Bloody Phylacteries

BLOODY PHYLACTERIES

It all started when I was asked to write a report on an induction (installation of a new priest in charge of a parish, what used to be delightfully if quaintly called “induction to a cure of souls”).

I tend to look at these things very much as if I were an outsider. What did this or that event look like in the eyes of someone who had just dropped in from Betelgeuse, or the 17^th century, or downtown Poorsville or Hungersville, or anywhere where my tribe and its rites are as foreign to the outsider as the carpet on the Mariana Trench is to me.

So I wrote, and faeces hit the fan.

I here reproduce what I wrote – albeit with names and locations altered because I’ve explored and posted all that.[1] That specific is dusted, and I’d like to move on. But the ramifications of the faeces need a touch of house-keeping.

In the old days – that is to say more than a year or two ago – inductions were dominated by a coterie of clergy dressed in their various glad rags, a pot pourri of rumpled or ironed, dazzling or drab humanity, a Chaucerian crew “of sondry folk, by adventure yfalle / In fellaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle.” In white robes. 

We don’t do that now – possibly because someone eventually realised it looked more like a gathering of the KKK than a show of ecclesiastical support by sister and brother clergy. Or possibly because the parading phylacteries dominated the gathering of the faithful congregants and fellow-pilgrims who are the heart and soul of a parish.

So no one paraded any phylacteries when the people of St Ultan's and assorted others gathered for an induction. No airs and graces, but a church full of those from the congregation, from the faith community, from the wider community, parishioners and clients and colleagues and whanau and perhaps even wayward strangers gathering because they have journeyed or will journey or are journeying with the Rev’d Illyana Intrepid.

And because they wanted to utter their amen or nod or smile as Bishop Thucydides Thunderbolt kicked off a new stanza in Illyana’s life and the congregation’s life and the life of a parish that is much, much older than a mere congregation.  

All this because one of the most historic faith communities of the diocese was kicking off a new phase. A new phase for St Ultan of Ardbracan’s, a new phase for Rev’d Illyana Intrepid. But not new for either. Illyana Intrepid, on and off, has been a part of the parish for, well, a year or two. 

Okay, to be honest she has been associated with St. Ultan’s on and off but more on than off since before she was born.

Until recently that journey culminated in a period in which Illyana, in conjunction with others, were effectively (and effective) sacramental ministers. But as a Beatle once said, “all things must pass,” and now the Rev’d Illyana Intrepid has been led, as her choice of songs reminded us, by the Spirit of God into the seat in which so many servants of God have sat since 1873.

So we gathered, sang, prayed, and of course ate, and Illyana Intrepid is now the priest in a long line of priests presiding over Word and Sacrament in a remarkable parish. She is surrounded by aroha and goodwill, proclaiming with the people of the Underworld the resurrection hope that dwells at the heart of the Trinity.

Kia kaha, Illyana Intrepid and your faith-filled parishioners!

 

It wasn’t a great piece of writing, but I was under pressure for time. Off it went, was duly pixelated and posted. I bumped into Rev’d Illyana in the cauliflower aisle the next day, and she was delighted. That was before the fan turned yellow-brown and sprayed.

I had, I was told, trivialized Anglican rites (I love them), offended anglo catholics (I am one), and spouted anti-semitic hate speech (I am not anti semitic, though I am no sycophant of the modern State of Israel, and let’s recall that Palestinians are Semites, too).

Actually there was some confusion about the alleged anti semitism; some doo-doo-despatchers seemingly forgot that the reference to phylacteries was from the mouth of Jesus, the Jew (Mt. 23:5). Others believed that “phylacteries” was a references to phalluses, and that I was promulgating some sort of public sexual deviance presumably involving foreheads and aforementioned organs.

Under duress I wrote what I wanted to say in response, then deleted it. 

Instead I wrote an explanation of what I had said instead … sort of an essay interpreting my own work. 

A recent piece I wrote as a reflection on the induction of the Rev’d Illyana to St Ultan’s has, according to correspondence received by the bishop, generated offence.

This offence appears to have been primarily concerned with my references to the Ku Klux Klan, always a blight on human history, and to phylacteries. These, as Jesus mentioned (Mt. 23:5), can represent not so much a desire to be close to the heart and will of God (as they were intended to), but a desire to be seen to be close to the heart and will of God, which can become a different matter. 

In responding I am somewhat hog-tied. Correspondence with the bishop cannot be reproduced here, so cannot be refuted. So let it be. I can only make two rather generic responses to the two foci of complaint.

In the first place my reference to the Klan was firmly past tense. Referring to the parades of clergy in white robes, parades which I note to have been “former times” (if not that long ago), I suggest that those looking at us without formation in liturgical practice wear a set of lenses different to ours. The gathering and parading of robed clergy can appear more akin to a gathering of a different, deeply demonic group of humans. They wore white robes, but were and are well-known for practicing unimaginable atrocity and evil. They were not a group of women and men recalling their baptism, rejoicing in the white-robed army of martyrs alluded to in Revelation 7:14.

I believe the term used today is a “metric.” What metric are we using to interpret elements in any given context? As one who used joyfully to parade in white robes, even black robes, I am critiquing myself as much as anyone else. What impression did I convey? What impression do I now convey? Which is closer to gospel truth in the streets of the suburb where I live, in 2023? Is there a difference between the clothes I wear in liturgy and the clothes I wear in the street? Do the clothes I wear or any other action I take in Christ convey oneness with or separation from those with whom I rub shoulders in the street?

I believe there was also criticism of my reference to phylacteries. Jesus is recorded by Matthew, that most Hebrew of New Testament writers, as noting a group of religious leaders, Jesus’ own people, Matthew’s own people, who “make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long.” Consensus amongst scholars and other bible readers is that this was not some sort of anti-Semitic rant from Jesus the Jewish teacher, but a metaphorical, generic description of those who like to draw attention to themselves in contexts where it is inappropriate to do so. If, incidentally, I had been wishing to offend my Jewish neighbours (and I wouldn't), I would have denigrated the wearers of tfillin, but that subtlety evaded my critics.

I was not criticizing Jewish people today. I was criticizing Anglican Christian people of yesteryear - and their contemprary imitators. This chronology I emphasized in my article by noting, “no one paraded any phylacteries, no airs and graces,” adding “but a church full of those from the congregation, from the faith community, from the wider community, parishioners and clients and colleagues and whanau and perhaps even wayward strangers gathering because they have journeyed or will journey or are journeying with the Rev’d Illyana” (emphasis now added). It was a joyous and unpretentious occasion celebrating a new phase in the life of a priest. A new phase too in the community in which she has been invited to serve God in new ways.

I added an apology, avoiding the lame “sorry (if) you feel offended,” but trying to avoid compromising my view, and my right to it.

That view remains. Coteries of clergy dressed up in esoteric finery and/or white sheets (often with hoods, subtly understated), ensuring they stand out from “mere” hoi polloi amongst whom they walk or sit, do the crucified outsider god few favours. They appear through the lens of a post-Churchianity society to resemble the Ku Klux Klan far more closely than they resemble the saints and martyrs of faith that the paraders think they’re recollecting, representing.

I’m not championing Baptist liturgy. In the enactment that Anglican liturgy is, wear costume if it helps convey the sacred. I do. What we do in the specifics of a liturgical role, when we have one, is up to us. The bishop and the inductee were dressed appropriately in ways that expressed thir roles in the liturgy. Otherwise, basically, if you don’t want to make an ass of yourself (and the gospel) don’t dress up as a donkey.

Oh … and if the metaphorical properties of phylacteries and donkeys and fans and faeces elude you enjoy your day without them.

In the end I published the apology unadorned. I figured those deeply immersed in their own institutional esoterism were probably not going to see themselves through the eyes of outsiders, and Anglican Christianity would be pushed further and further to the fringes of society.  

 

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[1] I have removed one paragraph that would serve no purpose here beyond identifying St. Ultan’s and its Illyana. 

bricks and walls

 

ANOTHER BRICK IN … SOMETHING

It was an epiphany of sorts, and about as unsettling as they usually are. There I was, driving along, somewhere south of the last town, and Pink Floyd shuffled their way into my consciousness. I never really got into The Wall. Perhaps there comes a time when angsty anti-establishmentism becomes a bit sort of pubescent, really. Maybe. 

Unless you’re Roger Waters. He stayed angsty, writing songs against the establishment. Good songs, too. But for most of us the fire goes out, somewhere around that moment when our first child comes along, and well, mouths to feed, houses to roof.

Still, “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” is one of those songs I couldn’t ignore, even if like most people I ignored the album. Dark Side of the Moon, yeah. The Wall? Yeah nah. Life’s too short. But the song? Margaret Thatcher hated it, so that sold it to me. I’ve loved it ever since.

On this occasion it broke through something of a dwaal. That’s a lovely Afrikaans word that will have to be translated by the weaker “daydream” I guess.  But you know … as the kids from Islington Green School chanted the chorus, “Hey, teacher, leave us kids alone” I came back from my dwaal and heard the tail of the song as if for the first time, somewhere south of the last town.

“Wrong, do it again!” yells a teacher, exemplifying, with the slight sneer in his voice, the “dark sarcasm” berated in the body of the song. I winced a little. I didn’t hear those sneers too often, but they were there in the psyches of the Masters of my childhood. “Wrong. Do it again,” and the thwack of whatever weapon came to hand across my butt remains a sound indelibly etched in my consciousness. Wrong. Do it again. Thwack. Hockey stick, sandal, slipper, coal shovel, whatever.

But it was as the voice started expanding its owner’s logic in naked fury that I realized my own footprints in the story. “If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding.” It was an order I recalled from those hard days in a bleak boarding school – though it was more likely to be the limp, dead silver beet that I was being forced to eat. “If you don’t eat your vegetables you can’t eat your pudding” doesn’t scan so well, and I don’t recall the abbreviation “veggies” doing the rounds back then. Not proper, you know.

But the harsh cry of the dislocated, spaceless, timeless voice doesn’t stop there. “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

It is the cry of a man whose universe is crumbling. For him there was an indisputable logic in his summation of the situation. No meat, no pud. How could it be otherwise? No water, no swim. No air, no breathe.

But to the kids his frantic cry was nonsense. He was just another brick in the wall, holding them captive, incarcerated in old dreams that had died a long overdue death. “Screw your meat” – or veggies, whatever. And I had been one of them (not in Islington, admittedly). I had hated what I saw to be the phony values of the generation before me. No marriage no sex. No military service no citizenship. No bombs no peace. How can you have any peace if you don’t manufacture your bombs?

The man’s voice faded away. His eternal truths were crumbling. If the song had been Lord of the Flies the kids would have overthrown him, torn him limb from limb. And I was a shit of a kid. I would have mocked him mercilessly as the crowd advanced and the wall began to crumble. All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.

It was wrong and it was right. Perhaps now I’d try to find the compassion to love the poor man whose world was crumbling. But I doubt it. I fear I would have been a part of the fickle, angry, hate-fuelled crowd. I still recall with horror a geography teacher fleeing our class in tears. Another brick in the wall.

Perhaps I might even have been Alt-Right. I hope not. But I wonder: my psyche dwelt in furious places. I was never brave; even now when I hope I’ve found something like compassion I’m not sure I would exercise it when push came to shove, and the realities of yesterday’s hero began to crumble. All have sinned and fall short. Welcome to Lent.

'twixt already and not yet - in minor key

 THOUGHTS ON INTERREGNA (written during one, years ago) 

Over my 40 years of involvement in Mother Cantuar (have I mentioned that’s my nickname for the Anglican Church?) I have journeyed through a number of parish and diocesan interregnums (yeah, or interregna). I remember well my first experience of the process. I was a parishioner at my (first) “church of origin,” All Saints’, Palmerston North. The vicar announced his resignation, and the priest (he wouldn’t like the word) who was on the parish team as a sort of senior assistant, took over. I was particularly cranky: I happened to be going out with the out-going vicar’s daughter, but that’s another story.

I was no great fan of the interim priest. He represented the tradition that felt that to preach a sermon under 30 minutes duration was to insult God. The departed vicar was a fine preacher, with a better sense of the balance of liturgy and “word.” The interim not so much. To compensate for his interminably long sermons (often followed by interminably long intercessions) he raced through the communion like a race commentator: “this time, and they’re …” Oh, whoops, sorry, wrong script. (Someone else will have to take care of Daggy Boy). The holiness of the Eucharist (though I didn’t know the word back then) was stolen from me. To get it back I started sneaking off to Mass at a nearby Roman Catholic parish, where the priest was as fine a liturgist and preacher as I ever encountered in any church before or since. Sadly he was later felled by a stroke, and never preached or presided again.

But, back at the Anglican parish, I shared the apprehension felt by many. What lay ahead? The dynamism of the departed vicar was never likely to be met, I feared, and the momentum that he had initiated would all dwindle to nothing. We were a fairly passionate bunch, I guess, in that parish, and hearts were in mouths for a while. Eventually a new vicar came, and I did my best not to fall into the trap of comparisons. Several months later I left for Australia, where as it happens I would experience the process again in my next three parishes (Flemington, North Melbourne, East Bentleigh). Eventually I became a parish priest, doing the complex dance of coming and going. Added to that a handful of episcopal electoral processes (Melbourne, Grafton, Auckland, Waiapu) and I began to get a complex: did I frighten all my spiritual leaders away?

The outcomes were not always – perhaps not ever! – indication that God agreed with my choices. I won’t tell tales but I was to see the good, the bad and the ugly over the change processes that followed (no, I won’t say which was which). Yet through all the changes and chances I have continued to see the fingerprints of the God who generates space for us to change and grow as human beings, made in divine image. Somehow the rumour of resurrection, sung in various keys, has gone on in all those places.

That commission, to rumour resurrection hope, must be our primary concern in every time of interregnum (and every time is a time of interregnum!).

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