Back in the saddle, for now

THOUGHTS ON A NEW JOB[1]

It’s a couple of years now since I was catapulted out of my role as dean of a small cathedral on the fringes of humanity.[2] Much water has flowed under the bridge since the time of my dismissal. The subsequent Tribunal finding that my dismissal was errant was gratifying, and I was happy to receive Bishop Hedge’s apology and move on. I’m sure he has moved on too, and no doubt both of us have done a little self-reflection in the many months since then. Let it be, as the late evening liturgy Compline puts it. What has been done has been done. Let it be.

In the interim, after wrestling with questions of my desire to be a part of an organization that could get matters so badly wrong, I have set about focussing on what my erstwhile director of formation called “Learning Issues.”[3] When I sat in classes as an eager young ordinand, sat wrestling with “learning issues,” I never expected them to be quite so dramatic, so capitalised. I never expected them to be much more than being late for a meeting because of a traffic jam, or maybe the way in which random personality conflicts can spark an ecclesiastical fire or two. These Learning Issues have earned their Upper Case.

On the other hand I’ve never thought being a Christ-bearer, and a flawed one, was an insurance against doo-doos happening. Even in the trauma of the last couple of years when I’ve been tempted to mutter “why me?” I have given myself a severe lecture of the “why not?” variety. I don’t want to tempt fate with too many messianic associations, but if we trudge along in the footsteps of a dude who was crucified it would be a little surprising if our track didn’t pass through a bit of brown stuff.

So after a dose or too of fairly stern self-talk and brief wallows of self-pity I stumbled off to a Tikanga Māori faith community, Te Pou Herenga Waka o te Whakapono. There I found embodied not empty words of welcome but radical, soul-strengthening manaakitanga, radical inclusive hospitality. This is “embrace” of the type proposed by Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf in his seminal work Exclusion and Embrace.

There’s a lot of difference between those ecclesiastical milieux that proclaim a welcome to everyone but whose gate-keepers glare at tattoos and allegedly sub-par clothing, and those that declare the divine “Meh”: come on in. God’s house is your house. There’s a world of difference between those who display Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace on their shelves and those who practice, instinctively or programmatically, radically restorative, inclusive faith. Many is the church notice of welcome that I’ve seen with Mary Magdalene or Matthew the Tax Collector beneath it, weeping tears of exclusion.

So I’ve had two years to think, two years to dwell in the place, that place where my instincts often take me, outside the hard oak doors of “Mater Cantuar” (my preferred nickname for the great, unwieldy monster that Eurocentric, English-speaking Anglicanism is).

Not really outside, of course. Tikanga Māori is, last time I checked, a part of the Anglican Communion! But outside Eurocentric, self-satisfied ecclesiology.

I have, not for the first time, looked from this apparent outside, seen hostility, exclusion, formidable formality, self-satisfaction and, paradoxically, tortured befuddlement. “Why don’t people love us?” cry tired voices as yet another middle-manager is appointed to review or save or otherwise redeem their slowly sinking ship. It’s not a pretty sight from the pavements of exclusion. It does not speak clearly of hope in an increasingly dismal, Trumpian miasma. Tired bleats of self-preservation do not speak of a divine, all-embracing still-point in a bewildered, chaotic world.

So why come back? Partly, of course, because I never left. The manaakitanga and arohanui of tikanga Māori massaged my scar tissue. And partly because, well, God. Because despite the bitter exclusivity practiced by some, there are also stumbling, hurting, love-remembering inclusivists.

In any case, perhaps ever since I was a teenage coxswain I have felt that it is inappropriate to stand outside the boat and yell abuse at the crew. Okay, I’ve changed my metaphor. Or not. Oak doors prohibit people but leak water. “I will go down with this ship” sang Dido (and yes, the persona in the song was acknowledging her fault, as I do, in the foundering). I whisper my amen. Mother Cantuar is a leaky tub behind her bulwarks. She often seems better at baling water from the ocean into her own bilges than vice versa. Yet she’s the leaky tub I belong to, that the God I believe in biffed me into.

So here I’d better stay, passionately, strugglingly believing, hoping that the lessons of manaakitanga I have experienced in tikanga Māori will continue around and hopefully through me as I splash around once more inside the shell of tikanga pakeha.

It’s great to be back in the saddle, if only for a season. Here’s to a journey of embrace.

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[1] From February 25^th 2018, and into an uncertain future but for several months, I am privileged to minister as Interim Priest in Charge, Parish of Wakatipu, in the Diocese of Dunedin.

[2] If a globe can have fringes? Said cathedral prides itself on being the “first cathedral to see the sun,” but given that the International Date Line is little more than a colonial-era convenience it’s all a bit metaphorical, really. The 180° meridian was, after all, chosen because it was as sparse and removed from civilization as possible. Napier just pips Malia Tupu Imakulata Cathedral in Nuku-alofa to the edge of nothingness.

[3] With capitals. Thanks, Dr Ames, wherever you now are.