The church grinch steals Christmas

... I feel
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
“Come, see the oxen kneel
In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know”,
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Thomas Hardy’s wistful lines. I knew that Christmas morning at the local community church at Snells Beach would be deleterious to my poise and fragile tolerance, so somewhat to the disappointment of my wife and daughter I headed off to 8 am at the Anglican church in Warkworth. Surely that would be a simple, unadorned following of the liturgy which, after all, speaks for itself.

Oh dear, oh dear... I don’t know where the vicar was, but the service was conducted, if that’s the word, by some kind of geriatric clerical comedian who hadn’t actually prepared a damn thing. That in itself is insulting. The congregation was mainly elderly (like me), but what they were experiencing was evidently what they expected – a string of unfunny jokes, some of the familiar carols very badly sung, and some kind of “sermon” which was more an embarrassing quiz on the details of the Lukan story, with mild telling-offs for “not listening”. All this was to the unrelenting accompaniment of small children who had not the remotest awareness of where they were or why, yelling, running, fighting...

I had gone searching for some thoughtful statement of love and incarnation, grace, peace, pardon. It wasn’t to be. Once before, some years back, I had gone to Christmas morning communion at the same church, and that time the vicar at least admitted that he had prepared nothing, and so he told us about his dog. A couple of years ago, Mary and I attended 8 am Christmas Day communion at the Anglican cathedral in Auckland. Old Paul Reeves officiated – and so help me he had prepared nothing. He had to ask the organist what the next hymn was. A major Christian festival, and these blokes don’t even try. Once again I came home, got on the web and found the sermon of Rowan Williams in Canterbury Cathedral, and thus a bit of actual nourishment, some thoughtful and scholarly message from the fact of incarnation.

This morning we were not ten seconds into the service but we were talking about food. The local churches are obsessed with food. They can do nothing without first ensuring their food supply. They have committees on food. Confronted with the mystery of incarnation this morning, this chap began by telling us the food arrangements for the New Year’s Eve barbecue, while various women in the congregation jumped up to correct him. Mary says they’re good people and they mean well.
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On National Radio I heard some business luminary commenting lucidly on the economy: “The big driver going forward is the reverse of the one we had to start with.”

Seasonal Seizures

The clergy buffoons at St Matthew-in-the-City in central Auckland put up a large poster showing Joseph and Mary in bed, with a silly offensive caption. Of course it provoked an immediate reaction from all sorts, who then got sprayed with general abuse from the vicar, Glyn Cardy, and his offside, a dim and angry chap called Clay Nelson – people who objected to the poster, they announced, were narrow and humourless, and so on. Well, I am neither narrow nor humourless, but this poster was by any decent standards obnoxious, and it certainly wasn’t funny except to those many who think anything to do with sex must be entertaining.

Someone then obliterated the poster with brown paint. So the buffoons erected a copy of it, while informing us that these things cost $250 a pop, and the replacement got slashed with a knife by an elderly woman.

Thus the church goes about celebrating Advent and Christmas. Inspiring, is it not? Cardy and Nelson, silly gits, are still fighting battles most of us retired from ages ago when we grew up. St Matthew’s has long been a centre for gays and for what some see to be liberal attitudes and all that. So there are always people running around there with chips on both shoulders. A little while back someone started teaching in the Christian gay community that one of the tyrannies under which they suffered was the constraint always to be nice and polite. But Jesus wasn’t always nice...etc. So now we get some pretty angry stuff emerging.

The local Anglican bishop, who should have firmly and without fuss instructed Cardy to remove the poster, instead made some anaemic comment that he didn’t like it. News and publicity of Cardy’s crassness went around the world, and reactions flooded in from Canada to Costa Rica. Yet again we are made to look pathetic – but then, I guess, that is what we are. It’s only one step higher from being boring.

Meanwhile, the miracle of Advent and Christmas is being quietly passed along in other ways altogether, heart to heart, in love and beauty, in justice and peace, in understanding and forgiveness, in silence and stillness.

Atheism on the omnibus

Only one aspect of the “God probably doesn’t exist” promotion on buses actually bothers me. It is that Garth George might feel called to leap to the defence of God. Or worse, “Bishop” Brian Tamaki. (For those who don’t know these gents, Garth George is our resident Christian bigot who writes a weekly column in the NZ Herald; and Brian is a self-appointed and anointed bishop who requires his followers to support him even when he’s wrong, which is just as well because it is usually the case.)

The news since is that the local atheists who asked for $10,000 to put their slogan on buses have received a flood of donations. They can now do more buses than they thought, and have other slogans.

C’mon, punish the church, write a cheque... Get right up the nostrils of those sanctimonious hypocritical Christians. It’s also a little sad that their slogan is unoriginal, as though there were no creativity whatever among the godless. They copied it from the London buses.

Well, I saw the leading atheist on TV the other night, and he’s quite a decent bloke who needs to cheer up a bit. He didn’t seem fazed by the observation that he’s actually having a bob each way – “God probably doesn’t exist...” He thought that it was time the rationalists, humanists, agnostics, atheists, got their say, as though the boring monochrome old NZ Rationalist Society has not existed here for about a century already.

How come these atheists think they have some monopoly on reason and rational thought?

I agree with them, however. The god they say doesn’t exist, in my understanding isn’t there at all. Never was. Neither is the god of Garth George, sad old bloke. Garth’s god turns out to be spookily like Garth. I have my doubts too about the gods of Presbyterianism, Anglicanism and Catholicism – although they are so obscured by the churches that it’s difficult to be sure. I suspect that in biblical terms they’re idols.

Faith for me has simplified with age. About all that is meaningful to me is the picture of God that Jesus offers, Jesus the Jew, the person the New Testament calls the “icon of the invisible God”. So it’s just as well perhaps that I don’t have to preach sermons now. Faith and prayer for me are best expressed in silence and stillness, and simplicity. Certainly not chatter or dispute.

Fleeing the football

Today they announced that seats at Eden Park for the 2011 Rugby World Cup final start at $350, and the premium seats will be $1250. Apparently they are not making this up. About 25,000 seats total will be available for locals, by ballot. The other 35,000 seats in the park are all allocated to the International Rugby Board for sale around the world and for giving to their mates.

There are zealots here who will tell you instantly, day by day, if you ask, how many days are left before the NZ 2011 RWC begins. Don’t ask. We saw a clock in Christchurch Cathedral Square which exists for exactly that. Presumably it is going to remain there in the Square, counting down the days, hours and minutes, until the glorious apotheosis of Rugby Heaven.

Major public works are scheduled to be completed for the RWC, as though that were their entire raison d’être. A plan to integrate all fares and tickets on bus, rail and boat transport services in Greater Auckland must be ready, they demand, for the RWC. Presumably were it not for that incentive it would never get done.

It daily becomes clearer to me that the 2011 Rugby World Cup is something to be strenuously avoided. The game is of no interest to me whatever. Should it be?

Someone tried to tell me that, up here at Algies Bay, the tranquil waters of normal life will remain unruffled. Indeed he said, Algies Bay might be just the place to be. Like smoke it will. The highway from here to Auckland will be unpassable. TV, radio and the newspapers will be obsessed. Global warming will be speeded up. Thousands of drunken British rugby yobboes will descend on the land and spread their foulness everywhere. The police will be completely occupied elsewhere and burglaries and rapes will thrive.

That most execrable and objectionable of all the manifestations of Kiwi “culture”, the haka, will drive us all nuts.

So I am plotting to escape. Somewhere far away. Mary is not so sure.

Rodney Writes

The Rodney public libraries system has what it calls its annual Rodney Writes Writing Competition. I knew nothing about this until, behold, on the counter at our freshly renovated Mahurangi East branch, free copies of the 2009 prizewinning entries in a quite handsome little booklet.

Now one’s whole inclination is to lend solid support to our local efforts, both in writing and in publishing. It is really amazing after all that we actually have such a light and airy and helpful library branch at Snells Beach (Mahurangi East), with all the on line systems and pleasant staff. But, in fact, there are a few questions about the Rodney Writes Writing Competition.

The three judges are named, one for each of the three categories – Premier, Novice, and Young Writer – but the names mean nothing to me. Why not introduce the judges? I am sure they are excellent people, and probably well known among the potters and vignerons and pickle-makers at the Matakana Farmers Market. I needed to know something about their fitness to judge. And there are no judges’ comments. What did they think of the standard of entries? Why did they like the winning entries, because I didn’t.

This year participants had the choice to “write on any topic of your choice. You may write a short story up to 2,500 words about anything you wish! Write to inspire, provoke, excite or entice your reader. We encourage you to be creative in your thinking.” Well, in those terms it was something of a disaster, it seems to me. That was far too wide a brief. Why not ask for a short story, or a brief biography, or something that required some research? So much NZ writing, journalism, these days, somehow defaults to what happened to me one day and how I felt about it, sometimes artfully but not successfully disguised. Michelle Hewitson and Garth George in the NZ Herald are prime examples.

But enough about being critical…! My first encounter with public libraries was at the stylish brick Remuera Public Library in Auckland, which is there to this day. Behind it, and all of a piece, is the Remuera Library Hall – where I once, to my everlasting shame, featured in a Meadowbank Primary School concert as a Nigger Minstrel, my face blackened, and singing “Massa’s in de cold, cold grave”. I don’t recall ever giving my permission for any of that.

However, back in the library, as a barefoot 9-year-old, I discovered Arthur Ransome. Remuera Public Library had a Children’s Section, in which children who dared to appear were subject to constant surveillance, and required to Make No Noise. I knew how to become invisible – a skill of increasing value in subsequent years – and could hide myself there, on the floor at the back, and read Swallows And Amazons and many other amazing books.

Libraries are what liberated me. They had ideas and experiences which were not described, authorised or explained by my seniors. That is always why libraries matter. Of course, there were also librarians. I still fight with them sometimes. But, clearly, there is a new generation, dedicated to facilitating things for people. We are well served at Mahurangi East.

Logic rules...!

Long ago, in the never-to-return days, when you could enrol as a fresher at Auckland University without conniptions about whether this was the most advantageous career path, whether these were the correct subjects and courses to take me through to a distinguished and lucrative professional life among all the right people – back then before anyone invented vocational counsellors or advisors... counselling indeed was a curious science still in its infancy and scarcely heard of... (pause for breath...) Long ago, I say, before gaining entrance to popular courses and subjects required A-passes and successful interviews with deans, to say nothing of a guaranteed supply of parental money for fees, books, trips, living expenses... Way back then, a lot of us used to sign on for Philosophy I. It promised to be interesting, and it was. It had not been taught in secondary school – and in my experience at that time at Auckland Grammar, teachers pretty well incapable of teaching Maths or English, History or Chemistry, would have been incapable of Philosophy. Also, as an added attraction, Philosophy seemed to have nothing to do with anything practical.

So it was, back then, we encountered Professors W Anderson and W Anschutz, and Mr K B Pflaum. I did not know at the time that Pflaum in German means plum. All I remember about Pflaum in that first year is that he was very keen on Ludwig Wittgenstein, who then, and to this day, remains impenetrable and incomprehensible. In subsequent years Pflaum seemed reasonably lucid on Locke, Berkeley and Hume, as also about Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz. I didn’t take any of Anschutz’s courses.

The department also included Father Forsman, whom we rarely saw. He was the parish priest at Parnell, and he taught Aquinas. I heard him say at a departmental party that so long as he had his beloved Aquinas and a full wine cellar, he was content.

Now, pay attention... A lot of us gathered twice a week in Room 19 for Anderson’s lectures on Logic. This turned out to be surprisingly fascinating to me. Anderson in some ways was a silly old goat. At least twice he arrived for the lecture, academic gown and all, staggered on to the rostrum, saw that the side door had been left open and went to shut it, but instead left by the side door and we didn’t see him again until next time.

Logic meant Socratic Logic. Syllogisms, major and minor premises and conclusions, fallacies, undistributed middle... I imagine no one teaches it anywhere now. Whatever was the textbook we used – I still have it somewhere on my shelves – it should be required study for politicians and all media personnel. We learned what doesn’t follow. It does not follow that because Hone Harawira supports his iwi, he is a racist. We learned about ad hominem and non sequitur. We filled ourselves with syllogistic logic. Our exams were a joyous process of spotting fallacies and constructing elegant syllogisms.

By the time we had passed Philosophy I we were really sensitive about these things in the circumstances of public discourse. To this day it profoundly frustrates me that spokespersons and media personalities seem unable to see that some charge is logically stupid. The inability or refusal to see this seems to be behind most of the current inexcusable media beatups on issues and personalities. Old Willie Anderson actually alerted and sensitised us to What Doesn’t Follow, and it stuck. It’s this kind of thing that makes some politicians froth at the mouth about ivory tower academia. If you are not from the outset sold out to compromise and half-truths, you are uncomfortable to those who assume that “Paris is worth a mass”.

Democracy...?

Some clown is now organising a Citizens Initiated Referendum which would attempt to require the government to enact anything decided in a Citizens Initiated Referendum. These people are hugely frustrated because they think if a “majority” has spoken in a CIR (eg, recently, to satisfy the apparent need of some parents to hit children) the government then ought to have no option but to implement it. This is what these odd people call democracy, and they are frothing at the mouth because the government seems normally to ignore the results of CIRs. I never cease to give thanks that they do.

Heaven help us all when naive idealists ever get their way. New Zealand has a representative democracy. We have only to look to Fiji to see what happens if this ever gets set to one side. Representative democracy means that we regularly and in an orderly manner elect people to decide important matters on our behalf. If we don’t like the people elected, we seek to change our representatives at the right time. If we want them to decide things our way, we lobby them and try to persuade them. This system has very real weaknesses, and it is generally inadvisable to listen in on parliament and their behaviour – but some good work still gets done, it seems to me.

I would be inclined to cancel the right to CIRs, as the waste of time and money they inevitably are, and urge the government to pay more careful attention to serious petitions. If outfits such as Family First want the government to do something, they should persuade by the force of their argument and data. It seems to me so utterly typical of right-wing pharisees that they instead seek to legislate and coerce.

Winston Churchill once said something very clever but wise about how no one in their right mind would support representative democracy, until they have surveyed the alternatives. (My own faith in representative democracy is regularly shaken when it generates someone like Rodney Hide – whereas Hone Harawira seems to me a national treasure.)

Miscellany

Small things occur to me from time to time. I had not really noticed or used the word miscellany, until I read about the English 19th century lord, Marmaduke or somesuch, who maintained an entire subsidiary and substantial family of children born to his various mistresses – and that they were referred to in polite society as Marmaduke’s Miscellany.

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A NZ Herald reporter, telling us about the trashing of a $4 million Queenstown mansion by its tenants, writes that “the secluded property... overlooks Coronet Peak”. Yeah, right...

It reminded me of the deliberate gaffe in the song Wunderbar, in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate:

Gazing down on the Jungfrau
From our secret chalet for two,
Let us drink, Liebchen mein, in the moonlight benign,
To the joy of our dream come true.

Given that the Jungfrau is the highest mountain in Europe, it must be some chalet.

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Mary and I took the TransAlpine train from Christchurch to Greymouth, stayed there for a couple of days, and then returned the same way. It’s a grand journey, just over 4 hours each way through the plains and the alps. But what a third-rate typical Kiwi tourism disaster! The train has a buffet arrangement with the usual cardboard food items, and booze, but no dining facilities. I was impressed with the number of people who, faced with a few hours of sitting still and other forms of tedium, as it seemed to them, filled up the space with eating and drinking. Some people on the end of a meat pie are not a pretty sight.

The piped-in commentary along the way is “Kiwi Basic” – a series of silly stories and jokes read from a script. Much of this vernacular is clearly incomprehensible to American and Asian travellers. You get the same lame and tame jokes on the way back. No serious facts lucidly presented about the amazing geology of the landscape, or the forests or the flora and fauna. We were given some comment on the impressive engineering of the Otira Tunnel, but even that could have been done much better.

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I am ploughing through Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel, Wolf Hall – a story of Thomas Cromwell. It’s 650 pages of florid dialogue, most of it singularly unlikely. And the writer has such an irritating style... The pronoun “he”, it finally dawns on you, is always Thomas Cromwell, and yet the story really contrives to be told in the 1st person. Both Cromwell and Wolsey, whom I always regarded as more or less monsters, are depicted as kindly, avuncular religious devotees, passionately concerned for truth and the law, who just happen also to arrange disappearances, torture and executions. Henry is unconvincing. Cranmer... You ask yourself, if such people were fluent in several languages as well as Latin and Greek, to say nothing of mathematics, how come they lived like cavemen among each other? The greed, the paranoia, the cruelty. The women... And how come that man Cranmer ever got to produce the sublime Book of Common Prayer?

You know that when one of those Tudor blokes, habitually wading through mud and blood, disease and danger, and vast social inequities, actually complains about the smell of the privies that day, they must have been apocalyptically bad.

The path to Whisper Cove

Cynicism flowed a few years back when the Mahurangi locals learned of the proposed residential development at the north end of Snells Beach. It was to be large and very expensive. It was to be called Whisper Cove... Whisper Cove...? The name bore no relation to anything except money and marketing. Nobody welcomed the prospect of a surge of newcomers who would prefer to live their prawns, pinot noir and barbecue lifestyle safely apart from the rest of us, among their own kind. Part One of the development proceeded, with much landscaping and drainage, roading and planting, and then about 36 dwellings, jammed up together, all a monotone grey, each peering around the next for a share of the view of Kawau Bay. Nobody except the locals, certainly not the developers, ever mentioned that “Whisper Cove” like the rest of Snells is mainly tidal mudflat for half of each day. The promotional photos never showed the tide, just the distance and the sunsets. Perhaps that is the connotation of “whisper” in this instance.

Then came the Recession. Everything stopped, except the tides. Nobody wanted to buy the units that were by now built and furnished, and were standing there like Shelley’s dry ruins in the desert. The developers went rapidly broke. Local contractors were left unpaid. Weeds began to grow through the flaxes and hebes. The ducks, who had wisely never believed in any of it anyway, continued to thrive. The rabbits came back. One or two forlorn human occupants do appear on the decks from time to time, like survivors of some nuclear disaster, but most of the units are clearly unsold. Nothing ever seems to happen there. The developers owe $36 million to Westpac and $17 million to other investors; some $2 million is owed to contractors, and it seems unlikely they will get a cent. The units were originally offered for sale for between $850,000 and $2.6 million each.

If you go down to the seafront at the other end of Snells Beach there is a convenient car park and the start of a walkway which follows along the shore all the way to Whisper Cove. There and back is about a 40 minutes walk, and we do it frequently because that’s what Senior Cits do. I take a walking stick, not so much because I need it, as because I can use it if necessary to intimidate dogs. Dog owners with their intense attitudes and little plastic bags, and scant regard for the seasonal rules about letting your dog off its leash, abound, so to speak. They form a loose community of their own and stop across the path to swap canine veterinary information. What dogs do is excrete, it seems to me. The owners seem to find some aesthetic value in this.

We walk to the end, at Whisper Cove. There is a wooden fence, which clearly delineates private property – but you can sit on the fence for a while, contemplate Kawau and the bay, and the desolation that is Whisper Cove -- and draw strength for the return. It’s such a good routine. This morning I thought also about another sector of our district altogether, Omaha. Omaha differs in that it has had huge commercial success. Its upmarket homes are a hymn of praise to all these people think matters. But Omaha is built on a huge sand dune. A local builder told me there’s nothing there, mate. Come the Perfect Storm, it all goes. Come the perfect tsunami, Whisper Cove goes too. So in that they are brothers.

Personal Racism

We were expressing perhaps somewhat smug satisfaction recently that our offspring appear to be free of racial hang-ups. We had talked with old friends who, like us, have lived for some years in the South Pacific, and their kids too all seem to have linked up with, and fallen in love with, people of other races and cultures, and live around the world. Our children effortlessly played and went to school with Fijians, Indians, Samoans – indeed as part of a cultural minority where they were. They enjoyed the differences. They simply assumed the need to make personal adjustments. A safe monocultural club, society, suburb or street seems to them simply anaemic.

Former US President Jimmy Carter has just said bluntly that much of the antagonism to President Obama’s health reforms is plain racism. So many of Obama’s critics, he said, actually object to any Afro-American being President of the United States – that’s what bothers them. One of the many tragedies of our time, it seems to me, is the abyss that seems to run down the middle of US history, society and politics, including some of its awful versions of Christianity, separating people God actually made of one blood.

And from the major to the utterly minor: The NZ Geographic Board has ruled that NZ’s small city of W(h)anganui should be spelt in the Maori way, with the “h”, since it is a Maori word and might as well be correct. This led the somewhat manic mayor of W(h)anganui, Michael Laws, to publicly label the NZ Geographic Board as racist. What Mr Laws meant was that they had presumed to make a decision which favoured Maori. And that is precisely the kind of decision that seems to have power to keep many non-Maori New Zealanders awake at night. Once upon a time in NZ white folks made decisions, and the natives simply had to listen and obey.

Clifford Longley, writing in The Tablet about regulation of the media, says that Fox News is: “the blatant and unashamed example of what happens when broadcasting is insuffiently regulated. Some of the people who appear regularly on it in the United States, not just guests but anchor persons and presenters, are rabid, raucous, racist, partisan and bigoted, happy to stir up any kind of rabble-rousing nonsense such as the idea that Barack Obama isn’t really American but Kenyan and isn’t really Christian but Muslim”. And to be sure, on the few occasions I have dialled up Fox News on Sky it has seemed to me beyond belief.

I guess the roots of racism are about as complex as humanity. Many PhDs have been researched therein. But surely racism is a choice, for adults, even if millions of racists have never thought of it as such or would be incapable of understanding the implications of choice. You can choose to be otherwise. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine expresses gratitude to Jimmy Carter for having so publicly named and nailed the evil disease, because that is what we should always do. Racism is unnecessary and destructive, immoral, blasphemous, even in its so-called benign forms.

Antisemitism is ignorant and always intolerable. Racism based on colour, equally. Religious bigotry, and the now too familiar emanations from Islam and some sections of so-called Christianity... Social discriminations of all types... to realise how embedded this is in English society read the novels of Jane Austen, the writhings of many of her early 19th century characters to be sure they are inhabiting their correct social stratum (or that of their betters) and that others remain where God in his infinite wisdom has placed them.

The relentless paranoia of much of right-wing politics... I have lived long enough to cease trying to find excuses for these things. Our friends seem all now to have seen the new movie, The Young Victoria, which portrays Lord Melbourne as a kindly avuncular guy, precisely the kind of bloke a teenage queen might want as her Prime Minister. He was in fact a rancid and promiscuous old bigot who stubbornly resisted social change, and maintained the primacy of privilege. Just a little bit of that does emerge slightly in the movie.

I suppose I am suggesting that one of the principle tasks of maturity in today’s world is to be personally free of racism and of all tribal attitudes which tend that way. I am beyond making global claims, but I would think that this would be one of the best contributions anyone could make towards world peace. Simply refuse to have adversaries or enemies, anywhere. Don’t permit them that power over you. And if they are people who are seeking to eliminate you, well... it’s tough, sure, but still don’t make them enemies. Jesus was right about that.

No dogs on Aitutaki

There are no dogs on Aitutaki. It’s worth a mention, because the dogs on the parent island, Rarotonga, are endemic, mangy, flea-ridden, sullen, starved and generally obnoxious. They bark and howl at night, they range and prowl, they foul the ground. But on Aitutaki they are mercifully conspicuous by their absence. No one seems to know why there are no dogs. Some chief long ago banned them, perhaps. The island is therefore free also of dog owners.

Back on Rarotonga however, some woman called Esther Honey made provision for a charity veterinary service where dogs hit by vehicles can have a leg amputated. There are notices outside this clinic appealing for money to help the dogs.

Aitutaki is a long way from where you ever are normally. 50 minutes by Air Rarotonga, from Rarotonga. You fly over the featureless Pacific, and then, suddenly, below, there is this breathtakingly exquisite atoll with its huge turquoise lagoon, its islets and coconut palms. Some parts of the Cook Islands are even more remote – Penrhyn, Pukapuka, Palmerston...

We stayed at a resort with nice clean villas – but the dining area and bar were another story. The owner had begun with romantic visions of guests dining on the beach, which is always a bad idea. So the tables and chairs are all on the sand, and nothing is actually level or stable, or free of insects, birds, vermin and other people. The owner herself sits at the bar and gets steadily less coherent as the day goes by. You share your food with predatory minah birds, cats and crabs. You also share it with the resident deity (pictured), whose name is Tangaroa, and who needs some pants.

Downtown on Aitutaki things heat up somewhat. The Blue Nun Cafe is straight out of Graham Greene. It’s right on the waterfront, and you can imagine pirates and yachties lurching ashore to grab a beer and a woman. Any vestige of sophistication has long ago been abandoned. Minimalism rules. A Fijian woman with about 30% metabolism staffs the cafe during the day. Of course we asked her why she came to the Cook Islands. She said, for the job. Well, it’s fairly low on the ladder of human advancement, one might think. Perhaps it’s a stark commentary on the regime of silly Bainimarama, back in Fiji. This manager of the Blue Nun Cafe takes 20 minutes to make a black coffee. But we have it on good authority that, at night, the Blue Nun Cafe really rocks.

One does get weary of tourist rip-offs. The Rarotonga departure tax at the airport is $55 per person, to be paid in cash. If you want to drive a motor vehicle you have to line up at the central police station in two queues, one to pay $20 for a one-year licence (never mind that you want it for only 2 weeks), and the other to have your photo taken. All of this can occupy an hour or two. Most restaurants are seriously overpriced. The toilets anywhere else but at the major resorts range from marginal to sordid. And don’t buy black pearls at the Avarua Saturday market if you want to be sure of their provenance. It’s better not to ask about the government or about corruption or competence... Every time you drive around Rarotonga you pass the sad, derelict Hilton hotel complex, never finished, bankrupt, and it just about bankrupted the country.

But a day out on the lagoon in sunny weather is a very redemptive thing. We visited three islands on the reef – Maina, Moturakau, Tapuaetai.

Restraint of Speech

"There are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence. For all the more reason then should evil speech be curbed...[Rule of St Benedict]

One of the ironies of the contemplative life is that you can’t talk or write about silence, or for that matter about what St Benedict calls Restraint of Speech, without using words. Presumably the teacher gives the teaching and then, as it were, pulls the ladder up. Maintaining a blog is perhaps hard to reconcile with Restraint of Speech.

Chapter 6 of the Rule of St Benedict, like all the rest of it, was intended for the monastery situation, so oblates and others who do not live in a monastery have to adapt and interpret. Certainly, in a monastery, few things could be less edifying than raucous laughter echoing down the corridor (see 6:8). But Benedict goes on to condemn in all places any vulgarity and gossip – a somewhat forlorn hope, one would think.

His primary purpose is what he calls esteem for silence, and the Rule has some pretty strict instructions about silence in the monastery. Silence is the space where listening and response become possible, and in which the voracious ego is always going to find it hard to thrive. So most of our contemporary culture regards silence as an enemy. It is immediately uncomfortable and threatening. You have to fill it up with some kind of noise.

But I think we can interpret Benedict more intelligently than just a noise/silence option. Restraint of Speech, it seems to me, has implications in many directions. Oblate discipline inclines us to listen rather than to speak, in company – even when we may have something to say. The prevailing culture thinks it terrible to have some unexpressed thought. Radio talkback is perhaps the ultimate horror product of this. Benedictines on the other hand typically choose not to articulate what they may have thought. Just as well, sometimes. It may be partly a reaction to the mindless conversation that passes for communication in so many settings today – a stream of clichés and off-the-cuff opinions and declarations, often lubricated by alcohol or something else, which structures time and functions as a kind of verbal dance of social inclusion and acceptability. I recently heard a “panel discussion” of some topic on National Radio; three women all talked simultaneously, over the top of each other, for 15 minutes.

The content also of much contemporary communication appals me. Vulgarity, profanity, relentless sexual references, violent attitudes, thinly concealed racism, wilful ignorance – and that’s just in polite company -- all thrive these days, on TV and radio, in the stuff we read, in the conversations you hear. This is by no stretch of the imagination restraint of speech!

News reports thrive on over-worked words. Fantastic, incredible, iconic, awesome, unique, freaked-out... and I could add 100 others. And that horror of horrors, unbeknownst, a silly archaic past participle, unnecessary, embarrassing, simply trendy. We are losing respect for the language, and have long since lost sight of simplicity and accuracy of expression, what one of my former teachers called economy of words. Invite is not a noun. I personally. Right now. For free. From here on in. Closure. Sexy. Funky. O my God.

So I am a fan of Restraint of Speech. It’s a worthwhile discipline.

Three score years and fifteen

Yesterday Mary went to Stephen’s first birthday party, and came home laughing at the memory of five one-year-olds and their mums, and the impossibility of getting any kind of overall order for a photo. It should be easier with me. I was born 75 years ago today, at Devonport, and the tribal memory is that my father fled to the top of Mt Victoria to await the all clear. Typical. This evening we have a select dinner here with my sister Marilyn and her husband Lionel, and also David and Alison Grant, friends who live nearby at Algies Bay.

Mary is now fully retired – that is, from medicine – but she threatens to fill up the space with all manner of activism. Perhaps my role is to redress the balance around here. Anyway, I have too many books to read. They form orderly queues in my study. I simply don’t have time for ill health or deteriorating eyesight, or pointless activity, or anything that might render me unable to read and ponder what I want. Last week some time, when I was otherwise occupied, in a manner of speaking, there was a knock at the door downstairs... but no way was I going to rise up and rush downstairs to answer the door. Then on Sunday, Mary came home to report that a certain activistic old humbug at the church, who had made a previous attempt to visit me but had been headed off on that occasion by Mary and by Marilyn, had been the caller on this occasion. He was determined to invite me to a new Men’s Group. This group sounds totally toxic. The agenda for their inaugural meeting is fish and chips, a committee meeting, and indoor bowls. No women! What’s the point of that? No young people. Just all these old blokes. I would rather have teeth pulled. Mary and Marilyn are on the alert to protect me from this elderly zealot.

Last time I lent myself to anything like that was in 1963, in Whitehill, Lanarkshire, Scotland. There was a men’s group on Friday evenings at which they sat around a trestle table and played dominoes. It remains in my memory as an early prototype of hell. On the first evening I couldn’t understand much at all of their dialect, and rapidly discovered that there was no way they could cope with me there anyway – I simply hindered normal conversation among these locals – and I ceased going. It was that same evening that we learned of the assassination of John F Kennedy.

It is difficult for me to express how fortunate I am. Living here, looking out over the bay, granted this time of leisure and quiet and reasonable health, married to Mary since 1961, two wonderful sons and one lovely daughter, all happily married, five grand children... The disasters of the past gone with the dew and the mist. And this morning Mary gave me a handsome pure merino jersey and a warm shirt, and an autobiography by Barack Obama, all with a card which reminded me that I “deserve” her. You bet.

Blood and Urine

Warkworth is pretty well deserted at 8 am on a Monday, except for the queue outside the Diagnostic Medlab “collection centre”. They “collect” your specimens, and the report goes to your doctor. The queue this morning was considerable, all elderly gents when I arrived, standing outside in the frost awaiting whoever might arrive and open the place up. Each of us had thought we were smart to show up early. Each of us was wrong. The frosty morning was no help to those with prostate problems. Some if not most had been fasting, on instruction, and were wondering how long it would be before they got home to breakfast.

Others showed up. Some women, one arriving on her motorised module, whatever those things are called. The conversation outside in the cold was beyond belief. Opinions were traded, on everything from the government to the weather to the All Blacks to medical care these days to the state of the roads around Warkworth – and to a generally gloomy view of human prospects.

Botox is irrelevant in this company. Gravity had triumphed. So had the general failure of the education system. We crowded into the waiting room and sat there like some kind of human demolition yard. The neurones that were available were devoted to remembering where we thought we were in the queue. The wits among us made their excruciating comments, and laughed at their own witticisms. Others of us simply endured.

The waiting room was devoid of reading matter, and a notice stood on the counter to the effect that there was a yellow alert about Swine ‘Flu, and therefore we could not read the Woman’s Weekly because it could harbour bugs.

One by one we were called, to be taken into a cubicle, bled and in some cases equipped with some plastic gear and directed to the toilet.

This is pathology, to which my wife has dedicated her life for many years -- although she has always dealt more with soft tissue and bones, histo-pathology. Nevertheless, the pathologists’ reports will affect the lives of these people, in some cases deeply or terminally.

I actually don’t care, ultimately, what any of it says about me.

Setting Ego aside

I am trying to remember how it was I went to all the trouble to borrow Honor Moore: The Bishop’s Daughter. The local Rodney library system didn’t have it, so it had to be ordered on Interloan, which cost me $5.00. Honor Moore is the daughter of Paul Moore, who was the Episcopalian (Anglican) Bishop of New York. She is still locked in battle with her father, who died in 2003 – and also with her mother who died of colon cancer – and this book is a tedious tour around most of her major dysfunctions.

Both Paul Moore and his wife Jenny were products of privilege and great wealth. Paul served in the US Marines and came home a World War II hero, with a bullet hole right through his chest and out the back. It had my name on it, but I guess they must have spelled it wrong. Anglo-Catholic, tall and handsome, all the right connections... it was inevitable that Paul Moore would romp up the hierarchical ladder in the church. He also fathered some nine children with Jenny – and Honor, who writes this book, is the first.

Father Moore got stuck into innovative inner-city ministry, in Newark, in Indianapolis, in Washington, and New York. This is muscular theology, and Fr/Bishop Paul could certainly raise the funds. It’s all very admirable, but you know all the time that none of this tribe will ever lack for a dime. They can always retreat to their mountain pad in the Adirondacks. Mother Jenny was sliding seriously downhill... but hell! it’s a jungle out there. I’m sure I don’t know how you remain sane when the babies keep coming, and your husband is poncing around in medieval gear accompanied by choir and organ and acolytes. Honor, our writer, flees the family nest to live in New York as a poet, dramatist, and whatnot. So we have drugs, dedicated promiscuity, pregnancy and abortion, regular visits to the therapist... You do have to wonder about these Manhattan therapists.

Then it turns out that Paul the Bishop, all along, indeed right from his days in the Marines, has had another life as homosexual. Not bad when you’ve fathered nine kids. At this point, gathering together all my renowned willingness to understand and appreciate human difference, I start to struggle with the dependence of these people on image and narcissism, pills, therapy, sexual adventure, relentless combat with each other and with their massive cosseted highly expensive Egos. I suppose Honor’s written reflections on all this are lucid to her. They are largely incomprehensible to me. Get a life, is what I say.

Those years, the 1960s and 70s onwards, were when we discovered and carefully nurtured the Ego. I’m OK, You’re OK. Millions of westerners went looking for themselves. How I feel became the measure of everything. That is what this book depicts. It also depicts the sad, chronic juvenilism of people who have never grasped that Ego is what really has to go. Love and freedom tend to be in proportion to the receding of the voracious demanding Ego. Letting it go is a product of contemplative prayer. And what is left? The person God has always seen and known and loved.

Contemplative?

Someone – Karl Rahner? – wrote that the church of the future will be contemplative. Can’t see it myself, although I certainly agree that it should be. The church exists deeply immersed in the culture of individual success or failure narratives. People assume they are the authors of their own lives, for better or for worse. Everyone has an opinion, and listening is a rare commodity. Professional listeners now charge a fee. All of this, it seems to me, is the diametric opposite of contemplative spirituality.
That being the case, the church had better get used to being not regretfully but properly counter-cultural. The old word for that is prophetic -- confronting and challenging the principalities and powers and the prevailing culture. While as we know there are plenty of centres of authentic spirituality throughout the church and beyond, it is not clear to me that the church itself is changing in that direction. Power and status still matter and become the default positions in the local parish and the church’s wider and weightier counsels.
We have become so enchanted by our personal narratives – in the cult of competitive CVs, in the counselling industry, on TV, radio and in the print media... even narratives of failure, shame and disgrace carry their own value. Victims have narratives which can earn them recognition, status and money. The celebrity cult, all-pervasive to the point of nausea, is simply a solipsistic performance desperate for an audience. Michael Jackson, his ruined face, terminal drug addiction and his crazed devotees... his hideous funeral epitomised for me all that is sad, empty, lost.
The cupboard is bare. The grand narrative which said that you could succeed if you knew how, is everywhere discredited. The church has lost its way, since Jesus clearly taught otherwise than hierarchies, status, power and control. And somewhat terrifyingly, the new grand narrative seems to be apocalypse, environmental catastrophe. A recent letter to the editor of a newspaper informed us that the writer intends to hang on to his guns, even against the law, because “they will eventually be needed”.
This is why, for me at any rate, contemplative spirituality, Christian Meditation, the disciplines of St Benedict as an oblate, have come to be so meaningful. They are the only way I know, these days, to embody and live my original commitment, long ago, to the way of Christ.

My contribution to sport

Sport was compulsory at Auckland Grammar. You had to play one winter sport and one summer sport. I lined up for hockey with all the bad grace at my command – I was a 3^rd former, 12 years old, and it was 1947. As I recall, they had me standing out on the field clutching a hockey stick, not having the remotest idea what I was supposed to do, or which indeed was “our” goal. Indeed, I didn’t even know whom I was playing for or against. I didn’t care. People were shouting at me. Evidently there was some autonomic sense of what to do in sport which I did not possess. I was apparently a bloody waste of space.

But I knew clearly that this was not how I wished to live my life; it all seemed even then juvenile and pointless. So I walked off the paddock and never went back. Over four years at Auckland Grammar I became invisible and watched the sporting heroes paraded at school assembly to shine the light of their magnificence upon us.

Sport was not an agenda in our home. My father, when he condescended to live with us, did have some prior and mysterious knowledge of wrestling, and that was of some interest to us in the time of Lofty Blomfield and Earl McCready. So we sometimes attended the wrestling in the Auckland Town Hall with morbid fascination, and considerable schadenfreude when the evil guys got dumped from a great height. “They know how to fall” said my father. Well, one would hope so.

Life proceeded without sport, as I still think it should. I could never understand why so many of my contemporaries were so eager to spend weekends on cold windswept paddocks to no good purpose. I recall being slightly amused when my father, by this time with a son at St Kentigern College, evinced a hitherto unveiled expertise in Rugby football, in the sense that he now knew all about it, and followed the fortunes of the St Kentigern First XV so assiduously each week that they made him an Honorary Member, and gave him a certificate which he framed and hung on the wall. My amusement was enhanced when he informed me one day that I did not and could not understand Rugby. He was right, I thought, the physical and mystical features of Rugby Football entirely elude me.

The fact is, I have always been unmoved and underwhelmed by the pervading cult of team sport and team spirit, speed, strength, physical prowess. These days it seems to produce, as collateral damage I suppose, sustained inebriation and gross sexual misbehaviour and crime. This is constantly excused by aficionados as the kind of latitude we have to allow to adrenalin-ridden sports icons, popping hormones all over the show -- and our role is to “understand”. That’s crap. These guys need to grow up. They haven’t yet come to terms with their gonads.

Professional football in all codes seems to me increasingly revolting. The juvenile and aggressive gestures on the field whenever someone achieves something, the often thinly-concealed racism, the tacit approval of violence and cheating against the rules... but then, as my father pointed out, I don’t understand any of this; it is somehow veiled from me. The exception, it seems to me, is netball, which appears to retain principles and is entertaining to watch.

Motor sport, on the other hand, is beyond belief. Noisy, polluting, wasteful of resources, hugely expensive, dangerous, pandering to everything less than admirable in human nature... Stock cars, drag racing, V8 stuff... It was a happy day for me when Auckland proved unable or unwilling to accommodate the international motor sport event which would have shut down part of the central city for about 3 weeks, and it went to Hamilton, which deserves it.

So I am counter-cultural. Isn’t that good! I have had a sports-free lifetime since I walked off the hockey field, and thus have achieved so much more in wideness and depth.

I'm as well as can be expected, given the state I'm in...

Personal health issues are usually boring, it seems to me. Mary says I am a compliant patient. Well, I long ago discovered that it suits me to be that, and gets better results. I subscribe to the weekly Mayo Clinic email newsletter, because they are supremely competent and professional. I have learned to be understanding of other people's pain, arthritis, loss of neurones, lack of eyesight or hearing... But I also refuse to cruise around the supermarket leaning on the trolley, or walking around with my mouth open.

Our GP back in Auckland was part of a practice right on the frontiers of every major social health issue. He paid us the courtesy of leaving it entirely to us whether we showed up to see him or not, he respected whatever intelligence we have. Now we have had to sign up with a new practice here in Algies Bay / Snells Beach / Warkworth area. I have yet actually to meet the doctor I am supposed to be with. I met the locum, and I met the practice nurse, the receptionists, another doctor who has left... But they have sent me a notice informing me that I am part of a programme about diabetes, with things to do including a set of tests. And I have to show up also for a medical check before I can get my new driver's licence, since my 75th birthday comes in August. I suspect, in this practice, it may be a fight to get past the practice nurse, but we'll see.

But there we are, discussing health issues, a prevalent form of egoism. It's not as though any of it matters ultimately. It would be good to be without pain and suffering until one's last breath, but that's unlikely -- and is itself, I guess, a form of egoism. Mary sometimes says, "Stay away from doctors, especially surgeons." Well, it's a fine aim. I'm trying, I'm trying...

The best thing is to have found a way to confront one's own mortality and actual death, and to know its sting is drawn. That's the road down which freedom lies.

David Bain

Once upon a time, a man I had never met showed up, asked if he could talk with me confidentially, and proceeded to confess to a murder. I did everything I could to get him to take his confession to the police. There was no way he would do that. So he was left with whatever solace comes from confession to a minister who could by no means offer absolution -- and I was left with knowledge of the identity of a murderer. The police never did resolve the matter.

It impresses me that only David Bain knows who murdered his mother Margaret, father Robin, sisters Laniet and Arawa, and brother Stephen -- five people. If Robin did it, that's four murders and one suicide. If David did it, it's five murders. Forensic evidence shoots either way, and could be argued ad infinitum. That has been abundantly shown in two major trials and an appeal hearing to the Privy Council. David himself presents as gentle and gentlemanly, open to hurt, braving the media, saying only positive things, entirely likeable. It is extremely difficult to see him in the role the prosecution wanted. He has said repeatedly he is innocent. Logic would believe him.

But of course just about everyone in NZ has an opinion.

I don't care. The Bain family was spectacularly dysfunctional, including psychopathological religion, and had become precisely the kind of environment in which something utterly dreadful could happen. And so it did. David survived from all that psychopathology, and he actually seems, even after some 13 years in prison, and much sustained harassment from the legal scene, to be reasonably intact. That's what matters.

The Solemn Feast of Queen's Birthday

One of the features of decrepency and retirement is that everyone else knows that next weekend is a long weekend because of Queen's Birthday, but you didn't know until it became apparent in the circumstances of life. Once upon a time, you knew it weeks ahead, and planned for it.

So we had Rachel and Simon and little Stephen (10 months) come up for dinner on Saturday, and Rachel and Stephen stayed over till Monday, and went back to Auckland with Mary. It was all lovely. Stephen is the most rewarding little kid, responsive, etc, etc... Both Simon and Mary subscribe to the NZ Taste magazine, actually quite good about menus and recipes -- but it means that Mary competes with Simon, in the gentlest possible ways of course. So we tend to get quite nice food.

It was Pentecost Sunday, and the locals were invited to show up wearing red for Pentecost. This amuses the local believers and advances the faith. Stephen utterly refuses to wear his knitted red beany, so that's a dead loss. Etc, etc... this is the local church from which I am emancipated.

But now they have all gone back to Auckland. All I have left to do is get the washing dry, and bring it in. I am alone..! Oh dear, how sad, never mind... I can live happily in both worlds.

And in my solitude world...? Well, that is my hermit existence. Except that tomorrow I feel committed to set off for Hamilton, to visit my mother's remaining half-sisters, Tui and Patsy, in Te Awamutu, and also Helen Oliver. Helen and Jack Oliver, Jack now died, are very old friends.

I don't want to venture from here. But this one I ought to do.

Pentecost passed without inspiration, except that I keep the faith.

I / We apologise -- Yeah, right...

A genuine apology means not merely that I feel sorry. It means that I know that my part in what happened was wrong, and that I have determined that it won't happen again. At a deeper level it means that I have had a change of heart -- I inwardly reject whatever it was that caused me to do/say that thing. Apology means that I have accepted my personal responsibility for what happened, I acknowledge that it was wrong and should not have happened, and that so far as it lies with me it will not happen again.

So real apology lies much more in the will than in how I say I feel. How I feel, even if I feel devastated, is not the issue.

In recent times we have a curious phenomenon. People are apologising all over the place. It has become trendy. Or it has become for some an exercise in damage limitation. Prime Ministers, Presidents, Popes and Bishops, are having to apologise. Others who see themselves as Victims are, often self-righteously, requiring apologies. Apologies are alleged to help towards something called Closure. I don't know what Closure is, and I suspect no one else is sure about it either. In some cases it seems to entail some implied permission to go ahead with a funeral, or to get on with life, as though these things were not possible before.

Media call it the "sorry word", which, as often as not, they say they're not hearing. But when we do hear the Sorry word -- from some celebrity typically, some sporting icon after the latest gang sex episode, or some commercial tycoon who caught his fingers in the till -- we tend to say Yeah, right. It is as though the secular world has really no pathway for healing and restoration, no redemption except for some pathetic ritual apology routine, which is about as empty and hypocritical as anything they criticise in religion.

But I think real apology is just as important and moving as it may be rare. I also think its currency has got drastically devalued in both secular society and the church, in these times.

If all you want is your oppressor to say he is sorry, publicly and humiliatingly, and then you will feel better, and perhaps put it all behind you (another cliche) -- well that's OK, and sometimes it can even be arranged. Then everyone is at liberty to say whether they think the apology is sincere (as though they have any way of knowing). Always there will be some who are satisfied with the expressed apology, and others, possibly many more, who are not.

Perhaps now political and church leaders should cease issuing apologies, for just this reason. For a real sincere apology to be given and then questioned, or rejected, is insulting, doubly humiliating, and perhaps destroying. But to issue merely formal apologies is also insulting, in other ways.

On a more personal level, if you wish your oppressor to confess sorrow and amendment of life, that is quite another matter. That is what the Bible calls metanoia, change of heart and mind and will, a turning around, a new heart and a new start. It is what is meant by repentance.

I don't think secular culture has any way of doing this. So real apology is rare, although ritual apologies are surprisingly common. On the other side of metanoia is not merely peace and resolution of past issues, but also a new life and resolve.

Local culture

This is Sunday (evening), 24 May -- and we have just phoned Rhys in Brisbane to wish him happy birthday.

Mary and I got ourselves to a rather remarkable concert in Warkworth, this afternoon, in the historic old Anglican church. They have a very versatile and well-installed electronic organ. Some people get sniffy about these things -- they prefer a genuine pipe organ, they say. Well, no doubt, but the modern electronic (digital...?) instruments are respectable and useful instruments in their own right, it seems to me. They are affordable by smaller churches. We had one in St Peter's, Mt Wellington, and it was actually better for our purposes than a pipe organ. It is 1000 times better than a couple of badly-played guitars, a piano, and some compulsive enthusiast with a trumpet. Or drums.

On this occasion we had the Auckland City Organist, Dr John Wells, who lectures at the university, composes preludes and fugues and other stuff, and is recording an organ version of Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues. He's talented and very pleasant and witty. So he gave us a programme called The Well-Tempered Afternoon, and it consisted of some J S Bach, some Handel, some Mendelssohn and Vivaldi -- and some John Wells. His own works were played on the parish's fairly ancient piano, and he managed to break the ivory off one of the keys in the process. All good fun. All of this for $20.00. Who needs to travel in to Auckland for culture...

He did explain why Bach called his composition The Well-Tempered Clavier. It all has to do with tuning for different key signatures, and how the modern piano is really a compromise that can be played in any key. In Bach's day the keyboard instruments were tuned only for certain key signatures. And in German, Bach's title means "The Well-Tuned Piano".

So, we enjoyed ourselves. All the music was lyrical, tuneful... And was soothing, since I had just found a flat tyre on my car (which had only just had a new set of tyres fitted), and we had had to come in Mary's car.

The abuse of children

A very high-powered commission in Ireland has produced a massive report on the abuse of children in Catholic institutions in the mid-20th century. It's monstrous. On the web, the .pdf files are huge. And sickening. Needy and helpless children knew nothing other than sustained torture, beatings and floggings, sexual assault, injustice and exploitation, fear and suffering, through their childhood and adolescent years -- at the hands of professing and vowed christian servants in orders such as the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy...(Mercy...heaven help us all...)

And that's just Ireland. This is not ancient history. The recipients of this christian service, many of them, are with us today. Many of them remain crippled and consumed with anger.

This is the shadow side of catholicism -- of importance to me, because I am a Benedictine Oblate, and therefore somehow committed to catholicism. I have always known that, wherever you are in the christian outfit you have to take the rough with the smooth, the ugly and the botoxed with the beautiful, the sinners with the saints. You have to buy the whole rotten field because it is there that the treasure is buried...

But this is unthinkable. To over-work a verb, I think Jesus also thought this.. Whoever harms one of these little ones, it were better for that person that a millstone were hung round his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea. (Anyway, see Matthew 18:6, and Luke 17:2).

Someone on radio this morning pointed out that, at that time, plenty of people entered these religious orders, not because they wanted to, or had any sort of christian calling, but because of family pressure, social deprivation, total lack of prospects. These people became professed Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy -- to say nothing of other orders. The children referred to these institutions encountered teachers, supervisors, whatever, who had actually no vocation, no hope, whatever. Ye gods.

And I want to write something, perhaps another day, about apology and apologies, and how the whole currency of real contrition has got devalued... Another day.

But meanwhile, the children. Children have an absolute moral claim on adult care. It's not negotiable. The Irish children, and others around the world, are an ineradicable blot on the conscience of a great many christians, most of whom had nothing to do with it personally.

The old boys gather and blather

Some rich company today. Peter Wedde came up from Auckland and brought Graeme Ferguson -- these were my contemporaries at both Auckland and Otago Universities, and at Knox College. Long ago. All our marriages have survived, and between us we have seen and experienced quite a lot. Peter and Graeme still do things in the church, while I don't. We enjoy each other's company, and I suppose each of us thinks the others have mellowed, and that "they" needed to.

So we had lunch together. I made some rather fine pea and bacon soup, and some bread -- and Mary left some chocolate and apricot squares for us. We talked. I'm interested to note that none of it was bitter or recriminative, or regretful. It is as though we have made peace with life and unanswered questions and unresolved issues. Graeme battles on with the effects of his big stroke some years ago, but he sat at the table and one-handedly buttered and cut his own bread, and dealt with his soup. Of course we traversed theology and politics, and the state of the church from where we are. They loved the situation here, the view, the quiet.

These are people who embody the gentle, scholarly, sensitive and liberal company of Christ. Our wounds and scars show, I guess. We have long ago relinquished any need for dogmatism or control. We have ministered everywhere from Scotland to Papua New Guinea, from Cambridge UK to Australia, to Kiwiland, in parishes and theological college. Mary was sorry she could not be present, but maybe soon we'll organise another such luncheon here, with spouses.

Day at home

Mary is at work, which means at Middlemore Hospital. It means she has to live in an apartment the hospital has provided for her in central Auckland, and take the train from there each day -- Tuesday to Thursday. I see her in the weekends.

I had to get blood tests, urine tests. It meant having no breakfast, driving to Warkworth, joining the queue of fasting supplicants hanging around there, and getting my doctor's form in at a reasonable time of waiting. I await results. Went to the doctor yesterday -- well, to the locum for the bloke who will probably be my doctor now -- and she, a very laid back lady, seemed merely to be amused at everything. That's fine with me. They'll phone me if there is anything untoward.

So tomorrow I have a visit from maybe three old colleagues in the Presbyterian Church, which I have departed. So they are good and loyal old friends, and I will entertain them with pea and bacon soup, and fresh bread that I have made.

Update

This is 18.05.2009. I went to set up a blog, and discovered I already had two from way back some time. It was interesting to read them and see how I have moved on in that time. Blogs are by their nature egocentric, and that is what I am trying not to be. But you can't write a blog without the use of the first person singular pronoun. And that's an irony, because I have just been fulminating about what the NZ Herald currently calls journalism -- which so often consists in columnists interviewing themselves, one way or another, about some apparently newsworthy person.

How do you feel about...? It's the standard interviewer question, and often it's astoundingly banal and inappropriate. It assumes that how someone feels about someone or something is news. Typically people these days haven't the remotest idea about facts and circumstances, subtleties and history, but they sure know how they feel. So egocentrism rules.

My wife Mary and I are now living at Algies Bay, which is about an hour's drive north of Auckland. You go to Warkworth, a lovely town but steadily now being ruined by "development", and then about 11 km out to the coast, via Snells Beach. We bought this property back in 1981, after we came back from Fiji. It was to be out retirement home, and in the meantime a holiday place. About 3 years later the estranged husband of a tenant burned it down. So we built this house, with a little self-contained flat downstairs for our holidays, but tenanted upstairs. Now it's all ours, completely renovated -- and we look out over Kawau Bay and watch the changing light and clouds and boats and weather effects. It's all lovely. We are growing feijoas and guavas, apples and plums, and during the renovations we got a raised vegetable garden built, which Mary has now planted in useful things.

But Mary had decided to do a 3 months locum back in her old workplace, Middlemore Hospital. So until July she is heading back to Auckland on Mondays, giving our daughter Rachel a few hours with our lovely grandson Stephen David Ross, and then on to the apartment the hospital is providing for her in central Auckland. From there she can take the train to Middlemore and back on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, and then drive back here on Fridays, again via Rachel, Simon and Stephen. I think it's working well, but I'll be glad when the 3 months are up.

I resist various attempts to enlist me in this and that worthy local community thing. Despite this blog, I actually prefer my privacy -- especially from the church, right now.