Available Light

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 ...

    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...

William Blake's earliest works include his short book of poems Songs of Innocence and Experience . These were originally printed separately ( Songs of Innocence 1789 and Songs of Experience 1794) and contain illustrations made using Blake's innovative printing methods.   The two short books were combined because they belong together, illuminating as they do two states of human consciousness. In writing them, Blake was reacting to the mythical dualism of Milton's Paradise Lost , which Blake greatly admired. Rather than following the pattern of Creation and Fall , Blake perceived the human condition to be a tension between two states, Innocence and Experience which worked in a dynamic tension in each human soul. The two states are portrayed in the book by pairs of contrasting poems. So, in the Book of Innocence we have the poem, The Lamb : Little Lamb who made thee           Dost thou know who made thee  Gave...

There's something I don't quite get: why would anybody pay good money for a treadmill when there's a perfectly good footpath just outside their front door? I guess there are some perceived advantages to staying nice and safe and cosy inside your house while you walk, but there are great disadvantages too. Namely, that it is nice and safe and cosy. We walk out of our little street, turn left and head up the hill. There is a bit of a wind from the South and the sky is threatening rain.  At the dirt path on Highcliff Road we begin the gut busting slog up steps which are never in quite the right place, and stop halfway up on the pretext of taking in the view. The hills shield the harbour from the wind so the water is silvery and still. "Look at where we live", she says. I take a picture. I can't hope to capture the grandeur of what lies just past our place, but I try. We walk on and down the other side with my thigh muscles asking what the heck do I think I...

Yesterday I spent about half an hour down the road at the inlet with my camera. I then spent maybe 2 hours at my computer looking at and processing the light I had gathered. Down by the waterside, I was looking through a window approximately 1 cm square, down a long metal and glass tube at a bird which was about 12 metres away and moving quickly, so until I got the picture up on the screen I didn't know exactly what I had captured. I knew what I hoped to get: the beauty of these ungainly birds and the stillness of the late morning and the constantly changing web of life into which the fish and the spoonbills and the mud and the water constantly weave themselves. But it was only later that I could see the shapes and textures of the feathers,and the way the bird and its reflection formed an oval, interlocking with the ring on the surface of the water, and the subtle vertical lines of the falling droplets. So I trimmed the image, emphasising shape and form, cutting out the things...

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 ...

On Tuesday afternoon I talked with a group of staff at Woodford House, in Havelock North, about the possibilities of Christian Meditation. There has been a concerted effort by the Department of Education to introduce Mindfulness to New Zealand schools, and some of our Anglican schools have experimented with it. The government's motivation is the well attested success of mindfulness programs in positively impacting the academic, behavioural and social life of schools. Of the various methods used to introduce Mindfulness I have not heard of any which have been entirely successful, and most seem to have foundered early on several intractable problems: Training. Mindfulness is simple but not easy. It can be learned in a half hour, but sustaining it in one's own life and teaching it with the integrity which only  comes from committed personal practice is another matter entirely. The training programs are bought by schools so the providers must be seen to be giving their ...

Nikon D7100, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8G, 1/400 f8, iso200 A couple of weeks ago Clemency and I drove to Queenstown to hear the poet David Whyte. I think that people resonate with writers when they articulate for us the doings of our soul, and David Whyte has done that for me several times, as I have mentioned here and here and here and here .  I had seen that he was in New Zealand to conduct one of his famous, week long walking tours, which I would dearly love to have joined, but my budget didn't stretch to the $US5,000 a head ticket price. But I saw  A Day With David Whyte advertised and decided that whatever the cost, I was going. Turns out it was only $95 a head, so Clemency, despite the fact that she was only vaguely aware of who he was,  came too. We left home in the dark and arrived in plenty of time for the 10.00 am start. The venue was a kind of back packer type place on the shore of Lake Wakatipu. About 60 or so people were there, mostly women, all of them...

There is nothing simpler than meditation, but that doesn't mean that it's easy. Also, it is a bit fruitless discussing meditation and learning about it in an academic sort of way. In order to really know anything about it you have to do it. More than that, you have to do it regularly and often and in a disciplined fashion and for a reasonable length of time before you can understand much about it, because meditation is about will and consciousness. Of course people dabble with it, which is perfectly OK and in truth, almost all meditators start as dabblers, but as part of the benefit of meditation lies in the discipline of it, dabbling won't get you very far in the long run. If you are serious, you will need someone to help and encourage you. A meditation group is a good idea, and the World Community of Christian Meditators has groups in many areas of the world, maybe even yours. You can get a fair way with a meditation practice by using a good book. An excellent prime...

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 ...

Wall of a derelict house. In the Maniototo, near En Hakkore retreat centre. I have a new monitor: 27" of clear sharp colour, take a bow Mr. Dell. Today, after a week or two of looking at the thing,  I noticed that it has an adjustable base, so I tilted it upwards a little. And an odd thing happened. The oblong screen became a parallelogram, wider at the bottom than at the top. It didn't really of course, it's just that in the time I had been viewing it the screen had been perpendicular, and at an angle to my line of vision and  my brain had got used to it the way it was, and had, without consulting me, been performing the nifty little trick of making a perceptual adjustments so that it looked rectangular. And now I went and changed the angles and my brain reinterpreted the shape using the old maths. I knew it was rectangular but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't see it that way. The illusion was so persuasive I even got a set square and made sure it was safe ...

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 pergola at the Gawler Centre, Victoria Australia. When I was first diagnosed with Cancer one of my parishioners, Richard Sutton, called in to see me. He too was living with a recent diagnosis of a serious illness. I had always liked Richard and got on well with him, but until he came to my place that morning, I don't think we could have been described as close friends, as he and I were so very different. He was a chess grandmaster and the Dean of Law at Otago University, a man about ten years older than me, whose huge intellect was orderly and focused. I always felt a bit haphazard and shambolic around him. The differences in intellectual firepower notwithstanding, we agreed to meet weekly and support one another in our common predicament. So, for the next couple of years, until Richard's death, once a week we went off to a cafe, drank coffee, ate friands and talked about illness, death, life, the universe and everything. We became close friends. Central to our discu...

A sunrise or a sunset, who can tell? It has been a month of endings; of acknowledging the severing of relationships, with no particular expectations of what might happen next. Last Sunday I preached in my local parish church. The people of St. Michaels were kind and generous in what they said over morning tea as they farewelled me as bishop and welcomed me into their congregation. Right in the middle of the Fourth Gospel, chapter 11 of 21, the author has placed the story of Lazarus. Right in the middle of the story of Lazarus the author has placed the story of Jesus' conversation with Lazarus' sister Martha, as she tearfully upbraids him for not doing more to save her brother. Martha speaks of Jesus as her hope, but she locates that hope in some other place, far removed from the  monumental rock right beside her and the putresescence of her brother's decaying body sealed behind it. Jesus is a little more material. He asks for the stone to be moved. Hope is here an...

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...

  A blue, clear sky and no wind. Dew on the grass in the slate gray, early morning shadows. Still. Silent. Wide. By now people are at home in the silence. It softens the crusted layers that time has hardened in their soul's depths. Bits break free and drift into consciousness. Tears come. And laughter. And immense courage, to bring to the light what is so feared, so reviled. those who try to make their life secure, will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it. I was privileged to witness death and resurrection today.

Today I started on 1 Chronicles, that book whose first 11 chapters are all but unreadable. These chapters are information dense and thin on structure which means page after page of eye glazing opacity: genealogies and lists and unpronounceable place names. If you believe in Biblical inerrancy it's best to avoid 1 Chronicles entirely as it is so full of contradictions, both within itself and with other parts of the Bible. You can preserve your belief  by pretending to have read it, the practice adopted, you will be reassured to know, by pretty much all of your compatriots. But there are,scattered here and there, one or two little bits and pieces which offer just enough intrigue to keep you going. So in v 2:7, for example we get  ".....The sons of Carmi: Achar, the troubler of Israel, who transgressed in the matter of the devoted things....." , and in 11:22 the record of Benaiah, Son of Jehoida who "was a valiant man of Kabzeel. He struck down two sons of Ariel of M...

The beige sheep graze the tan grass. The road signs sing: Gimmerburn 10 km; Ranfurly next Right; Patearoa; Not for use in Winter. Don't be anxious. Don't be too hopeful. I am not the Dalai Lama. Neither have I anything to offer you  from the City of God, or even its outer suburbs. Sit here. Let me light the candle. Tell me what is happening, more or less. Here in this space, with the strong warm wind around us, you lay out small evidences of a felt life. Road signs on your soul's journey. And mine. Oh my God! I see you.               

My bedroom opens onto a built in and furnished verandah. It is well set up with ingeniously recycled pieces and is comfortable and beautiful. Out through my windows is that vast sky and the tawny mountains of the Maniototo, looking like a pride of lions snoozing in the sun. I drove up today, towing the caravan because I go on from here to a family gathering in Nelson. My mother turns 90 next week, so my dearest will, when I arrrive, have temporarily become my nearest, from their accustomed haunts in Stockholm and Perth and Sydney and every part of New Zealand that you could think of. And a few that you couldn't even begin to guess at. I've got an 810km drive on Friday. I'd better rest up. I will, no doubt, rest here, but this is not actually my retreat. I am observing the silence and joining the prayers but this week I'm attending closely not so much to my own spiritual journey as to that of others. It is an astonishing privilege to be here and to play a part i...