Available Light

A sunrise or a sunset, who can tell? It has been a month of endings; of acknowledging the severing of relationships, with no particular expectations of what might happen next. Last Sunday I preached in my local parish church. The people of St. Michaels were kind and generous in what they said over morning tea as they farewelled me as bishop and welcomed me into their congregation. Right in the middle of the Fourth Gospel, chapter 11 of 21, the author has placed the story of Lazarus. Right in the middle of the story of Lazarus the author has placed the story of Jesus' conversation with Lazarus' sister Martha, as she tearfully upbraids him for not doing more to save her brother. Martha speaks of Jesus as her hope, but she locates that hope in some other place, far removed from the  monumental rock right beside her and the putresescence of her brother's decaying body sealed behind it. Jesus is a little more material. He asks for the stone to be moved. Hope is here an...

Photo courtesy St. Peter's Cathedral, Hamilton I went to church three times this last weekend. On Saturday in company with about 1,000 others I went to the chapel of St. Paul's Collegiate School in Hamilton to participate in the farewell service to Archbishop David Moxon. The next day I went to my old parish, St. Francis Hillcrest and was able to take in the main morning service before rushing off to the airport to catch the flight home. Then in the evening I went to the Resurrection service in the Regent Theatre in Dunedin, and again in company with about 1,000 people. The three events were quite varied. And that former sentence will be my official entry in this years understatement of the year awards. The St. Paul's chapel is a beautiful place with a soaring wood roof. It is light and spacious with the reflected light of a pool playing through a plain, frosted window featuring the words of Jesus arranged to form an enormous cross. The liturgy was considered, intel...

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...