Available Light

There’s a particularly worrying phone call which most of us will one day receive: “Hello, this is your doctor. There’s nothing to worry about, but could you come and see me first thing tomorrow morning?” I have had four such phone calls in the past decade, the last one, strangely, on the day after I began reading Myk Habet’s book. Each of these conversations has driven me to revisit what I think will happen on that day when I finally step out of three dimensional reality. I believe that whatever lies over the horizon for me will be characterised by the most complete picture of reality we are ever going to get, namely the life, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. Like a child emerging from the womb into the real world, I will, sooner rather than later, emerge from this current reality into one that is infinitely bigger than I can imagine but I generally try to set aside guesswork about what that might be like.  Catching me when he did, however, Myk Habets enco...

Sunrise in Northern New South Wales The following is my sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin on Sunday April 28, 2019 When people speak of “faith”, what they usually mean is “belief”. So we talk of “believer’s baptism”, or when we want to enquire after someone’s relationship with God we ask, “do you believe in God?” and what follows next is usually a conversation about whether or not God exists. Faith is, in other words, about facts. It’s about the universe as we perceive it, and what happens or not as the case may be. But I think that when the New Testament talks about faith, it’s actually talking about something else. The noun used in the New Testament is pisteuo, which means something like “I put my trust in”. So faith isn’t about belief, it’s about trust. It’s not about struggling to believe a whole lot of stuff which cannot be proven, but it is, rather, an attitude or a way of thinking about what we believe. If you’ll bear with me for a bit I’ll try and expl...

I took this shot in St. John's Roslyn years ago. The chalice was  placed on the floor and positioned to catch the reflection of the window Yesteday Noah engaged his mother in a conversation about belly buttons. The whole business of placentas was explained with the sort of honest and brilliant simplicity Bridget is capable of, but one thing led to another and he asked "If Amma is your mummy, then who is Amma's mummy?" So he was, for the first time in his life, given the name, Valerie Underhill, which meant so much to me. Which led to the question beyond the power of simplicity to mask: "Where is she?" Which led to tears. Deep, wracking, sobbing tears.  He knows about death; he knows that dinosaurs are dead and that it's just their bones in the museum, but yesterday a pretty major penny dropped for him, about the universality and inevitability and permanence of death. Bridget talked about heaven and afterlife, which helped somewhat and he has asked s...