Available Light

This is a recreation of my talk at the 3 in 1 gathering, in St Michael's church, Dunedin, last Sunday. I want to tell you a parable. The kingdom of heaven is like two young fish who are swimming along when they encounter an old fish. "Good morning boys," says the old fish, "isn't the water lovely today!" The two young fish swim on until the old fish is well out of earshot, then one turns to the other and asks, "what the heck is water?" I borrowed this parable from a speech by David Foster Wallace. He was using it for other purposes, but it fits nicely with the verse from John's Gospel I mentioned last week: No one has ever seen God. It is the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made him known. (John 1:1) No one has seen God, or heard, smelled, felt or tasted God either, for that matter, but that doesn't make God unreal, just as the fish's unawareness of the water in which they live, move and have their...

Jesus said look again. The Kingdom of God is as close to you as your own hand. God is never absent and never far away. What stops us seeing and living in the Kingdom is us. We see what we are habituated to see, and the effort required to get out of our own way is too much for most of us to bother with. So God's call to us is to want to see, and to give consent to Gods action in removing our preconceptions. Easily said, I know. The way past our own inner filters is to be still. To let the constant parade of our ideas and memories and emotions gradually settle, and for a brief time to be present to this elegant, bewildering, complex, overwhelmingly beautiful universe.  Photo: Clemency has roses growing around her vegetable plot, and this is one of them. I took this with a Nikon D750 and a Micro Nikkor 105/2.8. F8 to give a reasonable depth of field but not so much as to bring the background into focus, iso 200 to give as little noise as possible and 1/800 sec to make the numbe...

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 ...

  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...

Clemency and I got home about 5 yesterday afternoon, and although we had been away for only a little over 24 hours it felt longer. We had left at 5.30 am the previous day, towing the caravan  through thick fog in order to be at a meeting in Wanaka at 10. We had breakfast at the Tin Goose Cafe in Alexandra before I dropped the caravan off  at Clyde and Clemency and her schoolbooks at a lakeside table at Wanaka and headed off to sit round a huge table with a lot of highly motivated people. The morning was intense, but satisfactory, and in the middle of the day it was back to Clyde ready for a Michaelmass service in the little retreat house being developed in St. Michael's Church. There were conversations and negotiations and preparations all accomplished on the sofa of the caravan, which does pretty well as a hospitality space, albeit a small one. I preached and celebrated eucharist and had a few significant conversations and drove home through Lawrence and Milton, having put...

I drove to Balclutha just after breakfast. The weather was good and the roads clear, so it was a brisk trip. I was going south for a gathering of ecumenical parishes. The attendees were mostly Presbyterians and Methodists, but I had been asked to talk to them and be inspirational. No pressure or anything. I talked about Elijah, and then later about my own experience in Co-operating Parishes. I'm not sure whether it was inspirational, but, as often happens when I talk to people, it had a truckload of lessons for me.  Seems that lately, my past keeps coming back. Like my life passing before my eyes, but  not so much in a flash as in a slow dawdling conflagration. **** I  can watch cricket live on my phone. I refrained from watching but did, as a noble act of ministry to others who wanted to know, occasionally peek at the score. I knew that Brendon McCullum was doing something pretty extraordinary at the Hagley Oval but didn't look un...

Up early. Read the lections. Kneel. Remove my glasses and episcopal ring - why are they both so heavy in the silence? Set the timer going. Those little numbers flicking round are a trap. Why do I need to peek? The gong will sound at the end. I know it's about control, or the illusion of it, and this is one of the things I am slowly learning to relinquish. As the wisest man I've ever met said, " The way of pure faith is to persevere in contemplative practice without worrying about where we are on the journey, and without comparing ourselves to others or judging others' gifts to be better than ours. We can be spared all this nonsense if we surrender ourselves to the divine action, whatever the psychological content of our prayer may be. In pure faith, the results are often hidden even from those who are growing the most... the divine light of faith is totally available in the degree that we consent and surrender ourselves to its presence and action within ."...

The prayer of silence, whatever specific form it might take and whatever tradition it is practised in always works from a particular premise: that the truest part of ourselves is found within; and encompassed within that deep part of ourselves is something wiser and older and deeper and better than we are. So I sit in silence. I withdraw from all those things which occupy my everyday life. I try to be as still as possible beside this great well of life and meaning which opens up in the parts of me I am never able to directly observe. When I first started doing this, many, many years ago, I would be engulfed, every time I tried it,  in a sense of peace and wellbeing as I sat beside this deep inner pool; but I have learned to see this experience, attractiveas it is, as a distraction, drawing me away from the pure depths which are my heart's true focus. Sitting in that place of silence isn't easy. My personality is a complicated web of attitudes and habits and predispositions...

It's nearly the end of a silent retreat I have been making this week. We have had the last of our talks from the retreat master, David Moore, Vicar of St. Luke's in Christchurch, had our last silent meal and it now feels over enough that I can write this and talk to any other retreatants who happen into the room. At the start of any serious prayer I always have a prologue; a sort of introductory mini prayer in which I reflect on what exactly I am wanting from this imminent contact with God; a short place where I ask for any appropriate graces for the time to come. At the start of this retreat then, I asked that God would use the time as God wished and that I not get in the way. God seems to have taken me at my word. The first night I went to bed soon after 8 and slept until 7. I meditated for as long as my knees would allow. I went for an hour's walk every day. I took the Eucharist and attended morning prayer. David has been a superb retreat leader, giving beautifully ...

There was a 40 knot southerly blowing when I went for a walk on the beach today, so I wasn't bothered by the crowds. About halfway between St. Clair and St. Kilda three young women in wetsuits were pulling their surfboards out of the waves, trying to control them in the gale as they stumbled and shrieked their way into the comparative shelter of the dunes. Their faces and hands and feet were scarlet with cold and they caught my eye as I passed and  smiled in mute acknowledgement of the absurdity of their situation. It rained, and the sand blew in a small drifting mist at about ankle height above the firm beach. It was high tide and the waves just reached the six foot high cliff caused by the scouring away of the sand during the recent storms. After half an hour I turned and faced back into the wind, pushing against it and against the softness of my footing, glad of my Gore-Tex and gloves and snow cap, and straining on the flat beach as though I was walking steadily uphill. I retrac...