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Showing posts from 2017

Church on Christmas Day

We move up the generational ladder. It used to be that people came to our place for Christmas. We decided on menus and decorations and the order of the day's events, but now we are grandparents, and travel to where our children are, and someone else calls the shots. This year it was Bridget, who lives in Rolleston . Rolleston is a town which has grown from nothing to almost city size over the last few years, populated largely by refugees from the wreckage of Christchurch. There are a a number of retirees, but most of the inhabitants are young families renting or buying one from the plethora of new houses. The infrastructure of the place tells its own story. There is a large shopping mall, still in the process of construction and a bare paddock, where a proper little town centre is promised. There are playgrounds everywhere and four new primary schools, each with a roll of over 700 children, and an impressive new  high school has just finished its first year. There are rugby, s

Advent

I heard this album today after arriving back in New Zealand. It made quite a contrast with my penultimate night in Sydney, spent looking at the houses decorated for Christmas. The decorated houses are a kind of 21st Century folk art using projectors, LED lights, snow machines (in a 30 degree Sydney summer. Yes really) and automatons. 100 houses viewed, give or take. And the imagery was 3 Nativity scenes and the rest Santas, trees, snowmen, stockings, gifts, reindeer, candy canes and elves. There is no use crying about putting Christ back in Christmas: if Christ was ever there he's not now. The lit houses are icons to the central religious belief of Western Culture, namely,  that possessing stuff will make you happy. The sisters, I think,  have another motivation. **** I've done something to mark the start of Advent. I've deactivated my Facebook Account. Perhaps in due course I'll reactivate it again but at the moment Im rather inclined not to. I'm not going to

Blue Mountains

To capture something of the scale of this place, my fancy camera with its assortment of lenses stays in the bag, and I set the camera on my phone to panorama mode. Its as near as I can get.  It's easy enough to make an impressive photograph of the landscape in New Zealand. We pack a lot into a little space, and we major on height. There's usually something pretty to make a nice foreground and  if you want a bit of scale, there's always a convenient line of snow capped peaks somewhere, and possibly, an obligingly still lake in which to reflect them. The archetypical  New Zealand shot is this one,  which is not mine: It's of Lake Matheson, on the West Coast. It shows Mt. Cook and Mt. Tasman, both around 12,000 feet high reflected in the little lake which is at about sea level. So, with the reflection, 24,000 feet of vertical reach and a few trees to give a sense of scale. Lovely. And this is actually what it looks like, so capturing a pretty accurate picture of t

Here

There is a scarlet wasp dragging a spider down the footpath. The paralysed  spider is a huntsman, newly destined for the role of incubator for the wasp's egg. It's quite large,  too heavy for the wasp to fly with, so she is going by foot instead. She drags it a few inches, then leaves it to fly off, looking for a suitable place to stow her treasure, before returning to drag it some more. I make sure Zoe gives it a wide berth; that sting is still intact and the spider has not absorbed all the venom. **** The old men at the next table are speaking Italian. We have discovered rose petal gelato, and have stopped by here most days, to sit at the distressed tables on the odd assortment of stools and share a dish with our tiny grand daughter. **** The playground has been laid out for wheelchairs. A gentle ramp has chimes which passing wheels will ring. The huge electric roundabout has smooth, wide access on every side. There are tables for waterplay at just the right height.

Neither Here Nor There

The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say 'Look, here it is!', or 'there it is!' For in fact, the Kingdom of God is among you. -Lk 17:20 All we want. All our hearts long for. All that will make us complete. All that we so frantically search for in our own time honed suite of falsehoods is already ours. It is lying to hand, hiding in plain view on every side.

Seeing

There is a province in which the photograph tells us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, but there is another in which it proves how little our eyes permit us to see. - Dorothea Lange

Happiness

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony. - Thomas Merton

Teaching Theology to Children

Chaplain and students of St. Hilda's discussing mortality and history There's quite a bit of discussion in our Anglican schools about how you teach Religious subjects to children. It used to be a matter of preparing children for confirmation and making them all into good little Anglicans, but things are no longer quite so simple. Whereas once our schools were filled, by and large, with kids from Anglican homes who had a basic Sunday School understanding of the faith and a local parish church with which they could readily identify, pupils like that are now more the exception than the rule. In most schools,  parents sending their children have signed a statement that they are supportive of the school's special character, but what, exactly, "supportive" means varies widely - from deep and long-standing commitment to the faith, through the spectrum to vague agreement that perhaps a little bit of this religious stuff may not be such a bad thing.  In our sch

Seeing What is There.

Wall of a derelict house. In the Maniototo, near En Hakkore retreat centre. I have a new monitor: 27" of clear sharp colour, take a bow Mr. Dell. Today, after a week or two of looking at the thing,  I noticed that it has an adjustable base, so I tilted it upwards a little. And an odd thing happened. The oblong screen became a parallelogram, wider at the bottom than at the top. It didn't really of course, it's just that in the time I had been viewing it the screen had been perpendicular, and at an angle to my line of vision and  my brain had got used to it the way it was, and had, without consulting me, been performing the nifty little trick of making a perceptual adjustments so that it looked rectangular. And now I went and changed the angles and my brain reinterpreted the shape using the old maths. I knew it was rectangular but no matter how hard I tried I couldn't see it that way. The illusion was so persuasive I even got a set square and made sure it was safe

March Retreat

John Franklin, Sister Mary Hepburn and I will be leading a six day silent guided retreat at the En Hakkore Retreat Centre in the Maniototo from Sunday March 4, to Friday March 9, 2018. The cost will be $475. En Hakkore is set in the old TB hospital in the hills above Waipiata. The surrounding landscape is vast and open and beautiful, and provides ample scope for long and varied walks. The facility itself is spacious, quirkily interesting, and, while a little basic, very comfortable. There will be a rhythm of daily worship, which retreatants can enter into, or not, as they choose, including daily Eucharist. This will not be a taught retreat but there will be brief daily input from one of the leaders. I will be one of the three experienced spiritual directors available for daily conversation. Each day will include some group meditation sessions and there will be ample time for private refreshment. En Hakkore is about 2 hours drive from Dunedin, and public transport

November in the National Park

 I've written about the Abel Tasman National Park before, Here , and Here . We've been many times before, but this was the first time in the Spring. The weather was varied, with a couple of stormy days, but it was fine enough to walk on 5 of the 7 days we were there. In the old days we took tents. Now we’re a few decades on and the attractions of a solid roof, a comfy bed, a fridge and a bathroom are too hard to resist. We towed our caravan over the single lane gravel road and parked up beside my sister and her husband.  After years of absence, the Weka have made a welcome return, due to an intensive pest control program. The archetypical view of the Abel Tasman is of bush clad headlands and golden sand beaches, and there were certainly plenty of those sorts of things on view. But the other feature of the park is the track, 65km or so of fairly easy walking of which we tramped about a third, this time around.    It's hard to meditate in a caravan. Sit

A First Look at David Bentley Hart's New Testament.

Last week I received my copy of David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament. The first of his books that I ever read was Atheist Delusions , which I found so entertaining and helpful, that in fairly short order I bought and read The Beauty of the Infinite , In the Aftermath and The Doors of the Sea . For a while now I have been reading The Experience of God . Hart is not always easy to read, not because he writes badly, but because he writes well. His arguments are strong, clear, concisely and cogently reasoned but are often complex. He is enormously erudite and has a bigger vocabulary than anyone I have read for a long time.  Other writers, of course, know lots of big words, especially academics, who speak to each other in that siloed, obtuse, opaque  dialect particular to universities, but David Bentley Hart, while not lacking in academic street cred, isn't like that. When I read his books I always have a dictionary to hand, as about every second page there wi

Politics

Photo (c) Next Magazine The more astute among you may have been able to read between the lines of my moderate and well balanced Facebook posts and detect a few subtle signs that, when it comes to politics, on occasion I may lean slightly to the left. So you won't be surprised that I was pleased with the way things turned out yesterday. We have a new prime minister, one from the same generation as my children. I'm hopeful about how things might work out for her and her new government, but I'm not kidding myself it will be easy. She inherits a national debt whose servicing alone is costing us around $4.5 billion a year (that's about a thousand down the tubes for each man, woman and child of us a year), and people who know about these things are saying it's about to take a turn for the worse. The ecological and social problems which were intractable for the outgoing government are still there, and she has a number of promises, made on the campaign trail, which

A Few Days at St. Matthews School

(c) St. Matthew's School NZ St. Matthew's Church stands in the middle of Hastings, and it's pretty impressive. Its art deco style reveals that it was built shortly after the 1931 earthquake, and it is surrounded by wide grounds and an array of smaller buildings, so that, what with the tower and everything,  it looks like a smallish cathedral with its close. Many people in fact regard St. Matthew's as Hastings' cathedral, and it does have that air of dignity and community centred gravitas, which makes the enterprise conducted in and around it, the one that I had travelled to Hawkes Bay especially to see, all the more surprising. About 21 years ago the parish decided to found a small primary school, St. Matthew's School. It is an integrated school, that is, while the government supplies the teaching staff, the school owners (that is, the Diocese of Waiapu) supply the buildings and are responsible for ensuring the school expresses a special character: Angli

Living in Two Places at Once

Photo (c) Nick Wright 2017 The stories are getting more complicated as he gets older. He still arrives at about 6 am clutching the Beebops, who still greet me and, using my voice, relay their adventures of the night before. A year ago they were happy just to go to the park or the beach, but things move on. Now, when Noah is asleep, they apparently filch the keys to Daddy's Ford Ranger (the speediest truck on the road!), and drive off into the night to fly about the place in helium balloons, liberate lions and elephants from circuses, go to the airport for trips to Africa, or Spain or Auckland, and evade prosecution for underage driving by the simple expedient of turning back into toys when the police officer looks through the window. Yesterday, as the the intrepid stuffed rabbits were making their way to Christchurch's rocket base for a trip to Saturn, Noah put his hand up to shield his mouth from the Beebops' view and whispered to me, "This is just imagining,

The Omega

I woke early and rose while it was still dark. In the harbour below me, the orange streetlights made triangular reflections like a row of skinny, upside down Christmas trees. I made coffee. Lit a fire. Sat down at about 5.30, and by 6.25 this journey was over. During the last week or so, reading the epistles, I knew I was looking over people's shoulders as they wrote into arguments that are millennia gone. I was aware I was not consulting an oracle, but hearing  brief snatches of  one side only of  long and complex conversations. I was aware that the intended hearers were seldom individuals, but, usually,  groups. And, then, this morning, the  Book of Revelations It was hearing the account of a dream. It was as troubled and as violent, as you would expect from someone dreaming in a troubled and violent time, but there is a pattern and order to it and a progression. In the heavens which give meaning to this world, says the dreamer, all the seeming haphazard danger aroun

Working

I spent most of this week conducting a Special Character review of Craighead Diocesan School. This morning I dropped my colleague, Anne, at Timaru airport around 6.00 am and then drove South. When the sun rose, I was in my old Parish, and passed the ponds on the farm that used to belong to John and Erena Hay, so stopped briefly to take a nostalgic photo. Craighead is a simply stunning school. Tucked away in a quiet suburb of Timaru it has been a girl's school since 1911 and an Anglican one since 1926. The old buildings are tastefully and practically modernised and a confidence in the school's future has seen them continually upgraded. The guys in hi-viz vests are still putting the finishing touches to the latest iteration of that development, a new gymnasium sports fields and classroom blocks. At the heart of the school is the chapel whose dramatic modernist stained-glass window is East facing and therefore catches the rising sun every morning when the girls file in for

Patmos is Just Around The Corner

For years, I now realise, I have studied the New Testament, but not actually read it. Every time I've sat down with those familiar passages, as I have done pretty much every day for decades, it has been with a  text divided up into chapters and verses by Erasmus 1500 or so years after they were written. Every version of the Bible I own, except one, has copious footnotes and cross references to which I turn when befuddled. So now, I am reading it, not studying it, in the exception, my one version from which all that stuff has been deleted. It's just me and these old words. I'm reading each of the documents of the New Testament in one sitting, and leaving a few days between each one to give a bit of thinking space. This morning it was Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians, so Philippians will roll around on Saturday or Sunday. I'll be finished by the end of the month, I think. What has been left out by omitting the divisions in the text and the explanatory material is

Keeping Honest.

Therefore, you are without excuse, whoever you are that judge; for in that which your judge the other, you condemn yourself. For you who judge practice the same things.   St. Paul. The Epistle to the Romans .  When I was 20 or so, I rose one morning at about 10 am, more than a little worse for wear. When I eventually managed to dress and find my way outside I discovered that my motorbike was damaged. The handlebars were bent, the headlight broken and it was quite badly scraped along one side of the tank. I had no idea what had happened. The last I remembered it was late in the afternoon, and all day I had been drinking with friends in a pub in Sumner. Now it was next day and I was in my flat in St. Albans, on the other side of town, realising I had, apparently, ridden home through peak hour traffic dead drunk, coming off the bike at some stage; and I remembered nothing about any of it. Still don't. I could tell some other stories from that stage of my life, many of them

Deep Music

For He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought. By love he can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held.  Ada has been told that today Amma and Pappa will be here. So as soon as she wakes she pushes her little pyjama clad body behind the blind, so she can see out the window, down the drive to the road from which we will emerge. Her whole little self; her dark brown eyes sing a song of hope and expectation.  We are texted the photo and hasten our progress Northwards. Deep calls to deep.  I  awake at 6 am in the guest bedroom with the gentle rhythm of Clemency's sleeping breath playing counterpoint to the tattoo of the rain on the roof.  Through the walls I hear a conversation; the words are inaudible but the shape and timbre of the voices forms a soft melody. My son in law is making his breakfast and Noah has risen to be with him. A soft, piping of enquiry and exclamation. A muted thrum of strength constrained to gentleness. I hear nurtur

Invisible Grammar

There was, apparently, in the 18th Century, a native American chief who was a prodigy in languages. In the year after his first European contact he became fluent in Spanish, Italian, English and French, and was taken to England as a kind of curiosity. At dinner one night at some university college or other, when the subject turned to the differences between languages, he was asked "What is the grammar of your own language?" He replied, "My language has no grammar." The story may or may not be true, but illustrates an always true phenomenon which everyone encounters the moment they start to learn a new language: the grammar of our own language is invisible to us, except when some teacher drearily and pointlessly insists on showing us, although those of other languages are powerfully and bafflingly obvious the moment we encounter them. It's not just linguistic grammars, of course. Grammar is the set of rules and principles by which a language is organised,

Eden to Patmos. Turning the corner.

A couple of days ago I finished reading the First Testament. It's the first time in the history of my devotional life that I have read nothing but the First Testament for such an extended time- about 6 months. And it's the first time I have read it through using the Jewish ordering rather than the accepted Christian one. Take the same elements of a narrative and reorder them and you get a completely different story. We Christians tell a tale of a developing revelation; of a movement from the beginning of all things , through a salvation history to Jesus. The Jewish story is not so much about the past as about the present. It is about the law, by which is meant more than a set of rules and regulations. It is about the great ordering on which the universe is founded. It is a prophetic commentary in which society is critiqued against the standard of that ordering, and it is worship in the light of the law. By and large, I prefer the Jewish system, and wonder if I will ever re

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

To thank me for  for preaching at her installation as Dean of Christchurch, Lynda Patterson gave me a copy of Haruki Murakami's  2010 novel 1Q84 , one of the best works of fiction I've ever read. It was like nothing I had ever encountered in its smooth blending of surreal elements, its inventive scope and its array of quirky but believable characters. Yesterday I finished another of Murakami's books, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and found it equally challenging and satisfying. At a little over 600 pages it was written in 1994-5 and translated from into English in 1997 by Jay Rubin. Murukami's influences are, partially at least, Western, and although the "feel" of the book seems decidedly Japanese to me, he is sometimes criticised in his homeland as being un-Japanese. This is in some measure because the works of most of his compatriots place strong emphasis on family and connection while his books are filled with solitary people, and loneliness is one of h

Who Are We Really?

I didn't record this morning's sermon at Knox church, but this one, delivered while I was Vicar of St. John's Roslyn, covers much the same ground If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element

How to Meditate

The following audio file is the third in a series of three talks given at Knox Church Dunedin in June 2017 on the subject of Contemplative Prayer. In this last of the series I speak, informally, for about half an hour, about how to begin a practice of meditation. If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element

Finding happiness.

The following is an address from Knox Church, Dunedin, given on Sunday June 25 2017 If you cannot see the audio controls, your browser does not support the audio element Synopsis: We all have our strategies for happiness which give rise to most of the major choices we make. These strategies have a number of things in common: 1) most of us are looking for one of 3 things in an attempt to make ourselves happy. These three things are a) security, b) affection and esteem; c) power and control. 2. These strategies are so deeply ingrained in us that they have become part of us and we are generally unconscious of them. 3. These strategies don't work, because they can't possibly work. Security, affection and esteem, power and control are things we all need, and things our parents give to us, or not as the case may be, from childhood. We usually find ourselves with a felt deficiency in one or more of these areas, and faced with life's inevitable challenges and unhappin