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Showing posts from 2009

Kipling

Someone gave me a book of poems for Christmas. Apparently, a survey was done asking New Zealanders about their favourite poems and this book contains the top 100. It's an eclectic mix. Lots of James K Baxter, and all the stuff we learned by rote at school, and some nice little whimsies by people like Margaret Mahy; all of The Lady of Shallot and and bits of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ; Fern Hill and Ode to a Grecian Urn and The Tyger and all the usual suspects, including this one from dear old racist, sexist, imperialist Rudyard Kipling. I know it's not very PC but out of all of them, it spoke to my present circumstances the most. If... If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you But make allowance for their doubting too, If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don't deal in lies, Or being hated, don't give way to hating, And yet don't look

Costume Dramas

image (c) to, I suppose the BBC. Don't nick it. Like most families, we have inviolable rituals for the spending of Christmas Day. There's a couple of church services, of course. There are particular foods to be eaten at their apportioned times, and the contents of crackers to be guffawed at; and once the food and the red wine and the effects of the past week have taken effect, there is, for me, a couple of hours asleep. There is a particular time for parcels to be unwrapped and a time honoured way of going about it. There is the ritual phoning and texting and skyping to be done, and then, finally there is the one thing that happens on the evening of every Christmas Day: the watching of something long and absorbing on an LCD screen. There are some rules about suitable content, of course. It must be British (or at a pinch, something directed by Peter Jackson or something Canadian). It must involve people dressed in costumes from another time and/or place. It must have believa

Where The Heart Is

When we first saw the St. John's Vicarage it was 4 degrees celsius outside the house and 4.5 degrees inside. We went home to the green, wet, warm Waikato with a memory of a large dark scruffy house with gray walls and a bizarrely patterned carpet. The opportunity to live at 373 Highgate wasn't high on the list of motivations for becoming the Vicar of Roslyn, but after 11 years of living here, we are very loathe to leave. The house was built in 1925 and its first occupant described it as "well designed and well built, providing what is desirable without showiness or unnecessary luxury." It has 5 bedrooms, 4 living rooms and a couple of sunrooms. All the walls, interior and exterior are double brick and sit on immense concrete foundations, so that both stories and the basement all have the same floorplan. You can feel the solidity of the place as soon as you walk over the threshold. Doors and stairs are of thick, simply fashioned cedar which hasn't warped or cracked

Windows 7 again

It's now ben a month since I got rid of Windows Vista. I haven't had a single BSOD since then, but I have had a run of smaller crashes: programs freezing up; Windows Explorer not answering to the switch and refusing to shut down; my screen resolution changing to 640x480 all by itself and not wanting to change back. A couple of days ago I updated my video driver and so far, that seems to have fixed things. I have a fairly ordinary NVidia video card, and assumed that the Win 7 installation would have sorted out any driver problems but apparently not. So. A resounding two cheers for Windows 7! I am almost impressed.

Waiting and Knowing

Here we are, 3 days into December and still with an extra duvet on the bed and the heat pump running. Autumn is passing but the Summer is not quite here. I'm in an odd limbo time between the known and the unkown and it seems the weather has come out in sympathy. I have been down to Invercargill a couple of times, meeting people I already know quite well, letting them and me work out the beginnings of a new relationship. A couple of days ago I sat with a group of them, bouncing ideas around, trying to think about what might happen. Some of the ideas were great, and one or two of them will probably happen, but it wasn't really a time for plans and actions. It was the meeting and the talking that mattered. I drove home through the Southland Plains feeling energised and excited about what lies ahead. Richard and Hilary Ellena dropped by on Wednesday. Richard is a friend from a long way back, although I haven't talked to him much since he was made Bishop of Nelson about 3 year

Projection

Bishops Tea Party : oil by Garth Tapper, Gillman Collection I have received a lot of letters and cards and emails over the past few weeks. Most of them are warm and pleasant and measured but there are a few that are not. On the one hand there are those -admittedly very few - which gush over-enthusiastically and on the other there are those -admittedly very few - which sneer and chide and snipe. I'm told that this is a feature of episcopal life, and I had better get used to it. I'm not talking here about those who have realistic and well founded hopes for the next few years nor of those who, based on knowledge of me, have realistic and well founded misgivings about my capabilities. I'm talking rather about people with whom I have never shared three connected words of conversation but who nevertheless take it upon themselves to upbraid me for the inner workings of my psyche and my motivations; or those who seem to mistake me for some sort of saviour. As in every case where t

Red at Morning

Although it's all still three months away, slowly, my timetable is filling with episcopal type things; little traces in the lightening sky, harbingers of what is ahead. I meet weekly with Bronwyn, our Diocesan Manager, and with Debbie who will be my PA. At the moment both have forgotten more about being a bishop than I know and both are extremely useful sources of data. There are some huge issues to find my way into the centre of, and I am starting from the outside and working my way in. I have begun to consider the peripheral bits of the office. Such as apparel, for example. I will have to wear some fairly strange clothes. Today my friend Carl popped over for a while to explain them all to me and to show me websites where you can buy Rochets and Chimeres and little red things that tie around your wrists. I'll need a mitre and a cope, which are available off the peg or I could ask someone to make them. Off the peg is expensive. Making is slow, and soon New Zealand will lose

Creation by subtraction

Imagine a slide projector with no slide in the carrier shining its light onto a blank white screen. You would see on the screen pure white light. Then you put a slide into the carrier, and a picture appears. What you have done by shining the light through the slide is filter out most of the light. White light coming from the bulb contains every visible colour, but where the slide is blue, all the light is filtered out except the blue bits, where it is red, everything is excluded except the red light, and so forth. So a picture is created not by adding light but by taking light away. The pure white light when there is no slide in the projector shows no picture; but in another sense, it shows every possible picture: the light required to make any conceivable photograph is there in that pure white light. As Bernard Haisch says, in The God Theory , "the white light is thus the source of infinite possibility, and you create the desired image by intelligent subtraction, causing the rea

Windows 7

I upgraded to Windows 7 this week. Easy really. That nice Mr. Acer sent me a personal letter with a couple of disks in it; he promised these to me in August when I bought one of his PCs loaded with (shudder) Windows Vista. I popped the disks into the computer and followed the instructions. An hour later, all was accomplished. Not that you'd know it. Apart from a new start up screen, a revamped taskbar and a couple of little changes in the systems accessories, it all looks and works exactly like Windows Vista. With one big difference. Vista fell over at least every other day but I've had W7 running for about 36 hours now and not one single Blue Screen of Death! Wow! Amazing!

Election

On October 11 I was elected as the 9th Bishop of Dunedin. This was not something I had planned on or looked for. I went to the electoral synod as nominator of another, strong candidate, and argued vigorously on his behalf for all of the Saturday of the synod. On Sunday I was nominated from the floor and elected. Our church's processes are slow and thorough. It has taken about four weeks to have my nomination approved by the bishops and the general synod. This has now happened and I will be consecrated bishop on Saturday February 27 2010 at 1:00 pm. On the weekend of the synod three people told me of specific dreams and premonitions they had concerning my election. Since then there have been other similar experiences reported to me, one from someone who was several thousand kilometres away from Dunedin at the time. These serve to reassure me that God is calling me to this. I am somewhat apprehensive about what lies ahead, but also excited and eager. If God is calling, it can only

Paradox

What, with one thing and another the phone has been running a bit hot lately, so I used my day off to do a small job for the parish which would take me out of cell phone range: I towed a trailer up to Alexandra to collect a sliding door. The sun shone, the hills were golden brown and the air was diamond sharp. My little car performed approximately well and I listened to a CD of Robert Johnson, the Jungian analyst, talking about paradox, the shadow and creative imagination. I have been reading Robert Johnson's books for a long time now; his little trilogy He , She and We are revelatory and his insights on the inner life have been sure guides. Now, 87, he has produced a CD set called The Golden World which condenses much of his great insight into 6 or so hours of conversation. Yesterday I listened for an hour as he spoke of paradox, the shadow and creative imagination. We live, he says, for most of our lives with paradox. We fall in love with people we can't form relationship

So it begins

Next door to us is a piece of land that used to be empty. When our city was founded, it was set aside for educational purposes: to build a boarding hostel for Otago Girls' High School, to be precise. The hostel never got built but two other schools, Kaikorai Primary and Columba College used the land anyway. During the day it was occupied continually by children and in the evenings people would walk on it or play touch rugby on it or fly model aeroplanes or golf balls over it. It was one of those many open spaces which are dotted around our city and which give it much of its character. No-one ever imagined it would pass from public ownership, but in the 1980s we New Zealanders elected one of those governments with tunnel vision. This one's particular tunnel reduced everything - schools, hospitals, utility supplies, postal services, you name it , to the status of a business. And seeing as Otago Girls High School was suddenly, by dint of bureaucratic fiat, a business, this

Fair's fair

Every year we have a parish fair, usually on the first Saturday in November, but this year for reasons I can no longer remember we had it a week early.Not that the timing seemed to make much difference, as it all went off as smoothly as ever. There is a long history of holding parish fairs and a lot of people who know how it all works. People have their alloted jobs to do, and they know the steps in the process of making that bit of the process happen. I have my own particular contribution to make. There is a circuit of local schools and churches who all borrow trestle tables off each other, and, on the day before the fair, they have to be visited in turn by cars towing trailers, one of which is mine. There is a barbecue of formidable weight to be collected from the naval training base - why the Royal New Zealand Navy would own such a thing and why they would lend it to us are mysteries now lost in the fogs of history. There is a marquee to be erected and this involves a lot blokes in

Room 9 You Shine

I'm not the only one in the family with a blog. Clemency runs one for her classroom at Outram School. Just today we learned that her blog has been given an award by Interface Magazine as New Zealand's best classroom blog . Take a look . See why. Her prize is the nifty little Toshiba netbook she is holding as the kids talk via Skype to the editor. There was a reporter from the ODT in the classroom today, and there will be a profile in an upcoming issue of the magazine. And, yes, we are quite chuffed.

Revolutions

I have been reading about John Bell , an Irish physicist who died in 1990 and who gave the world Bell's Theorem . If you click on the Wikipedia link to the theorem it will all be explained to you. If the explanation leaves you a bit mystified, let me briefly explain. John Bell was addressing some of the wierder aspects of quantum physics - the bits of the theory that common sense tells you simply cannot be true. His theorem is a set of equations that would have to be valid if the ordinary, common sense view of the universe was actually the way the universe was made. He invited scientists to come up with a way of falsifying the theorem because if his hypothesis was shown, by experiment, to be false, it would mean the odd predictions of quantum, physics were correct, namely, that either a) things in the universe had no reality until someone observed them or b) the impression that the universe is composed of separate, distinct things is an illusion or c) both of the above. In the ea

Wow!

This is a Ukranian artist who won a television talent competition. It's a piece of performance art that embraces drawing and storytelling, and, almost at times, dance. It also reminds me of Buddhist sand mandalas. Amazing stuff.

The Quantum Enigma

As we get progress through the education system we tend to get more and more specialised. Study of English becomes study of the Romantic Period becomes study of Wordsworth becomes study of the Prelude becomes study of the rhyming patterns in the first stanza becomes..... Truly. I knew a guy once whose PhD thesis was on the reproductive system of earwigs. And as we specialise we tend to talk less and less with people outside our own discipline, so that the end result of higher education is that we come to know more and more about less and less. Now that's OK, it serves our society pretty well, and all the quite important stuff carries on: the electric milk frothers still get invented and the Ipod covers get ever more colourful. But sometimes there are very important things which can get overlooked because they are by products of someone's specialised discipline and therefore "none of my concern" to the folks who actually discover them and know about them. Like the way

Wisdom from Richard Rohr

Is your religion helping you to transform your pain? If it does not, it is junk religion. We all have pain—it’s the human situation, we all carry it in a big black bag behind us and it gets heavier as we get older: by betrayals, rejections, disappointments, and wounds that are inflicted along the way. If we do not find some way to transform our pain, I can tell you with 100% certitude we will transmit it to those around us. We will create tension, negativity, suspicion, and fear wherever we go. Both Jesus and Buddha made it very clear to their followers that “life is suffering.” You cannot avoid it. It is no surprise that the central Christian logo became a naked, bleeding, suffering man. At the end of life, and probably early in life, too, the question is, “What do I do with this disappointment, with this absurdity, with this sadness?” Whoever teaches you how to transform your own suffering into compassion is a true spiritual authority. Whoever teaches you to project your doubt and f

Whats in a Name?

Oban, Scotland, June 2009 Last night, by way of an evening service, Murray Broome led us in a piece of Bibliodrama. That is, the 25 or so of us who were there at the time acted out a selected piece of scripture; in this case, the story of Jesus' conversation with the disciples in Matthew 16:13-19. What struck me, as we lived out this familiar old passage, was the whole business of names, which I have written about before . I realised again, that names don't so much define the thing or the person being named; rather, they define us who are doing the naming. Jesus asks his disciples "who do you say that I am?" If I call Jesus "quack" or "charlattan" or "prophet" or "Son of The Living God" it defines me as the sort of person who will look at a specific set of information -ie the available data on Jesus life - and come up with that particular evaluation of it; an evaluation which may or may not tell others something about Jesus

Cats

On Sunday, for reasons I won't bore you with I got to sit in the congregation during the 8am service. Right at the start of the service a large black cat walked into the church. I'd never seen it before, but it was big, glossy, well cared for and holy. It walked under the pews, between the legs of parishioners and up into the sanctuary where it walked slowly around the altar purring. I retrieved it and put it outside. I haven't seen it since. That'll teach me to put Simons Cat videos on my blog.

Meditation and Cats

This video is "Simon's Cat". there are three episodes on Youtube, all worth a look. I thought of this today when meditating, although I was trying hard not to think of anything. My good resolve was shattered because Haku, the cat we have somehow inherited by a process I won't bore you with now, decided to join me. I was the only one in the house and she was lonely. But more, than that, she is fascinated by meditation and prayer. She knows what to do when people are asleep or when they are sitting quietly with a vacant lap. When they are in this other state, she is intrigued and tries to investgate. She pokes. She sniffs. She bats. She sharpens claws on my woollen cloak. She tries to get a response: any response, and in so doing acts (very well might I add) the part of the Zen master testing his students' resolve by stalking among them with a big whacking stick. And then, she purrs and settles down still beside me; not asleep but still. The meditating cat. I think

Seraphine

You have to hand it to the French: they know how to make movies. I watched this one in a tiny theatre underneath the town hall. There are only 8 seats, there is a line down the middle of the screen where it joins, and the soundtrack from the next, bigger theatre boomed through the wall , but none of that mattered. Neither did the fact that the dialogue was in French, for this is one film that could have got by without any dialogue at all. Two things carried the power of this masterpiece: the stunning cinematography of Laurent Brunet and an achingly beautiful performance by Belgian actress Yolande Moreau. The story is a fictionalised account of the life of Naive artist Seraphine Louis (1864-1942). In the title role, Yolande Moreau is present in almost every shot of the film. Seraphine is first seen gathering seeds and roots and mud and blood as ingredients for the paints she has invented. Her movements are slow and ponderous, her footsteps heavy, but she glides through the countryside

Dancing With Your Shadow

Christian books on meditation do not lie thick on the ground. There's Anthony De Mello, of course and John Main and Laurence Freeman. There's a wealth of classic material if you can find it and if you can come to terms with the archaic language. Morton Kelsey has a couple of titles which include some reference to meditation, but after that my own knowledge of the literature is starting to wear a bit thin. Which is why I was very pleased to be lent this book a week or two ago. As far as practical advice on beginning and continuing meditation goes it's the best I've come across. There are some useful chapters on the theory of meditation and some advice on what is likely to happen as you settle down to a committed practice. Kim Nataraja has had a varied spiritual journey which began in Christianity and took the scenic route through various world faiths before arriving back where she started. She is now a leading member of the World Community For Christian Meditation. She

Poem

Below is a poem by American poet Mary Oliver, which is, of course, copyright to her. This morning, after our Wednesday Eucharist, I had coffee with Wes who talked to me about the Vacuum: the thing that most of the universe is made of. Wes is a physicist, and I can usually just keep up if he talks slowly enough and repeats himself a lot. He described the nothingness which is not, and never can be nothing. Later, in the afternoon, I had more coffee with Kathy and Murray, in order to continue a conversation we began on Sunday night. We looked at Murray's laboratory, where he makes very small holes for a living. A lovely woman sat at a desk making titanium needles so small they can't be seen, even with a microscope. Then I had a soy latte to Kathy's evident disgust but despite my phillistinism, she gave me some information on labyrinths and the poem. I liked it a lot. The poem, I mean, not the latte though that wasn't bad either and I haven't read the stuff on labyr

Consciousness and Jung

No one should take up meditation unless they are prepared to deal with the consequences and nobody warns you before you start what is likely to happen. At least, no-one warned me. You sit in the quiet and get the chattering machine to be still for a while. Sometimes you succeed, admittedly not as often as you'd like to be able to boast about in a blog post, but sometimes. And sometimes is often enough, especially when you are diligent about getting in some practice every day over a lengthy period of time. Every time the stillness comes, unknown to you, a small drill starts and a tiny well is sunk down into the dark bits of your mind: the bits that lie forty fathoms deep beneath the moving, shallow surface. And when there is enough of the tiny wells, the flow from them becomes steady and continues even in the parts of your day when you are not meditating. Especially in the parts of the day when you are not meditating. Life changes happen. Old issues are raised. Light is cast into pr

Back To Church Sunday

Back to Church Sunday is something dreamed up somewhere in Britain. The idea is simple really: get the parishioners to each ask someone to church on a designated day. Help them out a bit by providing a nice looking invitation card, and encourage them by showing some preparatory materials in church in the weeks ahead. It seems to have worked well in the UK, and, over the last couple of years, here in new Zealand. This year we thought we would give it a try, and I'm very glad we did. Our main congregation, at 10 am on Sunday morning, has typically had about 130 people present. Over the past year, my foot has been off the gas pedal and attendances have dropped back to about 100. I knew it was time to take stock and think about our direction as a parish, and we had drawn up and distributed a parish survey as part of a wide ranging review. Back To Church Sunday happened along at just at the beginning of the whole process. The introductory videos were useful. They were mostly short clip

E-Day

It was E-Day today. All over the country collection points were set up for gathering old bits of electronic junk together so that they can be recycled. So I gathered my bits of electronic junk. I laid the back seats of the car flat, opened the basement doors and began to move back and forward like an ant at a picnic carrying treasures from one spot to another. I filled the car. Filled it! It was piled to the roof and I had four large banana boxes on the front seat beside me. There were four Commodore 64s and three Atari STs dating from the mid 1980s. There were monitors and PCs and bags of old, nameless cables and power supplies. There were boxes and boxes and boxes of floppy disks. The people at the recycling station were fairly impressed with the quantity and mystified by the machinery; after all, they were mostly students doing a day's worth of community service and some of the stuff I gave them was manufactured before they were born. Today I dumped stuff that I had once year

Wedding

Last night I acquired a son in law. This was an event that was supposed to have happened in about a year's time, but events have an odd way of surprising us. My daughter Bridget has been seconded by her employer to their new branch in Qatar, and if she was to take her fiancee Scott with her, what with Qatar being an Islamic state and everything, a marriage certificate had to be produced. So, a wedding was organised with about two weeks notice. This was not going to be the main event, you understand but a sort of mini wedding: a prequel. But events have a way of surprising us. The idea was to have a small informal gathering with just ours and Scott's immediate families present and do the formalities, while a bigger grander wedding reaffirmation would be held on their return to New Zealand. We thought we might have a small family dinner back at our place afterward, but nothing fancy. So, I made sure the church was free on Friday night. A license was applied for and a dress select

The last Post...

A few days ago, on a night I couldn't sleep, I wrote a post. It was not my best work. In particular, I insulted people who had had the courage and vision to allow themselves to be nominated as bishop of our diocese. Of course, I didn't tell you which candidates I had in mind, but I knew and God knew, and that's enough. I was indulging in exactly the behaviour which was so painful to me last electoral synod. It was unnecessary and it was counter to the Gospel and I am sorry for it. So I have removed the post. There's no excuses for bad behaviour but there are reasons and I had my reasons helpfully explained in a book by David Bohm, conversations with Shirley Brunton and Wes Sandle and an email from my sister Val. I am very grateful for all these benefactors, and if I can fit it into a blog post, I'll tell you about it sometime.

Systems

The China Study is a book with three parts. Part 1 describes the study upon which the book is based. Part 2 gives some outline advice on structuring a diet. Part 3 describes the encoounters the author, T Colin Campbell, has had with the American Medical system. This third part is quite chilling reading. It outlines in some detail the lengths to which people will go to ignore or even suppress knowledge they find unpalateable. People whose lives are based on the search for objective truth and the scientific method are capable of immense subjectivity when faced with information which counters deeply held preconceptions. I have been thinking a bit about the reasons for this, and particularly as my own church undergoes one of its periodic convulsions over the choosing of a new bishop, and displays its usual intractibility about change or adaption . It's all about systems, and I am indebted to David Bohm's Thought As A System for clarifying my thinking on this. Systems occur natur

A few days later...

I haven't written much on here lately because I have been busy with all the stuff life offers. I've read an interesting book about extinct species of humans, caught up with my parish, began to develop an idea of what the next decade holds for me and for St. John's, became immersed again in the life dramas of family and friends, and picked up the threads of involvement in my neighbourhood. The last week has been quietly, confidently good. Like a pianist struggling over a difficult new piece I wrestle with my attention every morning, and the wrestling is proving helpful in all sorts of unexpected ways. I haven't much to say today, except that I'm still here, still alive, still healthy and I've been thinking a bit about systems. I'll tell you more later.

Huzzah!

I saw the oncologist today. At least, I saw his 14 year old Chinese registrar, which was a good sign right from the start: the fact that he wasn't seeing me himself meant that there was obviously nothing complicated to convey and no hard news to give. The boy in the white coat peered at me through his rimless glasses. He asked how I was doing, and wanted to know if I had trouble with my waterworks or any unusual aches and pains. He smiled and nodded encouragingly at all my answers. He told me that my PSA levels have declined to barely above the detectable level, which means that the cancer has gone. I will go back to the hospital in 6 months just to make sure and after that my GP will keep an eye on developments, or more likely, the lack of them. I felt a bit stunned and I don't think I can have looked appropriately celebratory. I walked back to the car, texted my loved ones and drove home. On Pitt Street both my girls phoned and I pulled over to answer them, then burst