Verity's constipation

I have a guilty secret.  It's not Geordie Shore. It's not peeing in the shower. It's not wanting just "a milky coffee", not a triple mocha frappa rubber dubber cappuccino.  It's that when I stand in a bar, I find the guy outside smoking sexy.  I don't want to. I actively try not to. And frankly I wish it didn't happen. Not in the least because I end up internally wrestling with this while I'm trying to impress said sexy person. Which normally means I end up looking constipated.

No, I did not write this mindless, tasteless claptrap passing as journalism.  It is written in the NZ Herald (18.10.14) by Verity Johnson under the title: Rebels with a cough - why I find smokers strangely sexy. 

By my count, the first person singular pronoun occurs nine times up to, appropriately, constipation. 

The NZ Herald editors seem to admire writers who interview themselves.  Michelle Hewitson is another.  The culprits include men.   We seem to have a culture in which Ego is best, and with it goes the corollary, the assumption that what happened to me, or to my teenage kids, or what my day was like, or how I am feeling about something, or what food I would die for (or from, hopefully), is an interesting or even informative “read”.   Once upon a time when I was a junior journalist on the late Auckland Star we called it “interviewing your typewriter”. 

The Herald does have some competent and edifying writers, among them Brian Gaynor and Fran O’Sullivan.  Sir Robert Jones is good for a laugh and usually some sense.  There are others.  But surely the Herald can do without the excesses and indulgences of the women’s magazine scene, the fixation on bodily processes and food.  If Verity Johnson can’t stir herself to some real research on issues that matter, she should make way for journalism.

Occupy Omaha

Omaha is a beach community not far from here.  It is mainly on a sandspit, the houses in brave defiance of the biblical warning about the man who built his house on the sand.  A medium tsunami would wipe them out.  Nevertheless, a fair proportion of the Omaha houses are the upmarket summer retreats of Auckland’s wealthier lifestylers.  One of these is NZ’s Prime Minister, John Key.

Omaha is an extraordinary sight in places – house after house behind high grey security walls, dutifully equipped with built-in barbecues, pools, indoor-outdoor flow, pebbled surrounds, yuccas and pampas grass.  Each house says Keep Out, privacy, privileged only.  These people employ professional day and night surveillance of their assets at Omaha, video cameras and all, 24/7. 

You can sight some of the inhabitants on sunny summer Saturdays when they venture out to the Matakana market.  Women in their casual designer label frocks accompanied, often as not, by their indulged bored and sullen 14-year-old daughters named Samantha or Madison.

Behind the sandspit is a large lagoon, a golf club, a state-of-the-art boat ramp.  Not going there often, I don’t know much about it.  It’s altogether too depressing.

Suddenly there appears a delightful little novel set in Omaha.  Cathie Koa Dunsford: Occupy Omaha (Global Dialogues Press, 2014).  Our local rag, the Rodney Times, had a news item about this but, typically I’m afraid, omitted to give us the title of the book.  I prised that somewhat essential information out of the editor, ordered a copy, and behold – what I got turns out to be Copy 10 of 100, signed indeed by Cathie Koa Dunsford. 

Her story is witty and instructive.  Her hero is a 60-year-old named Gloria, made homeless since her new house turned out to be a leaky home and worthless.  The developer responsible for this had his holiday home at Omaha.  Gloria decides to move in, since it’s vacant most of the year.  She is very caring and responsible.  The Moet she drinks and the items from the freezer are all credited to his debt to her, the amount she believes she has lost through his deceit.

Soon it’s the occupation of many of these Omaha mini-mansions by single mothers and others, all strictly enjoined to do no harm, and all done legally by signed house-sitting arrangements.  It builds to a great drama involving the blocking of the causeway to Omaha, legally again, helicopters and much fun.  Cathie Koa Dunsford makes her point about various basic issues. 

Well, this afternoon I attended a meeting at our local Mahurangi East Public Library, at which Dr Cathie Koa Dunsford launched her book.  She was accompanied by Dr Karin Meissenburg.  I am unsure of Dr Karin’s role or relationship, but she played a kind of soulful ocarina or Maori flute while Dr Cathie read extracts from the book. 

I am no good at these events.  Dr Cathie knows how to talk.  I would have preferred quiet thoughtful questions from people who had actually read the book.  As it was, we luxuriated in memories of former days before garden centres and inequitable distribution of wealth. 

For all that, it’s a worthy little novel.  I think it might be time to read one or two of her others.

 

Neither male nor female

Dr Bruce Hamill, a Dunedin parish minister, has clarified a cloudy issue for me.   I am grateful to him.  In the just-concluded General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa NZ, the big issue of contention was, unsurprisingly, whether Presbyterian ministers were to be permitted to marry same sex couples.  The Assembly said no. 

I am a long way from these debates these days – I watch from afar with emotions ranging from dismay to despair.  The generation of ministers and lay people younger than mine, who long for an inclusive and intelligent church marked by generosity and Christlike openness, have been hanging in there, “much in sorrow, oft in woe”.   Some of their ministers and churches have been open for same sex marriages ever since the law of the land allowed it, and for same sex civil unions and blessings even longer.  But now the church has spoken.  The church has said no. 

The next day St Andrew’s-on-the-Terrace in Wellington announced that they will defy the Assembly’s ruling.  Others will follow, and I have no idea what the outcome of that will be.

My difficulty with all this until now has been recognizing same sex unions as marriage.  Civil unions, it seemed to me, and de facto arrangements, could be blessed in Christian ceremonies and in Christian churches where they were genuinely loving and stable relationships between people who know what they are doing.  But I saw marriage as a special thing.  It is clearly and biblically intended to be permanent, however often marriages fall short in practice.  I saw marriage as between a man and a woman.

Bruce Hamill identified for me the point I had been missing.  Here is what he had intended to say in the General Assembly, but was prevented by the exigencies of debate.  He began with St Paul:

In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, there is no male and female” (Gal 3:28).  Not even the great complementarity of male and female defines the new world of life in the body of Christ.  What there is according to the writer to the Ephesians is a practice called marriage which signifies the mystery of Christ’s relationship to the church. (Eph 5:32)…  Both a witness to God’s love and a practice in which we learn to love, in all the intimacy of our bodily existence, our nearest neighbour.   ... I do not want to deprive homosexual people of the opportunity to share in this witness, this asceticism, this practice in holiness and hope.  Jesus made the reform of a range of institutions into an art form.  I believe he is calling us to reform our understanding and practice of marriage, not to set it in ecclesiastical concrete.  I urge this assembly to remember the spacious love of Christ.

If (for the Christian) marriage is a sign of the love of God in Christ, then on what basis do we deny such a sign to two people of the same sex, in a loving, committed bond? 

Good one.  Thank you, Bruce Hamill.