Blogs

From time to time individual Brothers will contribute a 'blog' to this page as an informal way of keeping in touch with life in the Friary. These are their own blogs and are a reflection of their friary life.

Kentigern 27 January 2007

Last blog. Getting ready to move is a stressful time for a person like me who is a bit adverse to writing lists. I can’t really do this without having some sort of list to tick off. Not as yet has the clipboard and printed schedule appeared but I have had to have a few crumpled scraps of used envelopes which are added to when the thought pops in to my head - unfortunately it is 3am when I think “have I packed any razors” – I then mislay the list and have to start again.
My room is full of stuff, perhaps an odd admission for a Franciscan who many would assume in a romantic imagination was living in a bare cell with scrubbed wooden floors and nothing but a crucifix to adorn the walls but I live surrounded by clutter. The important thing for me is that I’m not attached to it and can pass ninety percent of it on to the people and places who might be pleased to have the use of my old books, clothes and general tat. There are a few things that I’ve posted back to the UK but even that feels like I shouldn’t be too attached to them as they could wash up on some beach to be scavenged by seagulls and human beings.

So I’m pretty much ready to go. Have had an exhausting week of saying my goodbyes to friends and colleagues, all of whom have given me words of much kindness. So farewell New Zealand, farewell you the readers of this blog.

Webster's note: Kentigern is returning to UK after his time of transfer in NZ. He goes with our best wishes for a safe and happy journey.

Kentigern - 7 January 2007

Haven’t written this for a wee while, events have rather overtaken me. The big thing in my life is that I will be leaving New Zealand and returning to the UK at the end of this month, which is now scarily close. I would have been finishing my term here in April but I asked that if I left early I could travel a bit before making it back to the UK.

My travel plans are slowly coming together. I’m travelling overland so a combination of boats, trains and coaches are getting this celtic hobbit back to his shire. Going via the Americas but really only seeing the USA and a little bit of northern Mexico. Getting excited about moving on and have a strange restless feeling like being for far too long in an airport departure lounge waiting and waiting for your flight to be called.

So have started saying my goodbyes. Went out to Raglan today which is a small, pretty coastal town where people go to surf and hang out at the cafes. I went to visit a work colleague who won’t get back to work till after I’ve left. The pohutukawa were out in force and looking lovely. The colleague and I said our goodbyes and since I was in a farewelling mood I stopped off at the Bridal Veil Falls one of my favourite and treasured places in the Waikato. The short walk through the forest gives me a sense of what most of New Zealand must have been like visually not so long ago, even if now there is no bird song to match the intensity of the flora. Why are waterfalls fascinating, who knows, but with this one there is an energy and aliveness that makes it pleasurable to be near.

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Kentigern - 7 December 2006

Feast of St Nicholas yesterday. Made baked cheesecake for the pudding at evening meal - I could probably be done for manslaughter feeding that amount of cholesterol and deadly dairy to a group of men aged forty-plus. I take baked cheesecake to be vaguely Germanic. I think this is because the first time I was fed it, it was by my German teacher at school (who was German) and it was considered by her to be a national dish, that’s all the proof I need. St Nicholas wasn’t even from where we now think of as Germany but it’s the Germanic traditions (with a touch of North American) that have pretty given us our western Crimbo traditions.

Damian pointed out how often I start my blogs writing about food and particularly that I’ve just cooked or baked something. I suppose I enjoy making things.

For those outside of the South Pacific the big news story here is the coup in Fiji. It would seem to me that a military take over is a bad thing but our churches can’t agree a statement to condemn it. But the really important news is that the coup won’t affect ‘Survivor’. Democracy, sanity, life and limb can all go to the wall but heaven forfend that some exploitative trashy pulp entertainment be sacrificed.

Alfred, our minister provincial, is visiting at the moment. He’s usually in Oz, he originally hails from Malaysia – Sarawak to be precise – he was the cook tonight so we got some very tasty laksa. Made, no doubt, to his old grannies recipe. Thought I ought to end with food too.

Kentigern - 26 November 2006 - Stir Up Sunday

Stir-up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Woke at six o’clock, must have been the intense anticipation of making the Christmas pudding ( - and I particularly like the part about Christmas puddings being “banned by the Puritans as a lewd custom unfit for people who followed the ways of God”.) In the absence of silver shillings or whatever people used to put in to the pud I bought a silver ring from the Warehouse. And at six dollars I’m sure it is of the very highest quality sterling silver. So I now leave it to steam away for nine hours. And to think I could buy one from the supermarket and ping it in the microwave in three minutes.

A pussy cat is expressing its cupboard love for me. It’s a fluffy multi-coloured thing, quite attractive, totally stand-offish and a bit of a scaredy cat. But it faithfully turns up morning and evening and miaows at me and I like some crazy old cat person dutifully feed it. Initially it wolfed (if that is not an inappropriate adjective) down whatever I put out for it, usually some left over meat from the fridge, but he/she/it has become more fussy as our relationship has deepened and matured so that it ignored the chicken satay the other morning and I felt obliged to come up with a suitable alternative. So now you know that to get my attention all you need to do is look mournful and miaow in an accusatory fashion.

Kentigern - 6 November 2006

Difficult to be an Anglican in New Zealand at the moment and not be aware of the events unfolding in Dunedin over the past weekend.

Last Saturday I was in Auckland at a conference on ‘Is Violence Inevitable?’. Was set up by people who are third order members of the community. Nicola Hoggard Creegan was interesting, she presented on ‘whence comes violence: a biological and evolutionary approach’. She did an interesting thing of keeping the Genesis creation stories in a dynamic tension with what we know from science and evolution. She doesn’t feel that she has to decide between them, that they can both inform the other. Being an old liberal my usual approach is to say the biblical and scientific creation accounts don’t match and are simply talking about different categories of ‘what we can know’ – like you wouldn’t compare love poetry to what an endocrinologist would have to say about our falling in love – so it was refreshing to hear what Nicola had to say.

The other speaker that caught my attention, though it was late in the day after we’d already had three papers presented to us and I was a little weary, was Marilyn McCord Adams speaking about horrendous evil! She was talking about the tendency to ignore violence and not name it for what it is. She got me thinking about the situation in Dunedin and how the Church has perpetrated so much violence over the centuries against lesbians and gay men and the current need to have a moratorium on ordinations – ‘we need time to pause and reflect’, say the church fathers, ‘whilst we consider whether we might get round to recognising your gifts and talents’ – that this is just more violence done against the bodies, minds and souls of lesbian and gay Christians.
George Connor, the bishop of Dunedin, has exposed the violence at the heart of the current bit of Anglican fence sitting.

Kentigern - 26 October 2006

Richard Rohr was here in lil ‘ol Hamilton over the weekend at Houchen Retreat centre. His public talk was about the role of scapegoats in today’s society and in the three day ‘retreat’ he was talking about the two halves of life. The workshops were ten till four and basically he spoke for fifteen hours (an hours break for lunch each day) spread over the three days. So quite old-fashioned teaching style. I struggled a bit and it did feel very crowding and ever so slightly oppressive. This was mitigated by the words he was speaking which were to do with kindness, liberation and freedom of thought; strange that his teaching style doesn’t model some of these values!! It was a bit more like going to the theatre or perhaps opera where it’s all a sea of sound and ideas and you can’t hope to remember very much of it but you might come away with a good line or a tune in your head and the general uplifted sense of having been at something inspirational.

Kentigern - 19 October 2006

Beautiful experience today of going on pilgrimage for the feast day of Tarore. Our neighbouring diocese of Waiapu have been having a year of these short pilgrimages to local saintly sites, today they crossed the border into our diocese of Waikato to pay their respects to the story and the memory of this curiously precocious girl. We started in Hobbiton, sorry Matamata, at the Anglican church. Bishop David gave us some of the historical and political background. We moved on to the Waiere falls where Tarore was killed. Walk along an ancient path through all the strange (to me) trees, bushes and shades of green that make a NZ bush walk but with huge boulders strewn across the path that were a bit scary; I thought of giants erecting barriers to their treasures. To come beside the waters of that stream then think of the awful events of 170 years ago and to allow the healing challenge of what flowed out from that spot. When revenge, and righteous revenge, would have been the culturally and perfectly understood response but that they chose not to act on that impulse but chose a different way. I would agree in no small part because of the young girl herself who (according local oral tradition) preached peace and the alternative way of the gospel in the years before her death. All quite a challenge to me who often wastes a lot of time running over revengeful remarks and situations in my head when I believe I’ve been insulted or misused. I believe that the thoughts are ok, we can’t censor what goes on in our heads and they probably serve an important function of setting up some protection from the vileness of some situations and people, but I can choose how to act on them and also how much time and credibility I’m going to give to all that thinking.
We went on to the grave site which was more than a little difficult to find and a bit neglected looking but gave some sort of completion to our little act of pilgrimage. So bless you Tarore, may you rest in peace.

Kentigern - 6th October 2006

Turning of the turf for Te Hurihanga. (see blog 28th July) I think the book I’m reading, Speaking Sex to Power by Patrick Califia, rather inspired me to take a stand; a little Gandalf/Luther moment, here I stand I can do no other and you will not pass. I took up defence at the perimeter and by a power I don’t quite understand held them back. There was a very nice guy from a security company and we both took the tack of being quiet of voice. He didn’t get into any conversations, I listened and absorbed some of the anger and poison, well hopefully not absorbed so much as soaked it up ready to squeeze it out. My kidneys hurt by the end of it I’d exhausted my adrenalin but I stayed calm and as I rehearse what I did and didn’t say I’m currently feeling a sense of rightness and that I did what I had to do.

The media reporting (both television and local press) were wildly inaccurate of course. Amazes me that two reporters from TV1 can spend about an hour and a half here and get so many facts wrong in their report. I can’t link the reports for you as the Waikato Times doesn’t have a proper website and TV1 haven’t put the report up on their site. But hopefully our trusty Webster (Bro D.K.) will have the photo from the Waikato Times and you can see me listening to the gently nuanced discussion of one of our lovely neighbours. (Done!)

Kentigern - 13 September 2006

Continuing to read around the subject of ‘Men’s studies’, currently reading David Tacey’s Remaking Men – The Revolution in Masculinity. (Here for an extract and here for a review ). Lots of gorey stories about fathers eating their children and men wanting incestuous relationships with their mothers. Yep, it’s Jungian and we’re talking about old Greek myths. Find it less convincing than last weeks' book, maybe I’m more of a materialist – in the philosophical sense.

Favourite silly local story of last week was the wild turkey of Masterton. The creature had escaped from a farm and was now “terrorising” residents and small dogs in the suburbs of Masterton. It had evaded capture and they weren’t allowed to shoot it because it probably belonged to someone and it was illegal to discharge a firearm in a built up area in pursuit of game. I have met a turkey and whilst they are impressively big birds I couldn’t say that I felt terrorised by it. Now the emu on the other hand, which I met in Oz, was a bit more adrenalin pumping. It was bigger than me and when those too-close-together eyes are checking you out about a foot above your head I didn’t feel safe or confident. And then there was the time I was terrorised by a couple of sea gulls on Brighton Pier till I threw them the ice-cream I had been eating. It was a planned, skilled, expertly executed raid by a couple of thuggish gulls with attitude. Anyway the Wairarapa Times-Age website actually has the turkey being a hen but the animal control officer interviewed on the national radio (yep, the story made national news) talked about a turkey. So this creature has added the art of cunning disguise to its repertoire of fugitive skills – if those bloody sea gulls get this clever I’ll be very afraid.

Kentigern - 1st September 2006

two days in bed with a virus, mostly just very drippy and snuffly and tired. Slept heaps and feel tons better as today is the first day of spring and it’s sunny and warm. The peach and almond blossom is out and looks very pretty against a blue sky. Actually when I’m done writing this I will need to go and have another look just because it is so special – soppy of me I know.

Over a billion dollars pledged to rebuild the Lebanon - and just like that the money appeared. Israel will be livid though hopefully they will sit on their hands and just let the re-building take place.

Our top news in NZ this past week has been about some poor teenage lad being strangled to death on his way to prison in the back of the van that was transporting him from the courts. The crime he was accused of (not sure that he got as far as being convicted) was stealing his mother’s car. I imagine there is a bit of hand wringing going on in that family. The man accused of killing him appeared in court wearing a t-shirt printed with “keep your eye on the rising star of crime” – lovely eh?

Current line of reading is around masculinity and the book I’m getting my stimulation from is called Masculinities by R.W. Connell. I like that it is a little more nuanced in its approach to thinking about men than just hairy drumming groups and it doesn’t need to be anti-feminist or blind to queer thinking to come up with a plausible analysis of how it is to be a man in the world. Of which it must be about time for me to go and spend some time with my almond blossom. Here’s a link for a poem about an almond tree that meant something to me as a teenager (you need to scroll down a little)

Kentigern - 15th August 2006

Gosh, the Feast of the Assumption of the Holy Mother of God into Heaven. I didn’t make it out of bed this morning for prayer; I’m such a slacker. Not sleeping terribly well and slightly over did it at the weekend planting all my little shrubs and trees that arrived last week. Looks good, just need to collect newspapers for weed mat and move a ton of bark chips for mulch.

I think I’ve planted 250 little darlings, my muscles and knees would put in a bid for a figure four times that high. All plants native to New Zealand which does seem to mean you have to pay a bit more attention to the shapes and the shades of green rather than there being big bold contrasting colours and forms (and not big on flowers either). But I like it when I’m out driving – like on the road to Raglan – and I get a rush of bush; all densely green and alive.

International diplomacy being a complicated business I don’t understand how you can have a ceasefire in the Lebanon with rockets still being launched, all feels very shaky. It must be profoundly scary and depressing in equal measure to live there. I used to enjoy reading Reem Haddad’s column in the New Internationalist (I say ‘used to’ as she doesn’t appear to do it anymore) it had a sense of reality but optimism about a country that had been through hell but was coming out the other side. I imagine it feels like all the improvements have been lost and time has rolled back over the past month.

Kentigern - 5th August 2006

Should have been with my supervisor/therapist this morning but her mother is dying so she’s rushed herself off to the UK. So instead I went to the dentist and to get my haircut; scraping out the gunk, putting on a bit of polish and having it all taken away a very good near substitute for therapy.
What else this week? Reading group; moving our way through David Tacey’s The Spirituality Revolution. Going well, interesting discussion about secularism and religious grazers – people who just want the ‘nice’ bits from faith traditions and not to make any commitment to making them work, a sort of religious consumerism. I played an excerpt from a Kim Hill interview with a Dr Susan Blackmore who was having a real secularist bash at religion (you’ll need to be quick to follow the link as radio NZ don’t leave them up for long). We, in our munificence, decided that Dr Blackmore is probably more of an ally than she might ever want to believe. She is at least asking questions of life and trying to supply some meaning to existence (even if she comes up with very different questions and answers to our little reading group) rather than those who are simply too apathetic or cynical to care.

Shopping for university quiet day this Saturday – somehow the Waikato Times got hold of the “story” (major event obviously – maybe they believed the angle would be that I might be seen actually wearing my habit in public) and doing a bit of bad editorialising and saying it was a day for spiritual healing. Imagining bus loads of people looking for deliverance ministry or some such thing. Boy will they be disappointed with my flaky ways; yoga, finger painting, origami cranes (for Hiroshima Day on Sunday) and general liberal open-mindedness.

Kentigern - 28 July 2006

Picking pieces of rice out from between the computer keys. I often eat at my desk and I often have wee accidents but this morning I managed to tip a substantial amount from a plate of rice and curry on to the keys. What remained on the plate was some very nice re-heat from Sunday evening; I like a savoury breakfast.

At a meeting last week about Te Hurihanga which finally feels like it will actually happen. We are close to the important stage of having a loyal Minister of the Crown turn up, stick a spade in the ground and give their ‘what an honour, privilege, exciting opportunity’ speech so we can then have asparagus rolls and broken biscuit cake with a cup of tea and feel like something has happened. I thought that the objecting neighbours had gone suspiciously quiet after last summer’s banners and protests but looking at their website I see they are taking their case to court. Most of the objectors live nowhere near the proposed building but for them this clearly doesn’t mean that their sway isn’t omnipotent.

I’ve been preparing some new beds out in what will become our front garden. I’m planning to plant natives. On the way I’ve discovered what happens to all those plastic bottle we faithfully put out for the recycling; they make dark, sombre, utilitarian garden edging. Not pretty but not exactly ugly either but seeing as I’m imagining all sorts of stunning mixed vegetation gracefully cascading over it and other plants distractingly soaring to the heights I probably shouldn’t worry too much about it. The middle-east is in melt down and I’m fretting about the aesthetics of my garden edging but then borders and who decides where they should be and what they should mean have never been so important as they are at this time.

Kentigern - 16 July 2006

Yesterday was a day of varied activity. Pruned the roses, read my book, got keys cut for work, went to the library, made bread for pizza, made the pizzas, typed up some material for the chapel, watched a two hour documentary on the American Civil War whilst chopping limes and grapefruits from our trees to make marmalade. About 10pm I was finished and slumped in front of the telly when I remembered – I’m preaching in the morning; shit, sermon, I need to write a sermon! How could I have forgotten? So that was me till about half past midnight pulling together some ideas for a sermon about fair trade coffee for this morning. My muse was being kind and the words sort of flowed. What was a further gift was that there was an item on National Radio this morning about fair trade coffee; a documentary film maker, Nick Francis, talking about his latest film on Ethiopian coffee, Black Gold. A further gift – if you could quite describe it that way – is the current issue about New Zealand butter being excluded from the European Union; I made the analogy of how it feels to be a farmer trying to get a fair price for your labour when the rules and the big boys seem to be stacked against you.

So now I am making the marmalade that Damian and I chopped the fruit for last night. Though it’s a blue sky and sunshine day so it would be rather nice to go for a cycle but that marmalade won’t make itself…

Kentigern - 10 July 2006

Careful readers of all the blogs will know that I was in Wellington last weekend for a conference – please see Damian’s blog for hyperlink. It was good but not quite what I was expecting. It was less a gathering of the like minded and more an academic symposium (without the wine, song and drunken rambling - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium). We had fairly in-depth presentations/lectures which were responded to by people some of whom were coming from a decidedly right-wing stance. A criticism of the ‘left’ that some of the speakers made (some of whom identified as left-wing themselves) was the fractured and un-focused state that we find ourselves in these days. We can unite against the things we don’t want but have trouble articulating what we do want. For example; Blair/Bush’s power mongering, the right-wing is very clear about foreign policy, international security and their favourite bogeyman of terrorism but our left-wing alternatives sound drippy and unrealistic. We are against environmental degradation but can’t agree on a strategy for change, some left-wingers are advocating nuclear power these days. Where is the robust left-wing programme and policy to run the world-economy – and if we don’t believe that we need one then where are the apologists for dismantling the big multi-nationals. And here in our little Anglican church the rise and rise of the religious right, the fundamentalists and bible literalists leaves the liberal left behind for dust. So taking this on board it felt a little strange to have a conference of the Christian left that had so much time given over to our critics and people who were not comfortable about identifying themselves as liberal or left-wing. But it was basically good and an excellent idea so I hope they do it all again next year.

After my conferring I spent some time in the capital city, which is something I hadn’t really done before – I’d used it as a stop-over to catch the ferry to the south island but hadn’t spent any quality time there. Wellington I enjoyed very much. I think the hills trapping it’s city centre in to a relatively small space gave me more a feeling of familiarity; it is how many towns and cities in Europe would feel having grown organically over the centuries. Cities that aren’t planned to be big and spacious but have been forced to grow inwards and to condense down rather than spread out in some well considered town planners dream. So things are more at hand, buildings and people having to get on with each other in closer company. I also enjoyed some of the tourist things like Te Papa, the city art gallery and see if the Guy Ngan links are still working; beautiful abstractions of Kupe’s anchor stone which I had seen earlier in Te Papa. Here’s a link for a picture of the stone sorry about the length of the link but our Webster is still working out how to anchor a link to a word without having to have the whole address on display - [Webster notes - Yes I can! - try this] www.teara.govt.nz/NewZealanders/MaoriNewZealanders/CanoeTraditions/1/ENZ-Resources/Standard/3/en - there you go, not so much an address as an entire letter.

Damian - 30th June 2006

Brian and I are bit like the ‘home alone’ kids. Kentigern has gone off the Wellington, driving South with friends this morning for the “Forum of the Christian Left” conference, keeping the right honest and the church balanced.

We had a pōwhiri this morning for two new groups at Te Ara Hou; Youth Horizons and the city council Neighbourhood Workers. A very good welcome and some great people joining the team here.

Kentigern - 23 June 2006

Been having a real time of introspection and withdrawnness. To some extent it’s the cold weather and winter generally but it is also to do with the material I’m reading at the moment – the men’s issues stuff (http://mensbiblio.xyonline.net) and the bios by Douglas Wright (Kiwi dancer - www.artsfoundation.org.nz/douglas.html). Really trying to get to grips with what I’m about, where am I going, what do I think I’m doing with my life – perhaps rather precociously having my mid-life crisis early, well it gets it out of the way.

Was out at the Field days (www.fieldays.co.nz) at the Mystery Creek event centre on Friday afternoon. Bloody cold and wet. Full of tractors, sheep and badly dressed country types as I would have expected but my eye was caught by some of the more absurd; the didgeridoo stall where there was a small queue to purchase that must-have ozzy aboriginal instrument whilst I’m at a farming event in the Waikato; again, an appreciative crowd gathered round a guy playing the pan pipes but I got the link this time he was really selling alpacas; the ‘colossal colon’ which gave your child the opportunity to crawl through a, well a colossal colon! There was a touch of what I hope/presume was self-parody in a number of teenagers with ‘in-breed’ stamped on their foreheads but maybe not! Best moment was two ancient settled old farmers stopping next to me at one of the many cross-roads of stalls and having a discussion about where to go next, was it going to be insemination or silage? They had the most gorgeous faces, large and wrinkled and weather-beaten but kind and contented. Faces that had not so much been exposed to the elements as open to the wind and the rain and the sunshine and whatever else was their lot and had allowed themselves to be shaped by their environment as they had worked hard to shape it.

Trying to get a mid-winter ritual for next weekend ready and finding it difficult to find a definitive picture of Matariki; I’ve ended by presuming that anything clearly from a northern hemisphere source ought to be transposed for our viewpoint but it was strange to find both transpositions (sometimes in the same document) when the source was Aotearoa for example www.matariki.net.nz compare to www.taitokerau.co.nz/matariki.htm Perhaps if you are an antipodean then you instinctively know which one is correct but it’s very confusing for a foreigner like me.

Kentigern - 3 June 2006

Wade cooking, so I’ve plenty of time to fill in before dinner. Thought we were going to have a house full of guests but they’ve all gone off to marry their oxen or something.

Was seeing my therapist this morning (www.poplyrics.net/waiguo/darwilliams/004.htm.) Strange, she’s quite unlike any previous therapist I’ve been to. Much more chatty, less emotional, not that feeling that it’s a place I have to discharge emotion, more a place to process and make sense of the dreariness of life. Work still gets done but I miss the pillow to cry in to (or beat) just a little. Stuff today about choosing. If faced with two ice cream containers (an odd metaphor this one as I’m not that keen on ice cream, well I like nice ice cream, just don’t like most of the cheap frozen vegetable oil that passes itself off for ice cream) and the chocolate is full and the strawberry is almost empty then I can decide on the strawberry because it needs finishing off. If faced with two equally full containers and no external reasons as to why I should chose one over the other but for the sheer joy and pleasure of having what I want then I’m stalled, I grind to a halt and will most likely walk away from having to decide. So what do I choose and more importantly how do I choose.

My favourite local story of the past week has to be the scandal that people are using the public toilets for their proper use. I’d like to link the story for you but the Waikato Times website is pretty rubbish and doesn’t keep stories for longer than two days. The gist of it is that tour buses full of tourist pensioners are stopping off at the Hamilton garden’s loos and using them for free! Now rather than seeing this is an opportunity to get people in to the gardens (which are rather good, www.hamiltongardens.co.nz) or as the broad hospitality of New Zealand to the important tourist industry, the mothers and fathers of Hamilton are screwing up their corporate faces and demanding that local toilets are for local people (www.lunacynet.com/league/char_tubbs.html#tubbs).

Damian - 31 May 2006

Hooray!! Today I went to the pool for my aqua walking for the first time for months.
It felt great!

When we had the tornado last September I scratched my leg with the broken small branch on a fallen tree. It turned nasty and I got cellulitis in my lower right leg. This broke out into sores which turned septic and so on it has gone for months.

I am now being treated by the District Nurse and the wounds are down to one small slow lingering (almost healed) sore. Today she gave me a waterproofing for the dressing and I am back doing the walking. It is a real help as it is the easiest exercise for me to do and I was able to do 35 minutes today.

Kentigern - 27 May 2006

Been quite a tumultuous week. Had an invite from a friend in Scotland to go over and be one of the witnesses at their civil union ceremony. A little piece of social justice that has only fairly recently become possible in auld scotia. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/4543274.stm) After much agonizing have decided not to go. Much as I love my friends and it would be a great honour and all that to be a witness I’m not ready to go home yet. Now obviously I don’t actually know how I would feel about being back in Scotland, seeing my friends and my places but my fear is that it would churn me up when I’m not quite sure about how I feel about being here yet.

And there are the discussions in our wee community about how do we respond to a call to help establish a Christian community down in the centre of Hamilton. In a sort of way it’s like the call from the friend; do we stay or do we go? What is the cost of either choice? My concern is to discern if this is an authentic call from the spirit of God, because if it is then I/we have to respond positively or we run the danger of being like the man off to marry his oxen in Luke 14 and who, we are told, doesn’t get a taste of the banquet – and I like my food.

In the realm of the surreal I was reading around for stories on the current melt-down in East Timor, the local press had the story as I would have expected (www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10383791), the UK press similarly (www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1783344,00.html) and has pretty much the same story to tell, so I wondered what the East Timorese press was saying. The top story on the website of the East Timor Press for today is about some students graduating with diplomas in tourism and hospitality management (www.easttimorpress.com/en/news.asp?ID=793). Bizarre! And then I notice that it is an old story from more than two years ago and it’s about a happier time and there is the picture of two young women smiling, full of confidence and expectation.

Kentigern - 17 May 2006

I’m not sleeping properly. So much so that the accumulated stress of it can feel like jet lag on my worst days. On those days I know I will sleep through sheer exhaustion but that can’t be a good thing. I’ve read and implemented all the ‘sleep hygiene’ advice (www.sleepnet.com) I’ve read alternative theories about sleep (www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/05/how-to-become-an-early-riser) I’ve taken herbal tinctures and homeopathic remedies. Fresh ideas; are almost as exhausted as I am. The one thing I haven’t done is taken the small blue pill from the doctor, it’s not a route I want to go down. I know I can sleep, until a year ago I slept from shortly after turning off the light till about five minutes after my alarm clock went off and I could often manage a wee afternoon nap on top of all that delicious elusive sleep.

My pattern, for want of a better term, is that I fall asleep ok then wake at 4am. Interestingly the mythical time of death and of the night office. I haven’t thought much of getting up to say an office, unless it could be the commination service (www.prayerbook.org.uk/bcp/bcp_online.asp). If I were lying there rehearsing and analyzing big or stressful events from the day then I’d know that I was being inattentive to my inner life and it was crying out for awareness during the lowest ebb of the night but last night would be a good example of why this seems unlikely. I woke at 4am and lay there thinking about an episode of Bro Town that I’d been watching with a friend (visiting from Scotland), I thought of a joke I could make into a card for another friend with a new job and I wondered about the person who had made my hot water bottle cover (it’s a bright yellow duck). Now I’m sure all these could be loaded with deep and profound significance if you were desperate but I’m only desperate for sleep and can’t understand why my body needs to be awake at 4am to dwell on these matters of supreme inconsequence.

Favourite cynical quote of the moment: “as a young man he’d been unbearably cute, these days people thought him just acutely unbearable”. Maybe that is worth my deeper introspection!

Kentigern - 14 May 2006

Have been asked to help out at an event for church teenagers, male only. The girls are meeting somewhere else at the same time. I suppose this is the on-going men's work thing.

I went on a men's workshop about ten years ago that a friend had organised. We embraced trees, sang songs, ate heartily and tried to find our way to the pub and got lost in the dark. Our camaraderie and bravery soon evaporated as we trudged over wet fields into oblivion till we saw the distant light of a farmhouse. We knew we had to knock and ask for directions and probably to use the phone to call a taxi (if such things existed out in the Styx of Welsh Wales) but we were suddenly all self-conscious and a bit shy for we felt sure we were going to be laughed at or that a 'gang' of ten men turning up on your door step at eleven o'clock at night was more likely to be met with the barrel of the farm shot gun than a warm welcome. I was chosen as spokesman as I was deemed to be the least threatening looking and I was too tired to challenge this challenge to my machismo but in the event we misfired. I've never quite worked out the mythopoetic meaning to the fact that who did come to the door was an ancient blind woman who, after hearing my story, invited us in for tea and biscuits with the farmer who was equally venerably aged and was stone deaf. The blind woman and the deaf man sorted out our predicament by having a neighbour come over and take us home.

I'm not sure what the issues are for teenagers in New Zealand. I know the issues we adults think they should have: depression, teenage sex, suicide, drugs, binge drinking and the rest of the depressing catalogue of adult angst about teenage boys so if I do my workshop with them I might be surprised that their issues could be homework, access to the TV and how rotten and unfair their big sister is to them. I'll try to be open to what happens.

Kentigern - Good Friday (14 April)

Good Friday morning. I was the only one at morning prayer (apart from the countless angels and saints of course) so I obviously missed the bit at the house meeting that changed the times we are doing things today, which is odd as I was leading the meeting.

So will I be going to church today? Well sort of; I’ll spend time in our chapel and find things that I want to do that speak to me of the themes of today, emptiness, abandonment, heroism that doesn’t know that it is heroic, suffering, being misunderstood, unjust practices, apathy, indifference…
But I can’t imagine myself going to join with a “church”. On an ordinary Sunday I can just about cope with the way liturgy is lead in churches with the priest behaving somewhere between pompous schoolmaster, games show host and eager to please sales person with an eye on their sales target. No trust to the symbols or the words that have been prepared, no sense of expressing something ancient that is bafflingly in the here and now, no poetry, no mystery, no point. So on a day like Good Friday when much of the rawer and tenderer stuff is allowed to bubble up the last thing I need is church.

Have been doing quite a bit of preparation this week for a reflection day I’m leading next week. Have decided the theme is going to be bread making, with the mundaness and ordinariness that goes with that activity but the vital connection to things of the earth and things of deep significance in the Judeo/Christian tradition. When I write it out like that it sounds a bit of pretentious guff but I’m hoping it’s going to be more hands on and right brain than I’m making it sound.

To hone up on my own bread making I reckon I need to go and make those hot cross buns. Damian came up with a good recipe that sounds very spicy but it must be from a post-christian cook book as it gave no instructions about applying the cross to your buns!

Kentigern - 6 April 2006

Back from hols in Oz. To state the obvious it’s a very different place from NZ. Once you get over the distance stuff – we drove for hours and covered about 2cms of the road map – you notice the different trees and bird calls and the different relationship to the natural world (human beings living in the un-natural world presumably). Whilst you never meet all those dreaded killer snakes, spiders, jellyfish, sharks, aussie sense of humour, the stories abound and vigilance kicks in and nature becomes a threatening enemy. If you live there you’d laugh at my naïve pomegranate fantasies but those images of your land must percolate down and affect your relationship with the rest of the creatures you have to jostle along with. And then there’s the human story of 50,000 years that my country managed to overlook and which still causes such apartheid.

I went snorkelling on the great barrier reef whilst my friends went proper diving. It was basically a diving ship so us snorkellers were being humoured until we grew up to realise that what we really wanted to do was dive, dive, dive! I didn’t want to dive, it was scary enough floating about in two feet of water with Nemo wriggling about in his anemones below me but when you swam (I use the term in it’s very broadest sense of what a human being flailing about in water might think he was doing) off the reef in to un-known depths and there was box jelly fish and sharks to avoid it went well out of the comfort zone.

There was then having to go back to the boat and face people asking ‘so how was it?’ when they thought that they already knew the answer, which was that it was fabulous, brilliant, just the best thing ever, so they didn’t really want to hear me saying that was really unpleasant and can someone get me a dry martini now, please. Apart from anything else the sea is full of fish pee and dead meat and we left it several million years ago for some very good reasons and I see no need to return to it. Actually I was very happy at the trashy SeaWorld theme park the week before when I stood in front of one of their huge aquariums and was thrilled and in awe at the other worldliness and beauty of the sea creatures; they were safely and contently in their world and I was in mine. Maybe I’m not as adventurous as I thought I was.