Monday, 12 November 2018

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


[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.

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