Pike River

Whatever else the Pike River mine calamity is, it has become a relentless study in social grief -- in the management, I suppose we have to say now, of sustained sorrow, anger, blame, anxiety, hope, devastation, distrust, frustration... Once upon a time, most of that was decently veiled. If it wasn’t, everyone was embarrassed. People got on with themselves and their loss, and the blokes with jobs to do got on with them. But now... ye gods. On and on it goes.

The mine blew on Friday 19 November. Lots of people in a position to know knew right then that there was little hope the 29 miners could have survived that blast. But the talk was all of hope and rescue. The mine was far too dangerous to allow anyone in, so we had the gung ho miners’ mates and others poised to rush in there and pull out their mates (mateship is everything, with its own codes and assumptions). Solid blokes were quite ready to risk the dangers -- “It’s what they would have done for us, without question”. But the police and the mine management said a firm no, not until we know the mine is safe.

When the mine blew again on the Wednesday next, the families had to be told that there was now no realistic hope of survivors. Many of them reacted with fury. Since then, with successive explosions and indications that coal itself has ignited along with gas, it seems clear that whatever remained of human tissue may well have disappeared or become unrecoverable.

Yet we still have the Mayor of Greymouth and others talking about bringing home their husbands, sons, brothers and lovers. They are now waiting for technology to seal off the mine and flood it with inert gas to extinguish the fires. Then, they evidently expect, the bodies of their loved ones can be returned to them.

The hero in all this has been the CEO of the Pike River mine, Peter Whittall. Caring, steady, competent, calm, professional as he is, he seems to me an exceptional person. Day and night he has fronted up, not only to the media with all their humbug, but to the miners’ families in their grief and anger, all along supervising the tasks needing to be done to secure and stabilise the mine. Today the Prime Minister is saying it may all now take a long time, and the new Royal Commission may take a year to report. We are hearing that bodies may not now be recovered, and that nobody can say when the mine can be open and working again.

Some things are a mystery to me. Something called “Closure” seems to have become one of the necessaries of life. You can’t have closure if you don’t have the body back. And this in a land which has endured the losses of two world wars in which many thousands of bodies had, in the euphemism, no known grave. In other words, they were blown to bits.

I don’t know what closure is. For some it seems to be when the courts have dished out what they consider to be adequate punishment to an offender. Ever since someone, I think back in the 1960s, identified what came to be called the Grief Process, we have this set of assumptions that following a loss of any kind you must do Grief Work. If you don’t, you might be the worse for it. You hear people say you must have this or that happen so that you can begin grieving properly. Huh...?

Human reaction to shock, grief and loss is infinitely varied. Maybe you never get over it. Maybe what happens is that the wounds gradually lose their pain and begin to scar over, and you continue permanently different from before. People moreover are entitled to their own private world of reaction and response. I can assure you, the last person I would have wanted in any of my griefs and losses would have been some counsellor with a Victim Support label, with a set of whatever he/she has learned at seminars.

So none of this seems to me to be helped by the Victim Cult or Victim Support. The societal reflex now is that if anyone has got hurt or suffered loss, or has been abused, or is in a group such as a school where someone has got killed, you must lay on counselling -- whether it is wanted, needed, or remotely appropriate. A phalanx of Victim Support counsellors was flown in to Greymouth as soon as the news of the first explosion was heard. Well, I had better confess that I am not a huge fan of the counselling industry, despite having been a trained and registered Marriage Counsellor in a previous life.

Who wants to be a Victim? One of the wisest apothegms of the secular society is just two words, Shit Happens. The task is not to become a Victim of grief or loss, but to get going again, to make peace with the fact that we are all fragile and mortal. Mystics know that one of the central signs of maturity is having made peace with one’s own fragility, sinfulness and mortality. Laugh at death. It’s going to happen anyway. Both life and death are part of God’s good creation. Pain is not an enemy, it’s merely painful. The way to peace is likely to be through the middle of pain, not trying to find some way of avoidance.

I have found it difficult to think about the churches in Greymouth and environs. No doubt the pastors have been working day and night to sit with people to comfort and strengthen. I have done that myself, often. It’s when they talk about it that one starts to shrivel up. One woman asked us all to pray that the bodies would be recovered. Did this woman imagine that if more people prayed, it became more likely? Oh dear... think lady, think. When will the church ever get over this superstition that you can ask God for things you wouldn’t otherwise get? I was personally unable to build a life of prayer until I abandoned the church’s relentless superstitions of some god who can be cajoled around.

If we are to have a secular society -- and I certainly would not advise any society based on the contemporary church! -- then it might be able to stay in touch with reality. Reality says that underground mining has always been dangerous. People have always got killed. Mine inspectors, improvements to the mines, have probably saved lives, but people still die. If you want to be safe from death, you’re out of luck, but it would be smart advice not to become a coal miner. When death happens, and it will, the task for the survivors is to honour the dead by getting up and getting going. When shit happens, get over it. Life is unfair and pain is inequitably handed out. Get over it.

Today the CEO apparently wants to stop any hope that there could be still someone somewhere down there tapping on a pipe. It's a sad image, so sad.

For me, God is all, the focus of meaning and life, the difference between light and darkness, the sufferer in our suffering, the bringer of life.

Lies and Self-Deceptions

Meredith Maran is an American feminist writer who eventually decided in middle age that her father had not sexually abused her in her childhood after all. But by that time her allegation had wreaked all manner of silliness, sorrow and alienation. She had severed relationships between her two sons and their grandfather, to say nothing of her own bond with her father, for some eight years. She had devastated other family relationships in the process. Her own marriage had fallen apart, and then her first lesbian partnership... That happened because the lesbian partner saw herself as another horribly abused female, and to throw doubt on any of this was to commit treason against the Cause.

But by the time Maran makes up her mind whether she was abused or not, a good bit of the damage she has done is beyond repair, and her father is developing Alzheimers. It’s difficult to know whether he understands her apologies.

This was all in the 70s, 80s, 90s... when else? Hysteria about sexual abuse of children spread across the USA and far beyond. Then it got flavoured with allegations of satanic abuse and much atrocity. Parents everywhere, but especially mothers, went on red alert, imagining and fantasising, listing “symptoms”, having meetings, writing and reading books by women, looming over their children’s every thought and action, prying and prognosticating... Much of this is now concealed behind a veil of embarrassment.

Kindergartens and other places where children were supposed to be cared for came under the scrutiny of the abuse warriors. New Zealand’s classic example is scrupulously documented in Lynley Hood’s book, “A City Possessed”. The city was Christchurch. A kind of Salem-madness swept the place, and the lives of good people were destroyed.

As a minister through that time, I had several instances in which distraught adults came to say that son or daughter had generated recovered memories of sexual abuse against a parent, teacher, minister. These emerging memories assumed, one way or another, that other surrounding adults are all stupid, blind, or complicit; that dreams and fantasies and various symptoms amount to fact; that known and respected people are crypto-abusers and criminals; that males are constantly needing and seeking sexual release...

The sexual abuse of children does happen of course, and is inexcusable. See http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/2010_10_01_archive.html But the hysteria of the 80s was also itself destructive, the mad and militant feminists who decided all men were a danger, the fantasies of recovered memory and satanic rites. This silly and strident thing eventually subsided, like a collapsing hot-air balloon, as did the witch hunts of old and the McCarthy paranoia of the 50s, under the weight of its own manifest untruth.

You have to wonder now how many Catholic priests and others have been destroyed by recovered memories that are actually fantasy. I accept of course that much abuse has occurred.

In NZ this kind of allegation was dangerous enough, heaven knows, but in the USA... ye gods. It seems that the whole population of the Land of the Free, committed to the Pursuit of Happiness, is into “therapy”. The “counselling” industry grew to monstrous proportions. “Therapists” specialised in “Recovered Memory”, now largely debunked. I had a friend who used to be a nun in the USA, but who left to get a PhD so that she could become a therapist.

Maran writes about being constantly in therapy -- personal therapy on Monday, special therapy to prop up her new lesbian relationship on Tuesday, Wednesday free perhaps, Abuse Survivors’ group therapy on Thursday. And then, when she decides she is diving into insomnia, it’s off to some psychiatrist to pick up a prescription for Halcion. And in the American urban culture none of that is abnormal. It’s a kind of addiction.

One mystery: How do they afford it? Like, how do the characters on Coronation Street afford the amount of boozing they do in the Rover’s Return? US$80 an hour seems to have been the going rate in San Jose in 1990 for a caring therapist.

Ego is the key here. I would think that the chief assumption of the normal secular culture, and certainly of the counselling industry, is that Ego Rules. The main task is to find and free up Yourself. Putting Self aside would be a total No-No, incomprehensible. Exercises and rituals and disciplines are all to release and expand the Self, to recover the Ego.

But the teaching of contemplatives is precisely otherwise. You receive, not give. You lay the voracious, demanding Ego on the altar. You are the person God sees, not the one you want constantly to protect, feed and enhance. Happiness is not the goal.

Meredith Maran: My Lie [Jossey-Bass, 2010]

Worship as stunt

Reluctantly, I have withdrawn this blog about worship. Some good and well-meaning people were offended by it. While I am very much in favour of candour and strong debate, it is not my vocation to cause pain. (Ross)

Amazing Grace

One of the memorable features of the 2006 movie Amazing Grace, it seems to me, is Albert Finney’s portrayal of the English Evangelical John Newton -- hymn writer, former slave trader, now Rector of St Mary Woolnoth in the City of London. The great emancipist William Wilberforce attended this church, and it was Newton who encouraged him through all the years it took to get a Slave Trade Bill through the British Parliament.

Newton appears in the movie in rags and bare feet, with bucket and wet-mop, swabbing the stone floor of his church (the cleaning metaphor is powerful) and preaching high Evangelicalism to his friend Wilberforce. A pivotal element of the Evangelical take on Christian faith is Freedom, and Newton expounded Freedom for slaves. It was, to me, strangely and very moving. Newton appears as a permanent penitent. Yet, the kind of penitent who knows he is forgiven, and overflows with gratitude and wonder -- not the neurotic kind, never quite sure, still anxious, needing reassurance. The inscription on Newton’s gravestone says it all:

JOHN NEWTON, Clerk
ONCE AN INFIDEL AND LIBERTINE
A SERVANT OF SLAVES IN AFRICA WAS
BY THE RICH MERCY OF
OUR LORD AND SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST
PRESERVED, RESTORED, PARDONED
AND APPOINTED TO PREACH THE FAITH HE
HAD LONG LABOURED TO DESTROY.
NEAR 16 YEARS AS CURATE OF THIS PARISH
AND 28 YEARS AS RECTOR OF ST MARY WOOLNOTH.

Newton is the writer who gave us the hymn “Amazing Grace” with its rich imagery -- and it has been a mystery to me ever since why this hymn, in this so-called secular and unreligious culture, is demanded at weddings, funerals, and just about any occasion on which people think they had better include something thoughtful. One gets so sick of it. It gets sung at powhiri when people can think of nothing else to sing -- never mind that they don’t know it past the first two lines. The sheer incongruity of some of these people blindly singing, “I once was blind but now I see... that saved a wretch like me...” renders me unable either to laugh or cry. Do they understand nothing? (Yes.) Is it the waltz time of this music that gets them? What is it? Is it the echo of bagpipes in the distance?

John Newton gave us “Jesus thou joy of loving hearts”, an altogether warmer and lovelier song. He wrote: If I ever reach heaven I expect to find three wonders there: first, to meet some I had not thought to see there; second, to miss some I had expected to see here; and third, the greatest wonder of all, to find myself there.

Any kind of Evangelical religion these days runs the gauntlet of hypocrisy and derision. So many of its leaders have been caught out morally. And that is indeed a weakness of the Evangelical spirit, the proneness to consider oneself an exception in moral terms. But now our worldly consumer culture expects nothing good of anyone who makes Evangelical professions. It assumes hypocrisy, naivety, zealotry, madness. The secular culture now typically spits contempt at serious heartfelt faith in Jesus.

But Protestant Evangelicalism is a large part of my earlier inheritance and formation. It came under serious attack from the disciplines of biblical criticism, various forms of theology and philosophy, and later the postmodernists. Ministers and teachers began to get nervous about certainties, about the status of the bible, about the psychological implications of conversion, about appearing different... nervous about everything really. Especially about sin, guilt and forgiveness, a real no-no. That was when I knew we were seriously off track. I have yet to discover that these sad people have anything to say to the realities of secularism. They don’t.

It was Hymns For Sunday Morning, really... Just after 7 am. For 30 minutes we get some of these hymns many ministers won’t have any more because of their Evangelical Certainties -- along with some of the banalities that pass for contemporary hymody such as “An Upside Down Christmas”, or horror of all horrors, “Te Harinui”. (There are a few good ones. “Lord of the Dance” is not one of them.) I started to listen again to some of those hymns of my youth, when we stood up and found melody to praise God for love and pardon and a faith to live by. They’re not too bad. They express real things. Their myths and metaphors can easily be taken as just that -- they tell a real story of love and pardon.

The practice of contemplative prayer, day by day, sparse and unadorned prayer, mainly just sitting still and mentally still, seems to have done what the Dalai Lama said it might -- make of a Christian a better Christian believer. These days I understand John Newton much better than I ever understood Spong or Geering. Interesting, that.

A broken Scottish heart...?

My paternal grandparents, Matthew and Leonora Miller. The old grainy black and white photo showed up here at some stage. I have no knowledge of its provenance, but I got to thinking about it. These are the paternal grandparents also of Joan Bell, my sisters Marilyn and Barbara, my brothers Morris and Duncan, and our late cousin David Miller.

It is a wonderful photo, full of life and humour. The old battered woolen suit, long since conformed to the particular human configuration, and long since past any ironing. It is comfortable. I understand that. The clerical collar and black bib are pristine, because that is the badge of office. Otherwise the trousers hang ready for sitting, the abdomen is comfortably advanced. The smile on Matthew Miller is perhaps the best smile the Millers have ever produced. Below, almost out of sight, there were serviceable and sensible boots.

Leonora is not quite so generous with her smile. Is she in her Good Dress, normally worn on Sundays? I think not. It looks to me like a working dress. What is the apparent white dressing that comes down her right arm to beyond her top knuckles? A plaster? Did she break her arm? (If you click on the photo you may get a larger version of it.)

Where was this photo taken? They emigrated to New Zealand in November 1921, because (goes the family story) some Scottish doctor had told my grandmother that a new climate would cure her asthma. It didn’t. But also, the NZ Presbyterian Church at that time had sent some bloke to Scotland to recruit likely Scottish ministers to uproot and come out to the Colony to make a new life. I think Leonora persuaded Matthew that they should emigrate. By that time they had Lex (13), Tom (my father, 11), and Len (called Spud, 2).

It would have been a huge wrench. Matthew Miller had been minister of his parish, Stevenston, Ayrshire, already for some 20 years. Scottish ministers were bound to their parishes by ties of love and vows and commitment. In many instances it was assumed to be a life-long commitment, like marriage. When Mary and I visited that church in 1964, some 43 years later, it was still known locally as Miller's Kirk. We walked into the church one day in the middle of the week, a woman was there cleaning and polishing, she looked up at us and said, "You'll be Tom Miller's son."

Matthew must have been powerfully persuaded by Leonora, and by the lure of evangelical service in far lands, in those theologically simpler days. They may have decided that the prospects for their sons were bleak in Scotland, given the social realities and the scant income of a parish minister. For all the innate conservatism of many Scots, Scots have also been hugely adventurous.

There is some evidence that Matthew expected to arrive to a significant city parish in Dunedin or somewhere similar, and had been led to false expectations by the NZ church before they left Scotland. On arrival, he was sent to Dargaville. Let me tell you where Dargaville is. It is at the end of nowhere. There is a lovely phrase in the late Justice Peter Mahon’s published letters to his son, where he says that he and his wife went driving, and came in sight of “the gleaming spires of Dargaville”. I think of it now every time I catch the first view of Warkworth from the south. What Thomas Hardy described in Jude The Obscure, his first distant view of the dreaming spires of Oxford, scarcely applies. You drive north from Auckland for maybe an hour and a half, to the Brynderwyn turnoff, then left for perhaps another hour and a half to Dargaville.

In 1921 those were dirt or deep mud roads. Transport was mainly by boat across the Kaipara from Helensville, and on up the river to Dargaville. To a Scottish minister who had always lived within a couple of hours by train from the granite fastnesses of Glasgow or wherever, this must have seemed the abyss of lostness. And at the same time they had become aware of the shadow side of the Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. It was a colonial church. It was nothing like the stability of his ecclesiastical support system in Scotland.

I am unsure of the sequence of events during the 1920s. They arrived in the Colony in 1921, and Matthew Miller died in Devonport on 6 October 1930, of bowel cancer. So my guess is that that smiling photo was taken in maybe 1923 or soon after, to cheer people up back at Home. They would have said, “Ah, but Nora looks to be having a hard time of it…”

Matthew and Leonora were not long in the parish of Dargaville -- November 1921 to March 1923.There is a brief stay at Point Chevalier in Auckland in 1923, and then the parish of Helensville, September 1927 to March 1929. I wonder when he began to be depressed and unwell. The progress of bowel cancer must have been an increasing nightmare in the days and nights when nothing could be done about it. I have had bowel cancer, but by that time there was understanding and successful treatment.

Lex was sent to board at Mt Albert Grammar School -- one of the few wise decisions my family made. I have no idea who paid for it. Maybe he got a scholarship. Tom, my father, never went to secondary school. At some stage they tried orcharding at Kumeu or some such place. But by then Matthew was sick, and Leonora arranged to rent a substantial house at Cheltenham, Devonport, down in Auckland, where she could nurse him and also take in boarders to help with the finances. There Matthew died. One of the boarders was Eulie Armstrong, our mother. So life generally tries to renew itself.

It’s likely that this photo was taken outside the old Dargaville manse, about 1923, while Matthew still expected to make a go of his new life. The brevity of his tenure in Dargaville and Helensville, however, indicates to me the onset of depression, sorrow, grief... cancer. Did he feel he had abandoned his parish far away… to say nothing of his Scottish colleagues and commitments? Well, it would not enhance healing.

I never heard my grandmother talk about her husband. That is extraordinary in itself. My father remembered him mainly as a big strong man who exercised a firm and painful discipline on himself and others, and could smash open a coconut with his fist. My mother seemed to have no direct memory of him. It’s all very sad. I think Matthew broke his heart and his health by walking away from Stevenston, Ayrshire. But by that broken heart, most of us came to be born.

Sonny Bill who...?

Major sporting developments usually creep up on my awareness, long after everyone else has become fully acquainted with the facts and the prognostications. Mary considers it important to know what’s happening in national level sport, so that she doesn’t appear stupid when it gets discussed at church or in the walking club. Appearing stupid is something I don’t mind very much.

So it is that in the last week or so I found myself having to ask, surreptitiously as it were, kind of sotto voce: Who exactly is Sonny Bill...? Mary says he is a former League player who has now been selected for the All Blacks (Rugby). Apparently this is Big. I don’t know why. He is all over the news, and his photo is on the cover of next month’s Skywatch magazine. Sonny Bill is certainly a handsome lad except for his heavily tattooed right arm which his mother should have stopped him getting.

The sports writers assume I know things I don’t know. There seems to be controversy about where he will play, what position. Does it matter? Perhaps it does. Anyway, the latest is that he wasn’t in the team for the test against the Wallabies in Hong Kong. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. He is the new rising talent, the possibly Jonah Lomu redivivus, no less.

We subscribe to Sky here, as most people do, but not to Sky Sports -- incomprehensibly to many. The nation, I understand, is plunged into mourning because of some catastrophic cricket tour of Bangladesh (“the minnows of world cricket”). We won no games out of four. Some cricket luminary says we played like dicks. Well, that’s not very nice. Not very nice at all. I must have some sporting empathy bypass.

During the week, in the sports section of the TV news, we typically get hilarious clips of the All Blacks or some such at their training session -- we are expected to take these seriously -- these big blokes are skipping around on tippy toes, running back and forth, rolling around the grass. Do they not want to grow up? They occupy huge chunks of the national consciousness and TV time, mainly twinkle-toeing around some footie pitch or signing autographs in a children’s ward.

This morning we hear about some rugby heart throb who is now out for this tour because of his left knee. Their knees, groins, tendons, calf muscles and other important little places are matters of relentless national concern. It makes me wonder whether the demands on their health insurance is simply pushing up premiums for all of us.

Well, you see, I am not a sporting person. Someone recently invited us to join the croquet club. Croquet...? Apparently it would mean initial lessons with some coach. How could I ever go around saying I had a croquet coach? Croquet conjures for me the image of the mad Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, playing croquet with flamingos as bats and hedgehogs as balls. I once conducted the funeral of a bloke who died playing croquet. I would be unable to play any club game without lamenting the loss of time and energy which could be spent on better things. Like sitting still, reading, meditating...

It is extraordinary to me that a society can expend so much of itself on violent body-contact sports. Plenty of blokes love it -- that I know. But why? It has been suggested that it creams off violence that would otherwise find hideous outlets elsewhere, like domestic violence. But we have that anyway. I don’t seem to have that violent gene. It’s a mystery to me...

Boxing is without excuse. The aim is to render one’s opponent brain damaged so that he can’t get up off the floor. That simply disgusts me. Samoan boxers are cult heroes -- it’s ignorant and debasing.

I still don’t know who Sonny Bill is, or why he has dominated the popular consciousness to the exclusion of really important matters around the world.