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.