Skip to main content

The Living Church


It was cloudy and cool when we left Dunedin just before 8 am yesterday and nothing much had changed, weather wise, when we finished the service in Roxburgh about 5 hours later. Not that it mattered. The little church of St James had been full and buzzing with life, a testament to the new energy and purpose accruing to the parish since Petra Barber joined the team a few months ago. Then after the usual parish lunch we headed for Wanaka and a mile out of town the climate changed: not just the weather, the climate. Get over the first hill out of Roxburgh and you are into that clear, strong Central Otago light with the tussock and the schist and the inky blue skies and the lazy summer heat.

We arrived in Wanaka with plenty of time to spare, checked with Denis Bartley, the vicar, on arrangements for the confirmation that was to follow at 5 pm and went to St. Columba's. It was dry and hot in the church, certainly not the weather for a cope and mitre but why drag all that drag all this way and not wear it? 5 pm rolled around, there was another full church, a serious young girl prepared to profess her faith before her friends and family, and a lovely moment or two in the service. After the confirmation Denis invited anybody who wanted to reaffirm their profession of faith in Christ to come up to the altar rail. And one by one, almost the entire congregation came up, to kneel and receive the laying on of hands. There, with the golden sunlight sifting into the old church and the warm air around us, the sense of peace and contentment and conviction was almost palpable. And in the middle of it I blessed a small greenstone taonga for Beth Griffith, our one time diocesan youth and children's worker, and gave it to her as she returns to renew her life in Canada. Moving? Yes. We drove home early, missing the pot luck dinner; but the parish, or at least a key member of it, Ngaire Bartley, had prepared a little picnic hamper which we ate sitting on a park bench overlooking Lake Dunstan as the sun sank into the mountains behind Cromwell. E te whanau we are the body of Christ! I knew that for certain last night.

And then early this morning I drove to Christchurch to attend the memorial service for my former Bishop, Maurice Goodall. The Cathedral in the heart of the shaken but not stirred Garden City is a lively place. It is full of energy and movement and people. In the Dean's vestry where the bishops gathered it was full of wit and laughter and good humor as well. The cathedral was almost full- 800 or so people, I'd guess- sombre but calm and grateful for the life of this good man. I remember him coming to see me when I was Vicar of Waihao. His mission at day was to convince me to become the chaplain of Christ's College. He arrived at our place and immediately took to bed and slept for 20 of the 30 minutes he had allowed himself for the task, so tired was he from the effort he was putting into pastoring his diocese. I found that experience quite moving: that he was prepared to be vulnerable and to be ministered to by the most junior of his clergy. He didn't succeed in that day's mission but he did succeed in his bigger one, of shifting Christchurch away from a very traditional style of ministry into a more contemporary one which, ultimately, allowed for the bustle and liveliness evident in his cathedral today.

It is easy sometimes to be tempted into despair and cynicism about the church. But not today.

I finished my day around 5 pm and GPSed my way to the motel Debbie had booked for me. I could have driven home, I suppose, but I've about had my fill of driving for today. Besides, I really want to see the Ron Mueck exhibition in the Christchurch Art Gallery, so tomorrow I'll have a day off, look at the sculptures and drive home in a leisurely fashion with my camera on the passengers seat, grateful for the life and energy of the Church of Christ.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Location:Bartlett St,Christchurch,New Zealand
Labels:

Comments

NIE said…
Two very rich days indeed. Please take it easy on the way home. Hope the mountains,rivers, sea and skies lure you into lots of photo stops.. Even a walk along the little beach at Moeraki?
Blessings for tomorrow.
8 November 2010 at 23:15
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