Skip to main content

Beginnings



The flight from Dunedin left early so I was up at 5 and driving to the airport in the dark and wet. Wellington was cloudy and Auckland, when I arrived slightly misty and, by Dunedin standards, warm, but that doesn't seem to stop the wimpy locals banging on about how chilly it is. I picked up my bargain basement rental car- an aging Nissan Sunny with the performance and handling of a slug negotiating a plate of porridge- and navigated my way across the city with surprisingly little bother. With an hour to kill before the powhiriri I found a cafe near the Orakei basin and bought a large and good and inexpensive latte. I sat and looked out at the streets around which, 35 years ago, I had jogged with a pair of adidas on my feet and a pained but determined expression on my face. This was a neighbourhood near which I had lived during that period in my life when I had first been truly happy, and now it was at once familiar to me and as foreign as Honolulu or Beirut.

Through long remembered streets I drove to St John's College, where the theological hui is being held, parked the glutinous Nissan and entered the Wesley building. There are heat pumps and a data projector now, but otherwise, it was wall to wall Deja vu: same carpet, same curtains, same tutkutuku panels, and even some of the same people, although, poor old dears, they have aged so much they found it hard to recognize me.

This college is where so much began for me: theology, the Biblical languages, liturgy, more friendships than I can now recall, preaching, contemplation, snooker, a collection of books, diaconate and priesthood and even, in a way, episcopacy. After lunch I walked the kilometre or so down to Abraham Place and past the tiny flat where my marriage began and also my son Nicholas. I walked back up the hill over which I used to run and thus over the ground where my knee problems started. And I sat and listened to Andrew McGowan, who is one of the best lecturers I have heard in many a long year, speaking about Perpetua and the start of Christianity as we know it.

As Andrew pointed out, the 2nd 3rd and 4th centuries were when much of Christianity had its beginnings. The New Testament found its shape then as did the creeds, baptism as we understand it, and the eucharist and the form of ministry into which I was shaped, in this building, 35 years ago. He reminded me of the surprising relevance of the development of Christendom to us who are witnessing its unravelling.

Perpetua was a catechumen, that is, an apprentice Christian, who was martyred in 203 AD for her refusal to sacrifice and acknowledge the genius of the Emperor. It seems that the Romans were quite tolerant when it came to religion. You could believe in what you jolly well pleased and participate in any act of worship that took your fancy as long as you still paid homage to the official state cult. That is, you were fine as long as your faith was a private affair and didn't interfere in your duties as a citizen which included a public affirmation of the deity - that is the ultimate importance and authority - of the Emperor. Perpetua refused. For her, faith encompassed all her actions. For her, allegiance to Christ took precedence over all other allegiances. She was a citizen of the kingdom, and could not therefore pledge undying loyalty to something as limited and flawed as a mere earthly nation. For this conviction she was prepared to risk all, even her own life. "Jesus is Lord" was the first Christian creed: an allegiance so total and so exclusive that it crowded out all others.

Lately I have been reading Marilynne Robinson and Terry Eagleton and David Bentley Hart on the nature of modernity and of modernity's virtual deification of tolerance: of the tendency for contemporary people to regard the very act of acceptance as of supreme importance without giving more than passing thought to the content of that which they are tolerating. Modernity tends, by affirming everything, to affirm nothing, except the desirability of affirmation. Accordingly, who amongst us moderns has anything to which we hold so dearly that we would face the wild beasts rather than forsake it? Perpetua's defiant conviction at the start of Christendom raises an uncomfortable questions for us at its end: can we still proclaim "Jesus is Lord"? And if we can, what on earth do we mean by it?

Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:St. John's College, Meadowbank, Auckland.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Having “Nissan Sunny” and “episcopacy” on the same page is a bit of an image clash – are you a closet iconoclast?

“I had jogged with a pair of adidas on my feet and a pained but determined expression on my face. This was a neighbourhood near which I had lived during that period in my life when I had first been truly happy”

Very good! As an escapee from “Fantasy Island” one can well imagine your facial expressions :-)
31 August 2010 at 15:57
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