Skip to main content

Birds, the park, 1662

On Friday 15 March I went for a walk in Foster Park, near my daughter's house. I had been there, earlier in the day with the children and had seen a pair of white faced herons, and now, with my grandparenting duties temporarily suspended, I came back to see if I could get some photos of the birds.  As I was walking home across the soccer field, a woman approached me and asked what I was doing. It wasn't a friendly question, and I could understand why. I was an old man, alone near a playground, carrying a big camera with a very long lens.  I told her about the herons, and also about the plovers which were at that moment keeping a fair distance from me. They too were suspicious of my motives. She nodded and went on her way. The world is not an entirely innocent place.

I came home and began processing the pictures, and was in the middle of tweaking the one above when Bridget entered the room with the astonishing news that Noah's school was in lockdown. And then we were reminded of just how far lacking in innocence the world really is. Someone was shooting in the mosque in Christchurch and until the police knew how many people were involved and where they were, all kids in the wider area were being kept safe.  it was all still unfolding, a friend or Bridget's texted her the killer's manifesto and offered her a copy of the video he was apparently livestreaming. She declined the latter but accepted the former and passed it on to me. I flicked through it - it read like a schoolboy essay, hastily thrown together, full of Facebook opinions and self pity. It began and ended with poetry, of the type chosen by people who are not themselves poetic but who would like other people to think they are. It described with great calmness the events taking place on the television screen before me. The snivelling little bastard. He'd planned all this. This was no mere lack of innocence. This was evil. Pure evil. I deleted the damned (sic) thing. 

So the week passed, with time to process the events, and look at the faces of the innocent victims, and watch the reactions of my fellow New Zealanders. There was time to visit the wall of flowers near the mosque. There was time to talk and think and feel and share,

Then this Sunday past I led the 8 am eucharist in the cathedral, using the old service, the one from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. I preached, of course, about the murders. And then, after the offering had been taken and the vessels placed on the altar I began the prayers of intercession. And I couldn't continue. I had wanted to mention the victims, and to pray for our Prime Minister but inside me was a sob too big to come out. Conscious that I was not there for myself, but for these faithful people in front of me, I stopped for a bit, and then, instead of improvising my own prayers, read aloud Cranmer's lovely old words. They come from a different era, when death was closer and the frailties of the human condition are not so well anaesthetised against as now. They speak of the reality of evil and ask for the punishment of wickedness and vice, and beg for mercy when the world seems unpredictable and hostile. They were perfect. They got me through. Just.

So today, I looked again at the pictures I took of a lovely bird, its beak filthy from visiting death on the worms in the Foster Park turf. How beautiful the world is! And how dangerous. And how real is the evil which shrouds that beauty from us. 

Have mercy upon us, most merciful father. For thy son our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, forgive us all that is past and grant that we may ever hereafter serve and please thee in newness of life. 


Labels:

Comments

Craig McLanachan. said…
No-one has been left untouched by these events. We all have coped and reacted in our own way. On the Sunday, outside the Mosque in Clyde street, I was overwhelmed by the love shown. If the perpetrator's aim was to sow hatred he has failed miserably. My moment of emotional release came when sculpting with my radio on National Radio and Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings was played. Never did it sound so poignant and powerful for me. Nothing about this atrocity defines New Zealand or its citizens for me. Kia kaha.
26 March 2019 at 09:20
Elaine Dent said…
The congregations I serve as interim have been including the people of New Zealand in our prayers....probably not as beautiful as Cranmer's. And you and those for whom you care in this grieving time are in mine.
26 March 2019 at 13:04
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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