Available Light

    A journey begins for a kotuku So how is it that Jesus is God? How come Jesus is wandering about on Earth, getting hungry, sleeping, only being in one place at a time, getting cross with some people, being kind to others, and all the while he is also the omnipotent, omnipresent, all seeing, all wise God who called the Earth and everything in it into being out of nothing? People have been arguing the toss on this one now for about 2,000 years, sometimes getting very twitchy indeed with those whose answer to that question differs from their own. People with long lists of titles before their names (such as me) or long lists of letters after them (ditto) sometimes pretend to the definitive answer. Let me assure you, as one who has a passing familiarity with all of the most popular answers, they're kidding you. Or sometimes they're kidding themselves, which is pretty much the same thing. My own experience is that the more vigorously people promote a particular answer the less li...

Lately, as I wander round the birthplace of our nation, and look at the sites once inhabited by those who first bought the Christian Gospel to these shores I have been reading a book by a Buddhist nun. Tenzin Palmo is an Englishwoman, one of the first Western women to be ordained as a Buddhist nun, who spent 12 years in seclusion, living in a cave in the Himalayas. She has authored many books, and Reflections on a Mountain Lake is a collection of her retreat addresses. It is a wise and profound book aimed at giving practical advice on living a Buddhist life in the circumstances in which one might find oneself. As long term readers of this blog know, I have a longstanding interest in Buddhism, fostered by the various members of my family who have chosen that particular spiritual path; but the value of Reflections on a Mountain Lake has been the light it casts on my own Christian walk. I was greatly helped by Tenzin Palmo's explanation of the doctrine of karma. I hope I'm ...

This little memoir by Rachel Mann is not an easy read; but  not for the usual reasons. It is only 135 pages long and the author is poet in residence at Manchester cathedral so she knows how to handle words. She has lived a full, some may even say sensational, life so it is never dull. Her initial academic training was in philosophy but she doesn't tie her readers up in complex philosophical knots. I found it slow going because it engaged me so deeply that I had to pause every chapter or two to think about what she was telling me, and let it sit with me for a couple of days. Rachel Mann was born Nick Mann and this is the story of her journey across gender. It is also the story of her battles with debilitating, painful, life threatening disease. It is the story of her conversion to Christianity and of her call to priesthood in the Anglican Church. It is a raw, visceral piece of writing but despite the plethora of edgy material in her life history it never invites the prurient or...

I must say I am heartily sick of the whole Jesus is the reason for the season routine that I am supposed to be spouting at the moment. Let's get real! In solidarity with my distant pagan ancestors, I  have a decorated tree in the corner of my living room and over the next few days fully intend to indulge in the ancient, pre-Christian practices of feasting, giving gifts and singing carols. What's more, I will be doing the whole darned thing on the Saturnalia,  December 25. We humans had been celebrating in this way for centuries before we Christians wandered into the festivities, looked around, liked what we saw and surreptitiously forged our name on the bottom of the ownership papers. Of course it is all a load of pagan nonsense, but that's the point really. Emmanuel. God with us. God fully present in the human condition, as much in the raucous celebration of the Saturnalia as in the witness of a peaceful sunset. As much in the worried crowds on Christmas Eve combing ...

In Beirut airport there is a smallish bookstore containing a smallish English language section, containing a few John Grisham novels, some travelogues, a good number of books on Islam and this: Atheist Delusions, The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies , by David Bentley Hart. I bought it immediately, and discovered at this point that my Visa card was still in an ATM back in Ashrifiyeh, but that is another story. I started to read the book on the plane and discovered a new hero. David Bentley Hart is an Orthodox (note the capital)theologian of immense erudition, intellectual capacity and wit. I have now ordered some of his other works, but this one proved to be a great way to fill the long hours drifting above the clouds. His way of dealing with the challenge of the new Atheism is one I warm to immensely. I have long known that the best way of dealing with Atheist splutter is to use their own non-arguments against them ( I used to be an atheist but in my early twenties ...

Here we are, 3 days into December and still with an extra duvet on the bed and the heat pump running. Autumn is passing but the Summer is not quite here. I'm in an odd limbo time between the known and the unkown and it seems the weather has come out in sympathy. I have been down to Invercargill a couple of times, meeting people I already know quite well, letting them and me work out the beginnings of a new relationship. A couple of days ago I sat with a group of them, bouncing ideas around, trying to think about what might happen. Some of the ideas were great, and one or two of them will probably happen, but it wasn't really a time for plans and actions. It was the meeting and the talking that mattered. I drove home through the Southland Plains feeling energised and excited about what lies ahead. Richard and Hilary Ellena dropped by on Wednesday. Richard is a friend from a long way back, although I haven't talked to him much since he was made Bishop of Nelson about 3 year...

Every year we have a parish fair, usually on the first Saturday in November, but this year for reasons I can no longer remember we had it a week early.Not that the timing seemed to make much difference, as it all went off as smoothly as ever. There is a long history of holding parish fairs and a lot of people who know how it all works. People have their alloted jobs to do, and they know the steps in the process of making that bit of the process happen. I have my own particular contribution to make. There is a circuit of local schools and churches who all borrow trestle tables off each other, and, on the day before the fair, they have to be visited in turn by cars towing trailers, one of which is mine. There is a barbecue of formidable weight to be collected from the naval training base - why the Royal New Zealand Navy would own such a thing and why they would lend it to us are mysteries now lost in the fogs of history. There is a marquee to be erected and this involves a lot blokes in...

I'd like to write a bit more about Iona but need to take a detour first. At the moment we are in Carlisle, Clemency's birthplace. There is a castle, a real one, and a magnificent cathedral and a maze of tiny streets opening onto a market square. It is all quite picturesque, although dreary and careworn at the same time: this is a working city, not a tourist oriented museum. We have looked at the street where Clemency was born and the vicarage (now a Buddhist centre. These Buddhists are everywhere!) where she grew up. And we have looked at the cathedral. Carlisle has a smallish cathedral, built in the late eleventh century to serve, alongside the castle, as a demonstration of Norman power. It has been overrun by the Scots on numerous occasions, and been subject to the indignities which various reform movements have inflicted on the church. Nevertheless, it is more completely original than most other cathedrals I have seen. The bulk of it is still the eleventh century original an...

Today we caught the tube across the city to Walthamstow to attend church in the parish where my friend Tony Cant ministers. Walthamstow, deep in the East end of London is a parish with four centres, and St. Luke's in the High street is one of them. Sort of. There is no real centre at St. Lukes if you make the mistake of thinking of church centres as buildings. There is a congregation, which meets in a house on Wednesday evenings for worship, instruction and Holy Communion. On Sundays they have a stall in the local farmers' market selling cheap but excellent fair trade coffee and cake. Tony manages the market and spends his Sunday morning helping people erect tents, minding the shop while stall holders nip out for a quick smoke, and making sure the whole thing runs smoothly. For an hour, while the market is running, a dozen or so people gather in a nearby cafe to read the Bible and eat a leisurely brunch and chat. It's church, Jim, but not as we know it. There is a public pa...

It's been a busy day, so I'll work backwards through it to the beginning, to the place I really want to think about. This evening all the household, 12 people in all, went two doors down to Madame Ogi's. Madame Ogi runs a restaurant. Not a huge affair, just 6 tables: the sort of place which performs the sort of function I suppose the local pub used to perform at the end of British streets. It is the place where locals gather; where everyone knows everyone else, and where the events of the village are discussed in intimate detail. And where, just incidentally, the food is superb. I had the perch, caught that day in the lake, and served with potatoes, salad and the most delicious sauce. There was a local pinot noir to wash it all down, and it was, quite simply, the best fish I have eaten in my life. When we left, there were the regulation handshakes and three cheek kisses for everyone, and from everyone - the chef, the waitress, the other diners - and the sense that you hadn...

I had my little brother to stay this week, and didn't get time for things like blog writing. There were other things to be done: motorcycle shops to be visited and sofas to be sat on and words to be spoken. Lots and lots of words. Since I have been ill, all my brothers have come to see me, and my sister too for that matter, and all in their own way have brought me something to move me along the path of wholeness. I'm not sure that it was planned that way, but all my familial visits seemed to bring the right person to me at the right time. Now, the radiotherapy has only another week to run: I am nearly out the other side of this process and am feeling ridiculously fit and well. In about two months time there will be another blood test and it will tell me whether the deep fryer has dealt to this thing for good or whether there are several more exciting chapters in the cancer story to unfold over the next few years. Either way, I'm not unduly worried and it was helpful to see...

Margaret in our Office lent me this book, 90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper, telling me that she had read it in one hit, unable to put it down. Me too. I read it in a sitting, and found it, in places, very moving. But a fascinating book is not necessarily a good book. This one is smallish, 205 pages, fairly well written by Piper's ghost writer Cecil Murphy, and quite undemanding. And it does seem strange, on reflection that a book which claims to tell of an actual trip to heaven and back should be undemanding. In fact the time in Heaven occupies only 15 pages. There is a brief postscript which does some rudimentary analysis of the whole phenomenon of near death experiences, but by and large, the book is about Don Piper's accident and his gradual recovery from some horrific injuries. On the way home from a conference, while negotiating a two lane bridge, his little Ford Escort was run over by an eighteen wheeler . Piper was cursorily examined by paramedics, declared dead and...

In 1991 I was vicar of a large charismatic parish when a phenomenon called the Toronto Blessing hit town. It was a sort of hyper Pentecostalism which involved people falling over and laughing- the twitch and gibber school of theology. It appealed greatly to some people in my parish but for me, it didn't excite any spiritual enthusiasm at all. Quite the opposite, in fact, when I saw the effects of 'The Blessing' in some people's daily lives. Although I had been a card carrying member of the Charismatic Renewal for a long long time, I was rattled. Is this what Christianity was really all about? Of course a lot of other things were happening in my life at the time, and in the middle of my questioning I took a book off my shelf that someone had given me five or so years before, but which had sat unread and neglected ever since: Gerard Hughes' God of Surprises . The book was a bombshell in my spiritual life. And in one of those odd pieces of synchronicity that happens...

Copyright unknown It's nearly Christmas. Time for clergy persons everywhere to whine, bitch and moan about the unceasing commercialisation of Christmas. Well, what do we expect? We hijack the Saturnalia and complain when the old pagan festival brushes off its Christian veneer and reverts to form? Get over it. However, being a clergyman and being rather partial to the odd spot of whining bitching and moaning, there is one thing I'd like to wb&m about. The holiday season offers, yet again, an insight into what I call the Social Credit syndrome. For the information of those of you unfortunate enough not be New Zealanders, and to remind those of you who really should remember your political history a little better (see, I'm in a hectoring mood) the Social Credit Political League was a political party that flourished in our fair country from the 1930s to about the 1990s. And by flourished I mean sputtered along, fueled by the enthusiasm of those who accepted its somewhat p...

It's not easy to establish a meditation practice if you are a Christian because there is no easily visible meditative tradition in most of the Church and even if someone becomes interested in meditation, where do they go to learn about it? You won't find a notice for Thursday's meditation class on many parish noticeboards. You won't find many teachers of meditation listed in the Diocesan phonebook. Books like Anthony De Mello's  Sadhana  or Morton Kelsey's  The Other Side Of Silence  can give pretty reliable information and instruction but does your local Christian bookshop stock them? Don't count on it. Sure, we know there are monks and nuns somewhere who probably meditate but mostly we hardly even know what the word means.  Sometimes we use the word to denote deep thought, particularly if that thought consists of pondering the meaning of tricky Bible verses. Sometimes we use it as a synonym for a short sermon. Sometimes we refer to it by kinder, more accep...

A rough, unscientific rule of thumb I have used in running churches over the past 30 years has been the distinction between sources of satisfaction and sources of dissatisfaction. That is, the things that make people happy and pleased to be here and the things that tick them off. Fairly early, the penny dropped for me that they are not usually that same thing. If you remove the sources of dissatisfaction you won't make people any more satisfied. In a church, the things that make people dissatisfied are things like heaters that don't work or a buzz in the sound system; or the Vicar's annoyingly drony voice or the fact that whoever chooses the hymns around here has the taste of a blowfly maggot. Sources of dissatisfaction are easily identified - people let you know about them early and often. Sources of satisfaction are harder to idenify. They are more subtle, deeper and often unconscious. People don't talk about them much and tend to take them for granted. They are ...

The most popular page on our website by far is Alan Firth's The Beginner's Guide To The Anglican Church . This brief informative little piece is linked to by 35 other parish websites in a number of countries. For the last couple of years it has been read about a thousand times a month. The feedback we receive about it is generally very positive, but last week we had an email from a reader who called us confidence tricksters for publishing such a thing. What struck me about the email wasn't the content of what was said but the tone. It was filled with fear and anger. Fear and anger are of course closely related. Anger is a threat response. We get angry when we are threatened with a loss of some sort. The loss might be real or imaginary. It might derive from something in the world around us or the inner world of our conscious or unconscious psyche. The loss might be to us personally, or to something or someone we care deeply about. An angry response may or may not be an appro...

Today I got to the point in Ian Gawler's book where I am on quite familiar territory: the bit where he explains his theology of healing. It's a theory I know well in various guises, a theory that crops up time and again in various Eastern and/or esoteric philosophies. He says that we have seven bodies, only one of which, the physical body, is accessible to the senses. The other six - the emotional, intellectual, intuitional, spiritual and astral bodies - are of varying degrees of subtlety and while some people can "see" some of them they are invisible to most of us. Illness happens when the energies of two or more of the bodies are conflicted and healing occurs when coherence is restored between them. I'm not sure what I believe about this theory: I'm probably too steeped in my Western world view to embrace it fully but it's  disconcerting  that some practices based on this idea, such as acupuncture,  seem to have real, measurable effectiveness, as does Ia...

This last week has been spent at our diocesan ministry conference. I have been leading daily Bible studies, about an hour and a half a day of riding my hobby horses through the lecture theatre in front of a captive audience. Poor sods. It's been helpful to me, though. CS Lewis said " Any fool can speak learned language. It's the vernacular that is the real test. If you can't put your faith into it, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it. " It's certainly true for me. Until I can explain something to someone else in plain simple language, I don't feel I have fully grasped it. So, in as simple language as I can find, I have tried to explain that Jesus' central message is about the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom isn't a place or a state of mind. It's not a set of doctrines. It's not an organisation or any other kind of thing. The Kingdom is something you do. It is a particular way of orienting yourself - it is a way ...

I am indebted to Brian McLaren for the reminder that the way of Jesus is not a thing that is to be possessed, or a state to be entered, or an institution to be maintained, so much as it is a path to be walked.In my last entry, I briefly reviewed his book Finding Our Way Again . I would like to talk about the book, perhaps on here, but not only on here. I would like to discuss it, but I don't want to teach it. I would not like to trade and refine ideas about the book, or acquire more knowledge, I would like to use the book to help me walk further on the Way of Jesus. So here's the deal: Anybody who would like to talk about the things in Finding Our Way Again is welcome to come to my place on Thursday September 11 at 7:30 pm, and for subsequent Thursdays for as long as it seems good to continue. I will advertise this in my parish, but to come you don't need to be a member of St. Johns, or an Anglican, or even, I suppose, a Christian, although seeing as I want to talk about ...