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On the way home. Lake Pukaki The Parish of Upper Clutha has churches in Cromwell, Tarras and Wanaka and I was scheduled to be there for the whole of the Easter weekend. This is a part of the world where people go to ski, mess about in boats, hike, run or just gawp open mouthed at the scenery. Upper Clutha has had a new lease of life in recent years and is one of our Diocese's most vital parishes. It was 1 degree in the Manuka Gorge at 7.30 am on Good Friday Morning and we were towing the caravan, so what with the weight and the risk of ice and everything we took it fairly slow. We arrived in Cromwell  just in time to help a fairly sizeable crowd carry a large wooden cross from the Junction Lookout by Lake Dunstan to the Presbyterian Church, maybe 3 km away. After the customary country style morning tea, we drove on to Wanaka for an early afternoon Good Friday Liturgy, and then parked the caravan beside the church, on the site of what I hope is soon going to b...

The Sunday after Easter Sunday is called Low Sunday because in comparison to the festivities of the week before it is just that. Whenever we reach a peak we have to come down the other side and just get on with things again. As I did after finishing the Hikoi and entering straight into Holy Week. From Palm Sunday through to midday on Easter Sunday I led 9 services; pretty average for the time of year I'd say. There were two chrism Eucharists, where our people renew vows of various sorts - baptismal and ordination - and where anointing oil is blessed for use in the coming year. Then I went to Queenstown to lead Wakatipu Parish's celebration of the risen Christ which involved the usual cycle of services on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday with a baptism on Saturday afternoon.  Most years I seem to be spread thinly about the place, leading portions of the Easter celebration in a number of different churches, sometimes preaching, sometimes presiding at the Eucharist, some...

It is perhaps seven or eight hours until the sun rises on Easter morning, and I am thinking about two things. One is Anthony De Mello, who in talking of our enemies says, "Given the background, the life experience, and the unawareness of this person, he (sic) cannot help behaving the way he does. It has been so well said that to understand all is to forgive all. If you really understood this person you would see him as crippled and not blameworthy..." The other is Jesus being nailed to his cross and praying, "Forgive them for they know not what they do." I don't think Jesus was praying just for the drunken louts who were doing what the procurator paid them to do. He was praying also for the procurator and the High Priest, and the Sanhedrin and the countless, nameless ones who worked the machinery of power. He was praying for his friend Judas who had thought that the best course of action was to give the authorities what they wanted. All of them were not s...

I spent most of last week in Southland. I preached and talked to people and drove and celebrated the eucharist and drove and talked to people and drove and talked some more. Wynston and Lorraine Cooper gave me somewhere to sleep and provided me with interesting conversation and showed me some of the parts of the countryside I had never seen before, for example Curio Bay where there is a petrified forest. Amongst the slowly eroding composite rocks ancient tree trunks lie exposed to the actions of surf and wind and rain. Some of the trunks lie straight along the ground, scattered around like pick-up-sticks. Others are stumps of trees that must have stood upright when they were petrified sometime in the Jurassic period; that is sometime before even birds and flowers were invented. More ages ago than my mind can get itself around these long straight patterned rocks were living things. Now they are being turned to sand and are slowly being washed onto the ocean floor. At some equally unim...