on hymnic dissonance

There are some words and phrases that seem to slip slowly into one’s consciousness. Then, like terrible predators that consume their host from the inside, they burst into full glory uninvited. For me there have been harmless examples like “whatever” (with shoulders shrugged, lip curled), “yeah nah” (with emphatic disinterest), “sweet as” (which to my Australianised ear remains “sweet ez”). There have been more serious ones, too. I found “passive aggressive” suddenly bandied around every dysfunctional office, virtual or actual. I’m sure there were others. But “cognitive dissonance” is perhaps my fave.

It’s got lots of syllables, I guess. I like syllables. They’re kind of cute. They reverberate around the wordosphere full of self-importance, then die on a virtual pavement somewhere because they can’t survive divorced from their environment. They usually twitch a bit before they die, and it’s all rather sad at first, until they’re forgotten. A metaphor for us all, really.

Apparently, it was Leon Festinger who coined the theories of cognitive dissonance, but I suspect they spread far and wide beyond his intentions once they left his pen. He was big on group locomotion, too, incidentally, which always has me wanting to join Kylie Minogue (oh, and Little Eva and Grand Funk Railroad long before her) singing “come on baby, do the …” – but never mind. They might not appreciate my efforts.

Still, I was cognitively dissonating or whatever one does all over the place in church yesterday. You see, before Mass I like to grab a coffee, to centre myself, slow the world down, find some sacred stillness. Yesterday was no exception. I was heading to Mass at the cathedral (yeah, I still do cathedrals from time to time, and there’s a dissonance, cognitive or otherwise) but first I was reading whatever my latest world-expanding adventure might be.

As it happens it is very world-expanding. I’ve reviewed it elsewhere,[1] but Dunya Mikhail’s The Beekeeper of Sinjar is a mind-blower. If you’re not sure where Sinjar is don’t rush off to add it to you bucket list. Not yet at any rate. Thousands of Yazidi were slaughtered there by Daesh in 2014, 500,000 fled as refugees, and the world in general has wrung its hands, hated the perpetrators, hated the victims, erected razor wire fences and elected governments of nationalistic protectivist hatred ever since. Yes, Trump, Morrison (or whoever the latest Australian prime ministerial incarnation is this week), May: I’m talking about you.

At any rate, Dunya Mikhail’s tale is not easy reading, and there was probably a fair bit of cognitive dissonance swilling around in my latte by the time I swallowed the last dregs and headed off for the holies. And yeah, I’m an old-fashioned sort of a bugger, and I like tradition and stillness, and awe, and ritual, and the kind of counterculture (yeah, there another buzz word) they generate in the midst of road rage and depressing news and bills to pay. So a cathedral’s not a bad place if one overcomes the vast emptiness (that reminds me a little bit of the universe) and the sometimes crippling weight of crumbling dreams and glories, sometimes-corrupted glories past.

And the hymns sung and prayers murmured and words pronounced are thick with accruals of centuries of hope, guided and mis-guided, saturated with the implication that countless others have stood and knelt and wept and trembled, and occasionally laughed and danced too, in this place and this tradition. They remind me too that while I’ll soon enough lie down with their dead the universe goes on and perhaps hope does too, and the vast vaulted ceilings (small of course in universal schemes, but vast enough) rumour infinity and paradoxically perhaps a hope greater than infinity.

Occasionally these contexts can slap the participant across the psyche with the wettest of metaphysical wet fish. Singing songs of celestial expectation moments after reading of the slaughter of thousands of Yazidi in the valleys of Sinjar generated brutal cognitive something. Dissonance will have to do. From the comfort – all things are relative – of our pews we sang ancient words of hope, set to a reflective tune, celebrating the victory of Good over Evil. We sung in our comfortable setting of a saviour, who

… comes in succour speedy

to those who suffer wrong;

to help the poor and needy,

and bid the weak be strong;

to give them songs for sighing,

their darkness turn to light,

whose souls, condemned and dying,

were precious in his sight.

I could not but think of Yazidi men gunned down in the pits that awaited their death, and the women captured, sold and raped, and the children beaten and often raped as well, and the perpetrators who justified their acts of rape and other violence as, believe it or not, a form of redemptive prayer. Infidel women raped by the faithful are, according to Daeshis, made houris, made virgin, so they can be raped by men again in heaven.

I could not help but think of Dunya Mikhail’s narrative about lives turned from innocence to brutal experience, trust turned to despair, children brainwashed to become Daesh soldiers (and canon-fodder) while their mothers wept inexpressible sorrow.

Nor could I help but think of Scott Morrison’s determination to leave these same or similar families incarcerated on Pacific hell-holes, or the European skinheads marching for the right to exclude the unfortunate from their protected lands.

With sorrow I recalled three-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach, fleeing atrocities related to the same struggles told by Dunya Mikhail. Alan Kurdi whose father Abdullah now laments doors slammed in the face of refugees around the world. A broken, lifeless body on a foreign beach. 

I think, too, of Trump rarking up mantas of hate, claiming (again) that refugees bring terror and disease, leaving seven-year-old Jakelin Caal to die at the border, dehydrated in USA care, where she and her family sought safety, liberation from the oppression of corruption and institutional evil, but of course Trump and his cronies have never read the Beatitudes.

Yet as I stumbled away suppressing tears easily because big boys don’t, but wishing they would flow, I found one tiny sliver of hope. Because in the end – or beginning – this strange narrative of hope in turmoil, light in despair, was born not in a cosy armchair but in a context of cruel persecution, and somehow, somehow those first Christians found hope in the experience of a crucified God.

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[1] https://www.librarything.com/work/20625924/reviews

giving sorrow voice

There are those tasks of clergy life that draw the jewels of tears. Tread softly, for you tread on my tears.

For the average run of the mill priest there were many of those moments. Were. Before civil celebrants cornered 70ish per cent of the scene.  Alister Hendery notes ‘funeral practices are in a windstorm of change,’ and adds, ‘It is as if the valley of death has been subjected to cultural forces that make the terrain almost unrecognisable.’[1]

In my own priestly career, I have seen funeral demands drop exponentially (if that is mathematically possible). Every traipse in the valley of the shadow was a sacred traipse. In the early Noughties, in a rural NSW community, demands peaked at a ridiculous and pastorally unsustainable peak of some 60, by memory, in a year. In my last year in parish priesthood I conducted only a couple.

Geographical as well as sociological factors drove those changes, but still. The tectonic forces that drove the changes produced some fine results, as mourners found forms of expression better suited to their beliefs than those driven by Anglican faith. But not always: I have unfortunately seen secular rites delivered with nonchalance at least as bad as any I saw in the terrible days when the vicar was the default in any community. I have been aware of some civil celebrants churning through an assembly line of grief with the pastoral compassion of cake mixer.

But there are other deaths, too. In his Earthed in Hope Hendery references the death of a city landscape that was going on around him; he wrote in the aftermath of the Christchurch/Canterbury earthquakes. He wrote, too, after Aotearoa New Zealand’s Pike River Mine disaster, when once more a nation’s psyche was scarred by the knowledge that many in our workforce live and work somewhere close to the cusp between safety and peril.[2] Anglicans in Christchurch have watched the long, slow and ungainly pivot of their landmark cathedral, stalled in suspended animation, hardly life-support, somewhere between death and burial.

At least five of the buildings I have lived in
have taken their journey from structure to rubble

What, then, when a city or a building dies? When the dreams of countless ghosts who have inhabited it are released into nothingness? At least five of the buildings I have lived in have taken their journey from structure to rubble, reminding me that they and I are but dust, and to dust they have returned and I will return.

Actually, having swum in a vortex of depression a couple of years back I’m partially glad I’m not with them yet. “Partially” not because I have any great worries about surfing the wave of all flesh but because I’m stumbling along rather happily – but yes, very stumblingly – in a new job that I would not be exploring if I were dead. In that stumbling I am working alongside some powerfully “in the now” fellow-stumblers. In particular I have watched with gentle awe as my new boss has addressed precisely the questions of the life and the ghosts and the death and the fading memories, yes perhaps even in that order, of buildings.

These are the buildings in which previous stumblers have laughed and wept and prayed and nodded off over decades, moments in which he has given lament a voice, quietly weaving full stop into the collective memory of a community. He’s been closing … “deconsecrating,” “secularising,” whatever …. churches in which our predecessor-stumblers have stuttered their prayers and hurt their hurts. I’m not totally unrealistic about these things. Buildings die, like dreams and like loved ones and me.

My father’s ashes were interred in the grounds of the church where his funeral was held, where his daughter was later married. Church, ashes, and the protea bush that marked the latter are all gone now, and that’s life and death and eternity (this side of mysteries unveiled, at any rate).

These are the buildings in which previous stumblers have
 laughed and wept and prayed and nodded off over decades

But my bishop sensed that, and trod tenderly on the dreams and memories of those who gathered in the little God-boxes, humble sacred spaces in Mataura and Athol, where the buildings face probable deconstruction (a fancy word from other circles that in reality means little more than knocking to buggery), and central Invercargill, where the great, the grand old worship space will be reinvented and strengthened against tectonic caprice, and become a dreaming and working and meeting space for a tertiary institute with a  truckload more resources than a dwindling church can or should summon.

My bishop knew the pain and the tears, and trod tenderly. The death of a loved one, the death of a building, the death of a dream. The Christian community has orchestrated and perpetrated some tragic wrongs across the millennia, and it is only just that our words, words that should have been the poetry of hope, have been baton-passed to other players, runners, whatever the metaphor. Yet we are kaitiaki o nga kupu o te whakapono, custodians of words of faith; these are words that include lament, the wailings of breaking human hearts, odes mumbled in the shadows of broken and dying dreams. Ours are words that acknowledge the brutality of death – we die, we do not merely pass – and yet there dare to rumour hope.

This bishop’s words were not his alone but words drawn into order by a community of hurting, stumbling, hoping peoples, giving sorrow voice.  As it happens I fear many, many more churches, outward and visible signs of our stumbling prayers, will surf the wave of all flesh. Many more if not all of our buildings will disintegrate or reintegrate and become “former” churches. C’est la vie.

But if, as my bishop did, we find sensitive and soul-filled stutterings to give human sorrow its voice then we may yet have a place in the landscape of world society. Perhaps if we learn to listen we may have a place even until the warming planet breathes its last and we are all both dead and alive in the mysteries of eternity, where tears shall be no more.  

​(Dr) Michael Godfrey

Diocese of Dunedin
Ministry Educator 

---

[1] Alister Hendery, Earthed in Hope: Dying, Death and Funerals – a Pakeha Anglican Perspective (Wellington: Philip Garside, 2014), 12.

[2] A quick Google search of NZ mining disasters highlights the vulnerability of those employed in that industry. See https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10688752

thoughts aided by an aberrant duck

THOUGHTS AIDED BY AN ABERRANT DUCK 

The time has come to pick up Pivotal Pokes again. They are my much-neglected friend with and by whom to speak of many things. They lurk patiently in the background for periods, then resurface as my Broken Moments preaching roles slip into (this time welcome) abeyance. It is time to turn Pivotal Pokes into something by which somebody called a Ministry Educator can communicate … well …  ministry education, I guess. Here I can float thoughts and random musings to the world without a physical pulpit. Or, less that sound a little ambitious, and it does, at least float thoughts to a few willing pixels which I can, in more megalomaniacal moments, imagine are something like a world.

It may seem a faintly peripheral activity for somebody whose job description is to facilitate the ministry and education of those on the Anglican faith journey. But I guess I’m here to offer new directions to those skillfully offered by my predecessor (or, at this moment co-decessor perhaps). He has brought superlative skills to the task for twenty years, but it is my task to bring at least some new perspectives and meanings and slants and experiences to the role. In any case, as Martin Luther so wisely put it, “Here I stand, like many another.”

That, as you probably know, is not what Luther said at all, and I am not Luther, nor standing in his water-shedding shoes. I am standing where every human being has stood when they start a role not new but new to them, new in their hands, presenting myriad questions about where to start and how to continue. Luther, for better or worse, went for the radical solution. But he was facing degeneration and corruption. I have seen glances of those cancers from time to time in Mother Ecclesia, but not as I stare down the welcome barrel of this new task.

It was on Remembrance Day that I was thinking these thoughts. As I hiked the unformed contours of new beginnings I was surrounded by poignant signs of incomplete endings. Around me were symbols of the futility of war, potent reminders of slaughter on a scale at the time not previously seen. As I made my way through a glorious greenbelt, a nearby military salute echoed across my new city’s primary valley and its harbour. It was fired on the stroke of 11.00 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The salute reverberated exactly a century after[1] the Peace to End The War to End All Wars was signed. Fat kereru, recently named Aotearoa’s bird of the year,[2] paused from their drunken peregrinations momentarily. But life goes on, and there are lush berries to ingest.

Today, as Bruce Munro noted over the weekend,[3] 32 wars rage across Planet Earth. Only two are international, but the pitiless, seemingly endless internecine struggles that continue are fuelled and funded by international interests. Someone makes the bombs, and young men and women still head off to die.

I spent the morning marching the streets of my new city home. I had planned to make my connection with my god at eight o’clock Mass, but found the cathedral locked and hostile despite notices proclaiming liturgy at that time. Eventually, beneath the towering spires and Great West Window, itself a war memorial, I found a diminutive A4 paper declaring that, on this day, we would remember our forebears’ sacrifice in a separate liturgy later in the morning.

I slunk away for a coffee and a muffin at a nearby café. There I was joined by a belligerent duck who felt that, despite the carcinogenic ramifications, my muffin would serve as aid to her day’s commemorations. She was not altogether polite in her demands, but proved to be good if quarrelsome company in an unlikely city street-setting. After a time of uneasy communion ducky and I set off in different directions. I can’t speak for her, but I was able to participate passively in a fine introspective liturgy. We honoured the dead, maimed, and countless life-changed players in a war that arguably altered little.

As, afterwards, I climbed the hill to my temporary abode my thoughts turned to the men (no false generic intended) of World War One. Some of them were very old but still around when I was the age that they were when they strode off, confidently, to the battlefields of Europe. On this day I found myself wondering about their feelings as they set off on what was for many an exciting adventure. Then they came back, or not; dead, or sometimes alive, damaged, rarely other than these options. I thought about them as their unromantic memories tore apart the fabric of their own lives, the lives of those they loved, the lives of those who loved them.

Yesterday was a sombre day, and yet here in this southern city I was surrounded by bright light and had attended a liturgy that had breathed its own light into historical darkness. Somewhere in the midst of liturgy and military salute and drunk kereru I sense there was a message for us who as kaitiaki[4] of the taonga[5] of gospel, the taonga of hope, of at least some radiant form of truth, can bring to those around us.

I found myself thinking about the stillness and the reflectiveness and the beauty I had seen and was seeing amidst the chaos of a crumbling, Trumpian world. I found myself wondering: is this our pearl of great price,[6] clutched in our hands with such love that we must, with Luther, declare that our love for this pearl in our soul is so great that we can do no other?

As it happens, I read yesterday of a new appointment to the leadership echelons of the Australian Anglican Church, the realms that I have loved but left. Around that country many dioceses are turning to graduates of that instrument of intolerance, the Diocese of Sydney, and its boundary-preserving training ground Moore College. They are doing so I fear in the hope that rigid walls on spiritual borders will make Christianity a better, more vibrant place, will Make Christianity Great Again. As I trudged up the hill after quiet, introspective liturgy on the edge of the world, I wondered again at the shibboleths many of my fellow-Anglicans are grasping.

To some extent I abhor the language of branding, yet it serves an end at times. Surely our pearl of great price is not hostile walls on spiritual borders, turning away the damaged seekers, journeyers, even stumblers like me, but is found in moments of stillness and wordless embrace. It is found sometimes in soaring ecstasy too, which words and notes of music may aid and abet. But whether in stillness or ecstasy it invites, not repels, embraces, not excludes. The hungry and the hurting are welcome here.

For are not gifts like welcome, healing, stillness and light the essence of what I might call Brand Cantuar, as we bring to this chaotic frenzied world the immeasurable gift of a still small voice of calm? Is not our place the place where broken lives, like those shattered by the obscene military events that ended 100 years ago, may find solace and whispered hope? Our wars – for now – still major on sociological battlefields, where otherness is based on DNA or language or gender or sexual preference. But the hatreds of otherness leading up to World War One were not that different, and a hostile wall of hatred takes many forms. As we stand in the shadow of those who want to build new walls, spiritual and physical, racial and sexual and cultural and psychological, aren’t we instead challenged to stand with the One who whispers, “Come”?

So I stumble into a crazy and as yet slightly undefined realm, called to oversee formation, oversee dreams, oversee vocation. I stumble after one or two tricky chicanes in my own life into a new phase and responsibility, of I hope midwifing release of love and light, inclusion and embrace. I stumble on in a world I never imagined, in which hope-filled dreams of peace and love are being replaced by xenophobic vitriol. But we have a countercultural rumour to spread. Come.

As I stumble on, I will cling to a pearl of great price, still point of a turning universe; I will try to convey, and more important try to midwife in the lives of others this whisper of hope, this slender candle that growing darkness will not extinguish. I see the symmetry of this moment because on Remembrance Day I am of course reminded of the power of memory itself, and reminded too of the Hebrew wisdom that sees that memory makes present events that are past and provides promise for futures. As on this day I glimpse the power of stillness-in chaos, our strange and neo-Celtic, but neo-Hebraic, too, taonga, I pray God that I may help others liberate this gift in whatever place God the unseen has called us all to dwell.

Michael Godfrey

Diocese of Dunedin Ministry Educator

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[1] Give or take a few time zones and a bit of clock fiddling.

[2] An eccentric New Zealand rite that seemed not to bother its recipient.

[3] “The Prospects for Peace,” Otago Daily Times, November 10, 2018.

[4] Custodians, guardians.

[5] Treasure.

[6] Matthew 13:45-46.

bloody exams

THOUGHTS FROM EXAM SEASON (a few months ago)

Aargh! Yours Truly has exams over the next ten days, and may be a little distracted. When I was dismissed as Dean of Waiapu I decided to pick up a diploma course on Conflict Resolution. I have been muttering imprecations in my own direction ever since. Whatever was I thinking? Apart from anything else I’m not entirely convinced by the quality of the course (and in fact Massey University is canning it after this intake). But as I come towards the pointy end, with just (just!) two exams and a Practicum to go I’m really not wanting to fail.

When I did the first paper back in late 2016 I was somewhat shocked to find that exams still existed. I hadn’t sat one since my Divinity degree back in the mid-80s, and am seriously sceptical about their value as a method of assessment. As I went on through the course in 2017 I discovered to my relief that the exams were a diminishing part of the assessment, so I was somewhat shocked earlier this year to discover that they are 60% of these papers.

Oh well. A wing and a prayer. I feel chronically under-prepared. 

But maybe there’s a parable in this somewhere? Good old Christian doctrines of judgement (= assessment?) have taken a hammering over the years. The methods by which Christian teachers and preachers kept their flock in a state of terror over the centuries were not dissimilar to the methodology of examiners: “on judgement day …” Of course if you were lucky (or blessed or whatever) there were a few ifs about grace and about being found in Christ and ransomed by his blood et cetera, but basically the message was unchanging. “Be afraid, be very afraid,” as Quaiffe says in The Fly.

I will preach and teach often about not cosying up to “God-bro” (or “God-mate” in Australia, “God-chum” in UK, “God-buddy” in the USA, if you get my drift). As a people of God we should err on the side of grace. God is the God who creates grace, who welcomes us to the divine feast, who bridges the gap between our fallibility and divine perfection. I don’t think God (or St Peter) has a check list. But at the same time as we extend divine manaakitanga, divine welcome and hospitality to those outside our faith community, we need to keep remembering that we aren’t chumming up to God by dint of our spectacular worthiness. Not to bash ourselves up, just to “re-member” (as I try to put it, on purpose, in the Eucharistic prayer). It’s God’s feast, God’s church, God’s eternity (whatever that is), not ours.

God ain’t our bro. God invites us and will invite us eternally (whatever that means), to join the feast of joy. God invites all, and, I believe, will continue to do so – eternally. Whatever that means! We just need to make our lives reflect that inviting attitude, too.

I just wish my examiners would.



PS ... I passed

neutered gospel?

NEUTERING THE PROCLAMATION OF FAITH
(notes from an old pew sheet ... Waiapu Cathedral, 17.08.14)

I write in my “Gospel Comment”* of  the gift that is flowing from uncluttered, pre-scientific cultures back to our rationalist, materialist world. In its wackier forms it may appear as the “tree-hugging, alfalfa-munching, muslin-wearing” naiveties of New Age and neo-hippie groups. I am no fan of forms of angel-touting mysticism that sidestep the brute realities of the Incarnation and the Cross, but if push were to come to shove I would prefer that idealism to the cynical rationalism that reduces the central truths of Christianity to fairy tale status, labelling itself “progressive” while dismantling the great Christ-stories of hope and comfort.

In some areas we have grasped this well. We have reclaimed the wonderful respect, for example, that Māoritanga can give us for Ranginui and Papatuanuku, rightly speaking out when we exploit and destroy God’s earth. With the Celts we murmur our “amen” when we lament an attitude that sees “the earth [as] a witch and we still burn her, Stripping her down with mining, and the poison of our wars …”.  We voice our opposition (I hope) when that is, as it so often is, the dominant trend in our greedy exploitative culture. We must, for when we do not we are failing in our obedience not so much to the “marks of mission” but to the very commandments of our faith: we are stealing from God’s garden and from the hope-baskets of our descendants.

But we are doing so, too, if we take the texts that are texts of comfort in our whakapapa of faith and render them meaningless. The balancing act is fraught. Karl Marx famously called religion “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” It can be, if we allow it to be; if it leaves us cosy (which was not what “comfortable”, that maligned word of liturgy, meant) and complacent. “She’s right, Jack” is not the gospel-message.

Nor, though, is “if it can’t be measured it don’t exist.” When I am confronted by the recent horrors of Gaza or North-East Iraq, Central African Republic and Sudan, I will try in some puny human way to respond, giving to aid organizations, writing to politicians, what Paolo Freire called “consciousness raising.” I will also stutter prayers, often wordless, participating strangely in that mystery St Paul called “the groaning of the Spirit.” When a child dies (more obviously back in the days when clergy saw more funerals) I will offer words and touches of comfort, but, more importantly, I will whisper prayers, entrusting this and all brutal contexts of grief into the weeping heart of God that is also, inexplicably, the eternally-dancing heart of God.

For, beyond the child’s death, beyond her parents’ grief, beyond our speechlessness, God dances “amen” to and with all creation. That resounding “amen” of course can’t be measured, for it is eternal. That is why it is the last word in the New Testament.

*On Matthew 14. 22-33 (NRSV)

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea.

But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, "It is a ghost!" And they cried out in fear.

But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, "Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid."

Peter answered him, "Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water."

He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came

toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, "Lord, save me!"

Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, "You of little faith, why did you doubt?" When they got into the boat, the wind ceased.   And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, "Truly you are the Son of God."

It’s dangerous to put modern interpretations on an ancient text. Matthew wants us to see yet another example of the mustard seed faith that Jesus called for back at Matt 13:31-32 (or three weeks ago in liturgical time). Here in this woman is the great faith born of desperation and proximity to disaster. In the “Global North” (“West”. “First World”, whatever) we have tended to rationalize such faith away, making it an intellectual proposition. Listening to the stories of Indigenous and other non-rationalist believers I am increasingly unsure that this is wise: should I poo-poo the stories of those who have cried out in the face of evil and experienced the hand of God? Despite all the ransacking of the Global South “pre-scientific cultures,” that went on in the name of “progress” it may be the mustard seed of faith that is the gracious gift of the dispossessed, given back despite everything, back to those of us who believe safely from the comfort of our armchairs. 

on bowdlerizing fear

I’m not your kind of face your fear, jump-off-a-bridge-with-an-elastic-band-on-your-ankles sort of dude. Kudos to some of my daughters and some of my first cousins once removed in law (and where does the “s” belong in that construction?) and I guess anyone else who faces their fear and does that. Many bungy gurus feature variations of “face your fears” themes in their advertising, and I believe AJ Hackett Bungy (yeah, I promise I’m not being paid for this) are featuring my current whare karakia in a publicity film exploring in part the spiritual dimension of facing that fear. But I’m simply not brave enough. 

Heights and me.

Yeah nah. As I once said to my niece's and nephews in laws' cousins (and where go the plural and its apostrophes there?) paying for such escapades escalates fear to high enough levels, thanks. 

But I guess when rental companies say you can take their cars on any road except, then the wet paint syndrome kicks in. It was years ago, and I read it after I went from Auckland Airport to Russell and back to Whangarei one afternoon. Oops. The Russell Back Rd, which I took to spice up the return route, was verboten. Goodness knows why … sure it was dirt and there were a couple of steep banks but hardly scarier than some parking buildings. It was the 1980s, though, I guess, and kiwis were still paranoid about incompetent and murderous French terrorists popping up on the edge of Tai Tokerau. It was raining heavily that day back in 1988 and I didn’t see any frogpersons (no pun intended) lurking around, so I accidentally ticked that illicit road off, and survived to tell the tale. 

The second, Ninety Mile Beach (a gazetted road), I covered some years later in an aged and borrowed Subaru wagon. The aged vehicle was revelling in what was supposed to be its last week of active duty. It did so well it was given a couple of extra years after that. My life had taken a few personnel changes by then, but the principle was the same: head back to places of backstory and find a few adventures there. The Ninety Mile Beach was tickled off in the Subaru we called “Legend.”

But what of the third? As I noted here a few weeks back I’ve taken a turn down in the Deep South. Yeah, in bungy country, you could say. And the third verboten track is on my doorstep: Skippers, here I come. Though first I had to take a trial run out the Macetown Road. That probably wouldn’t have thrilled rental car companies, either, but Chuck is my truck. At any rate it wasn’t too terrifying. 

So, on to Skippers. And to my surprise it was a doddle. Or mostly it was. Though there is that  famous  bridge to focus the mind. The hundred metre drop  rather does that. But basically Skippers is a doddle, and I knocked the bugger off without too much terror (yes, that is the same bridge, albeit with someone else on it. The passengers walked). 

It was on the way home, though, that I encountered my parable. Because, disappointed by Skippers’ terror levels, I noticed another road, and wondered where it went.  Of course I turned up it ... and it went up.

And up. And yes that is the same bridge far below. Very far below. And the road is not terribly wide. It all focusses the mind most wondrously. 

I’m not into bungy jumping, or even climbing ladders, but there is no doubt a 700 metre drop and a not terribly sophisticated looking road can raise the adrenaline levels to a reasonable degree. And it did. It took a long time before I overcame my fears of height and inched my way around the corner.

Which is really the point of all this.  Because fear. There was no way I was going to leap into the car and practice my drifting on that precipice. It probably wasn’t epically terrifying, but it was for this little black duck. It was fear. Seven hundred metres above a bridge one hundred metres above the river. 

When I was a teenage atheist I was slightly puzzled by a fetish displayed by some Christians, adamant that the word translated "fear" in much of the Judaeo-Christian scripture didn’t mean that at all. Awe, maybe. Love, even. But a nice God doesn’t generate fear.

Nice? Like an English cucumber sandwich? 

No. 

I was terrified, 40 years later, by that bluff far above the Skippers Road. Far more than awed. And, as Tina Turner might say, what’s love got to do with it? I did not love that precipice. 

I respectfully suggest that fear is a thing. Aslan, as C. S. Lewis told us, and I have often stolen from him, is not a tame lion.

Aslan roars. 

I’m sorry, but the Creator-Redeemer-Judger of the Judaeo-Christian scripture is no doddle. We may choose not to believe such a being exists: I think that’s a far more honourable decision than turning a lion into a pussy cat. I disagree vehemently with those who think “God” is some bearded ogre in the sky punishing anyone who lives in other than an Adam, Eve and the baby boys (and where did the grand kids come from?) nest.  On the other hand I disagree vehemently with those whose sole interpretation of the biblical text seems to be focussed on who does what with their wobbly bits.  

But on a third hand I disagree equally vehemently with those who think the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a benevolent celestial purveyor of candy floss and cuddles. Those who take bits out of the bible because they look a bit grumpy, because they look not terribly cucumber sandwiches and Earl Grey Tea. 

Because by God, if there is a celestial Creator just beyond my sight and understanding, then I sure as whatever am not going to trivialize Her-Him with fluff of any sort. Not the fluff of lovey-dovey "God and his little boy Jesus are my mates" saccharinity. Not the insidious God likes me because I drive a Prius saccharinity. I am going to be so bloody focussed that I inch ... No: I micro-milli-inch my movements in the presence of that fearful, terrifying being. I am going to flat-on-my-face-bloody-terrified quiver in the place of that Divine Being. Far more terrified than I was hundreds of metres above the Skippers bridge. 

Oh yes. 

Of course the Judaeo-Christian scriptures indicate that isn’t the end of the story. Yes, they reveal a brutal method, a bloodied cross by which that God enters into and transforms my terror into dancing. But I, sure as that God (if such a being exists) flung stars across the heavens, am not going to sashay up to Him-Her with an ever so confident “Hey, Sis-Bro, didn’t we do good? Didn’t we sanitize your story and make it all sweet? Aren’t we great, getting rid of that blood and guts and fear so you became easy to swallow? You and me Sis-Bro. We did it.”

Because I think that the Lion of Judah might roar. An acrophobe’s terror of a precipice in central Otago ain’t nothing compared to the roar of the Creator narrated in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures. If there is a God I sure as whatever don’t want to chance that roar.

We will remember them

I was, I confess, a part of that generation that grew up with what I later came to see was an unhealthy disdain for the ANZAC tradition. I was deeply influenced by Alan Seymour’s The One Day of the Year, which I saw performed at the beginning of my teens.

I was too young to explore the many layers of meaning in the text, but bought readily into one of its superficial narratives, an exposé of a generation that I, readying to be an Angry Young Man, felt were overly controlling and out of touch with a post-Beatles world (the play, of course, was written before the Beatles). By 1986, when the play resurfaced, at least in Melbourne where I was by then living, it all seemed passé: few people attended ANZAC observances and World War One survivors were few and far between.

Then, suddenly, a whole lot of things coalesced, and either I or the world or both woke up.  Over the next five years our senses of respect grew exponentially; children proudly wore their grandparents’ medals, attendances at marches increased dramatically, school curricula embraced new reverence for sacrifices made.

With them emerged new waves of understanding of what those caught up in the  brutalities of war (not just WW1) had lived through. PTSD became a thing; slowly we who lived warlessly realized that the degenerate drunken day that Seymour in part portrays was not some sort of selfish nostalgic debauchery. Slowly, as the last WW1 Vets died out we realised that the gathering and marching and telling stories, and yes no doubt a drop or two of rum and the odd game of two-up, was a tiny step of healing for those whose scar-tissue reached far deeper than we could ever imagine into their minds and souls.

While I didn’t this year, it has been my privilege in recent years … perhaps twenty or more now, to take part in and often lead liturgical observances for those whose lives were caught up in wars not of their own making. It remains true, of course, that there are some deeply evil forces who strive endlessly to make money out of war, whose share prices soar when Messrs Trump and Kim Jong-un rattle sabres, but that has never been the real story of war.

The real story is told – or not – by the men and women whose lives have been irreversibly changed (and that includes families of service men and women) by conflict. The real story is written in scar tissue. As the War Poets made clear, there is no glory in war. But there is respect for those who put their lives on the line for ideals of hope, freedom, and justice. Lest we forget.