At the Hot Spot

The Mahurangi East Public Library has a Hot Spot. The vulgar sort may not know what this means. My wife’s cousin’s husband didn’t. The Hot Spot is where your laptop can access the internet by wireless. In the Mahurangi East Public Library the Hot Spot is down the back. It is undesignated -- you have to ask the librarian. It’s free.

(Note: Not “for free” -- that current trendy silliness that has infected all radio and TV speech...) We ought to enjoy the free services of the public library system while we have them. When Auckland got its Super City a few months ago, that is to say, one municipal authority from the south of Franklin to the north of Rodney, more than 50 public library branches became one system -- all free to ratepayers and residents. Its interloan service means you can order books on your computer at home (if your ISP consents to function) and have them brought from Howick or Helensville, to Mahurangi East -- free. This is civilised living. Now they are getting organised with eBooks for eReaders. But time is short, I fear, before the Super City councillors discover they have a potential revenue stream right there. What fun to make the blighters pay...

But back to the Hot Spot. It became important when we embarked on our spooky warfare with the atrocious Telstra Clear and our exasperating dealings with their “Customer Service” personnel in Manila or Singapore, who appear not to speak English. Then Telstra Clear one Saturday morning simply cut us off. Brian Edwards has a hilarious blog video in which a group of Belgians find a way to subject their tyrannical and incompetent telephone and ISP company to the same treatment they have been meting out. http://brianedwardsmedia.co.nz/2011/01/

Down at the library it was easy to log on at the Hot Spot, download my emails and look at the newspapers. Easy, that is, until a woman came and set up beside me, with much grunting and wrestling with cables and talking to herself. She had hauled her hapless husband along too, and together they were going to log on to some real estate website, find the house their daughter was evidently threatening to buy, and see what they thought of it. I imagine this woman thrives in many of the local clubs, the garden group, the walking group, that kind of thing. She never has an unexpressed thought. Never mind that this was a library -- I can remember when making a noise in the library was enough to get you slung out. Now of course you routinely compete with Rhythm and Wriggle, and happy stories for the kiddiewinkies. She found the house, and then began a litany of “I don’t belieeeeeve it...!” The husband contributed nothing, but sat there wraith-like, poised for instructions.

By the time I reached the pitch of exasperation at which I said to her, “Mahurangi East is really not all that interested in your beliefs”, she had finished anyway, she gave me a black look, packed up her computer and cleared out. She will tell them at the bridge club about that vulgar and so common man she encountered in the library.

Hagiography

John Newton, From Disgrace To Amazing Grace, by Jonathan Aitken (Crossway Books 2007). This is the first book I have read right through as an eBook, on my new Sony E-Reader. Great fun. You can buy it online, pay for it, download it and be reading it in five minutes.

But now, to business... First the author, Jonathan Aitken. He is a British politician who in 1999 was convicted of perjury and perverting the course of justice, was bankrupted, and went to prison. He had been a war journalist, had got entangled among international arms dealers (in the process he had managed to father a daughter with the wife of Adnan Khashoggi), had been elected an MP and risen to cabinet rank under John Major... But not under Margaret Thatcher -- there is a wonderful story of how he told an Egyptian newspaper that Mrs Thatcher thinks Sinai is the plural of Sinus, after which he enjoyed the view from the back bench in Thatcher’s government.

However, in 1997, after a colourful and chequered political history, to say the least, Aitken got interested in the Alpha Course. This is a study course in Christian biblical understanding and life developed from Holy Trinity Church, Brompton, fairly conservative in its approach, too much so for some, but stunningly successful around the world. Jonathan Aitken however embraced Christian faith in its protestant evangelical format, and then took on serious theological studies including Greek.

Now he has done what I am sure he thinks is a scholarly biography of John Newton. John Newton exists in Christian history as the writer of “Amazing Grace” and many other well-known English hymns of the late 18th century in which he collaborated with William Cowper. He is known as the former slave ship captain who was converted to Christ and wound up as Vicar of Olney, and then of St Mary Woolnoth in London, and was a leader of the Evangelical renovation of the Church of England. John Newton was a great and good man, a man of faith and prayer.

But this is not really a scholarly biography. Both Newton and Aitken, and of course many others, know themselves to have been found by grace, forgiven and transformed. I too am acquainted with the reality of grace. Far more people are than Jonathan Aitken seems to realise. Grace is a reality that the formal church often finds inconvenient and betrays. Grace is something close and real about God. It is of the esse of God. Without grace we are lost. John Newton experienced grace. So did Jonathan Aitken. In evangelical terms, in our need, grace abounds.

But we don’t go on about it. I suppose that is what mainly distances me from the evangelicals... Christ is better praised and loved by quiet love and faith. Newton’s hymns are among my favourites because they tell my story too. But they have never inspired me to prove something against the rest of the church, as Aitken seems to think is necessary. He has a sad view of the “quiet” church which actually includes many thoughtful, changed and deeply spiritual people, men and women of commitment and discipline, and deep love of Christ.

Aitken’s book fails the scholarship test because it reads like a polemic, a tract, an evangelical sermon. It is hopelessly repetitive. Some of it seems to be notes of the author’s own sermons or lectures on Newton and evangelicalism.

I find myself wishing the same story had been researched by some sensitive atheist or agnostic. Anyone but a militant Anglican evangelical at this time, perhaps. We might then have a really serious and objective biography of John Newton. Someone, some time, might undertake a study of the history of human biography, and of how many times a really important story has been wasted because it came to be told by the wrong person. But then, that is just the difference between biography and hagiography.

A calamity indeed

Tom Scott’s prophetic cartoon from nearly two years ago says most of it for me. The fulfilment came just a few days ago when three minor Anglican bishops stood in a line in the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral in London and were solemnly ordained into the Catholic priesthood.

These old boys had held some kind of roving episcopal commission in the Church of England, taking care of priests and parishioners unable to sleep at nights thinking of female priests, female bishops, gay and lesbian clergy, or anything “liberal”.

Now they are Catholic priests and they are the first of what Pope Benedict is calling a special ordinariate, whatever that is, for Anglicans who wish to go over to Rome but retain their Anglican ways in worship and whatnot. But they can’t be bishops any more because they are married. How feeble is that! Their compliant subservient wives, dressed uniformly in beige, stood meekly behind their husbands at the ordination holding the fresh folded priestly robes at the ready. So all was just as it should be.

One of the sadnesses for me is that I thought the Catholic Primate, Archbishop Vincent Nicholls, was a better person than that. How on earth did that intelligent man manage to go along with this fiasco? It was pointless, I thought, that he paid tribute to the generous spirit of the Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams, when we all know that the Archbishop of Canterbury was left with no choice.

Needless to say the cathedral was packed -- with everyone who still thinks it is impossible for the priesthood to be female or other than heterosexual and preferably celibate. The rest of us, around the world, looked on with despair.

It was a disaster of theology, a disaster of belief, a disaster of ecumenism, of sense and of grace and courtesy. If these three blokes needed to have catholic ordination it could have been done decently and in order in private. Instead they had to have this vulgar display. A calamity indeed.

Emma Woods

Emma Woods was walking with her two boys, Jacob, 6, and Nayan, 4, on a Friday evening in May when a teenager's car came from a side street, mounted the footpath, spun off a fence and killed Nayan. The distraught driver came to their aid and Mrs Woods forgave.

When the 17-year-old pleaded guilty to dangerous driving charges, Mrs Woods asked the court that he not be sent to jail. She said to him she did not want the tragedy to be the defining moment of his life. She and he have since worked together on a shrine to her lost son.

Her goodness speaks for itself. The rarity of her example of true forgiveness - in a society shaped too often by conflict, accentuated victimhood, revenge and forced apologies - makes Emma Woods our New Zealander of the Year.


That’s from the NZ Herald of 11.12.2010. This woman is not a sporting icon, or a business baron, a political luminary or a discoverer of a cure for cancer. She did not singlehandedly capture a machine gun nest in Afghanistan or sail solo around the world. She chose to forgive the 17-year-old who killed her son Nayan.

Nothing I have read says she is a practising Christian. She may be. If she is, she doesn’t parade it as some do.

She is New Zealander of the Year because she made a life-enhancing choice not to allow events to make her a Victim, but to take another path through loss and sorrow. I don’t know what Garth McVicar and his mates think of that, let alone all the people who have found their identity in their Victim status. I know what I think.

“I can’t forgive… I will never forgive…” Of course we can’t be judgemental of people who choose the path of blame and retribution, hatred perhaps, determined to hang on to poisonous memories and attitudes. The harm these people do to themselves is usually quite visible. They come from a punitive culture whose motto so often is An Eye For An Eye…etc.

Well, there is another path. It is a Christian path, but not exclusively so. Atheists can choose it, Buddhists and Baptists. And a choice, often a very costly choice, is exactly what it is. To forgive is to hold the future open for all parties including the offender or abuser. It is to refuse to pin condemnatory labels on people. It is to refuse to become a victim oneself.

How did the Herald get it so right?

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.

Rage

Chrissie Foster, with Paul Kennedy: Hell On The Way To Heaven (Bantam 2010)

There can be no excuse for paedophilia. There can be no mitigating circumstances. I share the visceral disgust at serial paedophilia by priests, teachers, social workers and others who have had power and privileged access to children. It is important for me to state this clearly at the outset, and to add that I am far from being an admirer of aspects of Roman Catholicism in which this vile culture has thrived. I will come back to that...

Two of Chrissie and Anthony Foster’s three daughters, Emma and Katie, were repeatedly abused as little girls at their Catholic parish school in Melbourne. The abuser was the parish priest, Fr Kevin O’Donnell, who turned out to have been a lifelong paedophile. He had many child victims, some of whom were emboldened in later years to come forward. Nobody knows how many more were still too frightened or traumatised.

After some 13 years of anorexia, mental crisis, alcohol and drug abuse, after countless hours of counselling, psychotherapy, rehab treatment, Emma died of irretrievable despair and a medication overdose, in her 20s.

Katie too plunged eventually into alcoholism. Then she sustained serious brain damage after being hit by a drunken driver -- Katie had walked blindly out into the roadway. She is now terribly handicapped and in care.

The Foster family has indeed been to hell and back. As Emma deteriorated as a young teenager her parents realised the horrifying truth that she had been one of O’Donnell’s victims. They found out about Katie later. The book chronicles Chrissie, the mother’s deep, developing, ineradicable and abiding rage -- against O’Donnell, against the priesthood and the hierarchy, and I think also against herself. Chrissie, she relates in various ways, had failed her daughters because as their mother she had not kept them safe.

She embarks on years of hammering on the doors of the church hierarchy, researching, writing, forming protest groups -- all while carting her daughters to clinics and consultations and battling with psychologists, psychiatrists, GPs, care-givers. Anthony her husband is trying to keep them financially afloat, while grieving for his daughters and the destruction of their family life.

And indeed, they meet little but stonewalling, lies and hypocrisy at the hands of the Catholic hierarchy. Archbishop George Pell, at that time still in Melbourne, emerges as implacable and duplicitous. It is like a little waft of fresh air when occasionally they meet some official who understands and cares. The crime against these children over so many years is almost impossible to comprehend -- yet the church, committed to the way of Christ, seems totally concerned with damage limitation, avoidance of responsibility, protection of its priests, and refusing to engage in serious discussion with mere laity.

It reflects a culture which puzzles and horrifies me. While of course there have always been priests and bishops who were primarily pastors in the best sense, there have been too many who assumed that they had the power, would call the shots and the laity’s role was to listen and obey. Women especially must not emerge from their God-given subservient roles.

O’Donnell seems to have been a priest simply unable to cope with any child or adult with questions about the way things are done.

At the same time, we have Chrissie’s account of her upbringing as a loyal Catholic to whom the priest was the representative of God and His Church. You had to know how to genuflect and shut up.

Of course it’s changing now. And one of the many effects of change is this relentless exposure of the church’s wickedness, woundedness and sinful hypocrisy. Pell, now Cardinal Archbishop of Sydney, must have been very glad at the huge diversion handed him by the canonisation of Mary MacKillop and all the excitement among the faithful. But the huge scandal in Australia, Ireland, USA, and many other places, from priestly paedophilia, remains. It was interesting that St Mary of the Cross MacKillop herself, in the 19th century, was excommunicated by the bishop for contumacy or something, right after she had presumed to report a priest for sexual abuse of children.

This book is informative, but it is mainly about Chrissie Foster’s rage. The church she loyally served turned out to be the destroyer of her motherhood and two of her children, she thinks... It is by no means clear that Emma’s or Katie’s problems may be laid at the feet of O’Donnell. It may be so. Chrissie simply assumes that is so. But plenty of young adults with anorexia, drug addiction, and eventually suicide, have not been abused in their childhood by anyone -- and plenty who have, have come to terms with it and have become balanced and happy people. It is a cruel world.

Test-tube babies

Dr Robert Edwards is the pioneer who first developed in vitro fertilisation. This morning it is announced that he has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Then, also this morning, as it were by reflex, Monsignor Ignacio Carrasco de Paula, a high official in the Vatican, announces that it’s not all good. Never mind that millions of otherwise childless couples have been enabled to conceive and bear children they love and care for. According to Ignacio, IVF has also resulted in discarded eggs. And that’s bad.

Well, I personally think that if our good God is worried about the eggs, which I doubt, he/she is perfectly capable of taking care of them. That’s all far outside my comprehension and jurisdiction. What I do know is that IVF has done much good, generated much happiness, made the world a much better place. Dr Edwards’s award was somewhat delayed, but richly deserved.

And yet again the church, right on cue, chooses death rather than life, gloom rather than light.

Mend our brother's broken heart

The other day it was sentencing time in the High Court for a former teacher, a school principal indeed, convicted of sexual abuse of pupils at a Maori school. TV gave us a look in the court, assuming that we are all voyeurs. This chap was cowering in the dock, shattered, beaten, humiliated, frightened and helpless as though at his public execution, as the judge gave him eight years.

I was impressed however with the judge, who denied himself the luxury of high moral indignation on behalf of “all right-thinking people”, and simply stuck to the legal necessities. Also, he allowed the teacher’s whanau not only to be present, but to conduct their own quite dignified karakia. Often this is a problem and an embarrassment, it seems to me, but this time we got a heartfelt prayer spoken by an elder, and the sentence that stuck in my mind was: “Mend our brother’s broken heart.”

Our culture applies a great deal of energy to punishment and retribution. An eye for an eye makes a lot of people feel better, they feel that the world is the right way up for once. If the punishment and humiliation of someone can be used as a warning and a moral deterrent, even better -- although there is precious little evidence to show it has any of those effects. People such as Garth McVicar of "Sensible" Sentencing and all his unpleasant ilk think we have a common stake in making sentences harsh. Their pet hate is judges who are “soft”. You wonder whether they would advocate state-operated tumbrils, if they knew what those were. It is incomprehensible to these people that anyone might be more interested in the reclamation and restoration of the offender.

Of course, society’s eye for an eye attitudes are also the fount of huge hypocrisy. The higher you climb on the moral ground, the more sickeningly hypocritical you get. We seem to be blind to it. Watch the feeding frenzy that results when some MP or other unfortunate, who has himself/herself taken some moral stand, is then shown to be fallible. Much of the media devotedly feeds these ugly aspects of our culture. It is as Gandhi said, An eye for an eye simply makes the whole world blind.

In all my CD collection, one of the best tracks of all has the two American negro sopranos, Kathleen Battle and Jessye Norman, singing the negro spiritual:

There is a balm in Gilead
To make the wounded whole;
There is a balm in Gilead
To heal the sin-sick soul.

And in all graphic art, nothing for me surpasses Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal.

A secular culture, in the end, lets people go to hell -- or remain in hell where they are already. Indeed, it is a mantra you hear people repeat these days, when someone has done something unspeakable: I’d let him rot in hell.

Worst of all, there have been instances in which such attitudes have emerged in what purports to be the christian church in NZ.

I have no knowledge of the teacher at the start of this essay, but I saw him there, and I know what grace and love can achieve. On the other hand, I recall a church colleague from years ago who was apprehended and found guilty of similar offences. The church simply didn’t want to know. He went to prison in an abyss of sorrow and depression, and there he died of a broken heart. The church still doesn’t want to know. I share in the guilt of that.

Silence ! ! !

Silence actually doesn’t exist. Anywhere. There is an insightful discussion of all this in a recent book by American writer, George Michelsen Foy: “Zero Decibels - The Quest For Absolute Silence”. Even in “the quietest place on earth”, the anechoic chamber in the Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, Foy could hear things. He describes sounds that emerge when just about every other sound is eliminated -- one is what he calls the Monster Breath, and another is like a bucket dredge at work. Of course he had long known to take account of the noises of his own body at work.

One of the effects of Foy’s research over a couple of years was that he became acutely conscious of the deluge of sounds most of us scarcely notice until we consciously pay attention, from the sounds of wind and weather to the inhuman din of downtown New York. (Tourists certainly notice this shattering racket, even at 3 am, but seemingly the locals get rewired with a sort of soundwall.) Sitting at home on a quiet evening, or at the beach alone, even fully submerged in water, Foy was still receiving a barrage of sound. He writes about the panic that can ensue if for any reason we are deprived of our noise accompaniment, and he surveys ways in which we fill up silent spaces with any din that comforts us.

The thudding approach of some hoon’s vehicle with boom box is happening as I write. Foy also discusses noise, auditory damage and hearing loss.

Aspects of this take me back to university days, Philosophy I, II and III, the empiricism of blokes like Locke, Berkeley and Hume. The classical conundrum: Is there any sound anywhere if there is no one there to hear it?

Foy discusses tinnitus. He thinks most people have some degree of tinnitus. If you live in downtown Manhattan how would you know? He goes to stay with the monks at Citeaux. But contemplatives have long known that it’s pointless to try to eliminate noise. You get rid of as much of it as is practicable and sensible, and you simply accept the rest.

People who come to visit us here at Algies Bay typically comment, how quiet it is! It seems comparatively quiet for anyone who has come from Auckland I guess. That is, until the next bloke fires up some motor. There is a widespread love affair with the internal combustion engine around here, and so the blokes love to run their outboards, motor mowers, line trimmers, leaf blowers (a truly evil device, the loudest of them all up close, and almost completely pointless), chain saws, tractors, motor bikes, pressure sprayers. The air down at the boat ramp in the summer reeks of petroleum fumes, and resonates with the cries of very happy blokes.

Today a neighbour got a very large poplar tree hewn down. It took most of the day, and others showed up to hear the music of chain saws and the hideous huge mulcher which turns tonnes of wood into chips. Never mind the local bird life. The tui and the kokako will no longer sing from that tree in the mornings.

I have come to value silence above most other things. But it is always a relative silence -- like everything else in this bent world, never perfect, at best approximate. The din of the church is one noise I have escaped, rather as the desert fathers and mothers of the 4th and 5th centuries fled the racket of priests and preachers, and theologians, into the wastelands of Syria, Sinai and Egypt.

But also, as far as possible, the clamorous culture that wants to turn us all into happy mindless consumers. Soon it will be necessary to flee the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

Some have thought that silence is God’s language. Well certainly, it’s hard to hear any word of God without the best silence we can manage. Interior silence is best, and essential. That takes time and some wise teaching. Interior silence has a lot to do with having faced and recognised one’s personal demons, having learned to let go of what is destructive or unnecessary, having no enemies, and having quelled the voracious ego. There is always further to travel along this road.

External silence is more like a gift, as coming to Algies Bay has been for me.

Church Inanities - September post 2010

Yesterday, a week following the Christchurch earthquake of 4 September 2010, Anglicans held a morning service in Cathedral Square. It had to be alfresco -- bits were still dropping off the cathedral with aftershocks. We got to see a tiny bit of the service on TV news, and that bit featured a woman called the Cathedral Theologian, preaching. Cathedral Theologian...? Aren’t they all supposed to be theologians? Do they have this woman vicariously think about God for them?

Anyway, to my horror, this is what she plainly told us on national TV: “God was good to us. No one was killed...” I am not making this up, and I have not misquoted. And this is pernicious pietistic claptrap. Was God not good to the Haitians or the Chileans, when they had their earthquakes with many fatalities, or to the tsunami victims of Sumatra or Samoa? Or was that some other God? Where did they get this woman? And who thought this level of humbug was adequate for a service as important as this one was? Anyone who wants to know what a real Christian response to such disaster sounds like might read Archbishop Rowan Williams's teaching following the assault on the World Trade Centre in New York.

Embarrassing is what this was. It panders yet again to superstition and credulity. It exemplifies why so many thoughtful and perceptive people are conspicuous by their absence from the church. It might have made some sense to take the view of I Kings 19:11 -- “The Lord was not in the earthquake.” The earthquake happened not because God was sitting up there doing things, but because tectonic plates were in collision, as they always have been.

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

Since I last had anything much to do with public worship, some meddler has invented a new Liturgical Season. It comes right in the middle of the Season of Pentecost, and it’s called Creation. Well that’s OK, I suppose. It does give a good chance to feature major ecological concerns.

But yesterday, at Snells and in Warkworth, there was a Litany of Creation which makes me wonder if we urgently need a Mahurangi Resident Theologian (an intellectually honest one). First we got:

We gather our animal family of Creation to worship with us,
All our kin living on this planet,
from the busiest bee to the tallest giraffe.

It’s well meant, of course, but it’s the kind of stuff which makes me grind my teeth and wonder if anyone has formed an escape committee. Our kin include also the cockroaches, wetas and great white sharks, but of course they’re not “busy” or cuddly. This is the dumbing down of worship, and one longs for Cranmer or Knox. But then came:

We remember our ancient relatives who became extinct,
Dinosaurs, dodos and the moa,
giant marsupials and the woolly mammoths.

I got into some trouble at breakfast this morning for venturing that that might indeed be an accurate description of my ancient relatives. But seriously, who writes this stuff? Is it for grown-ups? I am thankful I never actually met any of my ancient relatives on a dark night. (I did, now I come to think of it, have an aunt called Dodo.)

And so the litany continued, getting worse if anything. Well I’m sorry, but it’s too twee, too cute. And I don’t think it is worship.

The portaloos are coming

One fine moment in this evening’s TV coverage of the Canterbury earthquake... The residents of some badly hit street are standing at their gates watching the TV crew. Some are complaining bitterly about what they see to be local council neglect of them in their plight. They are sans water, sans sewerage system, sans electricity, and everything around is broken. Some of their houses are snapped in half.

...and as we speak a big lorry comes into view, rumbling up the road, laden with portaloos. It’s like the Berlin Airlift, only at a different pace and without the elegance of the DC3s banking down towards Tempelhof. Cheers rise from every gate, and the queues start to form. Using a bucket, I guess, has been just a little too reminiscent of the facilities in the railway cattle vans heading eastward to Auschwitz.

Christchurch, and places such as Darfield, Kaiapoi, Hororata, are going to take years to recover from this. Out in Bexley, too close to the settling ponds, whole streets of houses around five years old are now having to be demolished. Each house, some family’s dream, is not only damaged beyond repair, but is sitting on wretched terrain which has simply bubbled and jellified into a deep sludge of sewage and sand and heaven knows what. Who gave planning permission for this particular catastrophe?

The wooden structures seem to have fared best. The rather large stone Anglican church at Hororata lost the whole top of its bell tower, which fell through the roof and destroyed the organ. The organ is in a million pieces, says the vicar, a woman who seems to have trained in the Dibley college of pastoral theology. Never mind, she said, for right across the road is their previous church, an old wooden one, and that’s just fine for now. I’m sorry about the organ though.

A lot of churches have been badly damaged. Some of those Christchurch churches are fine even lovely buildings, but there are a few redolent mainly of cheap brass and formica, and a thin theology of worship. So it’s not all bad. Of course, some of the uglier ones, by some perversity, are the best loved. I’m thinking of one church which has all the charm and worshipful ambience of an electricity substation, and if there is any justice it will go.

It’s interesting I think, and a sign of the times, that the media coverage over three days now has had scarcely any mention of the churches. One or two photos, but that’s all. Other heritage buildings have had coverage. But even their two cathedrals seem to have escaped notice by the media. Both have been recently earthquake strengthened (at public expense, I may say), and have got by with little damage.

There were no fatalities, which is astonishing, and no rush of bad injuries. The housing has been the biggest casualty, I think, and small business premises. There are a lot of broken hearts. A lot of people now mortgaged for sums far beyond anything their properties are now worth.

I heard one laconic police officer say they had apprehended in the middle of the night two well known local criminals trying to get into the cordoned area under the guise of being council staff. ‘Ullo, ‘ullo, ‘ullo, what ’ave we ‘ere then...? It would have been interesting to hear the actual conversation.

He should have kept his big mouth shut

It was the local church’s annual congregational meeting. I have lost count of the number of these I chaired or otherwise attended over the years. The congregational AGM is a little like going shopping in downtown Ramallah or Baghdad -- you are never sure what’s going to happen, even blood and guts flying around. A congregational meeting can go smoothly and without injury right through to the tepid coffee and ginger nuts -- or it can melt down right in front of you.

In the Parish of Carfin in Lanarkshire, Scotland, where I was minister for a couple of years long ago, the last AGM before I arrived had been broken up by the police.

I don’t attend the local church. But it seems they had yet another instalment of the perennial debate about whether real wine should be served at Holy Communion. My personal view is that the minute that subject appeared on the agenda, everyone with any sense should have risen up and gone home. But no, you don’t do that. What you do is proceed with a pointless, fruitless, largely ignorant wrangle no one wants, in which you absolutely know that someone is going to get badly hurt about ten minutes from now.

And so it was. One of their best senior members, Trev, a bloke of experience and perception, found himself getting pecked to death and vilified for his views, and later decided that was all he was prepared to take of that church. When subsequently his departure was reported to one of the attackers, Fred, the attacker’s response was, “Well, he should have kept his big mouth shut.”

Now, hold it right there... It’s worth pausing to ponder Fred’s remark before we consign it to the oblivion of contempt. This is the Christian Church. It is committed to peace and understanding. It is supposed to be inhabited by mature believers no longer threatened by difference of opinion, creed, race or whatever. It is supposed to have found ways to deal with conflict without rancour or abuse, or alienation of anyone. It is supposed to have learned that every person is fallible, sinful, wounded -- and to have developed the consequent humility.

It is ironic, I think, that Trev’s view on the use of proper wine in Holy Communion was that hospitality requires it to be there, along with non-alcoholic “wine”. The point about hospitality is that it is inclusive. So it is a simple organisational problem to solve, but it is the hospitality that matters, and I entirely agree with that. Hospitality is a major biblical theme, and is most certainly part of our understanding of the Lord’s Table and Holy Communion -- "Eucharistic Hospitality".

It seems that Fred brusquely dismissed this because he is ignorant of it. He thought “hospitality” was something like generously providing booze at some gathering of blokes to watch the footie. Fred assumed Holy Communion was nothing to do with hospitality. It’s religious, don't you know. Hospitality is just generous-minded blokes. Later, Fred seemed unimpressed that his attitude had cost the fellowship dearly -- “Well, he should have kept his big mouth shut.”

Well, sorry Fred. That remark is counter to all that the church might mean. It connotes for me so much of the reason I rarely now go near. The last church I attended regularly prided itself on a large decorative glass screen at the entrance on which was etched: “A house of prayer for all people”. But in the end it wasn’t. Not for some.

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.