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Being here is like living in a painting. And, mercy of mercies, its not as hot as forecast.  The clouds arrived yesterday like the cavalry to save us from the relentless Maniototo sky. People who have taken the time and gone to the expense of being here are serious about their inner lives and yesterday a few of them came to chat with me, laying out the issues they have brought with them and speaking about possible paths through the next few days ahead. My task is to listen and try not to get in the way. The ones who have done this before know that a retreat takes on its own life and its not possible to predict what might have happened by the time they leave on Friday. But what is certain is that something will have happened. The place is spacious. Skies, hills, open valleys, clouds are all huge. So is this venue and so is the time. There is plenty of space for all that needs to happen. I walk for some time in the hills every day, taking my camera as a means of teaching mysel...

It's not my job to be silent, not this time. I'm here to sit with others, and to watch and wait and listen. Five times a day someone comes to the little house I'm sharing with John and Mary and for a brief while I am witness to the growth which their own silence is fostering. What brave and beautiful lives people lead. This is big sky country, spacious and wide. The quiet comes easily. The hills are steep and dotted with matagouri, wild briar, spiny spaniard and thistles, but here and there are what I am looking for. The yearling steers look warily as I step from rock to rock stooping to fill my hat with the large white mushrooms. It takes a few minutes to gather a couple of kilograms, and a bit longer to pick my way back across the creek and the barbed wire fence with them. Treasure waits where I don't expect it. Nightfall. The sunset falls through the huge, old windows. There are sixteen of us around the edge of the room with our backs to the sky and our ...

We finish tomorrow, so today was the last time I saw people for spiritual direction. My job is to keep my trap shut, try as hard as I can to keep myself out of the conversation, and listen and watch and pray. Occasionally I can make connections and see patterns that  the person has missed herself, but I don't have to make anything happen. I try to encourage and reassure but after the first day or two even that is unnecessary; the process works. There is a rhythm to the day. There are a couple of times of group meditation and a daily eucharist, at which we three leaders take turns at preaching - the day's only teaching input. The programmed events are spaced to give lengthy periods in which folk can walk, journal, read, pray or meditate. The food is excellent and plentiful. People can, if they want, come and see one of their friendly local spiritual directors to share coffee and have a wee chat. But mostly, they are silent, and in that silence the Holy Spirit is present. Y...

  A blue, clear sky and no wind. Dew on the grass in the slate gray, early morning shadows. Still. Silent. Wide. By now people are at home in the silence. It softens the crusted layers that time has hardened in their soul's depths. Bits break free and drift into consciousness. Tears come. And laughter. And immense courage, to bring to the light what is so feared, so reviled. those who try to make their life secure, will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it. I was privileged to witness death and resurrection today.

Today I started on 1 Chronicles, that book whose first 11 chapters are all but unreadable. These chapters are information dense and thin on structure which means page after page of eye glazing opacity: genealogies and lists and unpronounceable place names. If you believe in Biblical inerrancy it's best to avoid 1 Chronicles entirely as it is so full of contradictions, both within itself and with other parts of the Bible. You can preserve your belief  by pretending to have read it, the practice adopted, you will be reassured to know, by pretty much all of your compatriots. But there are,scattered here and there, one or two little bits and pieces which offer just enough intrigue to keep you going. So in v 2:7, for example we get  ".....The sons of Carmi: Achar, the troubler of Israel, who transgressed in the matter of the devoted things....." , and in 11:22 the record of Benaiah, Son of Jehoida who "was a valiant man of Kabzeel. He struck down two sons of Ariel of M...

The beige sheep graze the tan grass. The road signs sing: Gimmerburn 10 km; Ranfurly next Right; Patearoa; Not for use in Winter. Don't be anxious. Don't be too hopeful. I am not the Dalai Lama. Neither have I anything to offer you  from the City of God, or even its outer suburbs. Sit here. Let me light the candle. Tell me what is happening, more or less. Here in this space, with the strong warm wind around us, you lay out small evidences of a felt life. Road signs on your soul's journey. And mine. Oh my God! I see you.               

My bedroom opens onto a built in and furnished verandah. It is well set up with ingeniously recycled pieces and is comfortable and beautiful. Out through my windows is that vast sky and the tawny mountains of the Maniototo, looking like a pride of lions snoozing in the sun. I drove up today, towing the caravan because I go on from here to a family gathering in Nelson. My mother turns 90 next week, so my dearest will, when I arrrive, have temporarily become my nearest, from their accustomed haunts in Stockholm and Perth and Sydney and every part of New Zealand that you could think of. And a few that you couldn't even begin to guess at. I've got an 810km drive on Friday. I'd better rest up. I will, no doubt, rest here, but this is not actually my retreat. I am observing the silence and joining the prayers but this week I'm attending closely not so much to my own spiritual journey as to that of others. It is an astonishing privilege to be here and to play a part i...

 En Hakkore Christian community established to provide a place of rest and retreat.  An old TB sanatorium, it is sited on about 150 acres of land in the hills behind Ranfurly in the Maniototo  Ten families make their home here, and it is host to retreats and conferences at very reasonable rates for food and accommodation.  Rooms are plain, clean, and there are plenty of them  The old Hamilton cemetery is all that is left of a town that once was home to 4,000 people and had 40 shops and 23 pubs.  Nodding thistle. A noxious weed, but lovely nonetheless. This is Graeme Sydney country. The skies and landscape are huge, open, spacious, bare, beautiful  

We have nearly ended the last full day of the retreat. I have had my last session with each of my directees, and been humbled again at the privilege of being admitted to the lives of  strangers at such a deep, personal and vulnerable level. Tomorrow we will close, break bread and go. I have not had the opportunity to learn much of the community which lives her. The ten families are housed in various parts of this sprawling complex, and it seems each of them has expanded to take as much living space as they need. They live a fair distance apart, far further than they would in most suburbs but I have seen small groups of them working companionably in the gardens and fields. In the central building is a chapel, which is where I have been meeting people. The fit out of the holy place - a row of guitars, a drum kit, a piano and a data projector - and the collection of elderly books at the back tell me that the theology is general purpose Kiwi Pentecostal. It would seem that the commu...

Today started cold. There was a southerly and clouds stacking themselves up in great, untidy, unfolded heaps above the beige hills, and after the morning quiet and breakfast I had enough time to walk up the dirt road towards where the town of Hamilton used to be. If it had lasted, I guess it would now be Hamilton South, but it has long gone. Once there were 4000 people, 40 shops and 23 different places to buy liquor. It was a goldmining town and the diggings are still there, about a mile away, like a great purplish white burn scar on the bare flank of the hill. At the top of a hill there is a gate, a sign board and a small cemetery set behind a neatly made stone wall. That's all there is of Hamilton. I went and looked at the old Graves and the neat new plaque someone erected when the cemetery was restored just a few years ago. It records everyone who is buried there. Since the first person was interred in 1865 it was 23 years before there was a burial of someone over 60.  Chil...

On a retreat like this one there are as many motivations to be here as there are retreatants, but there is a commonality about what happens in the first few days. One aspect of this is that when people stop and become silent their body lets go of all the little subterfuges it was using to prevent them knowing just how tired they were. So people arrive full of eagerness to enter the silence and start making headway on their inner development and find themselves falling asleep all the time. They would apologise if they were allowed to talk  but they just make oops sorry faces instead. My spiritual director back in the day taught me to welcome this snoozing. The Holy Doze she called it. And so I pass her wisdom on to those who are coming to me on a day by day basis for direction. These first days will be about letting go and that includes letting go of the plans they have for how they will grow their souls over this coming week. It's only been 24 hours. I know what is likely to h...

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...