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Photo (c) Nick Wright 2017 The stories are getting more complicated as he gets older. He still arrives at about 6 am clutching the Beebops, who still greet me and, using my voice, relay their adventures of the night before. A year ago they were happy just to go to the park or the beach, but things move on. Now, when Noah is asleep, they apparently filch the keys to Daddy's Ford Ranger (the speediest truck on the road!), and drive off into the night to fly about the place in helium balloons, liberate lions and elephants from circuses, go to the airport for trips to Africa, or Spain or Auckland, and evade prosecution for underage driving by the simple expedient of turning back into toys when the police officer looks through the window. Yesterday, as the the intrepid stuffed rabbits were making their way to Christchurch's rocket base for a trip to Saturn, Noah put his hand up to shield his mouth from the Beebops' view and whispered to me, "This is just imagining, ...

It's 6 am and there is the usual knock on the caravan door as Noah makes his pre-breakfast visit. He comes in, makes himself at home, and we go through the routine which is evolving day by day. Over the week one element has grown and now crowds out all the others. "Talk the Beebops, Pappa" , he says, almost as soon as he arrives, and this initiates a game which he is very reluctant, always, to end and very eager, at any opportunity, to recommence. He has a stuffed rabbit, Beebop, well, two actually. A year or so ago Beebop was lost, and Noah was distraught with grief. His mum managed to find a replacement in a local toy shop and to distress it into a reasonable facsimile and effect an impersonation. Of course, a  day or two later the original made his way home, so now we have Old One Beebop and Other One Beebop. So Noah and the Beebops set off on an adventure, often involving air travel, pirates, policemen, cannonballs, submarines, the drinking of fluffies and the ea...

Ada playing in the Clearview Primary School grounds Photo taken with Samsung Galaxy Note 5 smartphone My Grandchildren teach me so much because they are open, simplified exemplars of the processes at work within myself. My own pretence at sophistication masks the fact that I have not actually arrived anywhere; I am, like them, in process and their learnings are only slightly less complicated versions of the stuff which occupies my own intellectual and spiritual explorations. 6 am and there is the usual knock on the caravan door. Noah has got himself out of his bed in the house, and is making his customary early morning call. Clemency stumbles up to let him in, and he climbs into her sleeping bag. He lies there quietly for maybe 5 minutes, and then there is a pattern to be followed. I will play a game which involves a conversation between me and Beebop (Noah's constant companion: the faded, battered, stuffed  rabbit which is exactly the same age as him) in which I  ha...

I read the story I have read a thousand times, of Moses and Aaron doing magic tricks before Pharoah, and then the anguish of the Egyptian mothers and the hurried meal and the impasse before the vast waters. Perhaps because I am reading it all in one piece, I notice for the first time, the rhythm of the repeated motifs and the beat of the language and the rising cadences of powerful emotion. This is a masterful piece of storytelling. **** I wrote the paragraph so long ago I hardly remember it, but I am struck by how clearly it speaks to me now. This insight has, I now realise, been sitting with me, unrecognized, for a very long time. **** I flick through the tens of thousands of pictures on my hard drive, looking for one in particular. I don't find it, but I stumble across others which I have taken and then never looked at again. They are so long forgotten it is like looking at someone else's work. And, like someone else's work, it refreshes and feeds me. ...

Opening Prayer E te Atua to matou Kai-hanga Ka tiaho te maramatanga me te ora, I au kupu korero, Ka timata au mahi, ka mau te tika me te aroha; Meatia kia u tonu ki a matou Tou aroha I roto I tenei huihunga. Whakakii a matou whakaaro a matou mahi katoa, E tou Wairua Tapu Amine. Introduction and Thanks Welcome, welcome thrice welcome as we gather here in St Matthews to celebrate our common life and plan together for our future. As we gather in this place, I am mindful of all who have carried the torch of faith before us, and who pass it to us today. In particular, we remember those of our number who have died in the past year, particularly Jim Brooks and Stan Mawhinney. It has been my privilege to journey amongst you for yet another year, and I am grateful for the strong team amongst whom I work at Peter Mann House. Alec Clark , has continued his work as ministry educator while accepting the additional duties of being Vicar General. I know from experience...

Stained glass window in the recently deconsecrated church in Millers Flat About a month after the night in Lower Hutt I was baptised in the New Life Centre in Christchurch by Pastor Peter Morrow. It was a Wednesday night, and there were about a dozen of us, all young men. The women were baptised on a different night because of the effect of water on 70s clothing and the need for decency. Together, we constituted that month's crop of converts, and we all shared a common experience. All of us had known what it was to be born again, which I now see was a conglomerate of a number of things all experienced in close proximity. There was a sense of release and freedom from guilt and anxiety There was an affirmation of us as individuals and, for me, the cessation of crippling lack of self esteem. The Lord of the universe loved, astonishingly,  even me! There was, for most of us,  one overwhelming experience of being immersed in the presence of God; of having senses and bound...

I've read Life of Pi by Yann Martel 3 times, the last time being about a year ago. It easily makes it into my top ten list of all time favourite books. Well, top 5 actually. I didn't think it could ever be filmed successfully, so when Ang Lee's movie was released, of course I had to go and take a look just for curiosity's sake. The film, as it turns out, is a triumph. Not only does it accomplish the difficult task of presenting the fantasy adventure of Pi's unlikely ocean voyage in an open lifeboat with an adult Bengal tiger for company but it manages to present the philosophical undergirding which gives the novel such unsettling power. Life of Pi is primarily about religion. Note: it is not a religious book but a book about religion.  A young boy who shares his name with a mathematical symbol survives a shipwreck and a long period alone in a lifeboat. At the end of the book the reader is presented with two different versions of his survival and invited not...

A couple of you have asked me privately to tell you the legend of St. George and the dragon. OK. Can do. But I know several versions of the story and am at a bit of a loss as to which one to tell, so I will divide the story up into sections, and for each section put down both of the two major variants I know of, one variant being written in normal typeface, the other in italics. Then you can choose the bits you like and construct the legend that you like best. 1. Once upon a time there was city ruled by a king who had a beautiful daughter. Near the city lived a dragon ( or in some versions a crocodile, but we'll stick with a dragon. They look better on flags and coins and such) 2. The dragon was very wealthy the dragon built it's nest beside the town's only water supply 3. One day the king got into debt. With no other sources of revenue the king borrowed the money he needed from the dragon, taking out a mortgage on his daughter as surety. in order to stop the drag...

Imagine a slide projector with no slide in the carrier shining its light onto a blank white screen. You would see on the screen pure white light. Then you put a slide into the carrier, and a picture appears. What you have done by shining the light through the slide is filter out most of the light. White light coming from the bulb contains every visible colour, but where the slide is blue, all the light is filtered out except the blue bits, where it is red, everything is excluded except the red light, and so forth. So a picture is created not by adding light but by taking light away. The pure white light when there is no slide in the projector shows no picture; but in another sense, it shows every possible picture: the light required to make any conceivable photograph is there in that pure white light. As Bernard Haisch says, in The God Theory , "the white light is thus the source of infinite possibility, and you create the desired image by intelligent subtraction, causing the rea...

Last time I posted, I said Middlemarch is the greatest English novel of the Victorian era. Katherine replied, and said on the strength of that recommendation she'd gone and bought it. Wow! Power! Who'd have thought it? It's an anxiety making thing, being taken notice of like that. Well, it's a great book, and if she's the sort of person who can settle into the century old language, and can handle big ideas cropping up on every second page, she'll absolutely love it.  It's big, rich, intelligent; a work filled with great characters and an intriguing plot. But, even so,  what a thing to say - the greatest novel. In whose opinion, exactly? Mine that's all. Oh yes, and the guy who wrote the lead review at Amazon.com . And a few others. Read on Katherine, I'd love to know what you think. Novels are a form of entertainment but they are so much more than that. Novels and films are the two principal ways in which our society deals with ideas. Philosophers a...