Skip to main content

Decently and in Order


My study is built, the books are on the shelves in more or less their permanent positions and there is a desk which will do in the meantime. Just through the wall is a corner of the garage which will serve as my workshop, and those familiar with our garage at Highgate will be astounded by its tidiness: there are little spring clips on the walls to hold all the tools; there are little jars and colour coded plastic trays full of bolts and screws and thingumejigs; there is a lamp and a vice which is actually screwed down to the bench. This temporary attack of anal retentiveness is unusual in someone and by someone I mean me, with the Myers Briggs personality type INFP, for whom, normally, the mere mention of the words "sub clause" or "scheduled" is enough to bring on an attack of hives.

Partly, this orderliness is the result of having a smaller house than we used to and having to make best use of the space available. Partly it is because at my age the natural progression described by the MBTI means that my tertiary and inferior functions - borderline sensing and extroverted thinking- are coming out of their 50 year long apprenticeship and are starting to throw their weight around. Partly it is because even I now realize that tidiness is actually the easiest and least demanding way of doing things, and that some semblance of organisation is needed to move the big picture imaginings, which are my stock in trade, from lala land into the world of being. Or at least into my garage.

Which is why I spent some of this week in a room with colored stick it notes and highlighters and very large sheets of paper. Benjamin Brock Smith had come up with an ingenious system for scheduling our Diocesan plan and we spent a few happy hours sticking things on and coloring bits in. Now, attached to the wall of the Diocesan board room is an enormous diary, outlining the way we will implement our vision over the next five years. It is a work in progress, and in fact has only had the barest preliminary outlines put on it yet. I hope that people, after they have cadged a cup of coffee from Barbara, will feel free to wander up the stairs and have a look at it, and make any suggested comments or alterations to me or Alec, or Benjamin or Helen Wilderspin or Bronwyn, who will all have a hand in shaping it. Seeing the plan begin to be set down on paper in doable chunks encourages me to hope that we are going to do more than that thing the church usually restricts itself to: circulating bits of colored A4 paper.

The energy for the changes we are embarking on will come from the enthusiasm of the people of our Diocese; energy such as that in the room when I met the combined vestries of Gore and Waimea Plains just yesterday. We were talking of how we could cooperate across that part of Southland and work together for the Kingdom. The enthusiasm was so palpable you could have cut it up and sold it by the yard. Perhaps someone reading this might fancy a 1-2 year job ringing in the changes in that busy little corner of Middle Earth or perhaps, later, the longer job of acting as the regional leader. There are plans afoot. We have it down on paper and the dates and names are steadily being filled in. It's very exciting, intuition, feeling and perceiving notwithstanding.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Glenfinnan Pl,Dunedin,New Zealand
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Dear Ven. Kelvin.

It's great to hear that the Diocesan plan is all slowly coming together.

The INFP type sounds similar to the Enneagram type 1 with a relaxed warm 9 wing. (or a En. type 9 with a 1 wing)

Interesting how different personality paradigms (systems) can point to the same thing but take one along different paths to get there (the concepts are different in name only, the deeper truths seem to be similar.)

Perhaps it is the same for many spiritual and faith journeys. We all seek to know God, to know how to Love better, and to understand how to be thankful for the gifts of grace that abide with us, and that can be found in every moment. (warts and all)

All faiths have their blessings, and it's a great blessing to live the Anglican journey.

The future looks bright with so much enthusiasm and cooperation across South-land.!

God Bless the diocesan, and may the Diocesan plans all come together brilliantly.

Enjoying and learning so much from your Blog, stunning pictures, and writings.

Thank you.

Yours in Christ,

Julian
3 October 2010 at 13:29
Kelvin Wright said…
Thanks Julian. In the Enneagram system I am a 9. I know something of the enneagram but not enough to teach it and I am certified as an MBTI administrator so that's the system I look to for analysis most of the time. Yes, I think the future is bright, although there are one or two litle matters to be resolved immediately.
7 October 2010 at 23:03
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