Available Light

The two books which have shaped my ministry more than any other are James W Fowler's Stages of Faith and Edwin H Friedman's Generation to Generation . So, when Stu Crossan mentioned in passing that he was reading the book that Friedman was working on at the time of his death ten years ago, I immediately hotfooted it off to Amazon.com and got myself a copy. I read it quickly and am writing this without the book in front of me because I have already lent it to someone. It's that good. A Failure of Nerve is about leadership and Friedman's thesis is quite simple: good leadership, he says depends less on expertise and data than it does on the maturity of the leader. He defines maturity as development on two parameters, a) self differentiation and b) the ability to take responsibility for one's own emotions. He argues that many organisations are profoundly anxious and, of course, provides analysis of the characteristics of an anxious organisation and the factors wh...

My son Nick is shaping up as a pretty good photographer, as these portraits of Naomi testify. And yes, he did take the one with him in it. But my personal favourite is this one of Charmaynes:

I know it's been a while since I posted, and I'm sorry about that, well, sort of, but I've been away: on the West Island. Sydney is a beautiful city, especially at this time of year, what with the flowers and birds and harbour and lack of heat and everything, but the real reason for nipping over there was not the prospect of time in one of the world's great cities. It was rather, the  company of someone I had never met before, yet who has as strong a call on my time and affections as anyone else on the planet: my new grand daughter, Naomi.  Clemency and I were only gone a week, but somehow it felt like a month and for all the right reasons. For the first time in a year or more I felt I could let go of my role and forget about emails and just be. We stayed in the Australian club, which was very nice in a buttoned leather, chandelier, stripy wallpaper, tasteful paintings on the wall kind of way. They let me in, no doubt much against their better judgement, because I am ...

I went to see Jane Eyre a few nights ago. I've never much liked the book, but obviously some people do as there seems to be a new and improved version of it on TV about every other month. So, I was a reluctant attender, but I didn't stay reluctant for long. The film is superb, with everything in place that the Brits usually do so well: casting, cinematography, editing, costumes, lighting, production values. Mia Waskowska was a tour de force as Jane:believably repressed and timorous and magnetically enthralling all at the same time. It was in fact, so gripping that I was prepared to reconsider my long standing prejudice against the book. I came home, downloaded a (free) copy onto my shiny new Kindle and reread the thing for the first time since (I think) 1971. I found it hadn't improved much as a novel in the intervening 40 years; the sifty, devious, manipulative Mr. Rochester was never someone who appealed, and neither, for that matter, was stoical, unsmiling little plain...

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

From Friday night until today I wore a purple cassock and sat in front of those who have entrusted me with the guidance of their diocese as we shared together in the business of our annual synod. We met in the Invercargill Working Men's club and the local parishes hosted us and made sure we were undo another notch in the belt well fed.We listened as Bronwyn Miller delivered some not very encouraging news about parish finances, the likely effects of the Christchurch earthquakes on insurances and the implications of new earthquake strengthening requirements. We are, after all, the inheritors of many historic and beautiful buildings, often made of unreinforced masonry and often with other parties (local bodies, the Historic Places Trust) wanting a say in what we do with them. Many are a struggle to maintain even now, and their future utility will exercise our imaginations considerably. For all that, the synod wasn't negative; not even a little bit. For myself, I am perfectly sec...

The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and St. John of the Cross writing of The Dark Night of the Soul allude to the same reality: that is, that God is unknowable and all our ideas about God, all our feelings about God, all our intuitions of God can only ever give us the vaguest knowledge of who and what God is. Whatever image of God it is that we hold between our ears is therefore largely the product of our rational, intuitive and affective imaginations. Paradoxically however, God calls us ever Godward and seeks us out. We are called, drawn to God and we make steady progress along the path to God and our knowledge of God, imperfect and fragmentary though it may be gets steadily clearer. As we progress along the narrow road that leads to life, there comes a point when we draw close enough to God that we must finally leave whatever it is we think we know of God behind. Like Reepicheep in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader , we get to the point where the ship of all our th...