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Photo (c) Anglican Taonga This weekend past marked, for me, the ending of a task that I was privileged to perform. During last year, after David Moxon's departure from the Diocese of Waikato/Taranaki I held the role of Archbishop's Commissary to the Diocese. Although Waikato/Taranaki has a remaining bishop, Phillip Richardson, I was the reference point for those matters where it was deemed inappropriate to involve Phillip and I was charged with overseeing the process of selecting a replacement for David. There were many trips back and forth to Hamilton, and phone calls at least weekly. In August I chaired the electoral college. Looking back with six months worth of hindsight, what strikes me about the process is predominantly how seriously and carefully the people of the Diocese took it, and how prayerful they were in their decision making. It is public knowledge that there were a large number of candidates and that some of them came from within the diocese. This is a si

On Sunday morning Clemency and I flew home early, catching the Air New Zealand ATR72 flight to Wellington at 7:40 am. About 20 minutes out of Wellington. there was a cockpit announcement that there was a"slight problem up front" and we were diverting to Palmerston North. I thought that the fact that we weren't going on to Wellington even though we were so close might indicate that the problem wasn't all that slight, but didn't say this to Clemency. The cabin crew quickly but quite calmly scooted through the plane with a big black plastic sack relieving people of their tea and coffee and belted themselves into their little fold out chairs. We banked sharply over Palmerston North with the plane leaping about a bit in a moderately strong wind and the pilot plonked it onto the runway. Then came a cockpit announcement I'd never heard on a plane before, "Cabin Crew to your stations". One of the stewards told us to get up quickly and calmly and follow

We're thinking of going back to Spain and walking the Camino Santiago again. This time we'll take the Northern Route, through Bilbao, so it will be a different path but some people nevertheless seem a little nonplussed at the idea. "I thought you had already done that," they say. "Why don't you go to South America instead? Or Latvia?" It's hard to explain the addictive pull of the Path of Miracles to people who haven't themselves set off  on a crisp Spanish morning wearing a scallop shell on their back. But it's not about the scenery, beautiful though it is, and it's certainly not about adding a list of been-to places to my collection of useless possessions. A pilgrim is not a tourist. When I travel as a tourist, I travel under my own terms. I arrive and stay briefly in some strange place, sleep in places that the local people would never use, eat food which is either exactly what I might eat at home, or a garish parody of local cuis

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

Next time, maybe? The recently deconsecrated church at Miller's Flat Today I took my bike to Lawrence and rode the Clutha Gold Trail , a recently opened bike track which runs about 73km from Lawrence to Roxburgh, where it joins the Roxburgh Gorge Trail, which in turn links with the Central Otago Rail Trail. This is all part of a good idea by our Government to build a network of cycleways extending from one end of the country to the other; an idea whose implementation is way behind schedule, but which might nevertheless be the most positive thing for which John Key's government is remembered. I drive the road beside the Clutha Gold Trail very frequently and had watched it being built. So today was the fulfilment of a plan formed when I first saw the guys at work putting together all those little bridges: to spend a day off doing an out and back ride from Lawrence. I planned to go to Beaumont which I thought might take an hour and a half, but I was surprised how easy it wa