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It's our wedding anniversary today. We've been married for  42 years, or about 2/3 of our lives. A marriage isn't an entity, but a process. Like everything else in the Universe, and like the Universe itself, we are, all of us, in a constant state of flux and change and it is an extraordinary gift to be able to make most of those changes in company. John's Gospel begins, In the beginning was the Word. Which means, I think, that this vast process of growth and transformation - life, marriage, Being - was spoken into existence; which is a way of saying it has purpose and meaning.The journey towards that meaning is A long pilgrimage in the same direction , to steal Eugene Peterson's phrase. For Clemency and me. For all of us. Photos: I took the top photograph in our flat in Abraham place in Auckland in 1977. I would have used a Canon FTb, a 50mm lens on Ilford FP4, developed the film and printed it in a darkroom I had set up in my study at St. John's Coll...

This photo of our grand daughter Ada was taken a year or so ago when she was 2. Clemency and I were making the 5 hour journey from Dunedin to Rolleston and she had been told that Ama and Papa were coming today . So, as soon as she got up she rushed to the living room, stood on the arm of the sofa and looked out past the blind, down the driveway to the road along which we were due to appear. Bridget took the photo and emailed it to us, still at home in Dunedin. Deep calls to deep. Her longing for us was exceeded only by our longing for her, and her watching called us to our priorities. We sped through our preparation and made for Rolleston as fast as legally possible. She had a five hour Advent that day, looking forward to embrace and communion. And ours is now only 39 days long. Photo: Iphone.

The following is the gist of the sermon I delivered yesterday, in St. Michael's Church, Anderson's Bay, at the baptism of my grandson, Theo.  We have rules in English about how we use adjectives. Most of us know that adjectives come before the noun, well, most of the time, anyway. We say The large mountain but other languages do it differently. In Maori, for example, we have the word maunga meaning mountain and nui meaning large and these combine, with the adjective last, to form maunganui . I'm not sure why the word order varies from language to language. It seems to be an arbitrary accident of history. But the rules about adjectives don't finish with whether or not they precede the noun. Consider the following two sentences: Look at those two, beautiful, little, red, French, sports cars.  Look at those sports, French, red, little, beautiful, two cars. The second one sounds odd, huh? That's because  because it breaks a fundamental rule of English gramma...

My brother Alistair says, whether originally or not, who cares? that retirement is like being a teenager again, only this time around we have money and couldn't give a stuff what other people think of us. He told me this when he was here a few weeks ago, riding South on his large motorbike, in company with Sue on her even larger one, and when they had stopped at our place to sit around and talk about the meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything. He's right, of course. It's been a year since I retired and there's no doubt about it: hands down, by a country mile, this has been the best year of my life. *** Adolescence is a transition. It's the period of no longer and not yet, that space between the dependency of childhood and the responsibilities of adulthood. It's the time to experiment with ways of being ourselves and to imagine futures. So here, at the end of responsibility, when there is not much future left to imagine, is another transition, that gr...

Photo (c) Nick Wright 2017 The stories are getting more complicated as he gets older. He still arrives at about 6 am clutching the Beebops, who still greet me and, using my voice, relay their adventures of the night before. A year ago they were happy just to go to the park or the beach, but things move on. Now, when Noah is asleep, they apparently filch the keys to Daddy's Ford Ranger (the speediest truck on the road!), and drive off into the night to fly about the place in helium balloons, liberate lions and elephants from circuses, go to the airport for trips to Africa, or Spain or Auckland, and evade prosecution for underage driving by the simple expedient of turning back into toys when the police officer looks through the window. Yesterday, as the the intrepid stuffed rabbits were making their way to Christchurch's rocket base for a trip to Saturn, Noah put his hand up to shield his mouth from the Beebops' view and whispered to me, "This is just imagining, ...

Sitting in that chair before the service began. Photo (c) Audrey Whittaker My family have gone and the house is quiet and tidy and spacious once again, and I'm kind of sorry about that. I had the best weekend ever. On Friday evening Dean Trevor James and Rev'd Michael Wallace were responsible for a wonderful farewell service. Two of my brothers and my sister were present with their spouses, as I expected, and in the weeks leading up to it Clemency had arranged, unbeknownst to me,  for my daughter Bridget, my son Nick and their respective families to be present. I realised this only when my bit of the procession got to the front pew and I saw Noah sitting on his Amma's knee. I heard the clang of my own jaw dropping on the floor. After the service Trish Franklin MCed a session at which people said some very pleasantly surprising things about me. The Selwyn men presented me with a spine tinglingly formidable haka and the women, a waiata. I was given some chairs for o...

 campsite  View from the caravan The cormorant or common shag lays eggs inside a paper bag the reason you will see, no doubt is to keep the lightning out. But what these unobservant birds have never noticed is that herds of wandering bears will come with buns and steal the bags, to hold the crumbs.   Clemency at her favourite beach in the whole park, Little Anapai.   On the track to Anapai   Totaranui Totaranui   After an absence of many years, and following an intensive pest control programme and some effective re releases, the weka have returned.   And so have the pukeko   Totaranui headland   Totaranui   The Avenue, Totaranui  This, and all the pictures following are of Totaranui

Totaranui Beach from the Headland Track, looking South to the string of beaches, ending in Awaroa.  The Abel Tasman National Park is a large block of native forest in Golden Bay. It is best known for the string of golden sand beaches on its Eastern edge, stretching about 65 km in a line from Marahau in the South to Separation Point in the North. A track follows this coastline, winding along the beaches and over headlands between them, providing a 4 day walk of exquisite beauty. There are huts and campsites spaced along the track, and a winding, single lane dirt road leads to Totaranui, a beautiful beach about 10km from the Northern boundary of the park. Totaranui has a large Department of Conservation campsite. Clemency's family arrived in New Zealand from England in 1962 and in 1963 went to Totaranui for the first time, when the national park was only 15 years old and the programme of reforestation from farmland had only just begun. They returned annually and spent about a ...

  My mother, Pat Wright and my niece, Tania My nieces Tracy, from Perth, Western Australia and Jasmin, from London, with my sister Valerie in whose house we were gathering.     Clemency and Ada.  Sandie and Jane, my cousins, with my Auntie Julie.  Jane is an old flatmate of mine. Sandie a very accomplished painter. And no Julie , I do not cheat at scrabble. I just have a better than average ability to imagine possible and PERFECTLY LEGITIMATE grammatical constructions, that's all. Tomorrow my mother is 90 years old, though her memory is fading a bit and she may not quite realise it. This weekend past my whanau gathered in Nelson to celebrate her contribution to us all. My brother Guhyavajra was here from Stockholm with his daughter, Jasmin, from London. My niece Tracy, whom I had not seen for 45 years,  came in from Perth for the weekend with her daughter Anya.  My nephew Hamish excused himself from the wedding of a close frie...

I slept away the first couple of days. Not dozing, but deep dreamless sleep which crept up on me wherever I happened to be sitting. I hadn't realised I was so deeply tired. Days tired. Months tired. Decades tired. There are no anchor points to the day except the ones I choose to find. So, shortly, this is what life will be like, all the time. I have finished slogging my way uphill through the Torah and am into the easy downhill of the historical books. I am surprised to be reminded how much space is given over to Balaam - 3 chapters, more or less, which is an interesting comparison to the brevity of the Christmas stories . And I had forgotten that Moses had him executed. I'm reading a few books, concurrently as is my wont. Cynthia Bourgeault on the Trinity. Mitch Cullen's Mr Holmes . Evan Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being. Clemency has just finished Archibald Baxter's account of his time as a conscientious objector in the First World War , We Will Not Cease....

Ada playing in the Clearview Primary School grounds Photo taken with Samsung Galaxy Note 5 smartphone My Grandchildren teach me so much because they are open, simplified exemplars of the processes at work within myself. My own pretence at sophistication masks the fact that I have not actually arrived anywhere; I am, like them, in process and their learnings are only slightly less complicated versions of the stuff which occupies my own intellectual and spiritual explorations. 6 am and there is the usual knock on the caravan door. Noah has got himself out of his bed in the house, and is making his customary early morning call. Clemency stumbles up to let him in, and he climbs into her sleeping bag. He lies there quietly for maybe 5 minutes, and then there is a pattern to be followed. I will play a game which involves a conversation between me and Beebop (Noah's constant companion: the faded, battered, stuffed  rabbit which is exactly the same age as him) in which I  ha...

You know it when you see it. It has to be symmetrical and nicely dense but with enough gaps in which to hang things. It has to reach the ceiling which, depending on the house, means it's going to be broad. It has to be a pinus radiata , otherwise it won't smell right. All the really good ones have been taken days ago by the people who put them up way too early, but our tree will be there, somewhere amongst all those misshapen or badly coloured pines; we just need to keep looking. **** Who knows why we have Christmas trees? Pagans used to put evergreen branches into their homes during the Saturnalia, but the first record of a Christmas tree  as we would recognise one, is from France in 1576, which means there is about a thousand years gap between its appearance and the last popular practice of the Saturnalia - which seems a pretty big chasm to jump. More likely precedences are the Adam trees which were used in medieval passion plays, decorated with apples (for the Eden sto...

This large space spends most of its life as a basketball court, but tonight with the chairs laid out in neat rows and the hoops folded up into the roof it is the space for celebrating the achievements of the pupils of St. Hilda's for the year. The ceremony is about 2 hours long, but I have always quite enjoyed it, and tonight will be my last one, ever. There are speeches, and two groups - a country rock trio and a classical duo - sing with exquisitely honed  talent. I take my turn to shake young hands and give out trophies and books. We applaud the outgoing prefects and the newly announced ones, sing the national anthem, I say a blessing and walk into the night. **** This space is also used as a gymnasium, and there are chairs in rows, but both the the audience and the tableful of trophies are smaller.  Again, there are speeches by a number of people including Clemency, and I learn something new about the person I have lived with for over 40 years. There is a photo of us...

We spent much of the weekend sitting in the car, me driving because Clemency is not confident about towing the caravan. We led a quiet day in St. Michael's Clyde, where we spent the night, then participated in a confirmation in Wanaka, and a lunch in Tarras. The weather was clear and still and warm and sitting beside each other as we drove past the lakes and rivers and tawny paddocks was about the most appropriate thing to be doing, because 40 years ago today we were married, and spent the fortnight afterwards traveling these very roads in our 1962 Volkswagen Kombi. The people of the Upper Clutha parish treated us today with the most extraordinary generosity and kindness. Clemency and I exchanged some small but significant things and our children gave us gifts which showed a great deal of care and thought and planning, including a USB drive containing 40 pieces of music our children knew and remembered from their childhoods, or that they knew one or both of us responded to. So...