Bin Laden is dead

Is there anyone else out there who feels ill this morning? That is to say, nauseated and despairing at the reactions of media, politicians, and thousands of the American People...?

Osama Bin Laden is dead. Hunted down and assassinated by United States special forces, the ones so many Americans thrill to see, bristling with weapons and menace -- Americans feel safe, moral and meaningful. Then these intrepid agents followed through some prescribed procedure for formally identifying the corpse, which they transferred to a conveniently placed United States warship and disposed of at sea with a sickeningly hypocritical attempt at Islamic protocols.

The Land of the Free appears to have erupted with joy. One newspaper, I don’t know which, bannered a headline, “UTU...!” I thought that was a Maori word, but perhaps potentially useful words spread far and wide. Another, the New York Daily News, headlined, “May he rot in hell...!” There was some light relief from Fox News, the TV channel I tune up briefly whenever I want to remind myself how awful the American Republican party can be -- their newsreader evidently misread the cue and announced, “President Obama is in fact dead.” That newsreader must be some kind of over-paid automaton.

Our own NZ Prime Minister promptly announced that the world is now a safer place. That’s curious, because the opposite is the case. It has just got a lot more dangerous because of the deep wells of rage that have been plumbed.

No political leader today dares to say hang on, this may have been clever, but was it wise... humane... just...? No -- for the moment revenge is all. Utu. An eye for an eye. As Gandhi said, it makes the whole world blind.

Justice...? Justice turns out to be a negotiable concept. The Americans claim that apprehending this man, blasting him through the head, disposing of his weighted corpse in the Arabian Sea before anyone else knew, proclaiming it a just and moral thing... is justice...? Ye gods. It is lynch law. It is stupefying to realise that Americans actually do still follow it.

I understand that there may have been serious difficulties in arresting this man and taking him into custody. I see indeed that the processes of bringing him before a suitable court somewhere, and hearing and deciding on his crimes, would have been lengthy, involving all manner of complications. I know that finding a place to house him in secure and somewhat humane conditions might have been difficult. It could all have been done.

The Americans decided on behalf of all of us that it couldn’t be done. They also decided that it shouldn’t. They assumed that the attack on their territory on what they call 9/11 took precedence over all else, and they sent some elite military unit to act as prosecutor, judge, executioner. That is what they call justice.
It is lynch law.

I don’t know what Bin Laden deserved, but Justice deserves better. And somehow the rest of the world needs to be stating to the USA that we do not wish them to be making our decisions for us, that the killing of American citizens is no worse than the killing of anyone else, that we do not recognise them as the world’s moral police, that we do not see their limited and corrupt democracy as a model, and that, in company with Plato, Jesus and Augustine, to say nothing of various better-inspired Americans, we believe that Justice is more than sending in the marines.

But all that having been written... I suspect it is better said by the NZ Anglican bishops this week:

Reflections at the time of the death of Osama bin Laden
The news of the demise of Osama bin Laden has been felt to bring a measure and a form of closure for thousands affected by the acts of terror over the past decade. It is crucial that the acts of terror in any form, including those masterminded by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, be challenged and overcome.

However, the death of Osama bin Laden is no cause for gloating, or unthinking jubilation. The biblical record is clear in Ezekiel 18:32: “For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live.” We are therefore not called to relish the death of anyone. We are called to grieve the fact that turning and living was not chosen in the first place by Al Qaeda, who chose the way of death, but also to grieve all deadly spirals of violence and fear, hatred and prejudice with all their various causes.

Learning to find a way of understanding the causes of the way of violence and death can, by grace, lead to a measure of God given forgiveness of enemies, as the Gospel calls us to do: Matthew 5:43-44, John 13:34, Luke 6:27-28, Romans 12:14, 1 Corinthians 4:12, Romans 12:17-21, 1 Peter 3:9, 1 John 2:9-10. We need insight under God, rather than vengeance. Vengeance belongs to God (Romans 12:19, Hebrews 10:30). An eye for an eye (Matthew 5:38) and the whole world goes blind. This means jingoism and enjoyment of the death of Osama bin Laden can find no place in Christian prayer or Christian thinking.

We can do no better than end with the words of a Christian leader who gave his life for the cause of justice, freedom and abundant life for all people: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."--Martin Luther King, Jr.

++Brown Turei
++David Moxon

Archbishops of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia

Appreciating the royals

The argument for the British monarchy has suddenly got brighter and better with the brilliant royal wedding -- while the argument for United States republicanism (and their limited corrupt “democracy”) has suddenly got even more difficult with the apparent candidacies of Donald Trump and Sarah Palin. Where do they get these people?

William and Catherine showed up on their wedding day looking just what they are, two intelligent and thoughtful young adults, full of life, deeply in love, talented, handsome. The occasion seemed to bring out the best in everyone. Catherine answered all the endless excruciating speculation about the wedding dress by coming beautifully forth in something utterly right for her, relaxed and lovely. William was as handsome a prince as any fairytale fantasy might want -- while brother Harry was exactly who you might want at your elbow right then.

And it was Christian. It was not any kind of sentimental saccharine substitute. It was a solemn occasion in the best sense. They did not get married on a beach or in somebody’s silly garden. They did not arrive already slightly intoxicated. They and their guests, for the most part, did not dress bizarrely. (An exception was the two York daughters who, as one fashionista observed, appeared to be going on to appear in some pantomime.)

There were old and precious values here. The Dean of Westminster, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, none of them ever pompous or preachy, contented themselves to let the great words speak for themselves, which they did. The prayer written by the bride and groom, and read for them by a good bishop, was simple and meaningful. The music was English, Welsh, and lovely. They made their serious vows together right where William’s grandmother long ago promised a lifetime of service. They were blessed by one of the finest archbishops ever to come to Canterbury.

Things do not always go right for the House of Windsor. They have not always gone right for the house of Miller, Smith or Jones. But I will back the Windsors. They wear their wounds with grace and dignity, and truth. They are able to change. They bear the utter poison of the mostly hideous British media for the most part with wisdom and grace.

Maybe this wedding was a punch in the solar plexus of the shallow-waders who are bored with anything thoughtful or meaningful, who airily dismiss marriage vows as “pieces of paper”, who assume serious commitment is entirely provisional and they must “keep their options open”... those who think it important to be trendy and consign “religion” to outer darkness since we are modern and enlightened. “Christian...? Oh god, no...!”

William and Catherine evidently think for themselves and come to decisions. They also seem to take counsel from wise people when they want to.

Well anyway, it gives me hope.

Miscellany 2

On 3 November 2009 I posted a blog called Miscellany. It was a vehicle to help me feel better about various idiocies. If I write it, I can move on. Here is Miscellany...2.

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An early 19th century captain in the British Royal Navy was renowned not only for his seamanship, but also for his Christian piety and his propensity to quote the Bible. It is said that another naval captain, whose ship had been badly damaged in an encounter with the French, had lost its masts and was crippled, saw this man sailing up to his aid. He was flying a signal, and it read, “Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.”

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An utterly irascible Scottish general in the British army in India, David Baird, was captured and held for a while by an Indian rebel leader whose custom was to chain his prisoners in pairs. When this was reported to General Baird’s mother in Scotland she said, “I am so sorry for the poor man chained up with my Davie.”

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I once heard the late BBC raconteur Frank Muir give an after dinner speech at the British Club in Tokyo. He began by saying he was honoured to have been invited, but that it was rather like having been invited to kiss Margaret Thatcher full on the mouth, in that the honour outweighed the pleasure.

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We learn that Donald Trump has already started his run for the Republican nomination to stand for President of the USA. Can there be worse news? We hear he has joined the paranoids committed to the belief that Obama was not born in the USA and therefore is ineligible to be president. This is a curious phenomenon, akin to climate change denial and worship of Michael Jackson. It can sometimes seem as though the collective silliness of the USA might just elect him. It’s terrifying. And now the news is that Arnold Schwarzenegger, having presided for two terms over the disintegration of the California economy, may now look to be president of the European Community. This cannot be so. I trust the Germans, French, Swiss, and even the Albanians, are falling about laughing.

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But back home, there is worse. Don Brash is suddenly challenging Rodney Hide for leadership of the Act Party. Don is not at present a member of the Act Party. The NZ Herald is running a poll on which you would prefer as leader of Act, Rodney or Don... That choice is akin to asking whether you would rather die painfully of a stomach tumour or a liver tumour. Both blokes are buffoons. Somehow (I don't need to understand this) we are also getting threatened with John Banks in the mix. Well, perhaps it is best to have them all in one camp, a kind of political isolation ward -- close to the psychiatric wing.

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We were told that the Rugby World Cup represented riches to New Zealand, and that the fortunes invested would bring dividends enabling us to build roads and set up magnificent sports facilities... Now we have been informed that the revised and improved estimates are out, and they show:

Cost $1.2 billion.
Net Income $700 million.
Deficit $500 million.

Now remind me... I concede that sport is important, although it is supremely unimportant to me. The RWC is about one arguably minor sport on the world stage, Rugby Union football. Most of the world will neither know nor care about the RWC.

It will come, it will happen, countless litres of beer will go down the alimentary tracts of thousands and into the gutters and drains. Something called Party Central (taxpayer subsidised) will operate in downtown Auckland, to the detriment of everything from the environment to the drinkers’ livers, to decency and order -- but not to the detriment of the brewers. Anyone who reaches for words like disgust will be accused of being a party-pooper. The ticket scalpers came out in force weeks ago and the whole event will be marked by increasing corruption. All sorts of necessary tasks in the community will get neglected while people are caught up in the waves of hysteria...

And then it will all go. We are left here with a $500 million deficit. Great. Maybe (which heaven forfend) we won’t even be holding the Cup. Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

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Solar bonus blowout to sit on budget bottom line



...Headline in the Sydney Morning Herald, 24.04.11.

Why I am not watching Coronation Street

I am recording it for Mary. Five minutes of it is more than I can stomach. This extraordinary programme was on UKTV when we lived in Carfin in 1964 and someone gave us a clapped out old black and white TV because they had upgraded. I remember watching Churchill’s funeral on it, too, and that agonising climb of the soldier-pallbearers up the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral in London with the coffin. But that’s how old Coronation Street is. Ken Barlow is still there five decades on. I am not.

I loathe the way they consistently lie to each other. I loathe the way they talk to each other, abuse each other, the malice always lurking in their relationships, the relentless cruel gossip and the way nothing whatever is confidential. The occasional fist-fight in or outside the Rovers can actually come as a relief -- some resolution at last, maybe, maybe not. I am astonished at the sums these people spend on booze, daily, nightly. A pint of beer in Scotland was expensive enough in our time there -- heaven knows what it costs now. But on Coronation Street they put it away even at lunchtime before going back to work in the Underworld knicker factory. Children are routinely denied the truth, sent upstairs, and no one ever seems to discover that the kids, not being stupid (that comes later) are unfooled.

One of the positive aspects of Coronation Street is that it does from time to time feature social issues in its plots and subplots -- homosexuality, transgender, various forms of criminality, abuse of minors, deafness, terminal illness, grief and suicide... And indeed, just about every character on Coronation Street has some interesting marital and extra-marital history, or a police or prison record. Published albums of Coronation Street give fascinating summaries of the marital and sexual vagaries of various characters over the years.

Does this accurately reflect life in the surrounds of Manchester? One or two of the characters are actually interesting. Roy and Hayley, I think. But Ken Barlow, Rita, and Emily Bishop have become simply predictable. Deidre is excruciating. Audrey also. Sometimes they introduce a character too evil and devious to be credible, even in Weatherfield. Scottish Tony is the latest.

Perhaps I have shot myself in the foot... I seem to know rather a lot about Coronation Street for someone who doesn't watch it. Well, it's part of life around here, or death. You can see nothing of it for a year, and then pick up the plot again in five minutes. For Mary, all those years, it constituted rest and relaxation when she got home from Middlemore, and could sit there with a nice meal on her lap.

Some years ago, at St Luke's Church in Remuera, I ran a seminar called "Coronation Street Aversion Therapy". It was very well attended. All we did was talk about Coronation Street. That was fun.

This is my 50th wedding anniversary speech

We had our celebration a little early, on 2 April. It was a lovely day and a lovely venue, the Ransom Vineyard just south of Warkworth. All our family showed up, and other relatives and friends... a happy occasion. Someone suggested I put my speech on the blog. It seems harmless...

Mainly, Mary and I have a sense of wonder that, almost 50 years following that ceremony on 13 May 1961, we are both still here and still happily together, showing our age and wounds perhaps in some ways, but still with most of our marbles and our sense of irony and the ridiculous, and our love. We are still capable of some faith and wisdom, and still glad of what we once upon a time called the holy estate of matrimony.

One of our grand-daughters informed Mary the other day that she does look like a grandmother in the face, but the rest of her still looks normal. It is a huge gift that we continue loving friends with our three children and our grandchildren. And it is very satisfying to note that this achievement is shared in their own cases by others of our friends and relatives present today, who were married in those days, long ago.

Generally speaking, at that time, we assumed that you got married and you stayed married, one way or another, unless it was a real calamity -- and even then sometimes. The number of times in ministry one has encountered a marriage which had found some modus operandi, but which was nevertheless a marriage which should never have happened in the first place... There were plenty of those. I came across a rather nice passage from G K Chesterton, written in 1902, in an essay entitled, “A Defence of Rash Vows”. Chesterton assumed that marriage vows, by their nature are rash. Well, anyone exchanging marriage vows with Gilbert Keith Chesterton was indeed rash. He would send his wife a telegram which read, “Am in Bognor Regis. Where should I be?” Anyway, this is what he wrote:

The revolt against vows has been carried in our day even to the extent of a revolt against the typical vow of marriage. It is most amusing to listen to the opponents of marriage on this subject. They appear to imagine that the ideal of constancy was a yoke mysteriously imposed on mankind by the devil, instead of being, as it is, a yoke consistently imposed by all lovers on themselves. They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words -- “Free Love” -- as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word.

For the record... We were married on 13 May 1961, at St Andrew’s Church, Symonds Street, Auckland, by the Rev George Jeffreys. George Jeffreys was a fine minister and friend, and I remember him most fondly today. I had introduced George to his wife Ngaire, and so it was the least he could do for us. Mary and I were living in Dunedin at that time, and we arrived in Auckland only in time for last minute dress fittings and all that. That is by far the best way to do it. If they want you to have a large wedding, an inter-tribal agglutination, something between an Indian Durbah and the Congress of Vienna, for your wedding, then my advice is to do what we did -- stay at the other end of the country, or perhaps in the Falkland Islands, and show up at the last minute, adopt an air of silly bewilderment, and absolutely veto one or two things at the outset. I must have got a new suit from somewhere -- I really don’t remember that, let alone how I paid for it. Our wedding was attended by 15 thousand people including some somewhat unhinged distant cousins and National Party stalwarts.

Mary looked lovely -- I do remember that -- otherwise, I was hanging out to get out of there. We were seriously broke. Mary was still a student for another two years, and I was on an assistant minister’s stipend and had yet to be introduced to concepts such as saving and budgeting.

Over these 50 years we have lived in Dunedin; in Browns Bay briefly; in Whitehill and then in Carfin, both in Lanarkshire, Scotland; in Mairangi Bay; in Timaru; in Suva, Fiji; in Ellerslie, and then in what the land agents called Onehunga Heights during 15 years at St Peter’s, Ellerslie-Mt Wellington -- and finally here at Algies Bay.

We produced our children, each one of whom is different from the others, mercifully you might think different from us, and indeed from all the rest of humanity. They have produced their children, and I guess the generations will proceed. We have been blessed -- which is one way of putting it -- by the clamorous presence of our grandchildren these last two weeks.

Mary found she was able to do things the way she preferred, over the years. So she was a full time mother until we were living in Suva and Rachel went to school, and then she sought a job at the Suva public hospital. She asked them not to be thrown in at the deep end, so they put her in emergency medicine, and Mary came home and said to me this is not a good time to be having an accident in Suva.

When we came back to Auckland she completed a postgraduate Diploma in Obstetrics. That was quite enough to convince both her and us not to pursue obstetrics. So Peter Herdson, a fine doctor and pathologist, persuaded Mary to sign on for the 5-year course for the Fellowship of the Royal College of Pathology Australasia -- which she got in 5 years, and proceeded as a specialist thereafter at Middlemore Hospital until retirement in 2009. A couple of years before her retirement she was named Distinguished Pathologist by her College, and there is a medal to prove it. I am very proud of what Mary has done.

There are so many important people here with us today. But first I want to honour some who were at that wedding in 1961, but whom we don’t see today. Mary’s parents, and mine... Aunts, uncles and friends... That day we even managed to visit my Scottish grandmother, Leonora Miller, who was able to get to the church but not to the reception. We called on her at the rest home in One Tree Hill. I think that might have been the last time we saw her.

It is wonderful that we have Margaret and Heitia Hiha with us, all the way from Napier.

And of course, this occasion was a reason for our offspring and their families to arrive. Lex and family came out of Japan at a time of huge anxiety there. Rhys and family came from Queensland, and although they were not directly affected by the floods, they certainly saw what happened around the Brisbane River. And of course we have Rachel and family here too.

Our dear cousin Joan Bell has come from her home in Cumbria in the UK, and it is wonderful to see Joan again. My sisters, Marilyn and Barbara are here, with Lionel and Noel. My brother Duncan has come from Brisbane with Genevieve. And my brother Morris has come. It is all good. It is also, I may say, all a great deal more than I ever imagined I was letting myself in for when I feebly agreed to what Mary called a small celebration.

Mary’s cousins Mary and Terry Boyd are here, Judith and Chris Parry, Helen and Don Fletcher...

Then there are our friends -- Barrie and Robin MacCuish, Peter and Barbara Wedde, Graeme Ferguson, Marjory Ramage, and from Wellington, Judith Aitken, with whom we have shared much over these years. (Actually, Judith set out to come from Wellington, but got foiled by Jetstar who cancelled her flight.) We had a message from Kim and Lola Bathgate, in Christchurch, who wanted to be here but had an earthquake.

Deja vu all over again

Another list. I hope it doesn't offend anyone or cause a riot within the tribe. These are mainly idiocies I hear regularly on the radio news and TV, and read in the NZ Herald.

Déjà vu all over again
For free
Grind to a halt
Any time soon
Shrouded in secrecy
Tight-lipped
Focussed
I was like...
Plus (meaning also)
Invite as a noun... a commute, a read, a molest, a rebuild...
Liaise as a synthetic verb
Looked like (meaning looked as though)
Passionate about (equals I like)
Fingered (“Methane fingered in mine explosion” - I wonder what the results were.)
It didn’t improve as much as what we expected. (What as a relative pronoun)
Touted
Munted
Vow (eg. “He vowed to get to the bottom of it” - People are making vows all over the place these days)
Fighting for his life (ie. critically ill)
Quiet cul-de-sac (Has anyone yet found a noisy one?)
Quiet beer (There is usually some faint sound of effervescence)
Albeit...
Unbeknownst (Aarrgghh!!!)
Incredibly (meaning very)
Incredible (when it has happened and is perfectly believable)
Obviously (when it is not obvious)
Of course (as though only a simpleton would think otherwise)
In shock
Closure
Want answers
I mean...
To be perfectly honest / frank / candid
Let’s be honest
Don’t get me wrong (why not say it accurately in the first place?)
From here on in / out
...wise (pricewise... currencywise... careerwise...)
Slate, slated
Accident waiting to happen
Bang for your buck
Iconic (ie. quite well known in some quarters)
Basically (this word has become almost meaningless)
Disconnect (it’s a verb, not a noun, stupid)
Sweet as. Fast as. (As what, stupid?)

Church Liquefaction

In the Shorter Oxford the word means either the action or process of liquefying , the state of being liquefied -- or can mean “a melting of the soul by religious ardour”. I didn’t know that. We didn’t have a lot of liquefaction in my parishes.

One of the NZ Herald’s better writers is Tapu Misa. An articulate, intelligent and generous-minded Samoan woman and mother, Tapu recently became a committed Christian. She does mention this from time to time, but always in a quiet and humble spirit. This differs from another of the Herald’s writers, Garth George, who seems unable to mention his Christian allegiance without one way or another implying lofty moral and spiritual ground. Tapu’s latest article is about religious nutters and her first paragraph reads: I knew I'd struggle with the injunction to love my enemies when I first became a Christian. I just didn't expect so many of them would turn out to be other Christians.

Religious nutters are rising to the surface everywhere, drawn by what seems to them to be the apocalyptic nature of world events, and yesterday I saw someone else refer to this phenomenon as Church Liquefaction, which of course it is. Traumatic events make it ooze through the surface where it lies noxious and entirely unhelpful. These people tend to read books from the American religious right, full of signs and wonders, neurotic and unhinged.

We have our share of ignorant haters here in NZ as well, writes Tapu Misa. In the wake of the Christchurch earthquake an equally deranged group declared that the disaster was God's punishment for hosting "the Lesbian and Poof Week" in Queenstown, among other unpardonable sins. “The Christchurch earthquake was a warning," these people said. "God has decided to clean out NZ of its wickedness, perversion, prostitution, bullying, gangs, drugs, violence, paedophilia and of its witchcraft and black magic."

Well this is when we need to speak up. It is when these sad people start implying, or openly stating, that earthquakes, tsunami, nuclear accidents, with the death and injury, dislocation and terror of many thousands, are the work of a vengeful god enraged at our sin… that it is necessary to say their god doesn’t exist. These people are telling us more about themselves than anything else, their insecurity, their need for order and reassurance and authority. Their need to see others punished. God didn’t do the earthquake. God doesn’t sit on high hurling thunderbolts at us.

But on the broader plane, I still find myself amazed and in despair at the silly naïve assumptions about God held by so many decent people in our churches. Where was God in the earthquake? Everywhere. God neither made nor stopped the tsunami. Life is hazardous, and sometimes it is fearsomely, desperately so. If anyone has the expectation that religious faith somehow confers immunity from pain and suffering, they are out of luck. It doesn’t, never did, and that is not its purpose.

Seismic matters

The people of the little town of Coromandel decided to have their own prayerful and commemorative service for the Christchurch earthquake, the February 2011 one. Of course they assumed it must be ecumenical, and it happened to be the Presbyterians’ turn to host such a thing. The Presbyterians being currently without a minister, some elderly elder took the reins. This was his great moment. He informed everyone from the pulpit that earthquakes and all their horrors are God’s response to our sinfulness. I suppose this self-righteous simpleton has been going to church all his life, and has learned nothing.

A couple of days ago news arrived of the earthquake off the coast of Japan. Now we have aerial clips of the tsunami flowing ashore in the north of the island, carrying everything before it, cars, boats, buildings, tonnes of debris. Our daughter-in-law Yuko arrived in Auckland that morning with Fiona and Lucas, but they had taken off from Tokyo shortly before the quake and they didn't know any more than we knew. Our son Lex was in his office when the quake happened, and emailed us to say he was OK, and was about to start walking home. We think it would be a walk of a few hours. He didn’t know if their home was damaged, but the main damage in Tokyo seemed to be to services. The trains and electricity were out.

One of the websites has a helpful interactive map of the world showing earthquake sites as they happen. There is the “Pacific rim of fire”, with the huge Japan quake all fresh and pulsating. The Christchurch quakes look tiny by comparison. While we are living right there on the rim of fire, Australia is off to one side, and according to the map nothing ever happens there. Just to the north, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia look like a seething mass of magma.

A couple of Christchurch emails...

We have a Baptist colleague here whose church has fallen down and whole house has been red stickered as well. Someone asked him what he wanted – was there anything they could do for him? He replied: Yes I wouldn’t mind a Fiat…(latest model car!) I have always wanted one of those.

...the parcel that arrived at our door this morning was fantastic!
90+ daffodil bulbs to give out to people at church as symbols of hope – what a creatively positive idea that was, then acted on!


Lex emailed later on Day One to say he had walked home in 3 hours with a stop for dinner. The apartment was shaken up but OK. Now, a couple of days on, the main problem in Tokyo seems to be getting basic food items. But further north it’s all simply horrifying. The threat from the ruptured nuclear reactors doesn’t bear thinking about.

Mary is wondering about assembling an emergency kit for when we get our calamity -- earthquake, tsunami, plague, invasion from Tonga... I have ordered a solar-powered battery charger from Dick Smith Electronics. That seems to me as sensible as anything. We already have a stock of assorted rechargeable batteries.

Darkest day

Some communications in Christchurch are working. I got a reply to my email from one friend, a fellow Benedictine Oblate, who said they were OK. But her daughter’s family home, three stories and a basement, was grotesque. The basement, she said, had popped out of the ground -- this is the phenomenon of liquefaction we have all become acquainted with -- and the three stories were now on a lean. I gather it is now uninhabitable.

I started to watch the TV when I became aware of the disaster, about 1330 hrs today. It soon became clear that many major buildings in Christchurch were in ruins. Both cathedrals were very badly damaged. Then it emerged that many people were missing, apparently trapped in the rubble -- rescue was under way. The Prime Minister said he could confirm 65 dead, but we all know there are many more than that.

This is Christchurch. We never lived there, and I really don’t know much about the place. It was always associated in my mind with Anglican grace and rectitude. Christchurch had its pockets of unseemliness from time to time, but nothing much.
After the September quake Christchurch was very badly wounded, but no one had been killed. We were just heading into the predictable debates about when the property owners would all get compensated and restored, and things would get going again. There was much muttering about properties on really damaged ground which may now be unsuitable for any building.

And then came today’s quake. Astonishingly it was of lesser intensity, but it was shallower, apparently, and it has done much more damage. I think Christchurch is in real trouble now. Roads and services are all in a shambles. Many buildings and homes are destroyed. We are going to hear tomorrow that many people have been killed. We have yet to hear from outlying areas such as Akaroa. We know Lyttleton and Sumner have been badly affected.

What do any of these people now do? The NZ economy cannot afford any of this. Do they rebuild Christchurch? I suppose enough of it remains to mean that it can scarcely be otherwise. Perhaps it gives some priceless opportunities for venture. A newly visioned central city. But who pays for that?

The loss of the cathedrals in the city may do wonders for the state and quality of Christian profession. I know the Anglican cathedral was much loved by a few. It was actually no great treasure architecturally. The Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament was admired by George Bernard Shaw, as I recall, and it was indeed somewhat striking. Now, either they have the funds to rebuild and restore these things, or they do without them. I am one who has serious questions about these days spending millions of dollars on cathedrals.

But now we await some account of the fatalities. It is horrific to think of people maybe trapped and alive in the ruins, when night has fallen. The Aussies are coming to our aid, as we came to theirs, and floodlights will be lighting up the rubble and the rescuers. We’ll see what happens in the morning.

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.