Serendipitous journeys

A VIRUS, WIDE OPEN SPACES, SERENDIPITOUS JOURNEYS; 

REFLECTIONS FROM A TRAVELLER

As Anne van Gend (to whom I’m married!) and I sat down at our dining room table last night, too tired to eat but thankful to be home, we rejoiced in life’s rich tapestry. Let’s not trivialize coronavirus here: the world is in a serious wobble. But sometimes the cosmic experience is incomprehensible, and we can relate only to the personal. We had somehow escaped the dark sides of potential calamity, and against shortening odds had made it home.

Forgive, please, my personal account. As a writer and a speaker I have long emphasized God’s footprints in apocalyptic times. I have long emphasized that faith is not an insurance policy against tough times. Believers suffer, survive, fail to survive. Lunatic fringes of faith see God as some kind of magician who will flick the faithful out of times of trial and leave the rest to misery. Such a God is not the God of the Cross. The God of the Cross is bigger than our suffering, but is not a magician flicking some out of and some into the trials of being. 

I’m not sure of the words to describe God’s methodology. In the last two weeks, as Anne and I traipsed on the edge of what will be calamitous times for some, I was painfully aware that most of God’s world is experiencing or will be experiencing suffering far greater than the inconveniences that were closing in on us. These, I kept saying to those around me, are strange times.

Let me explain. Before Christmas Anne and I had booked to attend a conference in Johannesburg. We had decided to give ourselves a few days holiday as well as the work (conference and other) commitments. As it happens the conference was cancelled, not because of a thing called coronavirus, but because of the crisis in the key speaker’s own life. But insurances did not apply, our tickets were un-refundable, and we elected to keep going, using the time to network and conference with representatives of South African Anglican schools and dioceses, to learn what we could from their post-apartheid world. We learned much, but that’s not my story here.

As the time approached the news became more and more saturated with information of this spreading virus. Its gravity became more and more serious. But there were no indications that matters would escalate in the way they did. Precautions about hygiene and personal space protections were issued, and our plans fitted well enough within the changing parameters. Wash carefully, cough carefully, change a few personal and liturgical practices to ensure safety. As we boarded our flights, Dunedin, Auckland, Singapore, Johannesburg, there was a little more chatting about these issues, a few extra notices, perhaps a few more masks worn. Pretty much on a par with SARS and swine ’flu (remember that?). We winced when someone on a nearby seat coughed too much, but that was about all. Oh, and sanitizer, sanitizer, sanitizer. More important, soap, soap, soap. Two Lord’s Prayers for each handwash.

On arrival in Johannesburg little had changed. Meetings went ahead, handshakes (remember them?) still happened. Sanitizer, sanitizer, sanitizer, soap, soap, soap. After two days of meetings we flew south to Grahamstown, inland from Port Elizabeth. Tourist spots were emptying out, though. More meetings, fewer handshakes, more namaste. As it happens, I remember distinctly my last handshake, in the cathedral in Grahamstown, after praying the office with local clergy and youth. Suddenly it seemed wrong. Namaste and elbow bumps were the order of the day. Did I mention sanitizer? Soap?

We flew back to Johannesburg and down to Cape Town. More meetings. Namaste and elbow bumps. Work and family now. But suddenly the reference points were changing. Every conversation was an allusion to coronavirus. We were with family now, discussing our differing circumstances; some were in communal living, some were immuno-compromised, all were concerned. By and large Anne and I were buffered from risk now: a gated community, careful spatial awareness, hands strictly away from others’ hands, and from our own faces; the two-metre rule was beginning to dominate. But we were going bush, off grid. There were no travel warnings, and we were to be well away from humanity. I spent a day hiking on Table Mountain, and the next we headed up country, and, as it happens, off-grid. We spend three days travelling, far from communication towers, far from most human beings, immersed in rugged, ancient landscapes, baked by an African sun. Hundreds of kilometres of dirt roads: happy traveller!

We arrived back on grid and all hell broke loose.

South Africa was closing its borders. South African Airway had stopped its international operations. Our flights out were cancelled. We still had limited phone access, and in any case airlines were restricting access to those travelling in the next 48 hours. We weren’t, and we were still a couple of hundred kilometres from Cape Town and from contact with the outside world.

We made our way back, as planned, to Cape Town the following day. Eventually Anne was able to get through on the air line helplines. Yes, our flight was cancelled, or at least the South African Airways Johannesburg-Perth leg was. No there was no other flight available. We had no choice: Air New Zealand re-scheduled us to April 17^th. It would be a long stay in Cape Town.

The president of South Africa, Cyril Ramaphosa, made some powerful statements in an address to the national – far more rational than those that were being made by another president in a large northern hemisphere nation at the time (and since). But no presidential address to the nation could cover the fact that South Africa is a nation ill-equipped to fight a pandemic. And, should we get sick, we would be at the mercy of and a drain on a somewhat challenged health infrastructure. When the virus reached the townships, crowds of humanity without running water, with compromised sewerage, with limited education, the virulent genie would break loose – it still will. Could we in all conscience continue to be a drain either on our personal hosts’ grace or the grace of the nation we were travelling in? We elected to forfeit our Air New Zealand bookings, and rebooked with Singapore Airways.

Singapore closed its borders.

Suddenly the language of border closure was sounding deeply ominous. Shades of the language of wartimes – circumstances utterly beyond our control. We were assured Singapore would reimburse our fares … sometime. There remained only two airlines that could get us out of the country: Qantas and Emirates, and both were cancelling rapidly.

So we managed to get a flight out of Cape Town to Dubai, and another via Sydney to Christchurch. Bookings made, we made our way to Cape Town airport. We were amongst the first in the slow but generally well managed and behaved check-in queue (kudos, incidentally, to airline staff, who were utterly professional throughout).

When we reached our turn we learned that our flight, too was cancelled. While we were driving to the airport Jacinda had announced a lockdown, and Emirates had pulled the plug accordingly.

Urgent phone calls, pleas with our bank to facilitate credit extensions, phone cards running out, more borders closing. For two hours we wrestled with the odds. In the end we secured the last two seats on the last plane out of Dubai – and that only as far as Melbourne. Online, as we flew, we found a flight from Melbourne to Christchurch, likewise the last before the lockdown. In Melbourne authorities baulked at letting Anne re-enter New Zealand – she has Australian citizenship. I was not allowed into Australia for the same reason. Flurries of calls to the New Zealand consulate. And finally we made the flight – Qantas, as it happens, whose compassion for the New Zealanders on board – there were no other nationalities – was exemplary. Anne and I fist bumped as we touched down in Christchurch, and were collected by a son who drove 350 kms up from Dunedin to fetch us. We rotated driving all the way home; fatigue was otherwise going to wipe us or someone else out.

We were the lucky ones. Heavily out of pocket, but who cares? Our hearts went out to many: we left behind the masses in South Africa for whom the coming months will be a nightmare of crumbling infrastructure. We watched as our Emirates plane took off again heading back to Dubai, now a taxi flight with only crew on board, crew who would have no job once they land in Dubai. Many of them will not be able to get home, for Emirates crews hail from all around the world, and the UAE borders are closed. Many travellers had to spend far more thousands of dollars than we did to get home – or nearer home.
We listened to the plight of those at Melbourne who were transiting through New Zealand to the UK and USA who were told they could not board their flight because NZ transit was closed. We read of the plight of the Belgian tourists who were tramping (the name given to hiking in kiwiland) for several days in Central Otago and emerged to phone contact to learn the world had changed, and their travel plans deleted.

We’ve made it. Dunedin has turned on a beautiful day. As far as we know we have no virus – though time will tell. But across our lives and across the globe there are countless worse off than we are. I have as yet no words or theological insights. We’re here, and will take time to work it out. We have seen countless acts of kindness around us and to us in recent days. Perhaps for now that will be the theological insight. But these, like every apocalyptic time, are interesting times, and the onus is on us to find and affirm the God in whose footsteps we are placing ours, no matter what.

Dear Professor ...

[I was recently meandering through farmland when a couple of sheets of paper stapled together, caught my attention. A southerly was howling, but beyond that I have no clue to their provenance. Well-schooled in The Famous Five, though, I am always ready for adventure, so I began to read. Unfortunately, what I later discovered was bovine faecal material had obscured the letterhead and the details of the addressee. Ah well. Life’s great mysteries … But I read on, and you may too]

Dear and Most Esteemed Professor

I hope you will pardon my addressing you thus, or indeed having the temerity to address you at all, but when we met you were so emphatic that this is what – (or is it who?) – you are, that I fear it would be remiss of me to offer any lesser form of salutation. Even so it is a mere shadow of the reverence with which, your insistent tone made clear, with which you are accustomed to being addressed. And rightly so, I hasten to add, for there was no room to doubt the gravitas of your claims.

But oh my goodness, how gauche of me! Of course you won’t remember having met me. So august a personage as yourself meets countless admirers, even before enumerating those of lesser significance. Those who, like myself, were foolishly unaware of your momentous significance, but who inevitably become devotees when you delineate  the height and breadth and depth of your wisdom and authority. 

I am naturally so thankful that the scales that once covered my eyes fell from me at the time of our encounter. You were very patient as you made clear the vast repertoire on which you draw, vast deposits of wisdom that I cannot begin to fathom, but which you were graciously willing to hint at by outlining your all but endless catena of qualifications and roles.

So while I realize that your remarkable prowess for recall would normally need no external aid, I recognize too that this mere iota, jot, tittle, zeptomoment of consciousness will have been filed under “r” in the vast corridors of your experience. I must therefore (and please grant my unworthy self your gracious tolerance) momentarily plead your anamnesis of that fractured happenstance in the narrative of that your greatness, which you so graciously outlined.

You will of course be familiar with anamnesis, for your vast knowledge of languages ancient and contemporary inadvertently burst forth from your shield of modesty when you mentioned that you would give me no more than a gamma minus – it occurred to me that your mastery of languages was demonstrated even more vividly by your easy segue from one Mediterranean language to another – for the work I was undertaking in your presence.

But oh dear: I had forgotten to mention the circumstances of our illuminating encounter! Despite my gross inadequacies I had been asked to facilitate – (never “lead” when such majesty of mind  was participating!) – a confluence of representatives seeking to, I think the cliché could become “future scan,” for a corporate organization of which you are a part.

You may recall the meeting? It wasn’t significant on the international scale of things to which Dr Google later assured me you are accustomed to contributing. But then as a learned academic and influencer of human society you wouldn’t know of this infradig font of information. Nevertheless, the degrees of passion that you and others exhibited meant that even the most sclerotic of synapses, the most saturated of minds may have registered some imprint of proceedings.

It was, if I recall, a faith-based, Christian faith even I think, assembly (though of course evidence is often hard to accrue at these gatherings). I recall some ambivalence about this: was this not also the meeting at which one of those present, (who you and your fellow participants described in terms of inseparably close kinship, a brother) expostulated loudly, proclaiming “this is bullshit” before making a dramatic, Shakespearean even, exit?

But that was before the process had begun, so perhaps my gamma minus recall has conflated events: perhaps that explosion of faecal passion emanated from the more agricultural environs of the rugby match that I watched later? It’s so hard to recall such details: “were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” But I digress again. Flimsy minds do that, I’m sorry.

Oh dear, the digressions have threatened to overwhelm the point. Where was I?

Ah, but I recall! I had in fear and trembling approached your personage to glean your name. It seemed so unhelpful to be stumbling along, fatally flawed by comparison with you, who had emerged as a frequent interlocutor in proceedings, without some sort of nomenclature. The frequency and stridency and repetitive nature of your expostulations and other ejaculations had brought you to my attention. I was of course immediately aware of your equanimity – how could I be otherwise? Once, when a diminishing inflection and catatonic pause had punctuated one of your fiercely rational outbursts, I had errantly deduced that you had made your point and begun to continue my own work. You rightly set me back on the path of obeisance, demanding an apology for speaking before you invited me to do so. It might have been then that I decided most cravenly to seek identification of your person? Or maybe it was when I attempted to answer one of your interjections about process, fallibly attempting to give words to procedures far beneath your contempt, and receiving your just admonition that I was treating you as an infant.

I wasn’t of course. I was so aghast at daring to give words to process when a learned professor sat at my feet that I lapsed into the prelinguistic utterances of a mere infant. No wonder you were bemused!  No wonder not amused! The shame. Had you only spoken earlier of that which a more discerning soul than me would have intuited I would oh so gladly have vacated the floor, for such opportunities to sit at the feet of greatness are so rare, and your leadership would have proved infallible.

But, dim as I am, I was yet to concretize the inchoate or perhaps instinctive knowledge that your obvious mana was so imprinted with academic imprimatur. I was so aghast that my words were less – well, less alpha magnus I guess – than you would wish. When later I learned from you of your intellectual and systematic magnitude I was overawed. But I was already overawed, as I have mentioned. So much greatness!

Ah, these digressions must end. I am, forgive me, so valuing at least the pretence of discourse with your learned self. As you may know, or would know had you ever had cause to notice my insignificance, I have an interest myself in that faith-based organization for which we were both, on that day, seeking to discern (or in my far less academically gifted, more stumbling way, “imagine”) a future. It is an ancient and was once a trusted corporate organization. Yes, that, even though your kin’s faecal outburst serves as a reminder of the Teutonic fall from standards of decency that even those claiming access to prim holiness eventually undergo.

But knowing now that I momentarily walked in the shadow of such intellectual grandeur as yours, I am, loathe though I am to trouble the greatness of your mind with mundanities, emboldened to ask a question of exegesis. You see your particular wing of the corporate body has drawn firm lines in the sand. You have objected strenuously to “otherness” of sexuality, based on a text or two from ancient writings. Clearly my exegesis, by which the central figure of the New Testament extends radical hospitality and welcome to all, is flawed.

You see, when I inadvertently took to heart and method the observation of the author of one of the biblical letters (a sermon, in fact[i]) that those who behave like children should be treated like children, when I inadvertently responded to what seemed to this more flawed human being to be mere petulance and intransigence, when I treated the source of the interruptions accordingly as childish, I accepted your remonstrance and apologised. Maybe after all it was at that moment that I needed to ascertain your name (with full knowledge of the weight of “name” in both Māori and Hebrew traditions) and was emboldened as if by the Spirit to seek the information from you, for I perceived your sense of importance and of en-title-ment.

So I sought your name.

I received instead an emphatic enunciation of your title, you see, hence the hyphens. I don’t suppose you saw what I did there, but never mind.

Tangentially, perhaps, I received to my surprise an uninvited insight into one of those great moments of the biblical narrative that you and your kind so vociferously espouse. You see when your Jesus (and mine) was interrupted by pompous critics in the marketplace he suddenly burst into an exposition of the word “father.” “Call no one on earth your father,” was, if I use correctly my terribly flawed gamma minus anamnesis, his response.

Many of your kin – who knows, perhaps you too? – used to be fond of quoting that verse (Matthew 23.9, if your august busyness clouded out the memory). Actually it followed quickly on the heels of a series of sayings about “tying up heavy burdens, placing them on the shoulders of others,” sayings that would have of course nothing to do with the attitude that many of your kin have extended to those of “other” sexualities (not to mentions faiths, cultures, and who knows what other demarcations). Funnily enough, and again only if my anamnesis is not fatally, irretrievably flawed, that sort of demarcation was the flash point that led circuitously to the day and the circumstances on and through which we momentarily met.

But, your worthiness, I wonder if your immeasurable expanse of intellectual vigour might help me with the one question that I want to put to you, that is the purpose of this brief (by biblical proportions) letter?

You see, as I mentioned, when I asked your name you gave me instead, emphatically, your claim to greatness. “I am,” you intoned sonorously, “Professor …” oh heavens, after the emphasis on your title I forget the rest. I was so overawed, I suppose. Then you delivered a quick curriculum vitae … I learned in brief but laboured sentences of your many claims to be infinitely superior to your struggling interlocutor.

I realised that in a corporate community in which sola fide (you’ll know the Latin, of course) is all but a mantra, the claim is empty. Your degrees, your curriculum vitae, these rather than empty claims of “Christ who lives in me,” were your claim to satisfaction, redemption, and first-class residency of the Reigns of God.

So my question at last: is a phylactery merely a phylactery, or might it be all the paraphernalia by which you exclude, belittle, and silence those you consider unworthy of your greatness?

You may of course want to read all of Matthew 23. Though I suspect so great a repository of knowledge will know it by heart. Though hearts can accrue scar tissue, I guess.

Enquiring minds want to know. That’s all. In abject humility of course …

[1] You are familiar with endnotes, so I am sure you won’t mind looking up Hebrews 5:11-14. Indeed you might even like to refer to my book exegeting that sermon, though of course you may award my work that same γ- that you awarded my flawed presentation.

[at this point the page was smudged. As mentioned above, pseudo-scientific analysis suggested a bull had deposited faecal matter. … Sadly (or not) I guess we’ll never know the author]

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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 

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[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

---

[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.