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
[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.
