Skip to main content

IDC

The last two days have been spent in The Inter Diocesan Conference, a meeting of the seven Pakeha dioceses, teasing out our common ground before we meet with the Maori and Pasifika parts of our church in the General Synod. We have been meeting in a large windowless room with the air conditioning turned up way too high, so it's been a bit like meeting in a gymnasium in Dunedin, except that I think in Dunedin I would have been warmer.

Yesterday morning we had a bit of a break from discussions to be welcomed by our hosts, the Diocese of Polynesia. We made a short bus trip through Nadi to St. Christopher's Church and were seated under a giant marquee and it wasn't a bit like meeting in a gymnasium in Dunedin, or anything else in Dunedin for that matter. We were formally welcomed in the Fijian way, with great dignity and energy, but with a very important difference. Usually, at such an important gathering, elders would have performed the welcoming ceremonies, but Archbishop Winston Halapua is utterly committed to the essential priorities of furthering the ministry of women and of encouraging young people. So, yesterday the ceremonial actors were very young indeed. Kava and a roast pig were offered and received. Speeches were made in Fijian and Graciously returned in Maori and English. Fine mats were gifted. A morning tea of byzantine size and intricacy was served and then we were entertained for an hour or so by more of the young people of the diocese. From Fiji, Tonga and Samoa they took turns to sing and dance for us. It was energetic, joyous, funny, sensual, spiritual, bawdy, reverent, graceful. I found myself at times moved deeply, almost to the point of tears and I'm still not sure why. Perhaps it was the presence of so many young people- hundreds of them - which I am so unused to in an Anglican context. Perhaps it was so many of them smiling shyly but exhibiting a complete ease with themselves and a pride in who they were in their respective cultures. Perhaps it was a sense that I was looking at a shift in the centre of gravity of our church. Some young Fijian Indians danced to techno pop in a style that was pure Bollywood. Samoans and Tongans and Fijians danced with hands and bodies to the complex rhythms of drums and to inventively used brass instruments. In every case they sang and danced to the glory of God, but the idiom was of the emerging nations, not of the missionary past. The self confidence and energy of the young Pasifika Anglicans yesterday was loud testimony to the fact that the Anglican church is predominantly now a church of the emerging nations.

A bus ride later and we were back shivering in the conference room, talking through the matters which concern us older grayer people. There was some preliminary discussion of those motions regarding relationships which the news media seem so interested in, and which it will probably be wise to leave undebated until the Gender Commission has done its work. There is one of those motions which I hope is not left lying around on the table however. Glyn Cardy, the Vicar of St. Matthews in the City, the Auckland church of billboard fame, is proposing an investigation into the theology and meaning of marriage. Glyn intends this, I know, as a preliminary exercise in getting the church to think through the possibility of blessings for people in same gender relationships, but I think it is of far wider importance than that. I suspect the church has lost its way on the issue of marriage, and we need to take stock. I for one would be pretty keen to follow up on Glyn's suggestion and hope we can give his sensible motion the air time it needs.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 incompatible formats
10 comments
Read more

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

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 the
3 comments
Read more

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old
Post a Comment
Read more