On not becoming a Victim

Victim Support, years ago, seemed like a good idea. People who were traumatised because loved ones had been wiped out in some car smash or criminal shoot-out, home invasion, medical misadventure... parents whose baby had died in the night from what medicine started to call Sudden Infant Death Syndrome... Victim Support was set up, trained its volunteers, and now it suits the police to call them in where needed.

Then, before we realised, it had become somehow important to be a Victim. The media pitched in, of course, and we began to get interviews with seriously aggrieved or bereaved people, usually at times when they were unlikely to be rational.

The media gave them status as victims, publicly honoured and encouraged their suffering -- and then started to consult them as to their opinions on law reform, criminology, traffic management, police administration, criminal investigation, court procedures, sentencing and punishment.

Just today I heard on the radio a woman whose son had been murdered, inform us that she agreed with the High Court judge’s decisions. As far as I know, this woman has no expertise in the law whatever.

So we developed the culture of Victim. It has become a recognised status, something you might aspire to, were it not for the unfortunate fact that you have first to be traumatised. Victim is something you weren’t before. You now have recognition in the media, no longer anonymous or invisible, the way most of us are most of the time. You may even get to appear in court at the time of sentencing, to read out your Victim Impact Statement. Some of these in recent memory have been utterly illogical, hideously embarrassing, unnecessary. I remain confused as to why judges permit them.

The Chief Justice, Sian Elias, a learned, astute woman, recently said something to the effect that our courts exist to stand between alleged offenders and the rage of the Victims. They are intended to be an area of calm, logic and truth. Every intelligent person knows that the best any court can do is approximate to this ideal, yet it matters.

I prefer the culture of forgiveness. It is fascinating to see how this affects various people. Victims bent on revenge -- and plenty of others -- see forgiveness as at best disappointing, but more likely as a cop-out, other-worldly, wimpish and embarrassing. It is an embarrassment to some Christians that the Bible actually teaches forgiveness and proscribes “an eye for an eye”. They prefer to keep revenge, punishment, recrimination, in reserve at least, in case they need it.

Tapu Misa, one of the consistently good writers in the NZ Herald (she writes about issues rather than about herself) said:

“I met a victim of violent crime last year who wasn't a member of the Sensible Sentencing Trust. Apparently, the trust hasn't quite cornered the market in crime victims (though not for want of trying, according to the victim; the trust made overtures, which she rejected).

“No worries, though, because the trust seems to have captured more than its fair share of senior government ministers eager to show crime victims how deeply they feel their pain - as evidenced by the presence of not only the Prime Minister but the Ministers of Police and Justice at the trust's conference at Parliament last week.

“The woman who told me her story over coffee and a few tears would not have defined herself as a "victim". She struck me as strong, brave, and hopeful. She could have been bitter as well, given the way she felt her family had been victimised not just by the person whose crime shattered their lives, but by the police's inept investigation and the sensationalist coverage in some media.

“But years later, she has made peace with what happened. Although her family were never the same again, she has rebuilt her life.”


Many people choose not to live in resentment, bitterness, revengefully. It is a decent and dignified way to go forward. It enhances life. And it is a free choice.

The pleasure of their company

My younger brother lives in Queensland, and his lovely Aussie wife Genevieve thought he might spend his 60th birthday with his siblings across the Tasman here in Algies Bay. Thus we turned to and arranged a kind of tribal coagulation for lunch here at our house last Saturday, the actual birthday.

So Duncan travelled from Brisbane with Genevieve and their two sons, Tom and Hamish. Tom and Hamish, let me tell you, are handsome, urbane, accomplished, poised, sociable, world citizens. They have two younger sisters of similar quality presently travelling somewhere in Greece.

Here at Algies Bay on any normal day that does not involve shifting furniture around for some family jamboree, arranging food, negotiating times and places, you would find my peaceful home with Mary, my sister Marilyn’s stable and tidy home with Lionel (another great Aussie), and my even younger sister Barbara’s welcoming home with Noel, a dinkum Kiwi.

Just over the ridge at Sandspit, where the boats leave for Kawau, is our sister-in-law Jan, who has an art studio. Jan doesn’t socialise with us. Jan’s husband Morris is our brother, Marilyn’s twin. And. mirabile dictu, Morris showed up smiling on Saturday, a wonderful gift for us all.

I hope you are keeping up with me here because now we come to the offspring, and their offspring. I won’t name them, and some of them couldn’t come. But quite a few of them did. One even brought his very brave girlfriend. And so we all ate ham and chick pea curry, salads and cakes, with wine, and beer for the blokes on the balcony.

We gave Duncan a birthday book, a real quality one about the 18th and 19th century sailing ships, with brilliant accurate illustrations, the best kind of gift, the one you would love to have yourself.

Now, you understand that in our tribe there are plenty of more or less constant adverse currents, relating to things that happened in years long gone which have left their wounds, memories, griefs.

Each of us has long ago gone our own way, making our own private arrangements eventually with the past, perhaps failing in the main to listen to or understand the others. It’s all pretty normal, actually. I don’t think we are a dysfunctional family. It’s just that the years bring their scars, and choices people made long ago have had huge effects down to this day.

The years also have brought their triumphs. We raised families. We did learn things and teach our kids things. We did support each other solidly from time to time. But now we certainly show our wounds.

I think in the main we have managed to demonstrate the triumph of openness and hospitality over division and bigotry; of love over fear of difference; of dogged loving loyalty over shock and catastrophe. We have all turned out different, quite different -- imagine that! From the same stock, we each became something else. We have no need to come together to pretend we are all the same. We are not. And that’s perfectly OK.

Our offspring will go on widening the diversity, even as they retain the genetic inheritance. That’s amazing. Our parents, Tom and Eulie’s cohabitation, long ago now, results in vastly different people in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and travelling everywhere, adapting to the cultures they discover, learning the languages and folkways.

We had a good tribal meeting. Nothing of any value got negotiated. There were too many people and there was too much noise and activity ever to discuss anything properly. But it was worth it all to see each other and get an impression of each person, recognise worth and what various people have survived and overcome, sometimes to share a brief heart to heart moment and understanding... It all mattered.

Prayer to Allah

Officials in the world's most populous Muslim country admitted on Monday that they made a mistake when issuing an edict in March saying the holy city in Saudi Arabia was to the country's west. The Indonesian Ulema Council, or MUI, has since asked followers to shift direction slightly northward during their daily prayers.

"After a thorough study with some cosmography and astronomy experts, we learned they've been facing southern Somalia and Kenya," said Ma'ruf Amin, a prominent cleric of the MUI. "We've revised it now to the north-west."

He said Indonesians need not worry, however. "Allah understands that humans make mistakes," he said. "Allah always hears their prayers."


Well, the above diagrams should be helpful. Perhaps the Islamic authorities have not yet caught up with the fact that the Earth is round -- a rather more serious problem than Indonesian two-dimensional geography. Clearly, Islamic prayer in most parts of the world needs to be on a slope, and at times on such a slope that the worshipper would require to be tethered, or somehow fastened on Velcro.

The inter-faith chapel at Auckland International Airport actually has an arrow on the floor, pointing to Mecca I presume. Presbyterians should ignore this. I profoundly hope the pilots don’t rely on it.

Someone will surely upbraid me now for poking fun at other religions. Well, tough. Humour has become one of the most important correctives we have.

Orange Road Cone

From: mosspub@rodney.govt.nz [mailto:mosspub@rodney.govt.nz]
Sent: Saturday, 29 May 2010 9:53 a.m.
To: customerservice
Subject: Contact Us Enquiry
New Contact Us Enquiry
Name: Ross Miller
Email: ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
Comments:
May the residents of Willjames Avenue, Algies Bay, have a new orange road cone at the intersection of Willjames and Alexander? The old one, which has been guarding an unfinished hole in the road temporarily filled with gravel for several months now, and has become an old friend, is getting very weathered and shabby. This brings the whole neighbourhood into disrepute.


From: customerservice
To: ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 10:14 AM
Subject: RE: Orange Road Cone Enquiry

Good Morning Ross

Thank you for your email.

I have raised a request, CR 664774, for a replacement cone for the hole at the junction of Willjames Avenue and Alexander Road as you have requested.

Regards
Lindsay

Lindsay Powell | Customer Service
p: 09 426 5169 | f: 09 426 0721 | e: customerservice@rodney.govt.nz
Rodney District Council | 50 Centreway Road | Private Bag 500 | Orewa 0946 | New Zealand p: 0800 426 5169 | f: 426 7280 | www.rodney.govt.nz

Please consider the environment before printing this email.


From: Lex Miller
To: Ross Miller
Sent: Monday, May 31, 2010 10:31 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Orange Road Cone Enquiry

Would it be going to far to raise another request for replacement of the gravel?

Lex


From: J and M-A
To: Lex Miller ; Ross Miller
Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 9:00 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: Orange Road Cone Enquiry

And surely the hole must be due a makeover?

M-A


Ah well, you see, following my email to the Rodney District Council, and the allocation to me of a work number, CR 664774, silence reigned over the land for the space of maybe three days. The shabby orange cone remained. Then, overnight, as it were in a miracle, the cone disappeared and the hole had been filled in, sealed and levelled -- and the place thereof knew it no more.

I would cause a Te Deum to be sung in the local community church, but they wouldn't know what that is.

Much shalom,

Ross

Ross Miller
ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/



From: customerservice
To: ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
Sent: Thursday, June 17, 2010 3:01 PM
Subject: CR 665009 Cone - Willjames Avenue and Alexander Road

Good Afternoon Ross

A quick email to let you know Downer EDIWorks - Water have advised me as follows: -

" 15-Jun-2010 11:49:50 - - Rodney Water - SN Waiting on hot mix to repair patch. ETR one month. "

Unfortunately I understand the cone hasn't been replaced with a newer one but I hope knowing the patching will be done within the next month is of help.

I will email you again once I am advised the repair has been made.

Regards
Lindsay

Lindsay Powell | Customer Service p: 09 426 5169 | f: 09 426 0721 | e: customerservice@rodney.govt.nz

Rodney District Council | 50 Centreway Road | Private Bag 500 | Orewa 0946 | New Zealand p: 0800 426 5169 | f: 426 7280 | www.rodney.govt.nz
Please consider the environment before printing this email.


20.06.10
Lindsay...

How good of you to keep me posted. Silly me, I thought the job was done. Evidently not.

Now I am alarmed to learn that it takes your contractors one month to acquire one square metre of hot mix. Is this one reason it has taken so far over 2 years to complete the fix up of State Highway One at Warkworth? If someone sends me the recipe, I could probably have it ready and waiting "in situ" as it were, when the blokes arrive. Say on Tuesday. I could do this at cost plus 10%.

And as you point out, we now don't have even one grubby orange road cone. It has gone. We now have none. So I rely on your assurance alone that progress is being made. So much of our lives consists in going forward in hope and trust.

Sincerely,

Ross Miller
ross.miller@paradise.net.nz
http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/

At this point, typically in serious but complex discussions with public officials, people start to lose the plot. This chap now thinks someone stole the cone. But no -- they took it themselves, the RDC. We begin steadily to move into some parallel universe. It may still be fun, but you can forget about anything like the original topic.


Hello Ross

Thank you for letting us know the cone has gone missing. I have spoken to the contractors and requested a replacement be put in place as soon as possible.

The reason for the delay in patching, I am advised, is because it is more cost effective to make the repair when there are several jobs in the area requiring to be reinstated rather
than the maintenance team making separate journeys to individual locations through out Rodney.

Regards,

Lindsay Powell

Customer Service p: 09 426 5169 | 0800 4265169 | f : 09 426 0721 | e customerservice@rodney.govt.nz
Rodney District Council | 50 Centreway Road | Private Bag 500 | Orewa 0946 | New Zealand p: 0800 426 5169 | f: 426 7280 | www.rodney.govt.nz
P Please consider the environment before printing this email.


Greetings Lindsay,

Willjames will rejoice at the advent of a new orange cone. It will lift everyone's spirits, as we await the final resolution of the hole in the road issue, hot mix and all.

It is of course reassuring to be reminded that your contractors store up jobs to be done in a particular area for reasons of time and other efficiencies. This is as it should be. Perhaps then we can expect, when the contractors venture into this area to fix the mix in Willjames, they will attend also to the small tasks along the walkway at Snells Beach. For many weeks now we have had iridescent pink markings from a spray paint can along the route, indicating to the simple minds of us locals that some trimming and repairing of concrete and edging is being planned around the council table. Indeed, more recently, these markings were renewed and refreshed, this time in dual colours, iridescent pink, and orange. Doubtless the colours denote different things to be done. We are in awe at this evidence of detailed and thoughtful planning. And we await what it all promises, the trimming of the concrete and the verges.

There you are, sitting at your desk co-ordinating all these things for us. Thank you again,

From your grateful ratepayers and employers...

Ross Miller


25.06.10

Good Morning Ross

I am advised by Downer EDI Work - Water, they have now reinstated the carriageway at the junction of Willjames Avenue and Alexander Road and trust it is satisfactory.

Regards
Lindsay

I too am a happily grumpy old man

This is a revised list. On seeing the first list, my brother emailed me to tell me not to be so censorious. But there are certain realities of old age, among them that, having lived a little, one has likes and dislikes. I am happily grumpy. It seems to be my default mode. I can envisage a happy state in which people generally set aside their egos and behave courteously. The list may be added to as time goes by.

People who think it necessary to censor, conceal, re-write, lie about or sanitise their family histories for their descendants and others.

Anglicans and other church luminaries who in the 21st century insist on poncing around in grotesque gear.

The noise that now passes for music. Why can no one write a decent tune any more?

Apologies that are more about adjusting other people’s feelings than about any true sorrow or amendment of life.

Corporate criminals who avoid any real consequences for their actions.

Silly, banal, unnecessary, unpleasant and sad swearing.

People who call me mate when I am not their mate. People I have never met before who call me Ross. People who say no problem. People who say have a good day. All these people are assuming things I will decide. People who address my wife and me as you guys.

People with no inner resources to manage boredom.

People unable to cook themselves a meal. Finicky eaters. Compulsive vegetarians. People with no sense of good food someone has thought about and prepared for them.

People who phone at dinner-time, or any time, wanting to sell me something.

People who never listen to Bach. People who don’t know who Bach is, as though it doesn’t matter.

People who enter a room talking to everyone, or worse, try to make some kind of Entrance, irrespective of, or not even bothering to know, what they may be interrupting.

People who interrupt a conversation to start up another one of their own. All people who interrupt. Radio interviewers incapable of letting their interviewees complete a sentence.

Pre-dinner drinkies. Cocktail parties, and all such mindless, banal, pointless, tiring occasions.

Stream-of-consciousness conversation which passes for intelligent communication. People who routinely respond to every statement in the first person, talking only about themselves.

Journalists, columnists who write only about what happened to them and how they felt about it.

Wine columns, wine correspondents, wine experts, Masters of Wine, anyone who thinks that wine is anything more than an expensive medium for alcohol, wine bores, wine tasting, wine bars.

Bony chests and low necklines. Silly drunken women at race days, wearing silly hats and displaying bony knees, and staggering around in high heels. The mindless unfunny drunken males who seem to accompany them.

Tattoos, piercings and all forms of body mutilation.

Blokes who think it’s appropriate to enter restaurants, cafes, shops, supermarkets, in smelly singlet and shorts, hairy legs and grubby bare feet with or without jandals.

Baseball caps, especially worn sideways or back-to-front, as though these people think their heads have been installed the wrong way round.

Motor racing and all petrol-heads.

People who can’t spell and don’t think it matters, people with no concern for grammar and logic.

Sports fanatics -- as though any of that actually matters...

Anyone who says, “What you’ve got to realise is...”

Luridly painted toenails. The current female trend for long straggly unkempt hair with all the life dyed or bleached out of it -- what we used to call dull, lifeless hair.

Dog lovers. People who let their pets live inside, feed inside, smell inside. People who think I ought to be charmed with their bloody pets.

Pseudo-sophisticates, usually female, who say O my God!

Mindless adjectives such as sexy, funky.

Racists. People unable to live happily with different cultures in the community, different habits, different languages, different customs and values – ie, in the real world. People who assume the best society is some extension of themselves.
Gated housing developments, and the assumption that anyone who seems to be different is not an acceptable neighbour.

(Usually) American women expressing surprise or some other emotion with their mouths wide open.

Utter dishonesty in funeral orations. The usual range of lies following a violent tragedy... he died doing what he loved, he would never have hurt a fly, he was a gentle giant... It was a quiet cul-de-sac where nothing ever happened...

Pseudo-concepts such as “closure”.

People who “want answers”, as though they would understand them if they got them.

People who can’t sleep because they want “heads to roll” – or because the law has deprived them of the right to hit children.

And all of the following...

At the end of the day
Fairly unique. (Huh…?)
I personally
At this moment in time
With all due respect
Unbeknownst
To be perfectly honest, candid, frank… (Was he not before?)
Absolutely… fantastic… incredible…
It's a nightmare
Shouldn't of
24/7
It's not rocket science
In any way, shape or form
But look…
Basically… Obviously…
Mayhem, carnage (when it’s not)
Turning 1-syllable words into 2-syllable: grow-en, unknow-en
Anythink
From here on in
Going forward
Heading into negative/positive territory
For free
Accenting prepositions, as in: We now go to our correspondent IN Wellington, who is ON the scene…

Liars, Hypocrites and Humbugs

Duplicity comes in many forms from malignant to benign, and most varieties were conceived by rulers and politicians from ancient times. I have reached the stage where, encountering now some of our leaders on TV or radio or making portentous statements anywhere, I find myself thinking, I do not actually or implicitly believe anything this man/woman is telling me.

Alison Weir in her recent and very detailed account of the fall of Queen Anne Boleyn, describes what happened on 8 June 1536. Henry VIII showed up at Parliament for the opening. He had already deployed the brightest legal luminaries in the realm to find him a way to divorce his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and this had been done. The grounds were consanguinity (she was the widow of Henry’s brother), and her failure to produce a son who could survive 16th century neo-natal care.

Then Henry, having been married briefly to Anne Boleyn, and still not having a son, decided he needed to get rid of her in favour of Jane Seymour, with whom he was now besotted. Cromwell had come to the rescue, and found so-called evidence that Anne had been adulterous all around the court, even with her own brother. Tricky -- in times like theirs, and ours, marked by hypocrisy and galloping paranoia. She was convicted of high treason and sentenced to death. Henry decided to be “kind”, and decreed that she would not be burned at the stake, or beheaded by an axeman, but swiftly decapitated by a swordsman brought over from France for the purpose. Within a few days Henry was married to Jane Seymour.

Now we come to the opening of Parliament. Lord Chancellor Audley made a speech to the King and to both houses. This included reading out the King’s Speech in which Henry plunged into serious damage limitation. Alison Weir reports how Henry publicly lamented that, having been disappointed in his first two marriages, he had been obliged, for the welfare of his realm, to enter upon a third, “a personal sacrifice not required of any ordinary man”.

At this the Lord Chancellor paused, and asked, “What man in middle life would not this deter from marrying a third time? Yet this, our most excellent Prince, not in any carnal concupiscence, but at the humble entreaty of his nobility, again condescended to contract matrimony, and hath, on the humble petition of the nobility, taken to himself a wife this time whose age and fine form give promise of issue.” Audley thanked the King for his selflessness and the care he had shown for his subjects.

This is what public office and power seem to do to people. Of course there are occasional shining exceptions. I do not know how I would have conducted myself had I ever been given high office and power. Over the years I have learned too much about my own inner frailty ever to be sure. I never learned how to carry on regardless, simply riding over the debris I have created and emerging again, as so many do. St Benedict has important teaching about personal humility which would be entirely lost on today’s achievers and all who set goals as though their personal attainment is the meaning of life and the universe.

Unless we discover and adopt a better way, such as Benedict teaches, or others such as the Dalai Lama, we are doomed to wars and destruction, paranoia and the collapse of hope, bombs, disease and starvation, injustice and brutality -- all of which, more or less, is what is happening now.

Episcopal Barbie

Meet Barbie, the Episcopal Vicar..


Bess writes: She has more than 6,000 FaceBook fans, and a wardrobe that sparkles with clerical chic. Even her own matching thurible.


Yep that’s right, meet Barbie, 51-year-old blonde rector of St Barbara’s-on-the-Sea, Malibu.


Nope, Mattel hasn’t got religion. Episcopal Barbie is the invention of a real clergywoman, Rev Julie Blake Fisher, resident in Kent, Ohio.

A dab hand with the scissors, Blake Fisher has fashioned “vestments, clothing and holy hardware for well-dressed 11.5’ Episcopal clergy."

A gallery of Barbie modelling her finest ecclestical garb may be seen on this "open" access group on Facebook. And this is merely the start.

“My next project will be Episcopal Priest Barbie: Cathedral Edition” Blake Fisher reveals, in this article on virtueonline.

But expect radical changes: Bishop Barbie will be African-American. Naturally the news has sparked a host of Barbie-theology joke posts.

Will Barbie save the Episcopal Church?” asks Faith Matters on the American Interest Online: "Every now and then I am tempted to believe that the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States is in a death spiral as its membership ages and dwindles, as more and more of its parishes go on life support.."

But “there is still hope; we Episcopalians still have a message to the contemporary world. We are ‘fun’. We dress up. We are PC. We have incense. As a church which has borne Christian witness in this land for more than 400 years falls to pieces on our watch and around our ears we have hundreds of hours to spend making vestments for dolls”.

Quite.

Personally I've seen nothing yet to beat Greg'scouch and the speech bubble coming out of Barbie’s mouth: “I used to eat like a normal human being, but then I found God. Now, I’ve been blessed with a 2-inch waist, a car, anorexia and a man!"


Genius.

Murdered teen's mum ... 'farcical' sentence

It’s become a ritual. Desperately aggrieved, bereaved, shocked, enraged, relatives and friends attend in the courtroom, equipped with Victim Impact Statements which they have worked out over the weeks of the trial, full of purple prose -- and with photos and mementos, complete with teddy bears.

The media lovingly report the juicier bits of these statements, the ferocity of the delivery, the eyeballing of the accused, and the visible reactions, if any, of the accused. Judges seem to have become astonishingly tolerant of all this. Sometimes, but very rarely, one of these statements might speak of understanding and forgiveness, of decisions to avoid bitterness and hatred, rancour and revenge.

Then inevitably, the sentence imposed turns out to be less than the eternity of torture they believe appropriate, so they convene outside the courtroom and say how disgusted, or “gutted”, they are, how they have lost faith in the justice system (why would anyone think that an intelligent assessment?), and what they would do to the offender if they had access.

Of course these people are feeling desperate and helpless, powerless. But the country’s justice system can’t save them from the facts of life. Life includes tragic events. The world is a perilous place. Living is dangerous. There is grief and loss, and huge injustice all the time.

Typically the victim’s families say, as in a case this week, “So eleven and a half years was all my daughter’s life was worth…” Well, lady, that’s not what anyone thinks, not the judge, not the counsel, not the jury. The victim’s life is incalculable. The judge dares to believe that the offender’s life is worth something too. So do most of us in our better moments.

Then, behold, it turns out that the victim’s family have suddenly become experts on criminology and penology. The silly media start to hang on to their every word as they prescribe what they think should now happen in law, in police action, in prison administration, in parole guidelines.

A lot of this has been gathered up in a lobby called the Sensible Sentencing Trust, whose representatives are wheeled out every time there is the slightest public perception that some judge has “got it wrong”. The head guru in sensible sentencing is Garth McVicar. Garth sees the world in black and white.

“Sensible” sentences are apparently those governed by the central rubric of these people, that “The punishment should fit the crime.” So what they really think, although they rarely say so, is that we should reinstate capital punishment, and possibly also corporal punishment. “An eye for an eye…” They never seem to grasp that (a) the bible does not teach an eye for an eye; or that (b) another name for it is the Law of the Jungle.

In a civilized society, accused people are protected from the rage and revenge of others. Justice, to be just, does have to include a solid component of wisdom and mercy -- otherwise we are back in the jungle, subject to the law of the lynch mob. We have judges precisely so that we are protected from people such as Garth.

And all of this is without venturing into the question whether our prisons are doing any good anyway. Obviously some people have to be detained, perhaps for life. Otherwise our prisons seem to be simply assembly belts of crime.

(Postscript: It costs five times more to keep a convicted youth offender in prison in the UK, than it would cost to keep him at Eton. Eton might work better.)

Priestly Paedophilia

It seems unlikely that Pope Benedict XVI will read and pay close attention to what I write here. But the main function of blogs, as ever, is to make the writer feel better.

I wish the Pope had not apologised, as he did at inordinate length, to the RC church and people of Ireland, for the many instances of priestly paedophilia which are being revealed almost daily. Benedict’s apology is at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7069664.ece

I can’t bring myself to read it closely.

Of course the media have also decided, from their once-over-lightly reading of history, that a papal apology is unprecedented -- popes simply don’t say sorry -- and therefore this one highlights the severity of the crisis.

Well, crisis indeed it is. Ireland has long been famous for clergy abuse, including sustained brutality of children, girls and women, the handicapped and helpless, in its schools and orphanages and other “Christian and charitable” institutions. But Ireland has never had any monopoly on this human disease. The latest is from Bavaria, the Pope’s own Heimat, where the Pope’s own brother, Father Georg, used to slap around the boys in the prestigious choir of Ravensburg Cathedral, the Domspazen, the Cathedral Sparrows. Stories of abuse are flooding in from almost everywhere. The USA, some years ago, was only the start, probably because it has more people aware of the possibilities of litigation and compensation.

But this is now beyond apology. The Pope should have made a simple address from his position of awesome power and prestige in the church, and said: It is a crisis. I intend to deal with it. These activities, whatever their cause, are intolerable. They are an abuse of power inconsistent with the way of Christ. Priests and others in the church who abuse children will be expelled, and I am instructing the bishops accordingly. The church will no longer make arrangements for monetary compensation -- that is a matter for the civil courts.

Apologies have become a pastime in our culture, and they are largely worthless. I dealt with this in my own way some time ago, in my blog http://rosssmoment.blogspot.com/2009_05_01_archive.html

Of course, the media have now decided that the real problem is not the abuse itself, but the historic unwillingness of bishops to deal with the offending priests decisively. The bishops have been simply transferring them elsewhere. Crimes have been getting concealed from the police. There has been, and remains, a ecclesiastical culture of coverup. Thus, the church has been and is complicit in crime.

Well, it’s quite simple. All this has to cease. The Pope could instruct the bishops accordingly. The coverup has been disgusting. The expectation of the priests that mother church would protect them has to give way to the manifest right of children and others to protection from predatory priests, users, bullies, sadists, nohopers…

Obviously there are many contributory causes. The insistence on celibacy is one of them, but only one. Compulsory vocational celibacy outside monasteries is a silly, unnecessary and false doctrine.

Also, there is the malignant culture of power in the church. Hierarchy. Nothing could be less consonant with the way of Christ. Priests living apart and wielding power over the flock. Bishops poncing around in medieval gear and issuing orders. The miracle is that, within this structure, there have been so many christlike, scholarly, wise and thoughtful people, so many non-abusive and horrified by all this.

When John XXIII said he wanted the windows thrown open, one wonders now if he was thinking also of this whole area of clergy abuse and misuse of power.

Then there is the issue of vocation. Who becomes a priest, or a nun, or a minister or pastor? Who knows? There are complex admission procedures, tests, assessments. But it remains a human issue, and no one understands the echoes of personal loneliness or resentment, the subterranean areas where decisions may get made. Only a wise and developed theology of human fallenness and redemption can cope with this.

The victims…? It’s sad, profoundly sad. But victimhood is a chosen state. No one has to be a victim. I realise how unpolitical this statement is -- but it is possible to get over it, to get on with life. That may be the main and heroic task.

Meanwhile, it is utterly tragic that all this continues now to be dealt with on the level of who should pay for what happened.

Ethanol

Inside the Rover’s Return, in Coronation Street, is where most of the action happens, episode by episode. Over the 50 years since the series began in 1960, we have seen this corner pub renovated, crashed into, burnt out, rebuilt, remodelled – yet it remains the focal venue of just about every plot and sub-plot.

I do understand that the “local”, in England at any rate, has long been an important social institution. And it’s easy to see how convenient it must have been to the producers of Coronation Street to have so much of the action in one place. Right from the start, when Ena Sharples, Minnie Caldwell and Martha Longhurst sat and swapped their venomous gossip in the Snug over their milk stouts, nicely insulated by frosted glass from the raunchier and riskier world of the public bar, it has been possible to concentrate on faces and moods and dialogue, with only the occasional irruption of action and flying fists. The Rover’s is where they daily oil the social mechanism, bonding, abusing each other, reassuring each other, planning one-upmanship, checking their defences and nourishing their antipathies. You can’t do any of that alone at home, really; it’s social, it requires others to listen and respond.

But how much week by week do these people spend on their alcohol? The “girls” who sew garments in Underworld routinely adjourn to the Rovers for their lunch. Sure, there they have Betty’s ‘Otpot, which presumably would give them some sensible protein. Come to think, does the Rover’s ever serve tea/coffee? I have never, ever, heard of it. Typically, day or night, the locals require ale, wine or spirits, or some fruit drink if you’re pregnant. Mike Baldwin normally asked for “my usual, please, and whatever she’s having”. His usual was a double whisky. He died. These people drink. A pot of tea, on the other hand, “a brew”, is what you have at home. “I could murder a brew...”

Perhaps the normal level of salaries/wages in the UK takes account of the money one spends on buying alcohol for oneself and on purchasing rounds for others. I doubt it. It must be considerable. It would be bad enough here in NZ... It says something about the place alcohol has come to assume in the lives of so many, as though it were indispensable as a social lubricant.

We too have the beer culture, and the profoundly silly wine culture... There is a NZ talkback host who thinks it sophisticated to inform us that he would never buy a bottle of wine under NZ$25.00. We have wine “experts”, and some radio chap who is wheeled on to advise us which wines to choose with which foods. People are making money from telling us which wine they personally prefer, as though it matters or is even remotely interesting. We now have “Masters of Wine”, whatever they are. Wine, however ancient, is simply another slightly more sophisticated vehicle for shunting alcohol into our brain cells. You like a particular wine or you don’t, I would have thought.

The beer culture has drunken obnoxious Britons fouling the streets of Europe and elsewhere following rugby or soccer or league. They threaten to come here for the 2011 Rugby World Cup, as useless and abhorrent an event as I ever imagined. Vulgar yobboes with their tinnies and over-strained livers.

The wine culture, more pervasive, has otherwise sensible people thinking they can be connoisseurs of taste/smell/whatnot... They have their own wine literature about redolence of apricot and lavender, slightly... ye gods, who invented this humbug...?
But the real social damage is in simply drinking. Alcohol is an addictive drug, for many. Teenagers are getting paralytic at parties, and are falling about on the streets. Beer boozers in rugby clubs and at home are beating up their womenfolk and their kids, sometimes with fatal consequences. Alcohol moreover potentiates the effect of other more serious drugs. It is behind many of society’s tragedies and horrors.

I don’t drink. I decided some time ago to put alcohol out of my life. It was a good decision. No one needs that stuff. And I have recently decided it is not wowserism or puritanism to advocate really strong restrictions on the availability of beer, wine and spirits – it is simply to take seriously a serious social disease. I believe alcohol is unnecessary. For me the best social and personal remedy is abstinence. Most people don’t believe that, of course. But they have to come up with some remedies likely to work.

Awaiting Women

Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 12:24 PM
Subject: Stephen

Hi all,

Stephen has learned to be patient. He has had to. I explained to Stephen that he'll spend a good portion of his life waiting for women, so I'm helping him get used to it.

Gran was amused to find Stephen reading while he waited for someone to get him up.

A couple of days ago Simon had a mug of coffee on the coffee table. He warned Stephen it was very hot. So Stephen dipped his finger in it. He then felt the mug to see whether that was hot, and then dipped his finger into the coffee one more time to confirm that the coffee was definitely hot.

Stephen is a sensate.

Hope all is well with you guys.

Love,
Rachel

.................................


On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:56 AM, Ross Miller wrote:
Listen Magoo...

This business of Stephen spending all his life waiting for women... I am the one to educate him about this phenomenon, not you. I simply know more about it. And the trick is not to be patient, or "get used to it". That's only what girls think. Girls think men are performing some proper function by waiting around patiently.

The trick is to learn strategies, which not only make better use of the time, but also alter the future. Read a book, for instance, is a good strategy. Always have a book with you. I have got through War and Peace, Vanity Fair, and quite a lot of the Bible, while waiting for your mother. (And for you, incidentally...) Other possible strategies include getting real mad (but that one is ultimately too costly... it just helps sometimes to lay a real good guilt trip on them...) I do not really advise getting mad. It is also a good time to recalibrate the clock in your car, do your fingernails, make difficult or boring phone calls -- best of all, make one or two phone calls which really annoy someone. You can check your tyre pressures or even clean the car, inside or out, or both, that's entirely up to you. If you are waiting in some public place there are endless possibilities. Mentally write short stories about the weirdos you see. All of this and much more we could call the creative use of time spent waiting for females. But Stephen needs proper instruction in this at the right time... not some boring old advice to be patient.

Much love and shalom,

Ross

...........................

On 01 March Lex Miller wrote:

There are various grades of being made to wait:
1. No waiting required. This is only theoretically possible.
2. Being made to wait a period of time for which patience is possible for the normal bloke.
3. Being made to wait a period of time for which patience is possible for the normal saint.
4. Being made to wait a period which renders the eventual departure meaningless.
5. Suffering 4 and then being blamed for it.

Getting used to it only takes you as far as about 2.5.
Reading a book may take you to 3.
Number 4 probably required some sort of preemptive action.
If anyone knows how to deal with 5, please let me know.

Lex
..........................

On 02.03.10, Rhys Miller wrote:

Stoicism works for the 2 to 4.5 range.

Rhys

Tsunami...!

Well, I’m sitting here above Kawau Bay, awaiting the tsunami. Still waiting... Turned on the radio as usual at breakfast, and behold, the interesting Sunday morning programmes had been abandoned for what they keep calling a Radio One News Special.

The “massive” earthquake off the coast of Chile has generated a “massive” tsunami, which is “racing” across the Pacific in our direction at “the speed of a jet aircraft”. There are vague reports from the Marquesas, as though they are farewelling the world and gurgling in an unseemly manner as they sink. Then it seems the Chathams are getting a series of waves, but they don’t seem too big to me. It’s about now I learn something new, about “negative” waves – that’s when the bay empties before a big one comes in.

Ah yes, I remember that. Old Ron Connolly from Fiji once told of standing on the wharf in Suva when the whole lagoon suddenly emptied. Fish were flapping on the seabed. He was a silly twit to keep standing there – but being Ron, he survived.
There’s a long reef jutting out from the south end of Algies Bay, and I figure that it will be my marker. If a negative wave happens I will see the whole reef. It hasn’t happened yet.

Radio One News Special is grinding on, interviewing mayors, a variety of Sunday morning activists and blearily on-duty civil defence type persons, and copious vox populi. There is a certain amount of bureaucratic indignation about Members of the Public who presume to defy orders not to venture on to the beaches. How could they...? The worst offenders, it seems, are dog owners. That figures.

At 1045 hrs Kawau Bay does seem to be shallower. The reef is more visible than I would have expected. Maybe some of the boats at their moorings will be aground soon. Up north at Tutukaka, I hear, the boaties have put to sea thinking that’s safer. It sounds like a cast-iron excuse for a day’s fishing, to me.

Many years ago when I was a journalist on the Auckland Star there was a standard journalists’ joke about boring headlines. One such was Small Earthquake in Chile – Not Many Hurt. Well, this one was a big one. We have yet to hear about casualties. Organisations such as Red Cross and Medicins Sans Frontieres will be stretched to the limit. It tends to give perspective to the NZ obsession this morning with the safety of people on our beaches.

At 1400 hrs all is well in Kawau Bay. The south-end reef is more exposed than I have ever seen it. Everyone seems to be coping. Nothing has come roaring in from the Pacific.

Going to the barber

We used to have barbers. Remember that? They were strictly for blokes. The barber at the Remuera shopping village – this is in the 1940s -- had all manner of stuff going on. Cutting blokes’ hair was part of it. He sold cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, pipes, cigarette papers, matches, walking sticks... and, I now realise, c-nd-ms. I got sent up there with 1/- or maybe 1/6d for a haircut whenever my mother thought I was starting to look terrible.

The shop had a sign which said, “We post to Tasmania.” Well, we all did if we wanted to. But that was code for Tatts. Gambling was illegal in NZ except for the government-sponsored Art Union, but Tattersalls operated in Australia. People bought Tatts tickets in hushed tones at the barber’s.

The place also seemed to have a lot to do with horse racing. The senior blokes hanging around knew everything, all had copies of Best Bets in their pockets, and the walls were replete with pictures of horses and jockeys. The barber took bets, which was seriously illegal. A 9-penny haircut kid sitting in the chair just had to wait, frequently, while these things were fixed up.

No one had ever heard of styling. The only kind of cut was off. The Remuera barber ran his fingers through my hair, hard against my scalp, and amputated everything above them. It’s actually not a bad style, and all the boys at the local primary schools looked the same.

The Warkworth hairdresser in 2010 differs from this in certain important respects. First, she is seriously female. There is no nonsense about suspect activities. Just when I have come to the time of life when I have an alarming paucity of hair left, she talks to me about styling. Styling...? I simply don’t want it in my eyes or ears any more. Off remains the stylistic criterion.

Blokes still turn up, however, with that old blokey awareness of who’s first, who’s next... Girls would never do it that way. The hairdresser, Julie, conducts an incessant banter with everyone within earshot. She knows just how to engage each bloke, more or less, although she does have some difficulties with me.

Norman Rockwell has a wonderful painting of Shuffleton’s Barber Shop (Saturday Evening Post, April 29, 1950). The shop’s actually empty and in semi darkness. But light is streaming through from the back room, and you can just see three blokes playing violin, flute and cello. Nothing like that in Remuera, in my memory. But at Shuffleton’s in the gloom of the barber’s shop the coal fire still glows, the hair is swept up from the floor and the large broom rests against the wall. Life is all as it should be. There is a large poster of the American flag.

The PCANZ - gently sliding from sight

I am in the curious position, having altogether departed from the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, of watching from a distance as it dies. It is something like, having been rescued from a torpedoed boat, sitting in safety at a distance and seeing it ever so slowly upend, teeter, struggle for buoyancy, and slide from sight.

The PCANZ was torpedoed when the forces of biblical literalism, fundamentalism and moralism, and people who simply want safety among their own kind and all the familiar ancestral noises, and think that is what the church is for, eventually achieved the majority vote in the General Assembly and presbyteries of the church. In 2006 they were finally able to force through legislation which severely proscribed gay and lesbian ministers and officebearers. Very serious injustice was done to a lot of people. The new alpha males began to fashion a church in their own image. A lot of intelligent and sensitive members had been sidling out of the PCANZ for some years past. Others remain, some because it is still their livelihood. Many feel alienated and persecuted.

The PC(A)NZ in which I trained and was ordained was very different. It doesn’t exist any more. Ministers were seriously trained – you were expected to have a tertiary degree before you began theological studies – and Elders knew themselves to be part of a long tradition of thoughtful if conservative lay leadership. Zealots and charismatics were discouraged. The church was far from perfect, but it had some wise and good leaders. It was moreover a church in which necessary change tended to happen from within, by processes of prayer and theological reflection, rather than by revolution. That is the way the PC(A)NZ came to accept women in both the Eldership and the Ministry, ahead of many other denominations.

I don’t know what they have now. The ruling class in the PCANZ doesn’t share its thoughts with me. I occasionally get echoes of programs and projects supposed to put fire in your nostrils, and all more or less pathetic to this elderly bloke. Then there is the sector that doesn’t seem to believe in anything much, always plagued by doubts and provisos, generally devoted to the current trendy causes. These are the post-modern brigade, if anyone knows what that means. And we have the angry and alienated sector, the gays and lesbians – and the people always trying to agonise about what is Christlike in this or that situation... The whole show is sad, neurotic and dying. I guess it doesn’t matter. The PC(A)NZ served its purpose in its time and space, and often did very well indeed. I remember numbers of its great leaders with affection and awe.

Of course it will hang on for a while yet, propped up and temporarily resuscitated, in the recovery position.

But the trick these days is to make some simple but firm decisions about personal allegiance to Christ and his people. For me that means contemplative prayer and life in the Benedictine mode – which antedates most things in the Christian spectrum and history. It actually does mean general adherence to the faith of the great creeds, more as songs of praise and wonder than of norms of belief which include some and exclude others. I am very happy with all that. There is no longer any patience with denominationalism – I can’t be bothered with it. Inwardness is all – at any rate, in the sense that without it there is nothing else.

It is a life and a discipline in which one is formed, mostly in silence and stillness, according to the pattern of Christ, just as St Paul taught. And one joins the company of those contemplatively formed by Christ.

The Flag Debate

Suddenly the flag debate has heated up. A wide assortment of malcontents, of whom I am probably one, think it’s time to replace the official NZ flag, based on the Union Jack and the Southern Cross. It does refer to our history and to our situation in the Southern Hemisphere. But it’s also redolent to many of colonialism and the days when dear old England was still called Home. Since then Britain has become part of Europe and New Zealanders have to get in the queue for Aliens at the border. And there are apparently a lot of strange people who have difficulty distinguishing it from the Australian flag.

Now the Prime Minister has said he prefers the Silver Fern flag. Please, oh please, let this not prevail…! It’s black. The silver fern is nice, and it’s connected with sport – and that’s about all that can be said for it. I know that Canada adopted the simple maple leaf, and that seems to have worked. The silver fern won’t work for me. It’s not even halfway exciting. And we are not, repeat not, defined by our sporting reference.

One of the horrors of this debate is that everyone thinks this or that available choice would be perfect given just a little alteration, redesign, fine tuning, addition, twitching here or there. Some of the products that get suggested are… ye gods. And, it seems to me, the very last thing we want is something produced by an advertising agency or design school. I have enough experience of committees trying to finalise some report or official statement or creed, to know that this is never the way to achieve any good result.

We also have the Tino Rangatiratanga flag. I suspect this one is summarily dismissed by many because it is associated with Maori protest and aspirations – and even more because it gets disastrously called the Hone Harawira flag.

But it is a fine design. It is simple, dramatic, its colours are strong and restless, and it evokes for every Kiwi the meaning of the bush and the fern, and growth. Adopting this flag would also be a real gesture in our society right now. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world might think – this flag would be inalienably New Zealand and nowhere else.

William's Epiphany

Prince William came to New Zealand on an official visit this week. A couple of days before I had watched a TV clip in which Flight Lieutenant William Wales came briskly forward in a thoroughly military manner to receive his flying wings (I think on this occasion flying helicopters) from his father, Charles, Prince of Wales. William was already commissioned as a lieutenant in the Blues and Royals, Household Cavalry – serving with his brother – and, two years later, he earned his wings by completing pilot training at Royal Air Force College Cranwell. Last year the Prince transferred to the Royal Air Force, was promoted to flight lieutenant and is training to be a full time pilot with the Search and Rescue Force. Prior to all this he is a graduate of St Andrews University.

William had the grace, style, and clear common sense, to carry off that possibly embarrassing moment in front of his mates, smoothly and with aplomb. He and his father could effortlessly combine dignity and humour.

You have to admire a young man who is already a qualified airman, to say nothing of other achievements, from polo to coping with the hideous media. Yes indeed, I know, both he and his also talented brother Harry are hugely privileged people. They still had to prove themselves and pass exams, and win the trust of their mates, in the real world. All of this is entirely lost on sad commentators such as Brian Rudman in the NZ Herald, who probably couldn’t fly a kite.

However! what do we do now with William when he comes to NZ representing his grandmother the monarch, to open our new Supreme Court building in Wellington? This new building, for all its silly design, does matter because the NZ Supreme Court replaces our long reliance on the Privy Council as the final recourse in law. Well, we parade William around the obligatory hakas, hangis, barbecues... god help us all... across to Kapiti Island to be photographed with a kiwi... and of course through the children’s ward at the hospital, very nice.

We subject him to hordes of screaming silly orgasmic females in the Wellington streets. Where do we get these dreadful people, whose minds, if that is the word, never rise beyond their perception of celebrity, and ritual fantasising? We saw one little girl, Jacinda, hideously disfigured by Pink Disease, who said it was the greatest moment of her life. She was all of 10 years old, but that’s what you say to the media now when you’re on the fast track to fame and celebrity. Behind her was her awful mother, also pinked out, who said they would remember this all their lives. My kids used to have a word for that: “Double Yugghh...!!” Sometimes they would stick their fingers down their throats. I discouraged that.

There was one real moment, I thought, at the National Shrine in Wellington, the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a very, very moving place. This fit, handsome, qualified young man, who knows as much as most of the people present about war and weaponry and loss, stepped up, laid a wreath, stepped back. That sort of gesture takes my breath away. It is not simply that he has learned to carry through a formal, ritual function. Neither is it that William of Wales has history built into his genes. It was that he is real, himself – that is what he seems to have inherited from his generation, and which people like Jacinda and her mother will never know.

Meanwhile the pathetic media bleated on about how well or otherwise William was performing on the Celebrity level – and worse, so help me, about whether we should become a republic. Ye gods. This is now the abyss of the media, that we “interview” people randomly encountered in the street about complex questions Plato wrestled with.

We now go to our reporter in Queen Street. “Excuse me, sir, should we become a republic?”

“Huh..? what..? eh..?”

“What do you do for a living, sir, if I may enquire?”

“I’m a bank executive...”

One of the miracles is what this young man has overcome. He seems to have emerged intact from a spectacularly dysfunctional family, back to Henry VIII. Bullies, psychopaths, sadists, nymphomaniacs, simpletons... His mother, a beautiful woman, driven to distraction, separated from her husband and the culture of the Windsors, died violently in a Paris underpass with her current lover.

I don’t know why we have a “royal family”. Does a country need one family that special? We got the Windsors from the Hanovers, from the Stuarts, from the Tudors, from the Plantagenets... In that movie The Queen, at the height of the Diana’s death crisis, the two queens, Elizabeth and her ageing mother, go walking through the garden at Balmoral, and Elizabeth the Queen Dowager says to Elizabeth the Queen, “You go back 1000 years. Remember your vow....”

Well I honour that too. It was a sincere and very solemn and public vow from a remarkable young woman at that time, and I suppose that’s why we still have a royal family. Does NZ have to have one? We could honour all that history and let it go. I would be sad – although we could much easier do it than England could. Scotland and Wales, even Ulster, might feel that way too.

The main argument against a republic, it seems to me, is who would lead it. The USA does not inspire confidence. Neither, I may say, does the imminent race to decide who will be Lord Mayor of the new Auckland Supercity. It’s chilling.

But William did well. He is a hopeful, talented, poised, handsome, thoughtful young man. And may he not be repressed and ruined by the Establishment. He could just be the one who resets the boundaries of monarchy and republicanism, to say nothing of leadership and decency.

Heat and Feet

Mary left for Brisbane this morning, to spend 4-5 days with Rhys, Grace, Boaz and Lauren, in their new house at New Beith. So I have this time on my own, to revert to my default mode of hermit. It also means that I can buy some cream to enjoy with summer fruit.

This meant a swift trip to the New World supermarket at Warkworth, city of the brain dead – not Warkworth, the supermarket. Where do these people come from? I parked next to some unregistered wreck, bald tyres, doors fastened with filthy cord... And inside the supermarket were the owners, resplendent in grubby bare feet, torn shorts and filthy singlet, hairy tattooed shoulders, matted unkempt hair, yellowed teeth – and that was only the wife. The bloke was worse. The kids were, well, indescribable. It would have been good to call the health department, but where would they start?

I object to bare feet and horrible human specimens where I buy food. People simply too dozy to be clean, sanitary, more or less presentable. This is the Kiwi “Good Keen Man” Syndrome, popularised in the 1960s by Barrie Crump, who shot deer and pigs and beat his wives.

Human feet in any case are not normally a pretty sight, and it astonishes me that some weirdos seem actually to find them erotic. I recall being at some retreat long ago where one of the leaders, unable to cope with silence and stillness, and looking for things to do, suggested a communal foot-washing ceremony. Ye gods. I said I had no affinity with feet, and received the immediate thanks and relief of several other leaders. Perhaps that is the point of the Jesus story – that feet are such ugly things, especially one might presume, at that time to say nothing of now, Middle-Eastern feet, but he washed them all the same. OK. The Pope does it, with carefully screened and scrutinised and pre-washed feet. I prefer not. I take the point of John’s story, which is something much deeper and more precious than feeling we have to replicate it every time we’re spiritually bored.

But the bare-foot Kiwi Bloke ethos around here is pretty strong. The sound of their tractors, hauling boats to the boat ramp, back again, running their outboards... The uniform is shorts, singlet, bare feet, baseball cap – and they are usually an unedifying sight. The bloke next door runs his tractor out of the garage some mornings, just to drive it around the lawn and back again.

However, Mary is off to Oz. Melbourne and Victoria are currently having truly dangerous heat. So are South Australia and much of Western Australia, even Tasmania. But in other parts there are storms and floods. It’s all a bit dire. I think it’s OK where Mary is going. And of course bush fires are a terrifying fact of life and death now. You have to wonder what the future is in a land where the water seems to be petering out.

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.
-------------------------

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.