Skip to main content

Solstice


I will have my operation on June 21 - the solstice. Not that the solstice means a lot to me; just because the earth has got to a certain point in it's annual journey round the sun doesn't mean that I have to go dancing naked around a dolmen. I am, after all a hemisphere away from the nearest dolmen. And it's June. And it's Dunedin. The solstice does mean, though, that the year is exactly half way through, and it's a bit staggering to think of what has happened in this year.

In January my father died. For better and for worse he had a huge influence on the shaping of my life and so my family gathered in Motueka for his funeral and for a deeply significant time of talking and healing. Almost immediately I was a candidate in the election to choose a new Bishop of Christchurch. Episcopal elections are conducted in front of an employing committee of 150 each member of which feels obligated to comment at length on the candidates' belief system and pedigree. It's much like dancing naked around a dolmen, in June, in Dunedin, in front of a large and warmly clad audience. Then, even as the world was settling back into normalcy Clemency and I planned the sabbatical we had been anticipating for years. And just when it was all signed, sealed and on the brink of delivery my GP rang and asked if I could pop in and see him, first thing tomorrow morning.

The year is now half way through. It's time for the reserve to run onto the field with the plate of oranges and for us to swap ends with the team from the other school. It's time for the coach to stoop down 'til he's looking us in the eye and tell us to play the ball, not the man and remind us it's a game of two halves and it's there for us to win or lose, it's all up to us. At the end of the match there is likely to be the one about it not being whether we win or lose but how we play the game that's important.And that last speech is the true one, the one we didn't, but always needed to, truly understand.

This has been an interesting year, but it hasn't been an annus horribilis. It has been one of the most significant and powerful and affirming six months of my life. We learn not by addition but by subtraction. Growing into truth isn't a matter of acquiring new learnings, it is more a matter of removing old ones: of wiping clear the glass in order to let the light shine through. A lot of cloths and windowlene have been expended on me this year, and for this I am profoundly grateful. And I note with alarm, and excitement that the year is half way over. Only half way.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
.... winter sunshine. light in the grey and the waiting time- in the winter.Profound and a profoundly beautiful photo again Kelvin. Bless you. gk
7 June 2008 at 11:03
Anonymous said…
SOLSTICE

dawn creeps in
crystal clear
intrepid
yet
calm

endings
become
beginnings

savor this juncture
for the road ahead
is long
and arduous

but in this moment
all things
are possible

JS
7 June 2008 at 15:16
Anonymous said…
SOLSTICE POEM

The thin monk shivers
on his cot tonight.

The dark eye closing
in the afternoon
opened just a slit today
between darknesses.

The lone Carthusian
walks his narrow cell
under the drumming
of winter rain.

His inner light
burns bright,
like crazy fire,
in solitude.

JS
7 June 2008 at 15:26
Anonymous said…
Half way over or the better half yet to come? We will bring the half time oranges and try to help make the second half more promising than the first. Our prayers for you, Clemency and the family continue. Thinking of you lots. VMR
7 June 2008 at 17:44
Anonymous said…
I like paradox.

All this talk of halfway reminds me of 'Zeno's Paradox'. It is a mathematical and logical problem.

If you only ever travel half the remaining distance you never arrive. No matter how small the distance left to travel, if you only ever travel half that distance you never arrive. We measure using numbers. Numbers are infinite. No matter how small the measurement there is always a half measurement.

Perhaps it's not a paradox, perhaps its a metaphor, perhaps that's why we are immortal. No matter how far we travel, it is a journey without end.

JS
7 June 2008 at 22:36
Kelvin Wright said…
There's a version of that paradox which proves that a hunter can never shoot a rabbit. By the time the bullet has gone 100 yards, the rabbit has run an inch. By the time the bullet has gone the extra inch, the rabbit has run 1/100th of an inch. By the time the bullet has gone the 1/100th of an inch..... It's a lot like theology. It's unimportant that it doesn't work in practice, just so long as it works in theory.

Good poems by the way. Yours?
7 June 2008 at 23:36
Anonymous said…
A good thing for Greek warfare and subsequent Hellenistic history that Alexander was taught by Aristotle rather than a disciple of Zeno. Can you imagine having to read the NT in Avestan? or discussing the dezoroastrianisation of the gospel?

Kelvin, praying with you and for you each day.
Brian
8 June 2008 at 08:45
Anonymous said…
Kelvin, the poems are not mine, I downloaded them from the global neural network. For some reason they didn’t have the poets name on them. I’m glad you liked them.

Zeno’s paradox has always amused me because in my job we are told by academics that ‘theory informs practice’ and many dramatic reforms have taken place where it is apparent that it is our old friend Zeno again. My colleagues and I are often like so many harassed rabbits bounding away from ideological bullets hoping that Zeno’s theory works but bolting the armour around our rear ends as we flee.

The other interesting point about Zeno has to do with the limits of language in describing reality and the relationship of language to scientific hypothesis. It is mathematics that describes the physical nature of the cosmos. Language allows us to play games with mathematical meaning and logic. The test is, do the bullets hit the rabbit; yes they do and the traveler arrives at his destination and the rovers land on Mars.


JS
8 June 2008 at 11:55
Anonymous said…
Brian,
A direct ancestor of Zeno was the lead soldier in the wooden horse at Troy, so watch out! - ( that’s not true actually, I made that up). Variations of Zeno’s paradox are found everywhere, even in theology and biblical historicism. There are ‘Trojan Horses’ everywhere.
I don’t have a nom d’ordinateur but I do have a nom de plume.

JS
8 June 2008 at 12:08
Anonymous said…
Kelvin, I really like this statement of yours:

"We learn not by addition but by subtraction. Growing into truth isn't a matter of acquiring new learnings, it is more a matter of removing old ones: of wiping clear the glass in order to let the light shine through."

JS
8 June 2008 at 17:59
Post a Comment

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 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...
10 comments
Read more

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...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more