Motion 30

A wedding at the end of the Earth. Nosa Senora da Barca (Our lady of the boat. nb. The name is Galician, not Spanish.), Muxia, Comunidade Autonoma de Galicia, Spain.

At the General Synod which met in Waitangi in 2014 a great deal of prayer, care and time was put into the debate around matters of sexuality. We recognised that, as a church, we had people who held views that were theologically based and honestly held, but which were mutually incompatible and that the church would not be able to resolve the differences between them. Energy was directed, therefore at investigating ways in which we could, with integrity, continue to hold our diverse views but still remain in one church. After days of some of the most honest, considered and mutually respectful discussion I have ever been privileged to be part of, a statement was crafted and a commission was formed and charged with bringing to the next synod (ie the one that will happen in Napier in May) a plan for continuing to live with the tension of diversity.

The report of that commission has been completed and published. The full text is available here, and a very good summary is found here.

The report is long, and takes some reading. I will reserve my comments on it for General Synod, but in general I believe the report is a very good one and gives us a workable way ahead. We will make opportunities for people in the Diocese of Dunedin to discuss it before General Synod. We will hold seminars different parts of the diocese. As well, I recognise that, if the recommendations of the report are adopted by General Synod, there will be significant connotations for the lives of some of some of our people. I will be available to meet with individuals or concerned groups by appointment either before or immediately following General Synod.

Comments

Wynston said…

Having now had a chance to read the report it seems that that the Way Forward Group has tried too hard in attempting to find a way to hold two diametrically opposed groups within the church. The result is a compromised solution based upon a series of compromised foundations which will not only compromise the integrity of priests and bishops, but the integrity of the church itself!

If this approach is adopted it will mean that an Anglican priest cannot marry a same sex couple but, if a marriage celebrant has married a same sex couple then it will be fine for an Anglican priest to then bless the union. Thus, a priest will be able to bless in one service what the Church’s marriage canon says is “unblessable” in another!

Is it possible, let alone desirable, for the Church to hold two diametrically opposed views? If so, can we expect God to be happy with such an approach and bless both "views"?

I think that considerably more thought and prayer is required on the matter.

Wynston Cooper

1 March 2016 at 14:55

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...

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...

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 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 ...

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...

Available Light

Search This Blog