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.

Memory and Place

 

For my nephew who can be wise without using many words.  

“Too much time on your hands – you need to make more jam”.

Well the apricot season is over and we’re now in a world where there is much more time on our hands for most of us.  Over the past weeks it become quieter and quieter in our temporary wee home, under the flight path for Queenstown airport.  The world has changed and the future world remains very uncertain.  So it seems reasonable to use this time of reduced physical contact with others to sort out a few thoughts.   In particular, thoughts about memory and the renewal of memory, the re-membering, that comes with returning to a place of a previous time.

Consider this familiar experience: 

You go into a room to get something and, right away, forget what it was you were looking for.  Go back to where you were and likely as not you remember.  Crossing a threshold from one space to another does something apparently to our brains.   A connection is needed – a re-connection that brings the previous thought together with the different space.

Returning to the place where I began has done that in lots of different ways.  Making jam is one example.   It’s probably 30 years since the last batch of jam was produced, so what to do was not front and centre in my brain.   But it didn’t take long before the memory was back and it felt good, very good.

Being in places whose familiarity is longer than my conscious memory has indeed reconnection me.  Much more quickly than moving to a new place, I am beginning to feel located again.  The connections remain with the place that’s been left behind: social media makes sure of that in a way that the interactions through comments, messages, and emails are not just holding on to the past.   It’s engaging with what is happening for friends at a distance and, in a funny sort of way, cheering them on from the sidelines.   This is become even more the case now that we are all in lockdown because of Covid-19.  I am as close for the people of Whangaroa, for example, as to the people in my street.  In fact closer, given invitations to share karakia together.

Relocated, memories of the past place are memories of people who remain part of my world.   So there is still some sadness, not to be there alongside and supporting in person, but more than that is the appreciation of simply knowing these people and calling them my friends.  Put simply, I am relocated and have kept the old location part of me, because of its people.

Recently, I was very fortunate to be in the hills (and to get there by helicopter) to help with a wilding conifer eradication project.   Last year when asked why we were leaving the north, the reply was always because the south is where our mountains are, and our rivers and lakes.   Up in the hills on that project, I knew I was in the right place. Home.  

A comment from a Northland friend has also helped me get my bearings.  “I love your total immersion attitude”, she said.   I guess that’s what the Northland experience was and this is what my returning south can also be.   When you’re in the hills, there is no need to work at it: one is immersed already.   And in the connections I’ve had a chance to make already with St John, prior to the lockdown (still keeping links of support through social media with those in the north), there’s been a sense of immersion, of simply being part of what they are doing here, listening and learning and enjoying getting to know the people.  Lockdown means staying away, for the sake of my older family members and, I guess, also me.  It’s hard not to be actively involved, supporting busy people who are even more overstretched than usual.  But I can spare regular thoughts for them and I’ve have been assured they are there for us if we need help.

Returning to a place, whether it’s returning to the room you’ve left in order to remember what you left for or returning to a place to call home, reconnects.   But not just returning to what it was before, as we bring with us the life and learning of the different places where we’ve lived.  Places and experiences that expand horizons.  Coming back is both returning to the same place and seeing it through wider eyes.  

Music connects with memory like this too.   There has been as growth in “nostalgia” radio stations in recent years.   What’s interesting is that the memories when listening to the music are mixed.  The music can bring a smile, but it also can trigger a sense of loss and sadness.  

Listening to that same music in a new context can also create new experiences and therefore new memories.

Dislocation – Disconnection

I’ve moved location very recently.  Back to the home place, my ūkaipō, but away from my home of the last 15 years, the community, the whanau whānui, where I came to belong and felt totally and utterly connected.
The choice to move was the proverbial no brainer.  Retirement meant we needed to get our own house to live in.  We longed for our maunga awa moana, for the land and waterways that were simply part of our being because that is where we each were born.  The adopted maunga awa moana of Te Tai Tokerau will always be special to me.  They and their people have been so welcoming and inclusive in their manaakitanga and whanaungatanga.  The land and waters of the north are heart and soul of the people who tell me now that they miss me heaps.  (I’m still sure that I miss them more!)  Thanks to social media we can stay connected and tautoko (support) one another.
“Stay-well connected” was what I said as last words in my final service with the parish and community last month.  My task is make good connections in a new place – newly in my old place, the part of the country where I grew up.
We change, so it’s never a matter of slipping back into old connections and certainly not into old ways of thinking.   The old connections of family are a real blessing.  There’s an assurance for the long-term when you are with your own people.  But the biggest disconnection for me is in world-view, attitudes, and language.  That’s how I feel the dislocation most.
Here in Central Otago and the Southern Lakes it’s like Kerikeri without Kaeo, the socio-economic upperside without the socio-economic underside, mainstream NZ (“we’re all New Zealanders”) without the Whangaroa reality of Māori and Pākehā in tension yet striving for partnership.  Residing within a white world where diversity stems mostly from tourism, from a constantly changing human populace rather than from the tikanga and culture embedded in the land and its tangata whenua, I feel dislocated.
What we see and experience in our corner of the world is not the whole world.  This is especially important for those who are part of the dominant culture, the so-called “mainstream”, which really is only a “different stream” from the streams that flow in and around this motu.  Enclave-living does not suit me now, if it ever did.  I can’t live with just my people, my own kind.  My own kind has expanded such that I feel I have multiple kinds, that is, I belong to multiple communities.
What seems important is that we find space wherever we are in which to imagine differently from what is immediately in front of us.  Space in which to scheme and dream alternatives and space in which to include those whose lives are different.

In a new place, this means taking the time and effort to make connections with the people of this place.  The fact that they can feel “other” to what has become familiar is itself an opening for conversation.  Who are these people?  What are their stories?  What are their aspirations?  What are their fears?  Here’s what I read some years back from wise rural writer Wendell Berry:

Community, I am beginning to understand, is made through a skill I have never learned or valued: the ability to pass time with people you do not and will not know well, talking about nothing in particular, with no end in mind, just to build trust, just to be sure of each other, just to be neighbourly. A community is not something that you have, like a camcorder or a breakfast nook. No, it is something you do. And you have to do it all the time.

So in some ways things haven’t changed.   Connection and belonging are always being worked out.  Never static, never fixed, and definitely without walls that exclude and create community that is secure but closed.

Who is my neighbour?  My neighbour is the next person I will encounter. And  I will treat them as a person worth encountering.   That’s whakawhanaungatanga wherever we are – building community.

It’s a work in progress – like our wee house.   One day we’ll be able to move in and really be in our new place.

Rangimarie Peace Shalom

Robyn