on VAT 69 and funny hats

I remembered the moment, I suppose, because I was reminded recently of the walk-in pantry in the house in which I grew up. The conversation drifted on to the pleasures of walk-in pantries. My mind drifted to the memory of a fifteen-year-old boy sneaking into that pantry when his mother was out, not long after his father had died.

He tiptoed in, zeroed in on a bottle of VAT 69, poured it into a glass of milk because he’d read somewhere that’s how to drink whisky, and set about drinking it. Rum and milk might have been better. The toxic, synapse-exploding emulsion put him off whisky for years, and alcohol for, well, weeks.

But how did I  ... (I’ll dispense with the whole ‘reader: he was I’ charade because it was bleedingly obvious, and any psychologist could tell you I was using the foil purely as a psychological ploy by which to distance my adult self from the trauma of having once been an adolescent) ...how did I know VAT-69 was whisky? It was not because I had pored [or poured, for that matter] over Sir Ernest Shackleton’s diaries. Biggles was the limit of my adventurers’ memoirs).

No. Five years earlier I had been told a joke. It went something like

“What’s the Pope’s phone number?”

“I dunno.”

“VAT 69”. Kerchunk-plunk.

As a joke it was not in the big league and I fear I have it wrong. Maybe it was ‘who does the pope call in an emergency?’ I don't do jokes. But it didn’t work at all. I barely knew of the existence of some person called ‘pope,’ did not know he lived in a town (or whatever) called ‘Vatican,’ and had no idea what VAT 69 was.

Funnily enough, because it was the 1960s, the peculiarities of the phone number, foreign to a modern ear, I got. My phone number at the time was 201D. Why shouldn’t this pope fellow be VAT 69? The number was back to front and it would take a while to Morse out V-A-T but I figured he (it never occurred to me he could be a she) lived in England and maybe Brits had back to front phone numbers.

Somehow though I gleaned that the combination of letters and numbers referred to a thing called whisky. Some years later I noticed some in a walk-in pantry. Some years later I mixed some with milk, and blew my synapses.

Some decades later I was an adult. Perhaps because I had consumed too much VAT 69 (in fact I’ve only ever risked it once since, and prefer, on rare whisky occasions, nectars for gods far more discerning) I was an adult of somewhat addled brain. The synapses that were blown out in a walk-in pantry a few weeks after my father died were perhaps specifically those that look after the memory of positions in which I place my wallet, keys, phone and anything else that I place.  Parking doesn’t count. My synapses cope with parking spots. So far.

As an adult I had stumbled into a job called priesthood. Amongst other things this entailed wondering around a small part of a large building wearing funny clothes. The large building was variously called a church, of if committed to a particular role, a cathedral.  Cathedrals have a special chair in them, where bishops – of which I later learned the pope is a special example that I get to ignore – park their bottoms from time to time.  The word ‘cathedral’ comes from ‘cathedra’, which is the Latin name for a bishop’s bottom.

Often, if I was meandering around the small part of the big building I would discover that I had forgotten something. But often the something I had forgotten would be locked away somewhere, so I would need my keys. But often I would forget where my keys were. So, to circumvent this sad side-effect of the alleged papal phone number, I would attach the keys by a lanyard, to my person.

The small part is called a ‘sanctuary’, though in the USA that word refers to the whole kit and caboodle so it’s a bit confusing. In churchy traditions that are a bit ‘high’ (a reference to how much the participants move their bodies around rather than to their altitude, though on the other hand Shakers and Pentecostals move their bodies around a lot, so this won’t do as a description ... let’s try ‘a reference to how much the participants move their bodies around in an orderly and choreographed manner’ … though the choreography is by centuries of tradition rather than by someone creative and dictatorially directive) …

Oh dear. Where was I? Damned synapses.

Oh. In churchy traditions that are a bit ‘high’ you can tell the sanctuary because the people who move around in it wear funny clothes. They look ridiculous, but a bit like the emperor’s new clothes the participants in the moving around believe that they don’t look ridiculous at all. So they wear them.  And this memory-challenged wielder of funny clothes and keys would often attach the latter to the former in case some sort of excursion to a cupboard was needed.

Some wielders of funny clothes never need to excurt (and that should be a word) because they never damaged their synapses with VAT 69, but a few of us struggle with imperfections. Some of the most self-righteous wielders of funny clothes refer to the flawed wielders of funny clothes as ‘incompetent’ but on the whole I think the Jesus-dude who was (is) the excuse for funny rites and clothes would prefer that damaged individuals can be wielders of funny clothes (and keys) too, because sometimes the Damaged are otherly-competented, and those other competences are a gift that sometimes outweigh the lamentable flaws in a few synapses.

So one day this owner of keys and damaged synapses was wondering around in a sanctuary, keys and funny clothes melded with some discretion but apparently not enough. It must have been an important day, because a bishop was there, and bishops are very important, and they wear rather silly hats to prove that, but they don’t know they are silly hats because, well, bishops are a bit like emperors sometimes. They also wear flamboyant rings, because that shows they can write important letters, and they carry a crooked pole, and they wear similar funny clothes to the other people meandering around the sanctuary but more of them, to show that they are much more important or maybe much nearer to God or Jesus or Donald Trump or someone.

And on that day I was indeed wondering around in a sanctuary wearing preposterous looking clothes and the bishop in his (though it could be a her) funny  hat noticed my keys on a lanyard and snarled ‘take them off, they look ridiculous.’ And I glanced at the silly bishoppy hat on the bishoppy head, but I didn’t say anything because bishops are enormously powerful in their own small spheres of influence and I was quite keen to have a job by the end of the day and sadly I am as flawed and corrupt as the next person. So I shifted the keys a little so they were discretely hidden beneath one of the silly-looking clothes I was wearing, and my life and my job went on. Both, I guess only for a while but let’s not get all metaphysical here.

And somewhere between a bunch of keys and some silly clothes I realised it was all about emperors’ clothes (and yes the apostrophe is where it should be) and VAT-69 jokes.

Because VAT 69 jokes are only funny if you know

a)       phone numbers once looked a bit like that, and
b)      the pope lives in a place called Vatican City, and
c)       VAT 69 is a whisky
d)      and whisky tastes lousy with milk.

No – wait … the last doesn’t matter. Different folks, different strokes and all that.

And keys on a lanyard only matter if the observer is so obsessed with emperors’ clothes, so obsessed with protocol and self-importance, so disoriented and disconnected that the clothing of lackeys around him (or her) becomes an issue that may detract from the gravitas of their own clothes, the solemnity of their own ritual, the importance of their own role. Keys on a lanyard matter only if the observer of the keys is so unaware of how it all looks when little boys see the emperor’s clothes (or not), and does not realise that the keys are probably the only readily comprehensible thing in the whole obscure sanctuary and its strange, obfuscating rituals.

VAT 69 jokes work if you know a few things about whisky, Catholicism and phone numbers. Funny clothes can work if you know a few things about their (accrued) symbolism. Keys work, well, pretty much everywhere.

And those of us who wear (or used to) funny clothes in an obscure part of an incomprehensible building might need the occasional reminder that snarling about keys on lanyard might well be a parable about obscurantism, missed priorities, about an utter lack of reality about emperors’ clothes and bishops’ silly hats, and about a growing disconnect from a carpenter’s son named Jesus who at one stage had something to do with the rites in the funny building but who these days might be more likely to be busking in the mall or sleeping rough in a bus shelter, adjacent to a homeless bro with a bottle of VAT 69.  

Tightened zippers?

As we journey into Advent our liturgical readings will take us deeper and deeper into portents and portents of portents, into the surreal and the potentially scary. As we go home in the evenings (or perhaps as we walk out the  door if we have our smartphones attuned to media feeds) we will receive news reports of  portents and portents of portents, taking us into the surreal twilight realms of the potentially scary and even apocalyptic.

Back in another pocket of time, another apocalyptic moment, when (as I said recently in a sermon) Khrushchev and Kennedy were glaring at each other across the Bay of Pigs,  civilization was also dwelling in a twilight world, under the potential shadow of a nuclear winter, waiting with bated breath and tightened zippers.

Tightened zippers? Bob Dylan memorably wrote at the time

You’ve thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurl’d

Fear to bring children

Into this world.

They were dark times and there really was a sense that procreation of new generations should be off the agenda, that this was endgame in Orwellian times, and humanity was subsiding into the deepest of doo doos.

Dylan himself has produced nearly as many children as I have since then, so I guess he overcame his sense of apocalyptic despair.  Yet we would be fools, as our pockets vibrate with the latest news from Aleppo or Fotokol, not to wonder what world we are giving our tamariki and mokopuna. Is there a future, either in terms of clashing religions, ecological destruction, or economic collapse?

The weird and wonderful biblical language of portents and portents of portents, or earthquakes and famines and insurrections, is not about Syria, Turkey, Russia, no matter what the idiot fringes of Christian distortion may proclaim. It is about ever thus and ever will be thus, from the time the first amoeba crawled out of the primeval swamp until the time the last human dodo, alone and frightened, curls up in a foetal ball beneath a dead tree.

But it does not end with that. It ends with hope, ends with the radical in-break of an unimaginable New Heavens and New Earth, of Hope with a capital H. Another prophetic (and love -struck) song-writer writes of having “self deception tattooed like a flag across my back / holding hands with war-mongers I feel I’ve been betrayed.” That is what our brothers and sisters who set out in hope to flee apocalyptic scenes may feel—and what any of us could feel one day if our small safe worlds were to turn to custard and to bombs. “I advertise the scars of middle classness like a shiny piece of junk mail” continues that prophetic vision of Greg Arnold. If our small comfort zones of routine and sameness, nostalgia and myopia were all we were to cling to then the readings of the next few weeks would be no more than a clanging gong or a clashing cymbal.

If though our comfort is based in the radical promise of Jesus, present in word and sacrament, reaching out to us from God’s eternity future, then we can look our descendants in the eye, however scary the world becomes (and it will) and whisper the words of Jesus-hope: “I go before you into Galilee.”

 

Remembrance, Because God ...

We Will Remember them ...

No-one in their right mind glorifies war, and we like to think we are in our right mind. Nevertheless this Sunday, at Ormond and the Cathedral, we will join cathedrals and churches around the world, we will remember those who died and those whose lives were unalterably changed by the war that changed the face of the world; we will hold them before God in prayer and song, in spoken words and in silence. We will hold in the presence of God our uncles, aunts, parents, siblings, those we knew or knew of, and those no-one remembers. We will do so because God ...

As Christians we are caught between the Already and the Not-Yet. We believe that in the mysteries of the Resurrection God's final defeat of sorrow and suffering, injustice and death was achieved. Yet in every war, in every newscast, in multitudinous conversations we hear of sorrow and suffering, injustice and death. As we remember those who died in the unimaginable horrors of 1914-1918, 1939-1945, and indeed every war and every injustice (and let us not forget Māori and Pakeha alike, all who died in the injustices of the land wars of Aotearoa New Zealand) we do so clinging to a strange hope that their death was not the end of life, because God ...

On Sunday we will sing hymns and say prayers and break open the word with these complex mysteries in mind. We will do so not as a people without hope but as those who cling tenaciously to the glorious hope of resurrection in Jesus Christ, that injustice, suffering and death are not the final word, because God breathed resurrection even into the death of God.

On an unrelated note, spare a moment to rejoice in the work our young families have done with the Community Garden. Already it is beginning to produce, and however small the crop maybe it is a reminder that we care for those who are not as fortunate as we are. Take time out to have a look (pull a weed), eat a lettuce leaf, and rejoice to in the work of Amy and Jennifer Whyman who completed the gospel proclaiming sign: "Go in peace: eat your fill."

 

 

on cling wrap and guns

It’s time these Pokes woke up, for there is much to poke. Originally I had intended for them to be a place to replicate the sort of sometimes acerbic, sometimes playful commentary I used to make first in the Central Western Sunday paper in central New South Wales, then in Allan Reeder’s Market-Place across Anglican Australia. I thought I’d reproduce my pew sheet commentary for a wider readership (if anyone clicked by). Perhaps I still will, and perhaps this will be a place for more astringent comment still, though I will never quite reach the skills of Georgia Lewis’ The Rant Mistress or robyncadwallader’s Write in Pencil Only. I note, too, Robyn’s far less narcissistic title! Still, it’s time this sleeping microbe re-awoke, so that my penmanship is not spent merely on Broken Moments and its long and potentially soporific homiletic.

So here I am, in downtown Loveland, Colorado, attending a conference that has been illuminating mostly for the wrong reasons but illuminating nevertheless, muttering profanities about stewed US coffee, observing snippets of the Great Hegemonists’ kulcha, and preparing once more to engage on the micro On The Road adventure that so far (pre-conference) took me from Chicago to Denver via Presho (as you do), exposed me to the Badlands and Wall Drug (and I could tell you which was badder, which was more devoid of goodness, in my books)and Mount Rushmore, and which will now hurtle me across the I80 back to Chicago.

US sport (though thanks to mine hosts I did manage to watch the All Blacks annihilate Les Bleus) has bemused me, US cuisine fattened me, and did I mention US Coffee? US politics has frightened me, US geography exhilarated me, and ironically my 700+ song shuffle has taken me again and again, 90% of the time, back into the voluntary hegemony of US colonialism. Well: except for “Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep.” That was British. Don’t ask.

I won’t even go into the complexities of a society which wraps its apples (at least in this motel) in cling wrap for fear of salmonella contagion, but allows children to carry guns, presumably as part of the well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State. Nope, I won’t go there, because I want to get out of Loveland alive, and who knows when I might want to visit Presho once again?

So the sleeping microbe has stirred, and while you’ve escaped most of my ruminations on the delights of downtown Presho, South Dakota (a town that after some thought reminded me uncannily of Augathella in south-west Queensland), I will now surface more regularly, with whimsy and acid, to titillate the pixels of your iWorld (or execrable alternative).

Sclerosis of the Kiwi Heart?

The news of the increasing refugee crisis and catastrophe that is emanating from Europe and Australia, as well as the hardening of heart that is represented by the Trump campaign in the USA, should be interpreted by Christians as deeply demonic.

The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures make plain the responsibility of God’s people to open radical love and hospitality to strangers and wayfarers, the refugees and homeless. It is not an optional extra but an imperative deep from the heart of the embracing, welcoming creator God. Across the Ditch the attitude of the Australian Federal Government, incarcerating human beings on off-shore islands in a complex and costly (just fiscally, let alone in terms of  human costs) campaign of “not my problem” should have every Christian in that country bearing placards in revolt, initiating non-violent protest at every possible opportunity. Some are; it was heart-warming to see the Dean of Hobart amongst those risking arrest in a protest staged in that city.

Across the hemisphere the Christian communities are being put to shame. Iceland, one of the top 10% atheistic nations in the world, has just seen radical subversive action shaming its government: when the Icelandic Government announced it would take 50 refugees from Syria, activist Bryndis Bjorgvinsdottir began a Facebook campaign to encourage her fellow citizens to raise their game. Last time I checked 11,000 Icelanders had offered to open their homes. Statistically around 10% of those attend church regularly.

I was in Australia when the Howard Government there perpetrated its lies about “children overboard,”  and later turned the Tampa away from its waters on the stated basis that it was carrying 438 mainly Afghani refugees (this despite the wonderful impact Afghanis had had on the history of Australia). I was deeply proud of Aotearoa New Zealand, when we accepted over 150 of those refugees. Perhaps, like Britain’s Battle of Britain, it was our finest hour?

Because, despite the obscenity of Australia’s policies of off-shore processing, and the growing refusal there to allow media reporting on the shameful abuse of those behind razor wire, the rape, suicide and depression that are pandemic in the camps, nevertheless Australia rates more highly than New Zealand on proportionate intake of the world’s most desperate. Believe it or not, “Australia aims to host 4.7 times as many refugees per capita as New Zealand” [from a 2014 article by Murdoch Stephens, who leads Doing Our Bit, a campaign to double New Zealand's refugee quota and funding].
As a Christian community we should be  gnawing the ears of both (all) sides of parliament.

As a Christian community  we should be making conspicuous noise about the most vulnerable on God’s earth.  Though I am no organiser or politician I am hoping to get involved in action on this front in coming weeks.

Bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mothers? Tut-tut.

Perhaps the most cutting edge mainstream media across the Ditch is multi-cultural TV channel SBS. Over the last few weeks it showed a short three part dokko entitled Struggle Street, exploring the lives of the urban underclass. Dismissed by some as “poverty porn”, and certainly risking the criticism of being voyeuristic, Struggle Street took the risk of taking the audience (by and large tertiary educated left-wing professionals, once dismissed by an Australian Prime Minister as “the latte set”)  into the quite unsalutary home context of those at the bottom of the heap.

The sort of homes Jesus would visit.

Obviously I can’t watch the programme this side of the Ditch but the gist is clear. SBS shows the lives of those who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps,  turned their lived around, become wonderful examples of how hardship can be transcended. The response in the blogosphere was a collective outpouring of sympathy, of ooohs and ahhs of sympathy for those in Struggle Street until the final instalment. Then, when a clearly sub-functional family was shown wrestling with drug addiction, pregnancy, police-attention and all the ugly signs of life-gone-wrong, the blogosphere, twittersphere, instant-opinionspheres turned toxic.

What sort of home would Jesus visit?

Because poverty  is so romantic while it is all big picture, distanced, nuanced. When the reality of a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother  becomes a reality, sympathy, empathy and compassion collectively expire.

Big picture compassion is tidy, sanitised and uplifting. Public statements, letters to politicians, hand– and hanky-wringing  public or private meetings sometimes achieve a little, occasionally achieve much, often achieve nothing. Significantly, if we can extrapolate from another culture and another time, Jesus was not overly known for attending strategic gabfests.

Jesus visited homes.

Weeping, grieving homes, about to be stoned victims’ homes, lepers’ homes, tax-collectors’ wealthy but hated homes.  I doubt Jesus blogged spewings of hatred directed at a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother. I suspect he held her hand.

Or would have, had he been there. But, given that he has called us to be his hands and his feet, his body and his blood in down-town Napier,  from Maraenui to Poraiti [1] it maybe that he wasn’t. Few of us are comfortable when we are confronted with the image of God in a bong-smoking nine month pregnant teen-age mother. I include myself. I have a feeling most of us fall short of the glory of God when faced with the realities, rather than the romance, of poverty. Struggle Street is ugly.

[1] Locales chosen strictly on the basis of statistical income returns for the City of Napier, 2013.

skies of couple-colour

There are (well there are for me) moments in nature that take the breath away. The deanery spoils me: morning after morning the predawn light-show is beyond words beautiful, and because it is beyond words I shall not try. I am no pious dean, but there is no doubt there are moments when my gasp at the beauty of the rising sun becomes a stuttered prayer of thanks to God. For life. For the universe. For love. For beauty. “For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.”

An afternoon 25 years ago on the Awhitu Peninsular. A recent walk on the beach at Aramoana in Otago. A desert moonrise in Australia or an ocean one from the Deanery (again). Cape Reinga, as the oceans clash (or nearby Tapotupotu, where once I camped with about 7000 mosquitos). Occasionally they are human moments: Salisbury Cathedral rising from the plains, St David’s Cathedral nestling in a hollow, and I’m sorry to say some of the great temples of Mammon: the Willis (formerly Sears) Tower in Chicago.  Or the beauty of a butterfly’s wing, a bird in flight, a riroriro in song, a haunting human-made musical passage (and yes, rock or classical, massiv or minimalist).

All these and myriad more will hint to me of the majesty of creation and its Creator. They won’t, however take me to the Cross, of which Paul writes so eloquently in this week’s slice of his struggle-correspondence with the Corinthians (1 Cor 1:18-25). The riroriro will take me to awe, but not redemption. Nabucco’s “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves” will take my heart beyond the clouds, Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” will take my heart above the clouds (and Meredith’s poem ain’t bad, either). Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel” (we use it on Maundy Thursday) will place my heart in my mouth.  Dylan’s “With God on Our Side” or “All Along the Watchtower” or Jewell’s “Foolish Games”  or … or. .. Or. And so on.

Taste is a funny thing. I have Australian Indigenous friends for whom western music is blah, but the vibrated drone cycles of the didgeridoo (or more accurately, the mandapul, at least in the  Yolŋu languages in the regions I was recently living: “didgeridoo” was a derogatory balanda— = pakeha—term) are a foretaste of heaven. I get that. I’m not sure I get vuvuzelas though.

But none of these will take us to the Cross of which Paul was writing. In many ways not even the great Passions (Matthew or John) of Bach or the Passio of  Pärt will, though they may take our focus crosswards. The great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth was right: the Cross in all its foolishness must always be revealed, not gleaned, and it is the Cross alone that takes us to the heart of God’s eternity.

 Benedictus


It startles.
Not in unpredictability –
      of chronology at least.
Kairology, perhaps?
Nor even unexpected grandeur.

Ginger, first, to the east.

Westward hues of violet, indigo –
      blue, too, I guess.

To the east: ginger.

Exploring, licking surface of
      drought burnt earth.
Silence blankets. No cough
     disturbs this drama. No fly,
no breath of wind. Silence.

Ginger melts yellow, licks further,
kissing gidgee tops, gnarled survivors.

Teeth even dare not chatter
until divine breath and obedient angels bid.

Unlikely herald: a far-off wagtail chatters.
Still further magpies answer. Ubiquitous both.

Benedictus benedictus benedictus

Day breathes.



FARRARS CREEK (QLD)
29th June 2004

outback dawn