Skip to main content

Tomorrow I am flying to Napier to attend the national Youth Forum. I will be there for only a day, and on Tuesday will fly to Auckland to join Clemency on a flight to Doha to visit Bridget and Scott. We'll be away about a fortnight. My bag is nearly packed and I have got everything I need except for the folder containing all my Youth Forum papers, which is sitting in the back room of the Cathedral. Never mind. I'll wing it.

The last 24 hours has been quite inspiring. On Saturday evening I was at St. Mary's Mornington for a midwinter dinner. Of the 50 or so people present, the overwhelming majority were young families with children. There were games and an amazing magician with an even more amazing patter. His best trick was to mark a $20 note, then pull it out of the middle of a fresh walnut, which he pulled out of the middle of a fresh, unbroken egg, which he extracted from the middle of a lemon. It was astonishing; almost as astonishing as the sense of vitality and new life to be seen in this parish which has had its share of disappointments and challenges over the years. Whatever John Sherlock, the vicar is doing there, it certainly seems to be working.

This morning I went to the cathedral to confirm 13 young people. They were a bit bleary eyed, having spent the previous night sleeping in the cathedral and I use the word sleeping in the broadest sense of the word which includes tossing, turning, lying awake and clowning about. The service managed a nice balance of homeliness and stateliness, and we finished with a lunch in the soon to be developed crypt. Once more, I was left with the sense of a community with a great deal of vigour and hope. The core Cathedral congregation is comparatively small, but it contains many people of depth and commitment, who know how to get things done.

Then this evening, only a few hours ago, I was back at St. Matthews to speak at their Breakthrough service. As happens every Sunday night at St. Matt's, the big old stone church was stripped of its usual seating and the nave was filled with cafe tables. There was soft, mood lighting, and trestles at the back serving good coffee and a range of muffins and slices and cakes. A band led a few songs, I spoke, there was a reading or two and the band played one more song. It was calm, measured and relaxed. There were more than 100 people present. For the third time in 24 hours I left with a strong sense of a lively, cohesive, interesting community doing lively, cohesive and interesting things.

The strategic plan is developing nicely. I'll post it on here about the same time it is released to the synod. In the meantime, after today, I am even more reassured that there is energy and imagination enough to put it into practise when the time comes. So, with a great deal of satisfaction I leave for Doha and Petra and the River Jordan. I'll be in touch.
Labels:

Comments

Peter Carrell said…
That is all good news!
4 July 2010 at 22:40
Lee said…
Have a lovely and safe holiday, and enjoy seeing those wondrous, far-off places.
5 July 2010 at 14:44
Barbara said…
May God bless your journey and bring you both safely back here again, 'your going out and your
coming in....even forever more '

Barbara
5 July 2010 at 15:54
Merv said…
Petra!!
I've just spent the whole evening checking out the best way to travel from Queen Alia Airport to Petra to Wadi Rum & Aqaba next May.
I trust your faithful followers will be rewarded with an excellent trip report.
5 July 2010 at 22:31
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