Glimpses of God-Alive

 

Isaiah 11:1-9

Wisdom and insight; counsel and might; peace and joy; unity and hospitality; knowledge and reverence; judgment and repentance are the definitive marks of the reign of God.

Kenyatta R. Gilbert, Sojourners

These are signs of God-alive – God’s way being lived, already though not yet, in the sense that we only catch glimpses and live it in moments.  Obviously, it has yet to become the way of all things, the way of politics, of systems of order and organisation, of hearts and minds. This world we are living in is more like a dead stump, a wilderness.

But it is happening. There are new shoots and they drawing on more than what shows above ground. These qualities, quoted above, are being seen in down-to-earth action, everyday living, right relationships and faithfulness being the goal.

Peterson’s paraphrase speaks of brimming with knowing God-alive, of a living knowledge of God to the depths and the breadths, no limit. A living knowledge meaning it doesn’t need to use the word that many people around us can’t relate to – God. It’s known through living, through experience, through action, through simply being.

As the text pictures it, our initial reaction is likely “impossible!” Lions turning vegetarian, snakes losing their venom. A child as leader (wonder what that says to the matter raised by the Supreme Court about the voting age and of the majority response to it).

Now ideals can be a brilliant source of encouragement and purpose, but also dangerous. We can use them to moan about the world, or to escape from the world as it is, or we can put them into a glass case.  Nice to look at and leave be.

What is best is to give space to the contradictions in what Isaiah pictures, because this is life surely. Never simple, often perplexing.

Here’s a thought:

Think not so much actual animals, as human beings  in our context who are prey, and those who are predators.  The predators and prey in our world of politics and economics; those who socially are the upside and those who are the underbelly of our society, left behind by “progress”.

Notice where Isaiah’s vision is happening already: hospitality replacing hostility and the vulnerable sitting down with the powerful, the poor with the rich together, interacting with mutual respect.  It is possible.

Just one example that I saw on the news programme Te Karere: initiatives that are picking up young people who’ve got totally off track, ram-raiding and the rest, and enabling them to choose life rather than self-destruction and hurting others.

In Advent, these weeks before Christmas, we’re revisiting the anticipation and hope of this future: the poor get equal access to having their issues resolved, those who are harmed and those who do harm find peace and good purpose, and the voiceless and ignored benefit from the resources of the earth just as much as those in the centre of things.  We’re re-committing to being part of this transformation.  We’re preparing for Jesus’ coming, coming again and again every place where his way of turning things upside down is needed.  This is how a world of conflict will become the peaceable realm.

For now, our antidote to fear is to slow down from our racing after whatever we are told we need to race after. Take time to notice the signs of God-alive. Be aware the wilderness in people’s lives, and in our own lives, and notice the signs even there.

And believe the apparently impossible.

Eco-Inspiration

 

Silvia Purdie has a passionate faith and a gift for bringing to light inspiring people of faith. Eco Church is her focus, in particular, how churches can turn mission statements about caring for creation into regular and effective practice. She has found that people’s stories are the best way to communicate this kaupapa, this mission, to put the eco-theology of our faith into action. Yes, Christian faith is ecological at heart. The Bible is steeped in eco-theology: once we strip away the layers of narrowed interpretation inherited from Europe and Christendom, what we see is God’s story with land together with people. Atua, whenua, tangata.

Silvia envisaged creating a resource for faith communities by compiling a collection of stories of people working on eco-projects. Her decision to focus on women’s stories was to narrow the field but even so she found herself connecting with more and more material than a slim volume could contain. What we have is a substantial, and still affordable, volume (thanks to Philip Garside Publications) containing material to inspire and encourage all kinds of people who have a heart for God’s future for all creation.

My connection with the book is as contributor and proof-reader. The latter meant I got an early taste of the delights of the lives and activities of truly amazing people. I read and re-read the stories and found myself thinking how insignificant my contribution through rural ministry has been. But I also felt great encouragement, pride even, in being counted among them. Which points to the fact that it is not about comparing ourselves with others but doing our bit in our own place with our own life experience.

The title of my chapter was “I relate therefore I am”. Silvia used a set of questions for her interviews, and for those of us who wrote our own chapters, to draw out the personal as well as the practical, faith and values feeding action. We started with personal history and ended with thankfulness, and in between told of passion and pursuits in creation care. Awhi means to care or embrace: “Awhi Mai Awhi Atu” is being embraced and embracing, receiving and giving – what I grew up with as the Jesus ethic. This thread wove its way through my ministry with rural communities and it keeps hope alive for the future, even when things feel overwhelmingly negative.

This is a resource for local faith communities anywhere. With stories to encourage and – a distinctive feature of this publication – action points with every chapter, I’m imagining groups of us, men and women together, meeting and chapter by chapter chewing the Eco Church fat. Chewing the fat and finding practical ways to live the care and concern for our world that is basic to our faith.

The book is available as an ebook ($20) as well as printed ($35 plus p&p). 

The Isaiah Vision

 In 1992 Raymond Fung wrote a little booklet called The Isaiah Vision. It was based on Isaiah 65:17-25, a text that countered the dominant view of the world and human nature, showing it up as illusion, as disinformation, and not the only possible course into the future.

In summary the vision is that:

• children do not die
• old people live in dignity
• those who build houses live in them
• those who plant vineyards eat the fruit.

That is, the key issues of inequity in society and the poverty it gives rise to. Then and now.

It was one of the texts for Easter Day this year and I’d been asked to fill in when the minister’s household went into Covid-19 isolation. What a gift for this very occasional preacher. What an opportunity to explore what the tomb being empty might mean in practice for the vocation of living faithfully and hopefully in this time of huge challenges.

This text from Isaiah 65 is what Jesus reads when, as Luke 4 tells it, he goes to the synagogue in Nazareth. After reading from the scroll he delivers the shortest sermon ever: “Today these things are coming real.” Then and now.

From vision to reality.

This is poetry that can trigger practical action.

This is the Jesus manifesto.

Good Friday effectively says “no” to Jesus and his manifesto. Disinformation holds sway; control by any means rules. The future will be just more of the same, with an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and despair.

Easter is God’s “yes” to Jesus and the Isaiah Vision. Not dead, but living and continuing to turn vision into reality. Christ is alive and the universe can celebrate.

I remember a Bible study back in my first ministry appointment that looked at this Isaiah text and I recall clearly a participant’s reaction to the bit about the lion and the lamb. Impossible! How’s the lion supposed to live? I knew that it one sense it is impossible, and yet I also knew that there was something here that was offering an opening, an alternative to how things could be. It was, I would discover, “imaginative construal” and an act of “prophetic imagination” that changes the way we live.

The key to hearing the Isaiah Vision is that it is poetry. Not scientific description. Not literal, but metaphor. A metaphor points to truth. It puts an image into our minds that carries something meaningful, at the same time knowing that, as metaphor, it doesn’t fit exactly. Like the classic example of snow blanketing the ground. Yes, covering and wrapping, but definitely not warming. Take the image a bit deeper and it evokes ideas of hibernating, protecting, and healing as the cold knocks back harmful diseases.

So the lion and the lamb lying together: an image of no violence and no harm. Which, going deeper, means no fear.

Our fears are easy to name right now. The big three: climate change, viral pandemic, and war. And plenty of regular fears – having what’s needed to get by – shelter, food, health, e.g. all exacerbated by the big three. The Isaiah Vision dares to imagine these things not being a problem: children not dying of preventable diseases (measles, illnesses caused by unhealthy homes), old people living safely, valued and respected, not slave labour but people’s work bearing fruit for themselves, including having their own homes and accessible sources of food.

This is not to deny how bad things are; rather, it is refusing to take existing world-ways as the only option and presents an alternative of life-giving ways. This, not our fears, can then be front and centre to our view of the future.

We can make this vision the horizon that, following Jesus’ example, we are living towards. It is a case of believing it is possible, despite appearances, despite current events, and acting accordingly. It makes a difference.

This, to me, is the tomb emptied. Emptied of everything that deals death. Which means we can focus our hearts and minds on what is life-giving.

Mike Riddell, who has been living in Ōturehua and died unexpectedly very recently, had just written an article for the latest Tui Motu magazine.

He wrote:

The time of Easter is a celebration of transformation. In the midst of darkness, loss and disillusionment comes the resurrection – the shining light of hope sidelining death and despair. Through Christ, we look backwards on history from the other side of all that would distort life and joy.

As I write, there is ample cause for despair. The Russian invasion of Ukraine haunts us with nightmares of 1939. Whatever the situation might be by the time you read this, many innocent people will have lost their lives in the crucible of power politics driven by insatiable narcissism.

A virus runs rampant through our society, and our Parliament has recently been occupied by disaffected citizens – a disturbing though sometimes amusing sideshow.

It would be easy to feel bleak and powerless. But that would be to give too much weight to forces we have no hope of controlling. My own strategy has been to focus on beauty.

Mike then describes the beauty around him – his wife Rosemary’s music, the creative projects he’s been engaging in, his family nearby. His strategy for living is to give towards a good future, poignantly commenting that he may not be around much longer to enjoy it.

Quoting again:

Too often I suspect we regard the resurrection as some sort of magic trick to be applauded from the sidelines. It is so much more than that. It is the recognition that… whatever may befall any of us along the path, all will be well. The challenge becomes to live as if this is true, rather than drowning under the stormy swells of doom and gloom.

“To live as if this is true.” Grammarians, note well. Not as if it were true, but as if it is true. That is Jesus’ gift – showing us God’s future made present.

God – the love and energy that pervades everything that was, is, and will be – has said a resounding “Amen” to Jesus and his making real the Isaiah Vision. This lives on and is the core of our living as followers of the Way.

The Seasons of Alzheimer’s

 Alzheimer’s in itself is surely the winter season of a person’s life. It can be a long winter, with a painful start for all involved most notably for the person affected. For in the early winter of Alzheimer’s knowing what is happening is a big part of the suffering. For loved ones it is also a season of winter, sometimes a very long winter. That’s how it was for a friend from some years back and for her family and we shared a very special time recently saying farewell to her, speaking the pain and taking a step in letting it go and letting her go.

The winter of Alzheimer’s has seasons of its own, that is, the stages that a person goes through. Looking at it from the side of those who travel the journey with a loved one with Alzheimer’s, these stages, or seasons, are experienced as stages of grief.

The first grief comes with diagnosis and the loss of all assurance that life would continue as before. There is no way back.

The next grief comes as behaviour and interaction changes to the extent that what is distinctive about the person starts to fade. For example, a person who was known for the gift of listening and understanding and was always there for people: now no longer engages in the same way.

Then comes the grief at the loss of identity. Who is this person who looks like the person I have known so well, but feels like a stranger?

Each stage is hard but the season of disconnection is surely at the top end of hard. The grief we feel at the loss of response, when this person seems to look through me rather than at me, is deep. Where has our relationship gone?

When death comes, the loss of physical presence brings its own grief, compounded by all that has gone before, with the fear that we’re only going to remember these years of winter. What about the life we had before – the spring of childhood, the summer of the adult years of making the best life we can with people we love, the autumn of easing back on hard work and enjoying our favourite things and special people.

Stories bring back that life. They trigger our memories, as do photographs. For 15 minutes we just sat and let the photos and music wash over us. And our dear friend was restored to us.

I was aware too that letting go had happened at different points for different people. For some the loss of identity made it too hard to continue close contact, for some the letting go happened again and again at each stage. Whatever and however, it was surely right for each person and their relationship with their loved one. It’s the relationship, their unique relationship, that’s there to hold onto. For young ones who only knew her with the illness, the relationship is rich with what they did for her, visiting, taking turns to feed, spending time with her. This will always be part of them and helped make them the caring young people that they are. For those who knew well the person before illness, the task is to keep that person front and centre, along with all the loving that have continued to give her whether close at hand or at a distance. 

They kept holding her in their hearts and that will not cease.

Water and Livelihood

Ko Tapuwai-o-Uenuku te Maunga - Benio, Eastern Southland looking towards the Blue Mountains

E kore te wai, e kore te tangata.
No water, no people.

This has been the big issue at centre of attention in every community I’ve worked in and in conversations at International Rural Churches conferences: water.
How crucial it is.
How dangerous it is.
How contested it has become.
And how easily we turn it from fresh water, wai Māori, to wai paru.

Crucial

Without it, the land in Genesis 2 is not yet a seed bed for life.  When water enters the story, the narrator goes overboard describing rivers flowing from all directions. Sheer repetition (cf. the repetition of the phrase “seed-bearing plants bearing seeds” in Genesis 1) pointing to life as proliferation.  

As a Southland sheep farmer’s daughter, I didn’t know much about irrigation.  A few decades back, an old farmer in the Manuherekia Valley enlightened me about the process of going round the farm with a shovel, releasing water from border dyke irrigation. The goal was to get an even flow across the paddocks. He was an expert, never a bare patch on any slope. On the international scene, getting piped water was the priority for churches I met in the Sulawesi mountains.  And in Malawi the priority is community water pumps, USD4,000 ready-made or, better, teach rural youth to be engineering entrepreneurs to build minimal cost versions. 

Water pump constructed by students at University of Mzuzu

Dangerous

Etched in my mind is the Methven community gathered en masse to farewell a toddler who’d got through an open gate and drowned in a water race. It was close to where his grandmother had taken her own life some years before. Crucial for that farming community, but devastatingly deadly.

Contested

Contested for access and control and when it comes to rivers contested upstream and downstream. Between countries – the Indus flowing through Pakistan and India, the Rhine flowing across Europe.  Between States: Australia’s Murray River, from the Cubbie Station cotton farm the headwaters in south-west Queensland, through New South Wales and South Australia, with a contest also between land use and urban use. Likewise the Waikato,  from mountains, through farm land and urban areas, with the country’s biggest city arguing its need for increased access.

Regarding our local rivers the debate is about flow levels in relation to issues of water use and water quality – electricity, farm land irrigation, fishing, algae control, and mahinga kai (traditional food sites). The Otago Regional Council is currently asking us to “Have your say” on Manuherekia River water management scenarios.

Who owns the water?  

Ngāi Tahu’s freshwater claim to the Waitangi Tribunal is not about ownership. Their kaupapa is to design jointly (with the Crown) a better system to manage and care for our precious waterways, for the benefit of present and future generations.  They have their eye on the age to come, and are guided and driven by tikanga tuku iho – principles and values handed down the generations.

This has common ground with whanau Karaiti, people of Christian faith. We who are whanau Karaiti have an eye clearly on the age come and continually remind ourselves of what is tuku iho, handed down to us.  In the biblical heritage, water is gift.  Like the land, it is gift that keeps on giving, so long as we don’t do harm to it or put blockages in the way. 

Don’t treat the soil like dirt, says my nephew.  Even more so with water, on which the life of the soil depends.  To treat it as a commodity and battle over it is not to treat it as gift to treasure.  

Living Water

In John 4 Jesus meets a woman of Samaria at a well and they get talking about living water.  Kathleen Rushton SM reads this text located at Jacob’s well in relation to the ongoing contest for water in her region of Canterbury. For Sr Kath the whole of John’s gospel is best understood in the terms laid out in the prologue in chapter 1, namely the fundamentals of life’s origins and purpose. 

“Water”, she writes, “enables the birth of the stars, contributes to the formation of the planets, the forming and cooling of earth.  Enveloped by water, Earth’s creativity flourishes… Water maintains life by moving nutrients and energy within each living cell and between the cells of the whole organism.”  

As much as we are earth creature from the earth (adam the human being from adamah the top-soil), we are “waterlings from water”.*

In John 4, the woman, named Photina in early Christian references, has been forced to the edge by politics and culture.  Access to water, instead of being open and available to all peoples who may need it, has become exclusive.  Jacob’s well is a Samaritan well, with access closely controlled.  As a woman without a husband, having lost many and at this point not seeking another, Photina is at the very bottom of the economic system working as a water carrier, hard labour and borderline survival wages. Jesus also is at the edge, in his case because he is a Jew who, by rights, would not drink from a Samaritan water source.  But who “owns” Jacob’s well?  Sr Kath describes an image that is in a 3rd century Roman catacomb.  What is significant is that the woman standing in flowing water.  It is gushing out, nothing holding it back. It cannot be contained or controlled.

At the start of the episode Jacob’s well is referred to as pēgē, a spring. Other words are used as they speak of the well and of living water.  But there is a key point where Jesus uses that word again, saying: “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to the age to come.”  (v.14)

Water Released – Livelihood Released

Water is released: freed from economic and political control.  So also is life and livelihood.  

Indeed, livelihood is the issue at the heart of life on the land.  That is what farming is about. Viability that gives your household the means for life, a viability that is not just figures on a balance sheet.  In my experience it always was and still is about sustaining the land, to sustain the people.  

At Knox Church last November I told the story of my family’s relationship over the years with a farm in Eastern Southland.**   During my ministry, working with rural church people, I’ve asked them to tell the story of the land they work, as a way of digging into the connection between their faith and life on the land (this works with home gardeners too).  With my family – as with many other stories I’ve heard – it is a story of change and of care.  In our case, four generations deeply motivated to till and to keep (Genesis 2:15), learning with the times, making changes for the good for the land as they have understood it.  

The current situation in relation to water and farming relates to the pressing need as a nation to prevent further degradation in water quality and to work to restore waterways to a healthy state for the future. “Farmers fear new water rules could push them under” was a headline from earlier this year.  Regulations have always be the bane of their lives because farmers are fiercely independent and don’t appreciate a heavy hand from above.  Also because, as is the case in many spheres of life, one size does not fit all.  Farmer-driven plans and targets for meeting agreed goals in the local context would work so much better than blanket regulations.

Rural/Urban Divide

What hasn’t helped the conversation is the gap in understanding between rural and urban people, something that has become greater over recent decades with fewer town families now having relations living on the land and therefore a chance to experience rural life. 

I stand in two worlds, with rural origins plus continuing contact and rather many years of urban-based university education.  Thirty odd years ago the Association of Presbyterian Women’s magazine Harvest Field got me to write an article on the urban/rural divide, a matter that was already a growing concern then.  My key point was that the distrust (and sometimes disdain) works both ways.  On the receiving end it felt like a case of “judge us before you know us” but I was, and am, aware that it works rural to urban as much as urban to rural. A clear case of othering – what is not our own kind is “other” and therefore alien. The step that follows on from this sense of alienation is fear of the other, the source of most if not all conflicts in our world.

Living in Northland I came to articulate the urban/rural divide in terms of two languages.  Rural people, as well as speaking their own lingo in country contexts, can change out of working clothes, go to town, and speak in terms urban folk understand.  Country people have always interacted as equals with business and professional people and those who have practical skills like they do – in trades and in manual work.  With improved mobility and technology, plus the cultural dominance through the media of urban perspectives, rural people now live in two worlds.  We are, effectively, bi-lingual.  

I got to know a lot of te reo speakers in the Far North, many who only learnt English when they went to school.  Maori is their “heart” language. Even for those who have learnt te reo Māori second to English, the intonation and the concepts of the reo touch their spirits in ways te reo Pākehā never can. And yet the dominant view has been that, if they can speak English, why should anyone bother learning Māori. I thought that was changing but after returning south I’m hearing it again.

What is the benefit of people, including Pākehā like me, learning Māori?  It is in discovering how “the other side” sees the world.  It gives insight into the ideas and values that drive them, the internal meaning of their words, their understanding of what counts as best practice, and their aspirations for the future.  Learning te reo opens up one’s understanding of the other and they become less “other”.  No longer to be feared. No longer felt to be a threat.   

Likewise when urban learns “rural”. 

Water is perhaps the conversation topic that needs urban and rural voices talking together and learning to understand each other’s “reo”.  Not talking past each other, but, in the words of Nelle Morton, hearing each other to speech.***  

Speaking because the other is listening. 

Based on a presentation to the North Otago Dunedin Regional Presbytery at Palmerston on 25.05.2021

Footnotes:

* Kathleen Rushton SM, “Waterlings from Water: Exploring a Cosmological, Eschatological Reading of ‘Living Water’ in John 4:4-42 amidst the Braided Rivers of Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand, in Creation and Hope: Reflections on Ecological Anticipation and Action from Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Nicola Hoggard Creegan and Andrew Shepherd, p.92

** Knox News December 2020 January 2021

***Nelle Morton, The Journey is Home

 

A Māori Girl from Gore?

A good friend in the North, Wimutu Te Whiu, would often refer to me on local Marae as “the Māori girl from Gore”.  True, I was born in Gore, but I can’t claim any ancestry other than Scottish, Irish, and a little bit of English.  Nā Kotirangi, Airangi hoki ngā tūpuna, often out of solidarity not including the imperial Ingarangi in my mihi.  Matua Wi bestowed something very precious to me and yet I feel very hesitant to claim it and risk stepping into arrogance.  He affirmed a belonging among the whanau whānui (the family at large) in the Whangaroa area of Northland. Somehow this was so, perhaps because I was there with them in many different places as one of their ministers for tangihanga (funerals) and at significant hui; away outside my comfort zone, willing to be totally governed by tikanga and te reo Maori (customs and language), and stand and do my best to speak if and when I was called on. 

Now that I have returned to the south, I know that something got added to me during those years with the people of Whangaroa and Northland, something that can never be taken away from me.  Yet returning home, I return also to my “Pākehātanga”, to the social and cultural ways of southerners, friendly yet reserved, close-knit and pretty comfortable, content with their world and in no hurry to change.  These are the kind of people I grew up with. As noted in an earlier blog, it has been a “dislocating” experience.

Rural Eastern Southland in the 50’s and 60’s was very monocultural and that is not just the white faces.  The heritage was predominately Scottish (Presbyterian) or at least from the British Isles. It wasn’t till High School that I knew anything about the reasonable sized population of Māori living in Mataura for its employment opportunities. But it wasn’t close contact because the school had 1,100 pupils and the Latin class I chose to be in was unsurprisingly all Pākehā. It didn’t help that I was hopeless at sports.

What made up for lack of interaction was the philosophy and cultural attitude of the home I grew up in. I was aware that my family consciously stood apart from the mainstream in being respectful and accepting of other cultures, be it the Chinese greengrocer or people who were Catholic, or Māori the first people of the land. Through church involvement they got to know people of many different cultures. My father’s war experiences contributed to the overall inclusive attitude, and also his father’s independent thinking and non-conformist stance on many things that he inherited. My mother’s proto-feminism, as it could perhaps be called, added to it. She was the oldest in a family whose father had died when many of the children were still young. She didn’t accept gender stereotyping. Nor did she consider fitting in with others more important than thinking for herself and staying true to her values.

So philosophically there was an underpinning of the worth of all people, regardless of whether they were like us, “us” feeling we were not really mainstream anyway. Also philosophically, the Christian faith I grew up with was clearly articulated as practical Christianity, primarily about ethics and justice, caring for people and caring for the land.  For my father, to be a farmer is to be in relationship with the land – and the weather. Living with the variables – that is faith. Words like animal husbandry, agriculture, and pastoral farming all carry connotations of working in relationship.  Not objects to be managed and manipulated, but living beings to nurture and look after.  

Ethics and justice. Conversations at the dinner table introduced us to the inequities in society, and around the world.  Conversations continued into teen and young adult years and through the 1970s this included injustice for tangata whenua, with the hope and expectation that we would change as a nation. We thought that the next generation would all learn Māori in school and that the Treaty of Waitangi would be taken seriously across the board. As that was very slow to happen there continued to be the question “why not?”  What is getting in the way?

In the years that followed, and particularly when I took on church ministry, my learning increased exponentially. My philosopher’s brain maintained a high level of curiosity and a drive to expand perspective. An innate shyness helped me willing to keep silent and hold back my point of view and listen. Listen to people who knew the negative consequences of colonisation and loss of land and identity and thereby get a glimpse of truth from a totally different place than my own.  

It was while doing ministry in Mid-Canterbury and attending a training event in Sri Lanka that I had the Kiwi classic overseas experience of feeling the beauty of belonging of te reo. During a Christian Conference of Asia service, all the languages represented in the gathering were used during a prayer.  When it was the turn of Aotearoa, I was deeply moved and tears came to my eyes. Once home I got advice about learning Te Reo, whether it was right for me as a Pākehā to do so and whether the Correspondence School was a good way to go. The answer from a kaumatua (Māori elder) I served on a church committee with  was “yes”.  So the journey began, with the help of a Tūwharetua kaumatua living in Ashburton. The local church was not all that receptive to the use of the reo – there are no Māoris [sic] in our church – but there were occasional community events, like prayers for a Play Centre Conference, where the tikanga of the organisation was to acknowledge the Treaty. A formative moment was when Rotary held their national conference in our town and asked for prayers first thing on Sunday morning. I planned to end with the grace in te reo, which I had committed to memory as part of my study course. In the front row of the gathering was Hiwi Tauroa (former Race Relations Conciliator).  As I spoke the words, kia tau ki a tātou katoa…, I saw a huge smile appear on his face. Even though my pronunciation was atrocious!  

When a parish in Northland became a possibility in the early 2000s, a large part of the appeal was how different it would be from the south. I knew I would be challenged and that my world would have to expand. I look back on it as an amazing experience, a real blessing. It has been a gift that keeps on giving and what I may have given back will never match what I have received. As teina (younger sibling) to them as tuakana (older sibling), I sat at the feet of the hapū of Whangaroa and their many relations around the wider district. The College students laughed because of my accent when I first led karakia at Assembly, but as I listened, spending many days in many hui and tangihanga, slowly things got better and with every affirmation for my reo, I could sense that they were proud of who they were helping me become. 

Patient listening was my commitment and that came from two directions. One was simply tikanga Māori. That is the way to learn: ideally starting in childhood, being present, absorbing, and then, when directed to, standing and contributing. I was starting later in life, but I was determined to make the most of the time living in the North.  The other basis for this commitment to listen stemmed from what I learnt working as a church minister. Being counts as much if not more than doing in the role of minister. Just being with people. Not racing round solving problems. Not necessarily even knowing the right words to say, but simply being a companion on their life journey, whatever it is that they are facing. Using words  to draw out from people what is important for them; hearing them to speech to find their way forward. 

But more significant than what I might have contributed myself to this learning experience in Northland was what was given to me.  The manaakitanga – the welcome, the inclusion, the kindness – of the people of Te Tai Tokerau. The atawhai nui – the amazing grace – with which they received the halting attempts of a Pākehā Southlander to do justice to their tikanga. I was never growled, rather I was mentored. I got feedback all right, but it was always focused on the future, giving the expectation that I’d be back and the understanding that I would always be welcome. I learnt to stay silent during kōrero until it was my turn – if there would be a turn. Even when assumptions were being made about me because of the colour of my skin, I just let be, knowing that opening my mouth would make it worse. The best way was for people to get to know me on their terms. 

I sense that many Māori have had the proverbial gutsful of Pākehā talking back (“yes, but…”), of wanting to establish the truth as they see it, and requiring resolution and agreement on issues before the end of the day. An example of this became apparent as we worked together in Whangaroa to mark 200 years since the tragic events surrounding the ship “The Boyd” in 1809. Widespread antipathy among local Māori towards holding an event stemmed from their expectation, based on past experience, that it would be Pākehā driven and for the purpose of settling the problem of the Boyd.  Pākehā would say “sorry”, forgiveness would be expected to be given in return, at which point the pain and the disagreements would be history.

But for 200 years the only known history of the raid on the Boyd was based on Pākehā records, which contained known inaccuracies and conflicting evidence. The history and the māmai (pain) tuku iho (handed down through the generations of local Māori) had never been heard, with the result that their mana continued to be trampled on.  That was the key issue.

Our Remembrance event focused on the word “healing”, seeking as one of our committee put it “the peace of understanding”. As that was understood, more and more got involved for what was in the end very much a joint effort, Māori and Pākehā. On the day, as we listened to kaumatua and kuia share what had been handed down and speak of the pain that had ensued, we felt our whole community take a step forward towards that peace of understanding. We together felt the wairua of Whangaroa – a new spirit which was reflected in many subsequent events. Like a funeral of an elderly Pākehā woman whose family were invited to bring her to the Marae next door to her home, en route to the service at our church. The funeral director got a bit schedule-anxious as the time drew on, but what was happening was much more important than any schedule. The family were totally embraced and we all treasured it as a moment of journeying together as two peoples united in loss and friendship.

Again we experienced this journeying together in our commemorations for the centennial of the World War 1 battle at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 involving the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC). From April 2015 each year through to Armistice Day 2018, we gathered as a whole community, weaving tikanga Māori and Pākehā formalities to create a distinctively Whangaroa remembrance. It is a spirit of remembering that feeds into the present, giving our young people – and all of us – a clear understanding that what matters is how we give of ourselves for the sake of all people. 

A sign of the patience mentioned earlier, in listening and working through concerns until there is peace of understanding, is how long it took for one remaining issue after the 2009 Boyd Remembrance events mentioned above to be settled. It was the issue of the plaque.

An Historic Places Trust plaque had been put in place in 1994, but got damaged and ended up in somebody’s shed.  Our committee recovered it during our preparations and put it in a safe and suitably tapu place (a local church), until it could be decided what to do with it. In 1994, consultations with local Māori had been rushed, with a decision presented almost as a fait accompli. Subsequently many were not surprised that it would not settle where first laid. Patience was clearly required in order to get a genuine resolution. It was not until 2017 that agreement was found among all who held mana in the harbour or who had a significant stake in the matter. Finally we were able to settle the plaque in place in Whangaroa.

For photos of these events, click here 

Māori and Pākehā working together, we did not give up: Mā pango mā whero ka oti te mahi.

That has become my story. Even here in the South, I live and think and feel that drive towards true partnership that we continued to strive for in the North. 

 

Assessing Change

 

Were they the good old days?

I’ve been asked to write something about how the organisation I have served in has changed since 1990.  After 32 years I have now retired, leaving the tasks of ministry and leadership to “the younger generation”.  

Certainly a good time to reflect. But also a challenge to do it with clarity and equanimity.

The risk is being overall all negative.  My first thoughts are of what has been lost, particularly what has been of significance to me.  Can I see through that to what has been gained?

As a new on the job in the late 80’s and early 90’s I was finding my way into the tasks and the calling of parish ministry. The people who supported and mentored me were the key people in the organisation, regionally and nationally.  Being involved in national committee work was something new and fresh, as well as a chance to get to know more people with similar calling and purpose.

Key resource roles were disestablished years ago.  Working in the hinterlands of rural ministry, I’ve become more and more on the outer of what those in bigger churches and in the centre of the organisation are focussed on. 

It just hasn’t been relevant.

The challenge of reflecting with an open mind and an even had was sharpened when I read a document currently circulating. The document contains recommendations from a working group on the future of education for ministry.

How can I judge what they are doing now, let alone the ideas for the future, when it is so different from my own education?  The positives that have endured for me have been mostly connected to what doesn’t happen now – on campus education with university courses interwoven with personal formation in community. It is the community aspect that stands out most of all.   

Also I have had no recent contact with the process of ministry training, nor until this year any experience of the fruits of current training.  All my colleagues have either been in an older age bracket or have been educated in other denominations or overseas.

I can name all the good things we had that seem now to be lost, but how do I know whether they are relevant to those starting the journey now?

What is more, much of the change has happened because society has changed. What could work then – all students relocating (with their families) to Dunedin for several years – doesn’t fit personal and family lives now.  

I think what I need to do, if I’m to avoid simply harking back to the good old days, is three-fold:

• name what was good and proved valuable for me – that could be able to achieved in a different way now;
• identify the pertinent social and economic changes that have played out in the last 30 years – to clear the decks and be sure of addressing today’s reality;
• find words for what does not change throughout all this – the purpose of ministry in relation to the calling of the gospel – or maybe that should have been number 1!

Then and only then, perhaps I can have some insight into how things have changed in a way that can do justice to the good old days and to the good new days.