanging in a mesh bag. I open the door wide enough to take some photos. A few moments in the short lives of these little, conscious beings are caught, and become something else: pictures; compositions; trophies. And all for purposes way beyond the understanding of the hungry little birds. **** Looking for my camera's wireless control, I serendipitously find a notebook that hasn't been opened in years. This, the last volume of my journal is a beautiful book but old. I stopped regular journaling when I became serious about meditation, a decade ago. The book is bound in suede, and contains photographs, drawings, poems, little mementos from almost remembered events. Thirty of its two hundred or so pages are the daily reflections I made when doing the Ignatian Exercises. The hand is clearer, more careful than my usual scrawl, and written with the fountain pen I used only for journaling.  I read a few ent...

Every morning, at dawn, I walk the beach, here in this lovely place. This is an edge; it is a liminal time, the in between, where land meets sea and night meets day, although I try not to think about that. It’s not a time for reflection, but more an act of presence, this mile long there and back. I guess it’s a kind of meditation, though my Centering Prayer anchor word doesn’t quite fit the rhythm of walking, so instead I use the Jesus Prayer as my feet follow one another across the coarse golden sand. Later there will be enough time for thinking. For now, being here is enough. The dividing line is always indistinct. When does a day begin and a night end?  But when a boundary doesn’t present itself with binary clarity it nevertheless still exists. There is night and there is day. There is land and there is sea.  Some days the sun rises gaudily through the clouds and the dawn gathers in the perforated sand. Some days the shadows are as beautiful as the clear, strai...

It's not my job to be silent, not this time. I'm here to sit with others, and to watch and wait and listen. Five times a day someone comes to the little house I'm sharing with John and Mary and for a brief while I am witness to the growth which their own silence is fostering. What brave and beautiful lives people lead. This is big sky country, spacious and wide. The quiet comes easily. The hills are steep and dotted with matagouri, wild briar, spiny spaniard and thistles, but here and there are what I am looking for. The yearling steers look warily as I step from rock to rock stooping to fill my hat with the large white mushrooms. It takes a few minutes to gather a couple of kilograms, and a bit longer to pick my way back across the creek and the barbed wire fence with them. Treasure waits where I don't expect it. Nightfall. The sunset falls through the huge, old windows. There are sixteen of us around the edge of the room with our backs to the sky and our ...

A couple of days ago I finished reading the First Testament. It's the first time in the history of my devotional life that I have read nothing but the First Testament for such an extended time- about 6 months. And it's the first time I have read it through using the Jewish ordering rather than the accepted Christian one. Take the same elements of a narrative and reorder them and you get a completely different story. We Christians tell a tale of a developing revelation; of a movement from the beginning of all things , through a salvation history to Jesus. The Jewish story is not so much about the past as about the present. It is about the law, by which is meant more than a set of rules and regulations. It is about the great ordering on which the universe is founded. It is a prophetic commentary in which society is critiqued against the standard of that ordering, and it is worship in the light of the law. By and large, I prefer the Jewish system, and wonder if I will ever re...

The following audio file is the third in a series of three talks given at Knox Church Dunedin in June 2017 on the subject of Contemplative Prayer. In this last of the series I speak, informally, for about half an hour, about how to begin a practice of meditation. If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element

The following is an address from Knox Church, Dunedin, given on Sunday June 25 2017 If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element Synopsis: We all have our strategies for happiness which give rise to most of the major choices we make. These strategies have a number of things in common: 1) most of us are looking for one of 3 things in an attempt to make ourselves happy. These three things are a) security, b) affection and esteem; c) power and control. 2. These strategies are so deeply ingrained in us that they have become part of us and we are generally unconscious of them. 3. These strategies don't work, because they can't possibly work. Security, affection and esteem, power and control are things we all need, and things our parents give to us, or not as the case may be, from childhood. We usually find ourselves with a felt deficiency in one or more of these areas, and faced with life's inevitable challenges and unhappin...

The following audio file is an address from Knox Church, Dunedin, given on Sunday Evening, June 18 2017. If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element Synopsis: Like many of my generation I entered the Christian faith by way of the Charismatic renewal in the 1970s. In the early 1990s the renewal and I were beginning to part company, and, while I was Vicar of All Saints Sumner, responding to the works of Gerard Hughes and Morton Kelsey, I began to walk the path of Contemplative Spirituality, which I have been following ever since. There is a common perception that the Contemplative path is some sort of modern add on to the Christian faith, but this is inaccurate. Modern contemplatives, such as Thomas Keating and Laurence Freeman trace their lineage back through Thomas Merton to the medieval work, The Cloud of Unknowing , and then, even further back to the great medieval mystics and the desert fathers. In fact, the Contemplative tradit...

The headland between Totaranui and Goat Bay, looking South to Goat Bay and Waiharakeke Here are three things which are related. Please bear with me. 1. A couple of days ago I finished reading 1 Chronicles. So many odd names, and so many lists! And so many contradictions and omissions and obvious glosses! It was a tough slog, but I got there. And my understanding of the Bible as a whole is greatly enhanced by the effort 2. A couple of days ago Clemency and I walked the Abel Tasman track from Totarauni to Awaroa Inlet. We have walked this section of our favourite part of the planet dozens of times before, and the leg over to Goat Bay is easy peasy lemon squeezy: a very short, flattish jaunt around the base of the cliff. But, since we last did it, a landslide had taken out the track, and DOC has cut a new one over the top. Now it is a  steep little 30 minute gutbuster to surprise us as we begin. It was a tough slog, but we got there. And our walk to the inlet and back was on...

We finish tomorrow, so today was the last time I saw people for spiritual direction. My job is to keep my trap shut, try as hard as I can to keep myself out of the conversation, and listen and watch and pray. Occasionally I can make connections and see patterns that  the person has missed herself, but I don't have to make anything happen. I try to encourage and reassure but after the first day or two even that is unnecessary; the process works. There is a rhythm to the day. There are a couple of times of group meditation and a daily eucharist, at which we three leaders take turns at preaching - the day's only teaching input. The programmed events are spaced to give lengthy periods in which folk can walk, journal, read, pray or meditate. The food is excellent and plentiful. People can, if they want, come and see one of their friendly local spiritual directors to share coffee and have a wee chat. But mostly, they are silent, and in that silence the Holy Spirit is present. Y...

Happy are those      who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread,      or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the Lord ,      and on his law they meditate day and night. They are like trees      planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season,      and their leaves do not wither. In all that they do, they prosper. (Psalm 1:1-3) In my time in the Christian Church, ie 43 years, I've heard some pretty stupid things come out of the mouths of preachers. Back in the day, for example, I was once taught that all music in a minor key was evil. And there was a pastor who taught, albeit briefly, that peacocks and owls were "of the devil", whatever that might mean. I've heard various specific dates for the end of the world promulgated, and listened as people have debated, earnestly, the precise order of even...

We have not spoken in months. He posts a comment and I see that we're still at it, keeping pace; keeping, almost exactly, the same step in what we are thinking and even what we are reading. We both laugh aloud at the unexpected pleasure of seeing each other.  She tells me she's reading Dylan Thomas; I am reading Malcolm Guite but the poems which have pulled us both up short cover the same ground. Another one added to our long list of synchronicities. I read his news from the other side of the world. The wisdom he gives to others answers my own question for the day. I notice that the issues in his Buddhist community are the same ones wracking my Christian one. There is no need to ask, for I know what she will want, but I do anyway, just for the reassuring sound of her voice. She makes a joke which renders me helpless with laughter but which I doubt any other person would notice. We plan, with unspoken agreement, the day ahead. There is a trajectory to my life; a patte...

I own quite a few Bibles, a shelf of them in fact, and every few years I get a new one which becomes my main, working Bible. The translation and edition of those first amongst equals copies of the scripture give a sort of map of my Christian path over 40+ years. My first Bible was a New English translation, reflecting my Methodist upbringing, but that was frowned on in Pentecostal circles so it was quickly replaced with a King James Version, a Schofield Reference Bible with the generally approved floppy black leather cover. At St. John's College I bought an Oxford Annotated Bible, Second Edition, which I still use and which bears the scars of  my long encounters with the text and with God. Since acquiring it in 1977, I have used it but it has been eclipsed for a while by, variously, The Jerusalem Bible, the New International Version, and most recently a third edition of the Oxford Annotated Bible, which now uses the New Revised Standard Version in place of the former edition...

On Saturday 30th of July, from 10 am until 3 pm  at St Mary's Mornington I am running a dream workshop. I used to do this quite often but I haven't done it in years. That's what episcopacy does for you. We all dream, every night. The Hindus say you stop when you are enlightened but that's not anybody I've ever come across. Most of us are occasionally astonished by our dreams and mystified by them, but remembered, recorded and worked with they are a window into the actions of our psyche unparalleled for clarity and accessibility. I'll be talking a little about what dreams are and why we dream, but for the most part this will be a workshop where participants will talk and share and work. I'll share what I know about ways to remember, ways to record and ways to work with the picture show that unfolds inside the heads of all of us every night, and how all this relates to our spiritual journey. I'd be happy for you to join us. If you want to, drop m...

Here's a secret. I learned it this past Lent. If you want to change your life, meditate for an hour a day. The changes won't happen immediately but they will happen. Sit still. Stop trying. Don't just do something, sit there . Be quiet for a change. The psychologist Carl Rogers coined a phrase, Unconditional Positive Regard , to express the attitude required of a counsellor towards the one who comes for counsel. By it he meant that no matter what was said or done, the counsellor offers support and acceptance. The extension of this regard gives an environment in which the vast resources within the client can be mobilised for their own healing. I don't know where the humanist Carl Rogers got his phrase from, but it seems that great minds think alike, for this is the attitude God extends towards us. Jesus said, Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life .  I think he meant this: get out...

Up early. Read the lections. Kneel. Remove my glasses and episcopal ring - why are they both so heavy in the silence? Set the timer going. Those little numbers flicking round are a trap. Why do I need to peek? The gong will sound at the end. I know it's about control, or the illusion of it, and this is one of the things I am slowly learning to relinquish. As the wisest man I've ever met said, " The way of pure faith is to persevere in contemplative practice without worrying about where we are on the journey, and without comparing ourselves to others or judging others' gifts to be better than ours. We can be spared all this nonsense if we surrender ourselves to the divine action, whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be. In pure faith, the results are often hidden even from those who are growing the most... the divine light of faith is totally available in the degree that we consent and surrender ourselves to its presence and action within ."...

It was an early start as I needed to leave for Queenstown by 7.00 am . This morning's readings included a verse I was force fed when a new young Christian in a Church which believed that learning Bible verses by heart was the best way for people to become what God intended them to be. I have been crucified with Christ;  and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:19b-20). I am amazed the difference 40 years makes to how I read the verse, even as it still conjures in me a deep recognition of truth. But it is some words from Jean Malcolm's Facebook page which stay with me through the day. The great Anglican spiritual teacher Evelyn Underhill once defined mysticism as the art of bringing the self into union with reality. The mystic—the truly spiritual person—is one who embraces that challenge. And that means facing realit...