Tui motu 2006 april

Tui Motu InterIslands

April 2006 Price $5

Tui Motu InterIslands 1

editorial

A time to sow, a time to reap Contents 2-3 editorial

Anna Holmes 4 letters 5 Our prisons – a growing scandal

Christopher Carey 6-7 Divine acts of love

Daniel O’Leary 8 Sprung from earth’s dark womb

Dennis Horton 9-10 A beautiful dying

Mike Riddell 12-14 Intelligent design

Michael Hill 14-15 Chance or design

Bosco Camden 16 poetry: Deep Sea Days

Karen Beker 17 Religion’s role in building peace

Anjum Rahman 18-19 Celebrating a Dominican jubilee

Joy Cowley

and Neil Darragh 20-21 Shabbat Shalom

Trish McBride 21 A mother’s journal

Kaaren Mathias 22-23 Sex and sensibility

John Kleinsman 24-25 The laughing God

Glynn Cardy 26-27 A marriage on the rocks

Paul Andrews 27 Reflecting on Mark

Susan Smith 28-29 Books and film/DVD

Jim Elliston, Mike Crowl 30 Crosscurrents

John Honoré 31 A word from Rome

Humphrey O’Leary 32 On the stile

Eve Adams

ISSN 1174-8931

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aster is an event which can be experienced at various levels.

At its most superficial it is simply another public holiday weekend, the last opportunity perhaps for a getaway before winter. At the next level it is a major feast on the Christian calendar, coinciding with the Jewish Passover.

Inevitably there is a conflict here between sacred and secular. The secular world demands that shops stay open, and people be free to shop as they wish. The sacred calls us to rest and peace, to contemplation and religious observance.

Even for the most loyal Christians there are subtle pressures. What should be an occasion for richest celebration by the parish family is often encroached upon.

Congregations are decimated; choirs have to manage without key members; new members are being welcomed into the parish family from the RCIA – but many parishioners are not there to greet them. It is a classic example of the clash between what Anna Holmes (see opposite) terms the ‘schedule’ of holiday breaks and the ‘season’ of holydays.

Easter falls at a time when the seasons are changing rapidly: for us it heralds the onset of winter, of shorter days and early frosts, when the earth seems to be preparing for sleep and death. Mike Riddell eloquently reflects on Easter in the south in A beautiful Dying’ (pp 9-10, a piece first published in 1999).

Daniel O’Leary (pp 6-7) echoes this theme except that in the Northern Hemisphere Easter celebrates new life and the return of spring. But for both

it is the season of radical change. “The essence of Easter,” O’Leary says, “is that it changes everything. A new reality has entered into our consciousness... The impossible has become possible.”

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call to change is at the core of the Gospel, and during Lent, Holy Week and Easter this call is loudest. It is something many of us resist. We are complacent; we grow resistant to change; we hanker for the past. This is a dangerous condition for the Christian since it renders us insensitive to the unexpected summons of the God of Surprises.

One example of this conservatism is the cult of ‘Intelligent Design’, examined in two articles (pp 12-15). Evolution and Darwinism, we are told, are serious threats to Christian faith and major causes of religious apostasy in our times.

Intelligent Design offers Christians a ‘sound alternative’. The two articles demonstrate this as bad science and based on outdated Biblical theology.

God has placed us in an evolving Universe. To live in harmony with it is to be in tune with the ever-changing seasons. Our whole lives follow this pattern of death and resurrection. So, the deepest meaning of Easter is to suffer, die and rise with Christ. “To be perfect”, says Newman, “is to have changed often”.

Whether you spend your Easter at home or away at the bach, this summons to change and be renewed will this year be heard afresh. It is a call to rise from the dead.

Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed.

Alleluia.

M.H.

Tui Motu-InterIslands is an independent, Catholic, monthly magazine. It invites its readers to question, challenge and contribute to its discussion of spiritual and social issues in the light of gospel values, and in the interests of a more just and peaceful society. Inter-church and inter-faith dialogue is welcomed. The name Tui Motu was given by Pa Henare Tate.

It literally means “stitching the islands together...”, bringing the different races and peoples and faiths together to create one Pacific people of God. Divergence of opinion is expected and will normally be published, although that does not necessarily imply editorial commitment to the viewpoint expressed.

Independent Catholic Magazine Ltd, P O Box 6404, Dunedin North, 9030 Phone: 03 477 1449: Fax: 03 477 8149: email: tuimotu@earthlight.co.nz: website: www.tuimotu.org Editor: Michael Hill IC; Assistant Editor: Frances Skelton; Illustrator: Don Moorhead Directors: Margaret Butler OP, Rita Cahill RSJ, Tom Cloher, Robin Kearns, Chris Loughnan OP, Elizabeth Mackie OP, Katie O’Connor (Chair), Kathleen Rushton RSM

On Schedules and Seasons

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he Easter season is a time to of redemption, which is simply a new awareness of the presence of God in all creation. It is joy in the immanent God. Unfortunately we live in a world that has attempted to displace seasons with schedules. It is also a world in which the Sabbath has been extinguished with Sunday shopping and the weekend diminished as a time for recreation by an overload of sports fixtures.

Schedules are about expectations: drive us, give the appearance of being in control, are mechanical, take over, oppress, distract, are inhuman, detached, give time a price tag, turn it into a commodity, encourage staring at fragments not contemplating the whole, encourage sound bites not conversations. They set deadlines and encourage us to be forever in the past or future.

Schedules tell us time is precious, is money, not to be wasted. There is never enough time to do what we want or even what we ought. We dole out in mean slices – “I can give you five minutes”.

We save time by sending texts or emails instead of speaking to people.

Seasons are recurrent gifts: unfold, reassure, are sometimes unexpected

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the shops are neatly grouped, saving us the bother of going outside to find the specialist shops that used to exist.

(unseasonal), reflect human life, induce contemplation, give control to God and Nature, give a sense of time as gift, remind us of our relationship and dependence on others and the natural world. They are lifelines encouraging us to remain in and savour the present moment.

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love the march of the seasons.

Winter, with its silvery light and sparkling stars, auroras and sweeping storms – a time for hot soups and rich stews. Spring with unfolding leaves and dappled sun – daffodils and asparagus fresh from the earth. Summer with warm days scented with rampant roses clambering over the deck, lettuces picked leaf by leaf, new peas and a cornucopia of vegetables. Autumn with its amazing sunrises, changing leaves and smells of mushrooms and wood smoke.

When I moved to New Zealand It took me 17 years to get used to Easter in autumn. All the symbols and associations I learned in childhood were for Easter in spring. Such is the grip seasons have on our inner life.

We create for ourselves an environment that is season free. We make our shopping environment always summer – bright simulated sunlight and warmth in shopping malls where all

Offices, too, are made season free, warm, well lit and enabling their workers to arrive at the basement car park, spend all day inside and go home in a well heated car to a house similarly season denying. We can now get seasonal foods all the year round from our supermarkets – flown in from around the globe. The fact that they often lack flavour does not seem to bother people Jesus, in the Gospels, referred to seasons a number of times. He often told people to stop, to be aware – quite the opposite of a life run by schedule. In negating or denying the seasons we are not only living an illusion of being in control, we are also ignoring something that can give us spiritual insights into our lives and the creation. We live in and accompanied by our world. Its seasons prepare us for the time when we will die. They reassure us that death, like life is a precious gift, not to be denied or taken for granted.

Take time this Easter to praise God for the seasons, reminding us that creation is God’s free gift. Grab the autumn lifeline and lay down your deadlines for this Holy season.

Anna Holmes

Easter cover

he cover icon, by Phil Dyer of Christchurch, depicts a man and woman on the road to Emmaus and their meeting with the risen Jesus. The presence of a woman disciple is supported by an interesting convergence between the tradition in John that Mary of Clopas, a relative of Jesus’ mother, was one of the women disciples present at the foot of the Cross, and Luke’s statement that Cleopas was a disciple of Jesus present in Jerusalem at the Crucifixion.

Clopas and Cleopas are different forms of an extremely rare name found only in these two Gospels and in Hegesippus, a second century writer. Hegesippus writes of Palestinian Jewish Christian traditions about Simon, the son of Clopas, the brother of Jesus’ father, Joseph.

Mary of Clopas, then, may well be the wife of Clopas who accompanied him on the road to Emmaus where they met the risen Jesus. Other husband and wife disciples are found in the early church such as Andronius and Junias (Rom. 16:7) and Prisca and Aquila (1 Cor. 16:7).

As I walked one evening, Among the yellowing leaves, I met the Lord Jesus. And He looked at me.

I asked him where he was going. His eyes said, Come and See.

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letters On the stile

It has been interesting to read Eve Adams’ columns in the last two issues, and encouraging that you choose to publish a point of view that appears to strain at the leash of Catholicism.

For those who have slipped the leash altogether, perhaps their relationship with God develops elsewhere. God does not need our thanks and praise, whether dutifully delivered at Mass or in articulated prayer.

I wonder if taking our children to a Mass which bores and irritates them actually helps them to that deeper experience of God which evolves when we recognise that God is in our every moment. For Christians, knowing the kind of person Jesus was must be the most important grounding, and he did simplify the rules very nicely in saying: love God and love your neighbour.

Living one’s life with love and kindness remain the outward expression of God, while anything that is motivated by fear (or makes one feel guilty) does not come from God. Eve Adams mentions that a Christian journey is never a solitary one, and for many Catholics the church is their connection with like-minded people with whom they can develop their awareness of God. Let it always remain so, but let it never be effective in creating guilt among those who find that, somewhere along the way, God is leading them in other directions.

Karen Pronk, Invercargill

Kia kaha, Eve

I want to send Eve Adams a big hug, and tell her that she is not alone in her struggles. It is an excruciatingly painful place to be. I want her to know that others (and not only women) have been through it, and subsequently have not just survived, but thrived. Leaving the church feels like going out into a desert, and in a way it is. But the desert is richly alive with the presence of God and other wayfarers.

My question became: “What am I colluding with by staying?”. The vision I had was of good, dedicated parish

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letters to the editor

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We welcome comment, discussion, argument, debate. But please keep letters under 200 words. The editor reserves the right to abridge, while not altering meaning.

Response articles (up to a page) are also welcome, but need to be by negotiation

people praying round a crucifix while I was struggling with my own crucifixion on the tangled physical boundary of the church, unsure which side of it I would come down on if I survived. The praying people were oblivious, either deliberately or not, to the drama being played out within their reach, and that made it all the harder.

Eventually I handed in my Catholic passport, and that has been a liberating experience. Giving up the Eucharist which had been central to my life for half a century was a terrible wrench, but God has taught me to recognise the Christ-Food in any number of other guises. God, food, companionship, community are to be had ‘in the other place’.

Kia kaha, Eve. Trish McBride, Wellington

A living faith

Our Pope has come to his new role after some 25 years of loving and affectionate rule by the previous occupant of the Chair of Peter. The aspects of language and unity and authority and married priests and even women priests etc. are

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all being revisited as the pages of Tui Motu show in recent issues.

It would be valuable for one of our very erudite and wise clerics to give us down in the pews a straightforward and realistic commentary of the essentials of our faith. For faith is the essential, and relates back to the Last Supper and the words of Jesus as he broke bread and said: This is my body; This is my Blood; Do this in memory of Me. Jesus knew that Judas had betrayed him but he kissed him in a gesture of love; the woman taken in adultery was not condemned but given absolution.

Today’s world presents humanity with a bleak outlook and the complexity that can disguise the wonder of the promises Christ gave can become obscured by in a multitude of words.

The Gospels are filled with examples of the way of life Jesus was leading his followers towards. With faith, all things are possible. Even the good thief on the Cross was promised paradise with only a few minutes left to live.

The debate and discussions may lead our Bishops to give strong support for the letter “r” to return to the word “Celibate” so that our faith can ‘celebRate’ a new growth and a new vigour with a clearer recognition of the essentials that the words of Jesus can give the multitude of the world‘s peoples crying out for the reality of the hope that his life offered humanity.

Maurice McGreal, Auckland.

Questionnaire about our future

e have received a most encour­­aging response to the Question­naire which went out with the March issue. At the time this issue went to press we had received well over a hundred replies from all over the country – and even one from faraway Wales (not New South). These will be analysed and processed in time for the Tui Motu Board meeting

at the beginning of May.

For those of you who were intending to reply – but never quite got round to it – you have a reprieve. Any replies we receive

BY EASTER we can still include in the material for the Board.

Remember – the broader the consultation the better; and... it may be your suggestion which makes all the difference.

So, please take up your pen!

social justice

Our prisons – a growing scandal It is naïve to believe that imprisonment holds the answer to a rising crime rate. Given the fact that prisons have failed both as a deterrent and rehabilitative measure, it follows that their central role in the criminal justice system must be displaced. (Sir Clinton Roper, Prisons Review, 1989)

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he continuing high number of offenders being sent to prison in New Zealand is a cause for national shame. As of February 2006, 7651 people were in prison. Ministry of Justice figures indicate that 9000 could be in jail within three years. This is double the 1995 figure of 4500.

Several significant things have happened since the days of Roper optimism. Firstly, the 1999 referendum resulted in longer sentences, mandatory sentences and a climate of shrillness about crime that far outweighs the reality.

Secondly, the habilitation centres promoted by Roper were eventually partially accepted by government, then highjacked by bureaucrats. The rules of entry and eligibility were changed. The concept was strangled at birth.

Thirdly, the power of the prison officer unions, victims’ lobby groups and the Corrections Department bureaucracy has grown immensely. Fourthly, restorative justice was enacted by government as a complementary form of justice, rather than as an alternative to the retributive system.

New Zealanders have an infatuation with punishment.

We are punishment crazy. What does it say about the sickness of our national psyche that we punish so many so harshly? This has been a decade in which serious crime rates have been declining. Yet hundreds of millions of dollars has been spent on new prisons, perimeter fences, razor wires and drug surveillance measures.

The prison system itself is sick. Overcrowding prevails, prisoners are locked up for longer, prison work has been cut from 43 to 35 percent and last year the prison education budget was underspent by 44 percent while one of two specialist drug and alcohol treatment facilities was closed. Several prisons do not have libraries. A new ‘booking’ system for prison visits has cut visitors numbers and weakened prisoners links with their families. As John Witty, PARS national director, said recently: “prisoners are being turned into vegetables”.

The blowout on prison costs is breathtaking. More than $900 million is currently being spent on new prisons, which includes a $200 million cost blowout. To meet the expected costs of additional prisons by 2010, a further

$1.5 billion and 1800 extra staff will be needed. Each new bed costs $300,000. What couldn’t this money do for waiting lists at hospitals, resourcing in schools, health clinics, employment schemes and community development projects?

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hy does New Zealand imprison at a greater rate than Australia, England, Ireland, and every other European country? What is there to be gained from putting grown adults into a six-by-four metre cell and leaving them locked there for days, months, years? Do we really think that Jesus would tolerate that? We’d be crucified if we locked up a child or a dog like that. Yet we do it to adults by the thousand.

Government ministers Damian O’Connor and Mark Burdon are to be commended on their efforts to rein in this escalating disaster. They will need vision and moral courage. The way forward requires greater use of community-based alternatives including diversion, suspended sentences, home detention, restorative justice, probation and community work. And for the politicians, nothing less than a cross-party accord on future law and order policy making, similar to the one on superannuation. To continue to ratchet up imprisonment rates as an election ploy has become unconscionable.

For Christians, penal reform is an imperative. ‘Visiting the imprisoned’ may not always take a literal form, but it is one of the corporal works of mercy taught by Jesus. Even if we can’t physically visit the imprisoned, supporting other’s efforts to treat the imprisoned humanely is something with which we are all charged.

The ministers need to know they have our support.

New Zealand was the birthplace of women’s emancipation and the nuclear-free legislation. We were also the birthplace of family group conferences, habilitation centres and restorative justice processes, seeing them as non-violent redemptive Christ-driven ways of facing conflict and dealing with offending.

Our rising prison numbers are a sin against God and a blot on our social conscience. The feasts of Good Friday and Easter challenge us to think with the mind of Christ, ‘to build the New Creation.’ Surely it is not full of prisons!

Christopher Carey

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easter

Divine acts of love When life is at its most bleak, the grace of Easter will lift us out of the depths of despair, says Daniel O’Leary

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t was when the evenings were lengthening in the first week of the new millennium that Laura’s long lashes began to move again.

During those months of waiting, there had been a paleness about her, like a sick baby, and her parents’ faces had become etched forever with pain and fear. For Laura’s family, it had been a long Good Friday.

embittered when betrayed, then we are living out, in space and time, the hardwon fruits of our Saviour’s passion.

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“Fear not. It is I.”

ne day, Bruce’s artistic passion was no longer there.

The urge to paint had left him.

He looked helpless, without light in his eyes, without fire in his belly. It was a great loss, a deadly emptiness, “like something torn out of me”, he said. For most of a year we waited.

The autumn turned to winter.

Then one day at a Vigil Mass I noticed, when he came to receive Holy Communion, a small, shy smile on his face. It was all we needed to know. For Bruce, spring had come.

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If resurrection does not impinge and impact on the nitty-gritty moments of our days and nights, then whatever else it may be it is not real for us. It does not, to be sure, deliver us from the brokenness of being human, but it does put us back together again. The continual miracle is to be discovered precisely within the ordinary, relentless repetitions of each week, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes with a shock.

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t was to reveal the grace in moments such as this that Jesus died. It was to identify the hands of a healing God in those small resurrections that Jesus was raised from the tomb.

Whenever we weep tears of relief, gasp at the endurance of someone’s commitment to duty, wonder at the power in one word or look of love, then we are coming down from the cross of defeat. Whenever we keep going in spite of the deadly, daily routine of trivial chores, fight the despair that lurks in our breasts, refuse to become

A father holds his fearful son as he momentarily turns back, in panic, just before stepping on to the rugby pitch for his first match, against lads twice his size. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “We know you can do it.”

A woman holds her trembling man in the middle of the night and whispers: “Shh, love; it will soon be light.”

If these words are not God’s words, twice divine by virtue of nature and grace, of birth and baptism, then where do we look for the meaning of being saved and redeemed? Or is there another world somewhere, where Easter happens, but not in a way that can be “proved upon the pulses”, as the young poet Keats asked before he died at 25?

When that father and that lover spoke their words of hope to the beloved of their hearts, they were doing exactly what Jesus did: no more, no less, whenever he uttered those selfsame words of ultimate salvation before and after his final Paschal breakthrough.

What was revealed at Easter is that every human act of love is a divine act of love: that God, too, looks excitedly through our eyes, whenever we look at anybody or anything with wonder and delight.

Easter changes everything

The essence of Easter is that it changes everything. A new reality has entered into our consciousness. Nothing, any more, is irrevocable. The impossible has become possible. Betrayal, loss of innocence and despair do not have the last word. Because now the many graves and prisons we live in can be regarded as the very source of an amazing freedom – transforming our lives into new levels of light and being.

There is a breathtaking moment when we begin to realise that the past does not matter any more, that a totally new page can be turned over every morning for us to write on. But to turn that new page we must often reach beyond the limits of possibility into the depths of our soul.

The harrowing of hell

In fairly recent Western art, the Easter mystery is often depicted in pictures of the rising Christ carefully and confidently stepping out of some kind of coffin or tomb. It is all very deliberate and controlled.

The Eastern Orthodox traditions reveal another story. The ‘harrowing of hell’ is a theme in their mosaics and frescoes.

In them our Saviour is portrayed as bursting out of the fires of damnation in the most dramatic and amazing way.

Clutching Adam and Eve (the human race) under each arm, he thunders through the gates of Hades, from the inside out.

He is not painted as stretching to reach them or drawing them up, or sending

down a ladder. No, he vanished into the red-hot heart of hell, the place where the burning is most intense, those aching places in all our lives where pain runs rampant. With a fierce look in his eyes, his face blazing with intense desperation, he bursts out of the jaws of death grasping close his precious bundles with chains and locks and prison bars flying off in all directions. That’s the total intensity we’re in danger of losing. That’s the cost of discipleship. Easter is not for the faint-hearted.

In the course of a normal day

What’s important to remember is that such effort, such total commitment, is continued in the unpredictable hours

telling the truth and telling lies. Holding that ambiguous space is a holy art. On the Cross, with outstretched arms, Jesus did it. On the one hand his doubt, despair, a cursing thief and the absence of his Father. On the other hand his faith, his hope, a blessing thief and the presence of his mother.

And already within this night of contradiction, within this threshold of anguished waiting, the light was gathering itself to dance in the morning on the mountains. The seeds of the one were already taking root in the soil of the other. As we can gather from the gospel of John, the whole three traumatic days of Holy Week were, for Jesus, experienced in one timeless moment.

on the one hand Jesus’ doubt, despair, a cursing thief, the absence of his Father . . . on the other, Jesus’ faith, his hope, a blessing thief, the presence of his mother of our own days, in the violence of our passions, in the power of our compulsions, in the relentless urges of the mystery of our being. Wild and wayward emotions suddenly rise from deep within us. They strike us, without warning, in the stirrings and yearnings that come to us, with a devastating clarity, during the course of a normal day. They steal upon us at night when we dream, for no apparent reason, about people we have loved, feared, longed for, neglected or hated, bringing aching realities back to life, leaving us very unready for the coming day.

The intense Good Friday of love and fear, of hope and despair, is again lived through, whenever we try to hold the space between faithfulness and betrayal,

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erard Manley Hopkins, the cele­ brated Jesuit poet, did his priestly studies at St Beuno’s in north Wales – now a retreat house – and there he wrote much of his finest poetry.

The verses chosen here reflect not only Hopkins’ own personal journey of faith but also the haunting beauty of the

It is the same with us. For God is always true to the essence of Incarnation.

Whether gently or dramatically, it is only to the extent that we have sensed the presence of a redeeming Easter “on the pulse” of the wounds of our mortality that we can ever claim heaven.

Maybe resurrection, as our ultimate future, will be the surprised realisation that we have been experiencing it, at least in part, all our lives. We will know well when we’re home. “Heaven”, wrote Harry Williams in True Resurrection, “will be recognised as a country we have already entered, and in whose light and warmth we have already lived.”

Daniel O’Leary is a priest in the diocese of Leeds, in Yorkshire, England.

country around St Beuno’s especially during autumn (see pp 3,9 and 11).

The photographs are autumn shots taken round the retreat house, and are from A Winter and Warm, a booklet produced at St Beuno’s for retreatants.

Many New Zealand priests and religious have done renewal courses there.

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easter

Sprung from Earth’s dark womb Dennis Horton

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ne result of more than 30 years of celibacy is that I will most likely end my days without ever having a child of my own. And that’s okay. I remember lines from a poem I wrote as a young priest for a group of youngsters, after I’d shared a Eucharist with them at a beach on Waiheke Island: Perhaps there is some sense in the celibate’s love, real enough to be felt without ever possessing.

Love’s miracle man, whose spirit’s key unlocks a thousand doors he never enters.

No angel, but jester of the world’s court, whose miming sacramentalises the love exchange of those he serves, half suspecting, hoping firmly that in his folly lies a grain of truth that dies a fruitful death.

Yet one of my discoveries in the last ten years has been that the generative act is not absolutely required for the joys and challenges of sustained, ongoing parenthood. Like every experience of love, real parenting is more a conscious decision that a biological imperative.

As well, I have sensed that between my wife’s children and me there exists a mutuality of choice. They have been encouraged to avoid titles like ‘step-father’, referring to me simply by my name. And to my undertaking to be there unconditionally for each of them, they have responded freely with a trust and deep attachment that grow with the years.

Not all married love is procreative. But if it is for real, it is always life-giving and regenerative. Pope Benedict writes simply and profoundly in his first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, of sexual love between woman and man as a powerful image of God’s own love. In both divine and human loving, eros and agape are present, the one complementing the other and bringing it to perfection.

Our first instinct in loving is to reach out to the other, seeking intimacy, wanting to be in communion, to touch and embrace, woo and win, even to possess: such is the

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power of eros to lift us up and take us outside ourselves.

But agape reveals love’s other side: forgetfulness of self and tender, compassionate care, the determination to be there always, come what may.

And it’s because both eros and agape are aspects of the divine reality at the heart of our world that human sexuality gives perhaps the strongest clue as to what God is really like, and why so many of the images Jesus uses to speak about God relate to marriage and wedding feasts.

At every Eucharist I now attend, as I repeat the words of institution silently in my heart, I reach instinctively to grasp my wedding ring. It’s as though, in that sacred moment, the two covenants in my life meet: the promise of Jesus to be present in the bread we break, and the vows I now share with my wife, to be there for each other and for the widening circle that lays claim to our love, within our home and beyond it.

Perhaps because in our family females outnumber males two to one, or maybe because I have moved from clerical circles to work for a venture led by women religious, I am more aware than ever of the abuse of power in so many of our social structures and of why we need women’s involvement to correct it.

God speaks now less from a heaven beyond this world than from the heart of the cosmos that is our home, and I see more clearly that to be serious about making God’s kingdom come means being ready to embrace whatever wounded cross our path. Allowing our passions to open our hearts is the first step to transforming our world. Meeting love’s costlier demands may require passionate hearts to become compassionate. And in this, creation itself can point the way.

Whether it’s the radiant sun, rising each day to warm our Earth into life by its self-consuming rays, or the plants in our garden fading and dying so that another sward of wildflowers will burst forth next Spring, these images of selfforgetful, other-centred love surround and inspire us.

May Easter be a time for learning anew that love finds its way if only we trust it, and that from Earth’s dark womb life will break out to blossom where least expected.

Dennis Horton works for the Sisters of Mercy in Auckland, helping to sustain mission and values in their healthcare and community development Companies.

A Beautiful Dying Easter in the context of a New Zealand autumn,as seen by author and theologian Mike Riddell

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aster is, for us, a journey into darkness. The hem of the day is drawn in as the shroud of night lengthens. It has always seemed appropriate to me that sometime during lent, I find my morning prayer swathed in darkness. The journey we travel with Jesus is, after all, one of abandonment and shadow. It seems almost as if the elements concur, as we stand on the cusp of a season of stripping and dying.

Let us not imagine that our experience of Easter is not markedly different from those who celebrate it in the Northern hemisphere, where the emphasis (amidst the early signs of Spring) is on resurrection and new life. We may be following the same events in the life of the same Lord, but our perspective on them is richly coloured by our location at the bottom of the world.

To understand this is to recognise that the essence of our Christian life in New Zealand is subtly different in important ways.

Our work of faith, it seems to me, is not to try to recreate the experience of our European forbears, for whom Easter eggs and bunnies may have some peripheral connection with the rebirth they are observing. Rather it is to drive to the depths of what it means to remember the passion and resurrection of Christ in a land where life is draining back into the soil under the gentle brush of autumn. What is the special significance of Easter for us as the people we are, in the whenua where we (Pakeha) are only beginning to find our roots?

An obvious point of reference is that of darkness and dying. For us at Easter,

crucifixion will always be a deeper and more resonant aspect of remembrance than that of resurrection. This is because we enter into it not only with our minds but with all our senses.

For us, this death is embodied, incarnate, sacramental. The symbolic encounter with the falling shadows of Jerusalem is coloured in our imaginations by the musty smell of the air, and the drawing in of our lives as we prepare for the looming embrace of winter. We are moving away from our source of light and heat, on a journey into barren desolation.

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hat sense can we make of the death of Jesus for ourselves, at the other end of the globe and some two millennia on from the original events? The tradition we have received from our forbears in the faith is not merely about death as such. It contains elements of abandonment, of redemptive suffering and of atonement.

And finally, of course, more nebu­ lous for us to take hold of, it speaks of hope and renewal. So much is given to us by our heritage of belief.

But again, let us ask what special sig­n ­i­fi­cance we can make of these themes in our own context.

At the heart of Pakeha culture, there is a darkness often remarked upon by our artists and social commentators.

Sam Neill, in his documentary review of New Zealand film, wondered about the gloom and savagery which seems to feature so prominently and often.

James K. Baxter, our prophet and poetic theologian, had this to say: “Those peaceful New Zealand towns, centred upon a Post Office, a grocer’s store, a petrol station and a War Memorial, are strange places to sleep in if you stretch out on a bench in your oilskin, before the dawn shows itself above the scrub hills like a terrible unhealed wound.

Nowhere have I felt more strongly the ss atmosphere of the graveyard.

I followed Him then (Him whom me soul seeks) Through hills and paths and gates, By fields and farms, hedges and streams.

Tui Motu InterIslands 9

easter ss

Suffering can be creative if it finds a voice. But our innocence denies us the privilege of religious suffering. The sterile plastic flower on the tombstone slab signifies an anguish blocked off from self-understanding.” And in the works of Colin Mccahon, we discover an omnipresent darkness which constantly threatens to overwhelm the landscape and its inhabitants.

What is the source of this pervasive gloom? Outsiders have marvelled at how a nation seemingly so untroubled can produce such dark and pessimistic motifs. Probing below the sun-washed, friendly and uncomplicated life of our Antipodean culture is a troubling and surprising voyage. It reveals an angstridden, raging and slightly paranoid society, desperate to avoid underlying desolation by maintaining concentration firmly on the surface of existence.

Identifying the roots of such blocked and private suffering is a difficult process. However, I suspect that there is some organic connection between the darkness at the heart of national identity, and the rape of the land by European settlers. There is little point in allocating blame for this. The new immigrants were overwhelmed by the opportunity represented by vast tracts of ‘virgin’ land. Their vigorous and casual clearing of the land was in keeping with the common view that it was a resource to be used and made ‘productive’.

down other paths for the old alliance to be reformed, and this will remain a land where the spirit has withdrawn.

Where the spirit is still with the land, but no longer active. No longer loving the land.” He laughs harshly. “I can’t imagine it loving the mess the Pakeha have made, can you?’

“Joe thought of the forests burned and cut down; the gouges and scars that dams and roadworks and development schemes had made; the peculiar barren paddocks where alien animals, one kind of crop, grazed imported grasses; the erosion, the overfertilisation, pollution..”

the ebb of the season is glorious and resplendent – a beautiful death Compounding this psychic laceration is the subsequent historical experience of Europeans in their new home.

Feeling isolated at the end of the world, they maintained a strong sense of identity in their links with a Britain which was still regarded as ‘home’.

This connection was maintained with a tenacity born of desperation which saw many settlers regard themselves as the keepers of ‘England’s farm’, and generated enthusiasm for participation in European wars.

But to view some of the photographs of bush clearance from the early days of settlement is to be reminded of images of post-holocaust Hiroshima; a smoking and barren wasteland. In retrospect, it was naive to imagine that such desecration of the environment could be carried out without wounding our national soul. This is something that Maori have always understood, and Pakeha are only beginning to know.

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Keri Hulme in The Bone People has Joe listening as a kaumatua explains what has happened to the mauri of the land: “Maybe we have gone too far

Those who fought had put their lives on the line for the defence of high ideals, and for the protection of their communities.

In return, they had been forsaken and

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t thus came as a violent shock when New Zealanders found themselves abandoned by ‘Mother England’.

The crucible of such desertion was the Anzac experience of Gallipoli. It was more than a heroic defence of an impossible piece of territory; those who went through it knew that they had been casually used by British officers and as carelessly left to their fate. The betrayal was deep and abiding.

defeated. It is of some interest that the remembrance of Anzac Day has reached new levels of significance in contemporary New Zealand life. It is perhaps the only national ritual we have with sacral overtones. The words on many memorials have the legend Greater love has no man than he gave up his life for his friends, forever associating the event with the symbolism of Christ’s passion.

And why not? It is, like the passion of Christ, redemptive suffering. It contains the elements of abandonment and pain experienced on behalf of others which have been features of the traditional Christian understanding of the crucifixion. It is not, of course, of the same order. But is there not something of the grief and holiness of Good Friday carried over into those eerie dawn parades at which we remember our own dead?

And perhaps it is not stretching things too far to suggest that through the tragic isolation and death of our Anzac soldiers, nationhood was born. Some years ago, an exhibition at the Auckland Museum of New Zealanders at war was suggestively entitled “Scars on the Heart”. That is what we are talking about; the scars on the national heart which are touched upon whenever we symbolically re-enter the depths of Easter in the New Zealand context.

But what of the hope? How, in the midst of autumnal dying, do we laid hold of rebirth and resurrection?

In Otago, this is not difficult. Here, the ebb and decay of the season is glorious and resplendent; it is a beautiful death.

The journey into darkness is not one to be afraid of, but rather to be savoured and appreciated. The heavy mulch of fallen leaves will in time produce regeneration.

And here in a young land, as we come to embrace the wounds of our national spirit rather than suppressing pain or rendering it into violence, perhaps even here there is the chance for the Easter spirit to grant us a fresh vision for life in partnership with the land. ■

I Have My Mother’s Hands

2005 Amelia Keenan

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his image is the result of exploration into the issues surrounding the exclusion of women from the Catholic priest­hood. The concept stemmed from concern regarding the hist­orical discrim­ ination per­pet­uated against women by the Catholic Church, a discrimination that has gone virtually unchecked into contemporary times.

It is widely held that in order for a priest to fulfil his ministry he must act in persona Christi: he must host the person of Christ. By virtue of this argument the church places greater importance on the biologically male gender of Christ and loses sight of the fact that he was, most

importantly, the human son of God. A woman is equally well equipped to host the essence of Christ’s humanity, and if the physical proof of this ability were to manifest itself anywhere, then it seems likely that it would be the affliction of the mystical stigmata. The phenomenon of mystical stigmata oddly enough mani­ fests statistically more often in women than in men.

I Have My Mother’s Hands addresses the socio-religious stigma attached to being a woman through the visual juxtaposition of the stigmata and the female nude. n

(Amelia Keenan is a young parishioner from St Dominic’s parish, Blockhouse Bay)

McIndoe ad

As the leaves were falling and clouds threatened I turned weary eyes towards the hills From where shall come my help.

There, in the valley’s palm I sought the one my heart loves, Seeking my soul’s rest and foundation

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science & theology

Intelligent design

who says we are descended from monkeys?

In the US far more people go to church than in any other part of the Western world.

Some 40 percent of Americans also believe that the Creation story in Genesis should be taken literally. These include President George Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This belief is articulated in the so-called Intelligent Design theory of the origins of life.

Recently a protagonist of this school came to New Zealand from the United States to lecture on Intelligent Design. Tui Motu went along to listen.

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ome years ago I was part of a group visiting the Mormon College in Hamilton. It was a very impressive place and a choir of senior pupils entertained us. Afterwards, returning to base by bus, I found myself sitting next to the then Principal of St Kentigern’s College, a Scotsman with a wicked wit.

“Ye have to admire their zeal,” he said to me, “ but how anyone can swallow all that rubbish about Joseph Smith is beyond belief!”

Recently I attended a talk given by an advocate of the Intelligent Design theory of Creation. After an hour of indoctrination I felt just like my Scots friend. We were subjected to a lengthy lecture involving very selective quotes from church documents – totally out of context, some very poor science and even poorer Scripture scholarship. I admired the lecturer’s zeal but remained totally unconvinced.

Once upon a time there was real tension between Christian theologians

– especially Catholic ones – and evolutionists, especially Darwinians.

For centuries religious tradition had settled for an overly literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and it was not only the Anglican Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656) who held that the world was created in six 24-hour days in 4004 B.C. God had revealed to Moses exactly how the world was created – and that was that.

For instance the Pontifical Biblical Commission wrote from Rome in 1948 that the first 11 chapters of Genesis “relate in simple and figurative language, adapted to the understanding of a less developed people, the fundamental truths presupposed for the economy of salvation, as well as the popular description of the origin of the human race and of the chosen people.” (Cath.

Encyclopaedia 6.329).

But critical Biblical scholarship has moved a long way since Ussher and brought us to a quite different way of understanding the sacred writings.

The Catholic Church for a long time was reluctant to acknowledge the validity of this scholarship. But since Pius XII issued his Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu in 1943, Catholics have been able to explore the scientific orthodoxy of organic evolution and are free to accept that it in no way conflicts with the way they interpret Genesis.

What are those ‘fundamental truths’?

Simply, that everything is created by God, that creation is ‘good’, that the human race has a common origin, that male and female are made equal and that all humans sin. The fundamental truths remain; but in the story details Genesis describes creation in terms remarkably like the Creation myths of other peoples, including the Maori.

The Bible and Myth

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hen we use the word ‘myth’ in a Biblical context, we do not mean untruth. On the contrary a Biblical myth is a story which reveals the constants which lie behind human experience – the so-called ‘archetypes’. These myths may not be historical; yet in a sense they are ‘truer’ than the facts. They give meaning to the sketchy details of our religious and human origins.

The great Protestant theologian, Rudolph Bültmann (left), provided a sound basis for this interpretation in his theory of literary forms: the sacred author uses poetry, epic and myth as well as historical events to illustrate how God is revealed to us in Scripture.

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On his last visit to New Zealand the eminent Catholic Biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, urged that it was incumbent on preachers to teach their congregations that it is quite wrong and contrary to church teaching to say that the opening chapters of Genesis are to be taken literally. Brown was speaking from the viewpoint of an American, familiar with the powerful fundamentalist lobby in the United States, especially among the Religious Right. We should be aware that this school of thought is also alive and well here, even among Catholics.

Dowden refers to this conflict of ideas in his article Science, Truth and God (Tui Motu February pp 12-14). He says: “If the Book (of Genesis) clearly stated that God created the Earth in 4000 BC along with all the evidence to the contrary, then belief in the Book is belief that God is a liar.” In other words the literal interpretation of Genesis and the findings of science are in absolute contradiction. The solution offered by the literalists is patently absurd.

Pope Pius XII, whose Encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu gave a blessing to modern Scripture scholarship

Intelligent Design is bad science.

When Charles Darwin proposed the theory of organic evolution in his Origin of Species (1859), the principle evidence he offered came from the fossil record. The science of geology had advanced rapidly in the early part of the 19th Century, and well before Darwin it had become evident that sedimentary rocks were laid down over very long periods of time but in a recognisable sequence. One way of observing the sequence was by the fossils found in particular strata. The older the strata, the more primitive were the forms of life found fossilised there. What soon became obvious was that the process had taken far far longer than 6000 years.

Darwin presented several other lines of argument to support his thesis that present animal and plant species had evolved from primitive, common ancestors, and that during the process very many species like dinosaurs died out altogether. But his trump card was always the fossil record. So, if Darwin were to be believed, what about Genesis?

What about Bishop Ussher’s dating?

What about Adam and Eve? If we were to read Genesis literally, does that imply that when God created the world and all its living inhabitants in Six Days, God also created the fossils in the rocks exactly as we discover them? Some advocates of Intelligent Design say precisely that. Dick

Dick Dowden also points out that ultimately there can be no conflict between science and theology when both are investigating the same creation fashioned by the same God. There can, he concludes, be only one truth – not Divine, ‘revealed truth’ and secular ‘universal truth’.

Ever since Darwin the scientific evidence in favour of evolution has steadily grown until now it is simply overwhelming. But, as we pointed out above, Biblical scholars have also proposed a way of interpreting ancient texts which acknowledges that the sacred authors freely used myths and legends to tell the story of God’s dealings with humankind.

Natural Selection

Nevertheless, many at the time queried – and continue to query – Darwin’s insistence on natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. Do the neoDarwinists mean that the natural world as we experience it has come about by pure chance? Are we as humans simply the outcome of a sort of cosmic lottery?

Dick Dowden again: “Ultimately what we are seeking is the complete plan and explanation of the entire Universe.

Think of it as the entire ‘software’ of the Universe. It had to exist before the Big Bang. In whatever way matter (the ‘hardware’) comes together to form stars by chance and according to the laws of physics, how could the infinitely complex software come to be by chance?

The simplest way out to a scientist is to postulate God.(op.cit p13)”

Dowden’s model using the language of computers can be equally applied to biology. When a new species evolves, whether by natural selection or some other process, the potential to arrive at a new species is determined by combinations of genes. In other words the ‘software’ is already in existence.

The potential to evolve into an elephant is already present in an amoeba!

Or put it in another way: the possibility for any new species existed in the mind of the Creator before the first living cell ever came to be. The pattern of evolution may be predetermined, it may come about partly by chance, or it may guided by divine Providence.

But what the Book of Genesis states unequivocally is that God made it all and that God saw it was good. Science seeks to tell us HOW it all came about.

Theology tells us WHY. There is no conflict.

A static or a dynamic world

Let us stand back a moment and note the pattern of the process of creation.

What Intelligent Design is presenting us with is a static universe. God made it complete, exactly as it is, like an offthe-peg suit. Yet this is at variance with the way we experience God in practically every other respect.

The history of salvation described in the two Testaments is precisely a HISTORY. It is an evolving drama of God dealing with God’s people. And the drama goes on. Likewise with the story of each human life. We are always growing, learning, discovering, sinning, repenting. In faith we see it as an ongoing story: nothing readyto-wear about us. Clearly we are ‘custom made’, and we take a lot of responsibility for the way we design our lives and our world.

So when we come to look at Creation itself, would we not expect it to be also an ever-unfolding process, a story with a beginning and an end, with a destiny in the future and a pedigree in the past we can investigate – rather like the way we might research our genealogy ? ss

Tui Motu InterIslands 13

science & theology ss

So why do people believe in Intelligent Design?

A hundred years ago a Catholic writer, Friedrich von Hügel, wrote a book entitled The Mystical Element of Religion (1908). In it he suggests that just as humans progress from infancy, through adolescence, to adulthood, so in our religious experience there are three basic elements corresponding to stages of faith development: an institutional, a critical and a mystical phase.

Institutional faith simply accepts a religious statement on trust – on the authority of parent or church. Critical faith seeks to understand how the statement fits, whether it squares with one’s experience of life. Mystical faith longs to meet the Mind behind the dogma: it is a knowledge based on love more than on argument or authority.

Religion, asserts von Hügel, must contain the three elements in balance.

His theory is described at some length in Gerard Hughes’ book on spirituality God of Surprises, in Chapter 2.

Hughes notes there is always a danger that one element is overstressed or one is underdeveloped. “The danger in the institutional element”, he says, “ is that we never advance beyond a religious infantilism”. We look for clear teaching: what is right and what is wrong. We want the church to tell us what to do. We resent anything that looks like criticism. (Hughes also notes that if we get stuck in the critical phase we will be equally in trouble: we become rationalists who can be just as dogmatic as anyone enslaved to an institution).

I think this is where the Intelligent Design school has come unstuck. They seem to suspend their critical faculty.

They have ‘the truth’. The Word of God provides them with the literal answers. Why endanger their eternal salvation by going further? And of course, they may easily move from using the Bible to date the Day of Creation to predicting with the same exactitude and infallibility the Day of

Judgment. If God has told us when it all started, He will tell us when it is due to end – and what we must do to be prepared – and who is saved and who is damned... and so on.

This is an abuse of the Word of God, and the church in criticising fundamentalism is clearly warning us against this mindset. The Word of God, properly prayed over and with the guidance of the church, helps us learn how to live now, today, in this world. It is not a blueprint for a certain future. Nor is it a timetable for a far too recent past. We need to name Intelligent Design for what it is: a serious intellectual aberration which conflicts with the teachings of the Catholic church. n

M.H. The author’s tertiary academic qualifications are in Biological Sciences (Cambridge, UK) and Theology (Lateran University, Rome)

Chance or Design?

Bosco Camden FMS

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ur poor little Earth planet has its share of problems – tsunamis, terrorists, global warm­ ing, wide­spread poverty – and the rest. At the same time we should be in grateful awe at the extraordinary Charles Darwin, author of revelations of our uni­ the Origin of Species and verse provided by the Hubble space telescope, ‘father’ of Evolution and the incred­ible story of the Voyager spacecraft, photographing just about every planet – and of course the wonderfully creative scientists behind all this exploration.

From earliest times (Empedocles vs. Plato) there has been dialogue and debate about God’s part in this

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stupendous creative activity. The Scriptures wisely tell the creation story in its essence – God did it! Yet it took billions of years – our minds cannot encompass these immense numbers; but we must try to understand them if we are to come to grips with the modern debates over Chance and Design.

To put it baldly, has Planet Earth just ‘happened’ by chance, or is there a God who is guiding its development?

The words ‘chance’ and ‘design’ have become catchwords, caricatures, for extreme opinions in the scientific and religious camps. The polarisation of feelings is strong in USA, and has even shown up in the Wairarapa where a new Christian school felt it had to advertise its philosophy regarding the Evolution vs. Creationism debate!

This debate is just too simplistic – the issues are far beyond Darwin’s theories. For nearly a century we’ve had also to consider the implications of Einstein’s relativity; for half a

century we have tried to incorporate quantum theory into our understandings; for a quarter of a century we have been learning the complications of genetics; now in this century, we are hearing about multiple universes and the self-organising character of many natural processes.

The creativity of philosophers, theologians and scientists is truly divine in origin. The God of creation is clearly not that benign father-figure in the sky, so beloved of the medieval artists. So often we hear, “How can a good God let so many die?”, “How can God allow so much evil in the world?” Very presumptuous of us to be telling God what he ought to do and not to do! Here is the God of infinite power and goodness and beauty and mystery – and we puny humans are just beginning to understand a little of his immensity.

Instead of bickering about Chance and Design, we would be better off giving thanks that a part of this extraordinary creation is our own life and consciousness – God has given us something of himself, some part of his own image, some partnership amid the billions of billions of stars. That is why Jesus is so magnificent – he is God. At the same time he is us; he shows us how to be a genuine reflection of his Father.

Many people have no trouble in believing in a God of creation – Einstein was one – but they cannot believe in a God who answers our prayers. The faith needed for this personal God is a gift. Perhaps Einstein did not read as far as the page in the New Testament where Jesus says, “The Father and I are one.”

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f course, we should be speaking of Chance AND Design, and not of the polarising Chance OR Design.

What a dull world we would have without the element of surpise in creation; no wonder Darwin couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the gigantic, grotesque Galapagos turtles. And God must have been resting on his seventh day when he appointed the creation sub-committee that came up with the camel!

What a laugh God must have had, too, when the impossible platypus turned up – it could only happen in Australia! We are a billion Astronomical Units away from understanding how and why God has woken us up here in our beautiful country. We can only take one step at a time, being prepared to abandon old beliefs as new knowledge unfolds.

A great symbol of progress is Galileo: everyone from Neanderthal Man through to Shakespeare would confidently assure you that a heavy object falls faster than a light object – it stands to reason doesn’t it! But Galileo leaned over the parapet of the Tower of Pisa and dropped together a ping-pong ball and a small cannon ball; as they hit the ground simultaneously, 40 centuries of accepted wisdom went down the gurgler.

A fundamental natural law is that all things decay to a less organised state (entropy) unless enlivened with some outside energy. But as Philip Clayton observes: “Once there were apes living in trees, and then there were Mozart, Einstein and Ghandi!”(Emerging God) An emergentist theology looks forward, postulating God as a goal toward which all things are heading. Such a process theology is very appealing when we try to consider how Jesus fits into the scheme of creation; I wonder, is this process of ‘becoming’ what Jesus meant when he spoke of the kingdom of God? Some American opponents of Creationism are promoting the idea of Intelligent Design, that God is guiding creation towards some prearranged result, that the Chance factor is nothing. ID is an interesting notion, with powerful backers, but it is simply too glib. The facts of nature are eloquent – the extraordinary diversity of created forms, the millions of species of bug, plant and animal that differ in minute ways, the platypus that is surely not designed!

At the same time there is a growing awareness that life is more than atoms and DNA, and that creation is proceeding with some purpose, towards some goal that God has set.

The mechanisms of that progress, evolution et cetera, are slowly becoming better understood, and it may well be that our 21st century will experience a massive shift of opinion away from the last three centuries of mechanistic understanding.

Whatever God’s purpose is, our own purpose is clearly to align ourselves with God’s. We see God in the history of humankind, in the Prodigal Son, as well as in Darwin; in Abraham as well as in genetics; in the humility of Jesus as well as in stem-cell research. n With your beautiful eyes, I see a gentle light My blind ones could never see, On your feet, I bear a burden My lame ones could never bear.

With your wings, I fly though featherless; By your mind I am lifted ever upward; At your whim, I pale or blush, Cold in the sun, warm in the cold of winter.

In your desire alone is my desire; My thoughts are forged in your heart, My works are breathed in your breath.

Alone, I am like the moon, itself alone; Our eyes see it in the heavens Only as the sun enlightens it.

Michelangelo Br Bosco Camden is a Marist Brother and retired science teacher living in Wellington.

This article is taken from Marist News

Tui Motu InterIslands 15

T

Deep Sea Days

wilight nudged at the seaside day of the fisherfolk Calling back the tide, calling back the boats As seabirds squawked and swooped for tasty supper flesh

Fisherwoman watched and waited As Weather-beaten boats carrying weather-borne faces slowly chugged to shore, Waited and watched At the rising and falling of the glistening deep that captured her horizon “You need a new net,” she cried, “you need a new net.”

And by lantern light she wove and knotted, tied and stitched With rope and cord and string and thread The stories of the fisherfolk, the music of their days Rope of moonlight, sunlight, starlight, earth-warm, tree-tall, salt-sprayed, wave-washed light, Cords of memory, pulling back the time and place of ancient voices, And wine-soaked bread, much wine-soaked bread Knotted and tied with tearful moments, sad-full moments, weeping empty nothingness moments, angry forgotten fearful moments, And fragile moments, courageously carried in the barefoot dawn She wove in joyful, happy-full hand clapping times, children’s laughter-full times, firelight tender-full times And bold-full very bold-full times, the sea-storm times of holding ground Delicately she stitched in strings of tiny stones and jewels Chiselled shards of dried out bones, carved and polished jade and pearls Reflected fragments of New Jerusalem dreams that glistened like her deep sea day And in the lantern light of hands and heart the fisherwoman hummed and prayed for broken cords, frayed and knotted, tangled, tattered ends She hummed and prayed for many coloured threads Strong hues, soft hues, rainbow-rich mixed-moment hues The weft and warp of moments, places, times and seasons And in the early morning of another day …

“Go out to the deep,” she said, “Out to the deep.”

As seagulls spun and swooped and dipped and dived The boats chugged out to the place of the rising and falling The place that caught the glistening And fisherwoman looked from her cliff top watch And then she sang, soul to sea A soul deep song of faith and hope and love and joy, And then she danced, sea to soul A sea deep dance of faith and hope and love and joy, Rising, falling, lost and found And for a moment, time, or season All was wrapped in the netted gift of beauty All was silent, lost for words…

Wordless, silence As the tiptoed hearts of the fisherfolk stilled Listening, listening, in the sea glistening dawn.

Karen Beker

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peace & justice

The role of religion in building peace Anjum Rahman

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ll religions have common beliefs and common values which we can bring us together to help work for peace.

One positive aspect of the cartoons (both of Muhammad and of the Virgin Mary) was the way different faiths supported each other. The Muslim community very much appreciated the support from Catholics, the Jewish community, Sikhs, Quakers and others. We were also keen to support the Catholic community and to express our own disappointment at the broadcast of the South Park episode.

flip side to this, of course, is that the other is inherently wrong and therefore evil.

This notion is exacerbated by fear, ignorance and deliberate misrepresentation Anjum Rahman – a Muslim drummed up by those with woman from Auckland political agendas.

However, even though we have much in common, there is no doubt that almost every religion has some history of violence and conflict. The question we really need to ask first then is: what is it about religion that causes people to commit acts of violence?

It seems silly to say we should never fight evil with violence.

Take, for example, the Nazi regime which was surely wrong and had to be stopped. Surely the only option was an armed conflict? The answer of course is that the fight should have begun long before, by stopping vilification not just of a faith group (the Jewish community) but other minorities as well.

Those without faith often level the accusation at us that religion is the greatest cause of violence. I expect most of you will agree that the root cause of most conflicts is not religion, but rather underlying issues of wealth, land or resources.

Yet religion has often been used as a tool to motivate the masses towards conflict. Therefore, we need to rephrase the question: what is it about religion that allows it to be used as a motivating factor for violence and war? What is it that would cause a person to go against the strong natural instinct of self-preservation, to kill and be killed?

The role of religion in this context is to bring out the value we all have for God’s creations. I can only speak confidently from my own faith background, but I’m sure each faith has something similar. Muslims believe that the love God has for each of his creations is 70 times the love that a mother has for her child. Another tradition states that God gave one 70th part of his mercy to the world, and kept the rest for Himself. In other words, all the mercy that has been shown by any person from the beginning to the end of life on this planet amounts to 1/70 of God’s mercy.

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irstly, I believe that all people are intrinsically good.

Even when they do things that are wrong or make mistakes, they still have the capacity to be good and have a strong inclination towards doing good. Religion is a way to appeal to the need for good. Religion provides us with the notion of sacrifice – the need to give something up in order to help others. We sacrifice to protect or defend those values or persons who are precious to us. The ultimate sacrifice is to give one’s life for a noble cause. Thus the act of violence becomes an act of nobility.

The role of religion in overcoming this tendency to violence is to emphasise that there is more to sacrifice than violence. The greater sacrifice is when one gives up the desire for revenge and retaliation. There is greater sacrifice in forgiveness and giving up your rights, even when you know you have been wronged. This is a value that is common to all faiths – all creeds place a high value on forgiveness over revenge.

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he second factor is the certainty most religions give that only their way is right, that only their followers are on the truly guided path, and therefore truly good. The

Therefore, if we profess to love God, then we must love each of his creations, animate and inanimate. We must show sympathy, understanding and respect when dealing with those of other faiths. While we may continue to disagree with them, while we may seek to change their views through missionary work, while we may keep the belief that only we are truly guided, yet still we should foster that love, respect and understanding that would never allow us to commit violence towards any group.

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inally – religions have the ability to reach large numbers of people, due to the tendency of people of faith to congregate. We find that messages in mainstream media serve to publicise the views of and activities of extremists. The moderate voice tends not to be newsworthy.

It is an ordinary, everyday message that tends not to create headlines. Therefore, a role of religions is to use our ability to reach large numbers to provide an alternative message.

I would urge each and every one of you to continue to strive in your own way, to keep making an effort no matter how small. I believe God does not allow even the smallest effort to be wasted. Our future depends on it. n

An abstract of a paper given at the 3rd National Interfaith Forum, Parliament Buildings, 27 February 2006

Tui Motu InterIslands 17

dominican spirituality

Celebrating a Dominican Jubilee Prayer and Liturgy are central to the Dominican vocation. Two experienced believers – not Dominicans – explore the prayer journey which is everyone’s vocation

Prayer Journey

Joy Cowley

photo:Terry Coles

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rayer is a long and beautiful road where the scenery changes at every turn, as does the means of travel. Remember when praying was all about our effort? It was largely concerned with personal discipline. We had special times of the day when we made offerings of reverence and praise in ritualistic language. We held requests out towards God in some distant place called Heaven. The kind of words we used, were very important. Was that really prayer? Yes, of course it was.

Often we felt a response that we could not name, a sense of peace, the touch of some goodness that came to fill us and bring reassurance.

Yet there was more. As we travelled on the prayer journey, our awareness increased. God seemed much closer. Our Father in Heaven was also the loving companion on the road, with whom we could chat and share our innermost thoughts without concerning ourselves too much with formal language. This

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was quite a breakthrough for us, although, paradoxically, now that God was much closer, we were less able to describe God. Even Meister Eckhart’s word “Isness” seemed too small. But we did try, using a variety of images, and prayer rose spontaneously out of moments in the day. There was a sharing of our experience that is usual in a good friendship, and we felt, in that, unconditional acceptance. We were being guided on the journey by the Divine hand. We saw clear evidence of this. The path seemed much easier and lit with love.

Yet there was more. God the companion and guide came even closer so that the boundary between us was lost. We realised that the loving Presence was within us, and the voice of Guidance spoke from the depth of our being. Our first reaction to this could have been fear, perhaps even terror. The discovery of God within oneself may appear to contradict everything we’ve been taught. We may see it as worse than blasphemy. With that discovery comes the knowledge that we belong totally to God, and the responsibility involved is overwhelming.

But again there is more. Awareness expands and we can laugh at ourselves for putting exclusive interpretation on our discovery. The truth is that God is in everyone and everything and all creation is a manifestation of the Creator. The Love that made us for Itself, has always been a part of us. The great Light of

the Universe has placed in each of us a small spark of its brightness. That core of Love and Light within us gets buried in the wrappings of incarnation but it so longs for its Source that is creates a hunger and thirst within us, and our response is this pilgrimage of prayer.

It seems to us now, at this stage of the journey, that the experience of prayer is all around us, wherever we have eyes to see or ears to hear. Prayer is not so much about our giving, as our receiving. It’s found in listening into silence and stillness and being open to the abundance that is being poured into us. It is about sharing that abundance freely with others. It’s about seeing past human error to the beauty of God in every soul. Prayer is something that is constantly happening within us, as St Paul discovered. It is our birthright.

St Paul lists the eight gifts of the Holy Spirit and while we recognize their beauty, we realize that most are gifts that have to be earned through effort – patience, kindness, self-control and so forth. But there is a ninth gift that comes in prayer, a gift that comes unearned and unbidden, that floods our being with delight and awe and sometimes brings tears of wonder. There is no name for this gift but in attempt to describe it, I call it “sweetness”. It is as though the hungry soul has tastebuds made for this gift and this alone. You will know it. It comes in unguarded moments when we encounter God in beauty, music, prayer, liturgy, the Sacraments, the miracles of

Prayer and Liturgy

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his journey of prayer, for those who have been willing to travel it, has taken us into adventures with God beyond comfort or expectation. Most of us began this journey by imitating the timings and wordings of our parents and religious mentors, those travellers from other times and often from other places who lifted us aboard their own journeys. But for new generations the regularities of daily and weekly timings sometimes faltered and we had to wait for new rhythms. And the wordings sometimes felt like poor substitutes for silence.

Yet we travel with companions. We did not travel alone. There were communities of pilgrims on this journey. The image of the People of God, a pilgrim church, people travelling together, influenced the spirituality of many Christians in the late twentieth century. A pilgrimage is a journey towards a shrine. The shrine may be a real concrete place, or it may

ss birth and death. Our open hearts are

filled to overflowing with something a psalmist described as “Sweeter than the honey from the honey-comb” and we know the truth of our relationship with the Divine.

The mechanics of day-to-day existence may not get easier. We are still faced with challenge, hardship, pain, difficult decisions, all the exams we expect of life school; but the way we view them changes. We also have a different understanding of the structural prayers of our early journey. Now worship is not something we “do.” We experience liturgy as an open door through which flows food and drink for our journey.

All we need do on the path of prayer, is to enlarge our capacity to receive. The rest is done for us.

Joy Cowley is a writer and spiritual director, living with her husband, Terry, in Wellington

be a future hope whose place is not yet known. Whether the shrine is reached or not, the journey itself has the power to change and renew the pilgrim.

Our liturgies are the openness to God that we practice together, not just in the interior of our souls, but with our bodies – eyes seeing other eyes, ears hearing others speak, hands touching other hands giving and receiving, the feelings of postures and movements together, enclosing and distancing people in the same place with shared beliefs. Here is where we travel together, buffeted and supported, irritated and inspired by the activities of other travellers brushing and bumping against us.

Our journeys in personal prayer changed many of us over a period of a few years. But our journeys in liturgical prayer have proven more difficult and longer term. This journey advances slowly, staggered by quick surges and disappointing reversals. It is a journey on which we have to learn to be still, to be open, to be silent. But it is also one on which we are learning how to participate, to value our own contributions.

Participation in liturgical prayer uncovers the diversity and fragility of people travelling together: those travelling in and those travelling out, the confident and the desperate, the traditionalists and the futurists, the creative craftspeople and the tired practitioners, the power players and the dispossessed, the diversity of cultures and the distress of prejudice, the struggle for and against gender equality, the communication styles of youth and the shaky securities of the late middle-aged. It seems that this journey of participation with its interplay of diversity is still just at its beginning.

This particular pilgrimage is turning out to be longer than we thought.

Yet there are other travellers too.

As God became intimate within our personal journeys and the diversity of

Neil Darragh God appeared in our liturgical journeys, so we became conscious of another divine journey full of travellers flowing around us and through us. Rather than a path we walk along, this journey has begun to look more like a river that carries us along on its own journey through places we had never thought could be. The images of God that guide our journey now encompass images from land, sea and air. Openness to God means appreciation of the divine revelations in wind and air, darkness and light, mountain, forest, bush, sea, sand, sky, star and the minute symmetry of flower or leaf or insect. The creatures around us have become the mirrors and windows that filter light into the baroque architecture of our souls. Some of this is the revelation of beauty, but some too impresses on us the harder realities of suffering and transience.

The prayer journey, whether personal or liturgical, has become more awesome and often bewildering and can hit us into shocked wonder. The hymn of the Earth has turned out to be a prayer both of thanksgiving and of lament. Prayer of petition, it seems, is something only humans do. So here we are, a little lost, but caught up in the prayers of thanksgiving and lament of the travellers around us, and adding our own prayers of petition, yet thankful too for those human ancestors and the Incarnate One who felt the restless journeying of the Creator Spirit and have shown us where we too can take our own part in it.

Neil Darragh is a theologian with a special interest in Liturgy and the environment. He is parish priest of Glen Innes, Auckland

Tui Motu InterIslands 19

judaism

Shabbat Shalom – Building Bridges

Trish McBride

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few Wellington Christian spiritual directors were hon­ oured recently by an invita­tion to a very special birthday party. JoEllen Duckor was turning 50. Come, said the invitation, to a service at Temple Sinai, followed by lunch and dancing. I had been to the Temple, the Wellington Liberal Jewish Synagogue, before on open days as I have several friends in that community, so while the building was familiar, being there for a Sabbath service was a new experience.

Jewish training covering this ministry.

She had heard of the training provided for Christian spiritual directors offered

by Spiritual Growth Ministries. This framework has been training spiritual directors in Aotearoa New Zealand trans-denominationally for about 15 years. For a Jew to come into a Christian training programme which makes so many alien assumptions is a mark of true courage on JoEllen’s part, and also on the part of those who do the selecting and tutoring of the

mother and were honoured in return by the congregation.

We reached the solemn moment where the ark curtain is drawn back, and the scrolls of the Torah are brought out.

My over-riding impression is of the same reverence that can accompany the opening of the tabernacle in Catholic churches, especially in the old days of Benediction. Both churches and synagogues have curtain and lamp to denote the Divine Presence.

Warmly welcomed, shown to a seat, and given a booklet, we had time to orient ourselves. Rows of chairs, people greeting each other with hugs and ‘Shabbat Shalom’ – ‘Sabbath Peace!’

The men wore their head-coverings (yarmulkes, or kippot) and prayer shawls (tallit). Some relief that the booklet, and yes, we remembered it started at the ‘back’ and worked ‘forward’, had English translations, and in some cases transliterations, as well as the beautiful but baffling Hebrew script.

The service had been carefully put together with the birthday celebrations woven in. Perhaps twenty people had roles, ranging from prayers and readings to drawing back the curtain – but that came later. JoEllen herself played a leading part in the service, as she does in the synagogue community, where she is obviously much loved and respected.

During the congregation’s time without a resident rabbi, JoEllen has taken on a number of the roles without actually being ordained and formally installed. Two years ago she had a sense of wanting to minister more deeply to the spiritual journeys of the people in her community, but there was no

20 Tui Motu InterIslands

JoEllen Duckor outside Temple Sinai

programme. It has been a wonderful and challenging learning process for all concerned. Last year she addressed the group of Wellington spiritual directors, and they were moved by the depth of her own faith journey.

So, back to the Saturday morning celebrations! A first impression was of celebration and cheerfulness in the tunes for the early psalms. Later it was wonderful to see the participation in the service of JoEllen’s three teenage children. These New Zealand-born young people read prayers and scriptures in Hebrew, honoured their

The scroll, large, veiled and obviously fairly heavy, was taken in procession around the congregation, and again the familiar reverence of people truly recognising The Presence in the Word, and here they reached out touch It as It passed. So very like an old procession of the Blessed Sacrament carried in the monstrance. Deeply moving! And particularly when I reflected that this same ceremony has been enacted by Jewish communities world-wide for almost 2000 years.

For the first time JoEllen chanted the reading from the Torah, the familiar

A mother’s journal in Himachal Pradesh W

ell, we’ve survived this first month in Himachal Pradesh. Being a mother is such a transportable career – just pack the children and take them with me. Wherever I go, I find parents with the same job description of task lists and strategies for a successful day: feed often, keep dry and warm most of the time, let them play in puddles while they’re happy, distract them when they’re sad etc. The mothers around here are onto all the same tricks.

Now we’re woken by crows or a tooting bus horn instead of NZ’s sparrows and rush hour traffic. I still need to rise and get little people dressed. Here we’ve diverged from our Kiwi breakfasts. We eat rice, milk and banana or toast with fluorescent-red NO REAL FRUIT jam from Bhutan. It’s the same old routine though; cook, food on the table, clearing and washing dishes, pack lunches.

“Jaldi Jaldi, shoes on kids!”

Not enough time for Lenten reflection is the same too!

My six-year-old said yesterday “Its actually quite fun in India and we’re making friends fast.” Here in India we can still play with a ball, go for walks, tip cups of water. Routines can connect us to the world we know.

Motherhood for some is unimaginably different from my world. Last week a 20-year-old woman came into the clinic.

Let’s call her Meetu. She had been in labour for 15 hours and had travelled alone on the bus. Softly she explained the baby’s father left her when he found she was pregnant, her parents died long ago. She hadn’t told her uncle and aunt whom she lived with. She’d had no antenatal care and had heard we would take an unwanted baby.

Her baby boy was born an hour after she arrived. He cried lustily. Meetu didn’t look at him. She must have known she would never be able to give him balls to play with, warm clothes or even milk, rice and bananas.

story of Abraham being told to leave everything and to “go to a land which I will show you”. She had a special pointer (yad) to help keep her place, a gift brought for her from Israel. Then she related this to her reflections on her life journey, and her transition from her birthplace in USA to her adopted country Aotearoa New Zealand.

After more prayers, and singing, the service was over. Then came the lunch – and Jewish communities eat with the same dedication as they pray. Tables loaded with wonderful goodies with

Mothers in Kullu Valley, Indian Himalayas

Even as we sewed her up Meetu said she needed to catch the bus back to her village. She couldn’t miss housemaid work tomorrow. We tried to convince her to rest here – we’d give her food and cover her medical bills. Meetu said nothing, just quickly signed the orphanage form confirming that she didn’t want her newborn son. Only a couple of hours later the nurses reported that she’d taken the painkillers and left.

I live in the same place as Meetu, but I live in a completely different world. I have resources, support, wealth, opportunities

– in fact everything I need. I am able to give my children all they need. Living here helps me to live thankfully. It also challenges me to live generously and spontaneously. Meetu left while I was still wondering about slipping her a little money and food.

Kaaren Mathias is a mother of three children and a public health doctor. She has recently left NZ to live and work with a Christian NGO in Himachal Pradesh, India.

exotic names, challah, gefilte fish, halva, as well as the familiar, cheese, fruit and cheesecakes. Then the music and dancing – and again the energy and capacity for celebration.

And while the Christians who had been honoured with an invitation were aware of bridges being built by JoEllen’s openness and willingness to relate across the ancient barrier, there was another important bridge being built on that same occasion. She had invited the rabbi and members of the Orthodox Jewish congregation a few city blocks

away, but without any expectation that they would come. There has been a traditional suspicion between the strands of Judaism, much as there was between the strands of Christianity.

But for this woman on this occasion, people stepped across the line, and the Orthodox rabbi made his first visit to the Liberal synagogue to join the later part of the celebration. And so we were all enriched by the invitation!

Happy birthday, JoEllen! Thank you for a special experience of worship and community. n

Tui Motu InterIslands 21

theology of marriage

Sex and Sensibility In the first of two articles, John Kleinsman welcomes the message of Pope Benedict in Deus Caritas Est as a foundation for a renewed Catholic theology of sexuality and marriage

I

n his recent encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI highlights the intrinsic link between God’s love and human love. Writing about eros – erotic human love – Benedict describes it as a gift from God capable of offering “a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” (DCE n. 4) Married Christian couples know this already. Benedict XVI’s message is welcome, not because it tells us something we didn’t already know but because he acknowledges certain pervasive tendencies within Christianity – and Catholicism in particular – that have fostered dualism and opposition to the body, and left married Catholics to feel like ‘secondrate Christians’ for far too long.

Dualism in the church

The origins of this dualism are longstanding. Even while great theologians such as Augustine took a stand against the extreme dualism of sects such as the Gnostics and Manichees, they were unable to extricate themselves from a view of marriage as a ‘concession to lust’. Augustine theorised that, were it not for the sin of Adam and Eve, we would have been able to have sex without the passions that characterise our sexual desire, passions he regarded as intrinsically objectionable.

The message of Deus Caritas Est reflects a gradual move within Catholic thinking over the past 40 years towards a more positive and integrated appreciation of married love and sexuality. That this

22 Tui Motu InterIslands

message is now coming through at the highest levels is due in no small part to the writings of lay married theologians reflecting on their own experience of lovemaking as a holy act, a way of encountering the divine love of God and a means of sanctifying the couple.

Sarah Coakley, for example, speaks of the Trinitarian nature of sexual love, while presenting her case for the “overt entanglement of sexual desire and the desire for God”.

At the same time there has also come about a greater awareness of the personal significance of sexual lovemaking and its potential to nourish and sustain married persons in their call to be committed, loving, caring and generous persons. Dick Westley puts it well: Somehow… the making of love between two people, allows us to be more open to compromise, less demanding, more prone to make sacrifices, able to surrender some territory, to forgive, to let the other be first… These are all spiritual disciplines… Lovemaking, good mindful sexuality is a spiritual art.

The fruits of this spiritual art of lovemaking – discernment, selfsurrender, reconciliation, compassion and growth into maturity – are the very things that make for a truly human civilisation. The energy generated by wholesome sex is a powerful and fecund physical and spiritual force that extends well beyond any ‘reproductive’ capacity of sexual intercourse in the strict biological sense. This energy cannot be constrained simply because its origins

and significance are divine: it is a lifefostering activity in the widest sense.

For this reason, a couple’s sexual relationship should never be described as a ‘private affair’: it has profoundly deep physical, spiritual, social, economic, political and even ecological ramifications.

Dualism in the world

Benedict XVI’s reaffirmation of the beauty of married sexual love is particularly timely, however, because it challenges the predominant secular narrative regarding sexuality, a narrative that, ironically, suffers from the same tendency to dualism as Catholicism.

In today’s world, sex is generally promoted as a private matter between two consenting adults. This understanding is dualistic because, in its attempt to rationalise so-called ‘free sexual choice’, sex is portrayed as just another optional, recreational activity.

There is little appreciation of the fact that there is a deeper human and divine significance involved; that our love-making somehow and mysteriously helps us connect us with creation while helping us realise our deeper human realities. Gil Bailie puts it succinctly: Today the denigration of the body and the attack on sexual intimacy are led by those who regard sexuality as ‘no big deal’, having only minor moral implications and no religious ones.

An article that appeared in New Zealand papers in July 2005 illustrates this dualism. Headed up “Viagra can be a downer for Kiwi women”, the

writer reports that “New Zealand women are complaining their partners insist on having sex – regardless of their own mood – because the men want as big a bang as possible for the money they spend on Viagra”. The article notes that while much scientific research had been done on the safety of the drugs aimed simply at improving sexual performance for men, “few had looked at the emotional and relational impacts”.

Positive aspects of church teaching

In the face of today’s impoverished secular narrative, we need to be reminded that human sexuality has a meaning that is not simply the product of culture or personal point of view, and a significance that is wider than the union of two bodies. Benedict XVI’s plea for a truly human unification of ‘body’ and ‘soul’ (n.5) offers an important point of connection between the Catholic and secular narratives regarding the meaning of sexual intimacy. What has been in the past, and perhaps continues to be, an ‘Achilles heel’ for Catholics, gives us ‘a way in’, a place from which to dialogue with those who see sexuality as ‘no big deal’.

In light of this, the church is absolutely right to insist that the proper place for sexual intercourse is within a permanent marriage relationship. In the words of Gareth Moore, “the total physical selfgiving would be a lie if it were not the sign and fruit of a total personal selfgiving… if the partners to the act are not totally committed to each other”.

Or to quote again from Benedict XVI: “it is part of love’s growth toward higher levels and inward purification that it seeks to become definitive… both in the sense of exclusivity (this particular person alone) and in the sense of being ‘forever’.” (DCE n.6) On the basis of this understanding Catholic teaching rejects both ‘extra-marital’ and ‘premarital’ intercourse.

Furthermore, Catholic teaching seeks to promote a truly human, social and political notion of sexuality and

marriage by highlighting the intrinsic link between sexuality and procreation.

This link is most famously articulated in its teaching on the need to always hold together the ‘unitive’ and ‘procreative’ dimensions of sexual lovemaking, a teaching that informs its persistent condemnation of contraception and sterilisation, as well as its attitudes to the use of IVF technologies.

Needless to say, our present context makes it extremely challenging for us to sound convincing, both to many of our own Catholics as well as to those who are not Catholic in their affiliation. Firstly, we all know that Catholic teaching on sex before marriage is largely ignored. Secondly, it is no secret that Catholic couples use contraception and IVF in much the same numbers as other couples. Thirdly, we are all aware that the scandals of clerical sexual abuse have just made it a whole lot harder for Catholics to be seen as credible commentators in the area of sexual ethics.

The credibility issue is a serious one. But, while we may lament this state of affairs, we need not despair.

Catholics are not called to a blind or unquestioning acceptance of moral teaching. That would be to confuse the message with the messenger. There are better human reasons for believing that Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage is worthwhile.

The challenge is to show how such teachings can be located in a vision of well-being which can be taught and defended as truly human and faithful to the Gospel. Is this a novel idea?

No. The Catholic tradition has long maintained that its teachings reflect and may be derived from reflection on basic and shared human realities – the ‘natural law’. The natural law approach validates the appropriateness of experience as a criterion in discovering moral truth.

truth. To this extent, Catholic sexual teaching has deprived itself of a deeper validation of many of its rich insights.

At the same time, some of its teachings have been impoverished. A major challenge is to ground Catholic sexual ethics more deeply in the experience of Catholic couples who are practised in the spiritual art of lovemaking. The Catholic teaching will then regain a degree of credibility among many who no longer feel inclined to trust Catholic sexual teaching, including large numbers of Catholics.

How can we locate Catholic teaching on pre-marital sex and contraception in a truly human vision grounded in the experience of faithful Catholic couples?

The first step involves theologians bringing the Catholic moral tradition into a respectful, honest and open dialogue with married and cohabitating couples.

But even before we take that step we need to ask whether we are open enough to accept that honest reflection on the considered experience of Catholic couples might require us to reformulate our understanding and articulation of the Catholic vision for marriage and sexuality. This should not daunt us if we remember that our priority is not the defence of Catholic teaching per se but the responsibility to stay faithful to the message of the Gospel, which underpins the Catholic understanding of what it is to be fully human. n

John Kleinsman teaches Moral Theology at the Wellington Catholic Education Centre and is also a parttime researcher for The Nathaniel Centre. John lives in Wellington with his wife, Kerry, and three children aged 10 to 16.

Until recently, however, the experience of married Catholics has too often been ignored as a valid source of moral

Tui Motu InterIslands 23

spirituality

The Laughing God Glynn Cardy The rabbinical student is about to leave for America. When he asks his mentor for advice, the rabbi offers an adage that, he tells the student, will guide him for the rest of his life. “Always remember,” the rabbi said sagely, “Life is a fountain.”

Deeply impressed by his teacher’s wisdom, the student departs for a successful career in America. Thirty years later, he learns that the rabbi is dying, so he returns for a final visit. “Rabbi,” he says, “I have one question. For thirty years, whenever I was sad or confused, I thought about the phrase you passed on to me, and it has helped me through many difficult times.

But to be perfectly frank, I have never understood the full meaning of it. Now that you are about to enter the realm of truth, tell me, dear rabbi, why is life like a fountain?”

Wearily, the old man replied, “All right, so it’s not like a fountain.”

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here is buried beneath the sobriety of much religion a strong tradition of humour. In Orthodox churches Easter celebrations often begin with the telling of joke. An acknowledgment maybe that laughter is both appropriate and therapeutic in the aftermath of evil.

Humour is reflective of selftranscendence, that ability to step back from a situation, see the funny side of it, and laugh – chiefly at ourselves.

The health of a believer, the health of church, I would measure in part by the frequency of its laughter. Psychologists tell us that laughter quickens breathing, enhances circulation, and ignites expectations. Similarly I suspect for church congregations.

We have a laughing God. Read the Book of Psalms (2:4, 37:13, 59:8). God finds amusement with many things, especially pretentious politicians.

Likewise we have a laughing Jesus. This

24 Tui Motu InterIslands

tradition is not only found within the Gnostic writings but is there within the Gospels themselves.

Bill Phipps in his book The Wisdom And Wit Of Rabbi Jesus locates Jesus’ humour in the Jewish love of irony, puns, double entendre, and hyperbole.

Is not, for example, the punned phrase “You strain out a gnat (kalma) but you gulp down a camel (gamla)” (Matt 23:24) an attempt to invite legalists to laugh at their misdirected behaviour?

Or the hyperbolic admonition “If someone wants your outwear, let him have your underwear too” (Luke 6:29) an attempt to make people smile?

Yet so often biblical interpreters have thrown their own piety over the text smothering the humour. Regarding the underwear verse above, the King James Bible creates the fiction of a Palestinian peasant walking around in two coats! (In reality a peasant wore an outer garment and a loincloth.)

Many church leaders over the centuries have hermeneutically removed Jesus’ funny bone and thus a central component of his humanity. By the

3rd century the laughing Jesus had been re-crucified to appease the gods of austerity and self-mortification. The great Cappadocian, Basil, expounded upon the alleged wickedness of laughter.

John Chrysostem, the renowned preacher, said that Jesus never smiled or laughed. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, “I should not laugh or say anything that would cause laughter”.

As I read quote after quote condemning laughter a great sadness came over me. The church has suffered from killing the laughing Jesus. Society has suffered also as the church took itself too seriously, deaf to or punishing of its critics, intolerant of children and clowns, colouring piety with the dull grey of sobriety. Even nowadays when most Christians will enjoy a good laugh there is an underlying unease about the place of humour in worship, or anywhere that is seen as holy.

I commend to you Christopher Moore’s Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. Through the eyes of Biff – a sarcastic, sex-loving, crude, and deeply loyal friend – we get

Ribbonwood Greeting Cards – great for personal or organizational use $2 + pp normal card size with coloured image on the front, blank inside To view all 24 card designs and order, go to www.ribbonwoodcalendar.co.nz

images as seen in the 2006 Lenten Programme

a very humorous, fictitious, and yet insightful look at Jesus.

From the first meeting with the 6year-old Jesus – he was bringing to life lizards whose heads his younger brother had quashed – to the righteous young teenager who secretly in the dark of night went with Biff to circumcise a statue of Apollo (yes, the chisel slipped!) – the reader knows this is no ordinary book. As the dust cover says ‘this book is sick, seriously sick… but my kind of sick.’

“I’m going to be gone soon,” (Jesus states). “In the spring we’ll go to Jerusalem for the Passover, and there I will be judged by the scribes and the priests, and there I will be tortured and put to death. But three days from the day of my death, I shall rise, and be with you again.” … A shadow of grief seemed to pass over the faces of the disciples. We looked not at each other, and neither at the ground, but at a place in space a few feet from our faces, where I suppose one looks for a clear answer to appear out of undefined shock.

“Well, that sucks,” someone said.”

(P.391)

H

umour, like beauty, art and music, is a very subjective thing.

Within my family, for example, there are at least two different streams of humour. What will have two or three of us rolling on the floor laughing watery-eyed will have the rest of us looking bemused. So, if you don’t find this funny don’t worry. You’re normal.

But others of us aren’t.

That’s always the risk with humour.

Recently we’ve been approaching renowned comedians to speak at a fundraising dinner in St Matthew’s Church, the proceeds of which will go to the Organ. Dawn French isn’t available.

Next on the list is Rowan Atkinson, then Billy Connelly. Some comedians specialize in mocking religion. Some specialize in sex. Some, like Billy, have made swearing an art form. Even for

broadminded St Matthew’s I’m sure a few will find whatever choice we make difficult. As for our critics… well, they will make sure the event is thoroughly publicised!

Some of you will have heard of the Feast of Fools. This was a festival popular during the late Middle Ages.

It happened between Christmas and New Year. It was bawdy and irreverent, and it happened in church.

In many places a Lord of Misrule presided over the revelry. In France and England the ceremonies were often under the charge of a boy bishop.

During the feast lower clerics and minor officials parodied the sacred rites and customs of the church. There was the Mass of the Asses, Drunkards, and Gamblers. The smell of sour incense made of filthy old shoe soles assailed the nostrils. Men dressed as women sang outrageous ditties. It often degenerated into debauchery and lewd burlesque.

The festival had two themes. Firstly, and primarily, it was a day to laugh at the power of the church. Bishops were ridiculed. Piety was ridiculed.

Power was laughed at, and for at least a day the powerful seemed not to be in control.

The church doesn’t like to think of itself as powerful, particularly when our founder, Jesus, was critical of the religious hierarchy and suffered the consequences. Yet despite protestations, the church, for good and for ill, is a powerful body and like all powerful bodies is constantly in danger of taking itself too seriously.

words the humour of the feast danced across the line between acceptable and what was for many unacceptable.

So there were constant moves to stop the Feast. Yet the resulting backlash from the local laity and clergy was a more potent force than one can imagine these days, and bought the festival some time. There were compromises though: blasphemous extravagances and lewd acts were meant to happen only outside the church, and the boy bishop was only to be doused with three buckets of water during Vespers.

Eventually the Council of Basle forbade the Feast of Fools under the very severest penalties in 1435. Yet not before the Theological Faculty of Paris came to it’s defense arguing passionately “even a wine vat would burst if the bung-hole were not opened occasionally to let out the air”.

The wine vat is an interesting and profound metaphor, acknowledging our need to laugh and lampoon, and the role of humour in keeping humanity at its vintage best. n

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Or as Jim, my irreligious neighbour, put it: “The more hot air, the bigger the balloon; the bigger the balloon, the bigger the target; and the bigger the target the more they worry about little pricks.”

The second theme of the festival was fun. Risky fun. Risqué fun. There was little control over the fun, and open to individual interpretation fun frequently degenerated into debauchery. In other

Tui Motu InterIslands 25

marriage break-up

Trying to refloat a marriage on the rocks Paul Andrews

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harlie was asleep on the couch, heavy with drink. His wellfingered mobile lay beside him. Joanna does not know what prompted her to pick up the phone and scan the messages: maybe some sense of unease and distaste at the state of her marriage.

Her heart sank as she read the intimate, sexy words to her husband from a woman she did not know. In that moment her world crashed around her.

into her bed at night – Charlie would sleep elsewhere.

There had been signs, of course.

Charlie was drinking too much and absenting himself, always explaining he was with his friend Keith (who in turn was in a broken marriage and could be relied on as an alibi for Charlie in any crisis). Joanna was trying to establish herself in a new and responsible job.

Charlie blamed her both for being less available to him and the children, and for the state of the house – when she was home, Joanna wisely attended to the children more than to cleaning and sweeping. But of course Charlie knew how to make her feel guilty. He did just that when she confronted him; he went on the attack. He did not deny or apologise for his adultery, nor offer to give it up. He spoke of it as trivial, and blamed Joanna for wrecking the marriage; yet he was not at all clear that he wanted a separation.

Joanna is intelligent, a devout and vigorous Catholic. Every morning at Mass she belabours God in her mind, giving out and looking for guidance and help. She wants to be out of the house, and to see as little as possible of Charlie. But she sees the upset of the children, who need her at home more than ever. She knows they need a father as well. He may be godless (he has no time for religion) and unfaithful, but he is the only father they have.

When I met Joanna she was in the first agony of that conflict, pulled in every direction as though wild horses were tied to her limbs. Her job, in which many needy people drew on her, demanded huge energy and thought.

Her four children reacted to the tension in the house in different ways: the two older ones by acting up and seeking attention (to the point where the teenage boy was brought home drunk by the Gardai); the two younger by hanging onto her and snuggling

26 Tui Motu InterIslands

Worst of all was the conflict in herself, and the maelstrom of guilt, despair, rejection, fury at Charlie and the other woman, anxiety about the family’s and her own future, and desolation that the biggest decision of her life, her marriage, had turned out this way.

Should she throw out Charlie, go to a solicitor and launch a separation?

Her professional training as well as her upbringing have taught her what a bonus it can be for children to retain a bond with their father. But she wonders does anyone share her values. In a tennis match she is paired with a man who has left his wife for a woman twenty years younger. Every such encounter with a divorced man or woman makes Joanna feel more and more out on a limb.

Both sides went to solicitors, and started to work through the tough and distasteful details of what separation would involve, in access to children, in housing and money and dividing up the possessions acquired in 15 years together. It was a horrible task and a horrible time, full of uncertainties.

Charlie did not help. He wanted both the stability of a family and the titillation of a lover. He tried to be

the good-time Daddy, giving treats to the children, with an eye to keeping their affection and negotiating greater access. He was not keen to separate, but would not give up his lover. He was still drinking too much, still leaving his mobile around for curious eyes. The eldest girl sniffed a rat and charged him with two-timing, to his fury.

Christmas came and went, one Joanna tries to forget. Communication had dropped to a minimum, but the lawyers, once involved, maintained a momentum towards separation. Banks had to be asked for loans. The hardest issues for Joanna were not the practical ones that interested the lawyers, but issues of the heart. Am I right to separate? Could we save the marriage?

Have I still any love for Charlie? What is the right way forward, especially for the children? How can I keep my peace of soul, and a sense of goodness and of God? Joanna is lucky in that she is working for other people, achieving results with her skill, earning thanks and so retaining some self-esteem. Work is a help and could become an addiction.

She is lucky too in her brothers, who offer the best sort of support. So despite the months of indecision, living with but avoiding a husband who is not a husband, and despite the wild horses tearing at her heart, she is surviving. When Charlie moves out, her scene will be easier. My guess is that Charlie, once he is living alone, cooking and cleaning for himself, and possibly spurned by his lover, may be moved to contrition, apologise and beg to return, facing Joanna with another painful decision.

If only there was a happy ending! There was no happy ending in Jesus’ life. This has been a crucifixion for Joanna, and

scripture

Reflecting on Mark Susan Smith Mark 16:1-8 When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.

2

And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.

3

They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?”

4

When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

5

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed.

6

But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.

7

But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

8

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

M

ost people like a happy ending to a story, but Mark’s story does not offer that consolation to its readers. Mark’s resurrection account concludes by telling us that the women fled from the tomb, and said nothing for they were afraid. We know that the women’s silence was not absolute, and they obviously told the good news of Jesus’ resurrection to the disciples soon after the event.

However, the first Christian communities were as uneasy as many contemporary readers about the ending, and so, after verse 8, we read summaries of some of the ‘happy’ resurrection texts located in Matthew and Luke,

the crucifix has helped her to keep love alive in her battered heart. In all her anger and desolation, she feels closer than ever before to the suffering Jesus.

Pray for her. n Paul Andrews is a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist living in Dublin

such as the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus or Matthew’s great missionary command, and added to Mark’s conclusion sometime in the second century.

But what happens if we do take seriously the possibility that Mark intended to end his gospel at verse 8?

Verse 7 gives us some clues. The young man, sitting on the stone that has been rolled back tells the women to “go [and] tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee, there you will see him, just as he told you.”

We can presume that the disciples did go to Galilee, the place where discipleship began and where Jesus called Peter and Andrew, James and John to follow him (Mark 1:16-20). Later we read that Peter, James and John were with Jesus at his Transfiguration, and Jesus invited them to be with him in the Garden.

They were more enthusiastic about the Transfiguration than the Garden.

to be the beginning of a glorious, trouble-free existence. As Mark 13:913 makes clear, Christian discipleship after the Resurrection would be about being beaten in the synagogues, about being brought to trial, about brother betraying brother, fathers being against their sons, and being hated because of Jesus’ name.

Mark was clear that the future was not about freedom from suffering, so returning to Galilee means following the way of Jesus as spelt out during his Galilean ministry. Commentators suggest that the ‘unfinished’ conclusion indicates that contemporary disciples have to supply the ending. As University of Oxford Professor Tuckett writes: “It is up to the reader to supply the ending – and that is the perennial challenge of this gospel to all its readers today” (The Oxford Bible Commentary). n Dr Susan Smith is a Mission sister who teaches Biblical Studies at the School of Theology, University of Auckland

If the disciples were to meet with the risen Jesus in Galilee, this was not

Tui Motu InterIslands 27

books & film

Robert Fisk – journalist extraordinary “The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East” Robert Fisk Fourth Estate 2005 Review: Jim Elliston

S

hould Ahmed Zaoui be sent back to Algeria? After all the Algerian government has declared an amnesty, so his safety is guaranteed.

For the average Kiwi the word ‘government’ means a duly elected representative body that upholds the basic rights of its citizens. The Algerian government is not and does not. While Fisk treats the current Iraq disaster in depth, the story of Algeria over the past 170 years is instructive in that it exemplifies the history of many Middle Eastern countries. It illustrates the aggressors’ choice of words to portray their victims as responsible, the subterfuges used to hide the true reasons for their actions, and the absolute lack of humanity portrayed by so many in the name of peace, religion or patriotism, and more latterly, democracy. The disastrous consequences of the Bush/Blair venture were predicted by many who understood Middle Eastern history.

In 1960 Algeria was still a French colony.

Contemporary French mentality is summed up in a gravestone inscription for a colonel who “died in his county France, in a city called Algiers”. In 1830 the French commander proclaimed to his forces subjugating Algeria “…

So long oppressed by a brutal and rapacious soldiery, the Arab will see you as liberators…”

The French openly defended torture and committed innumerable atrocities during the 1954-62 struggle for independence, for France was “fighting to defend the West against Middle Eastern Islamic fanaticism”. France gave Algeria her independence in 1962.

But the new Algerian government

28 Tui Motu InterIslands

quickly showed it had learnt a lot from the French, with assassinations, rigged elections, and the imposition of a dictatorship.

Eventually, young Algerian unemploy­ ed, tiring of empty promises of a better future, turned to a militant form of Islam. The Algerian army, foreseeing that the Islamists were going to win, demanded suspension of the 1992 democratic elections. Fisk writes: “I was present as the Algerian military went to war with Islamists for the same ostensible reason (to purge the country of terrorists) torturing and executing their prisoners with as much abandon as their enemies.”

As in present-day Palestine and Iraq democracy was O.K. as long as people voted the right way. The same regime is still in power in Algeria.

Fisk wrote this book (nearly 1400 pages in all) over a period of 15 years from written and taped notes. He skewers Western politicians and news media, and details the hypocrisy and duplicity of past and present leaders of various Muslim countries and Israel. Among the countries treated are Lebanon, Afghanistan, Syria, Iran, and Armenia.

The ‘Great War’ (1914-1918) referred to in the title was the one called “the war to end all wars”. But the victors, mindful of their countries’ business interests, sowed the seeds of numerous other wars by dividing the Middle East into areas of influence and installing their puppet rulers. He chronicles significant events in many countries, showing how history repeats itself time and again. Copious footnotes allow the narrative to flow while furnishing detailed source references. A useful chronological index and a detailed subject index add greatly to the value.

He acknowledges that Israel has an absolute right to its own territory (as laid down by the U.N.) and

likewise the Palestinians. He describes murderous attacks of Israeli military forces on innocent Palestinians and the subterfuges employed by Western politicians to cover them up – all the while telling the stories of ordinary Muslims in their many countries, and of Israelis’ horrific suffering at the hands of fanatics, with compassion and insight. His descriptions of some of the tortures Saddam – “a monster” – and his minions inflicted on ordinary Iraqis are truly chilling.

He excoriates those journalists who sanitise these immoral actions and those of Western forces in Iraq. “Why cannot we abide by the rules of war that we rightly demand others should obey? And why do we journalists – yet again, war after war – collude in this immorality by turning a ruthless and cruel and illegal act into a ‘new twist’ or into ‘timesensitive material?” (‘Time-sensitive’ i.e. we have information that a ‘militant’ is currently in a certain building. We don’t have time to check the accuracy as he may escape, so we bomb the building, and if a few innocent civilians are killed or maimed, even if he isn’t there, that’s ‘collateral damage’.)

This disturbing book shows why our Government was correct in standing firm in the face of taunts of ‘antiAmericanism’ by sections of the political, business and general community.

The blasphemous misuse of ‘religion’ and ‘God’s Will’ figure time and again.

Pope John Paul II in the immediate lead up to the invasion of Iraq criticised those claiming they had God’s blessing on their intentions. The context of his remarks made it clear that Messrs Bush and Blair were included in his condemnation along with Saddam.

As Robert Fisk says, “These people”, from Muslim countries “do want some freedoms – especially freedom from us.” n

Partners for the dance

Bringing up Boys He’ll Be OK – growing gorgeous boys into good men

by Celia Lashlie HarperCollins 2005 Price: $34.95 Review: Mike Crowl

L

ashlie’s ‘Good Man Project’ grew out of an energetic discussion at a Heads of Boys Schools Conference in 2001, after the talk had focussed on such questions as: What is the definition of a good man? What is the essence of being male? What does it mean to be a young man in today’s world?

As a result Lashlie spent time travelling around a number of boys’ schools listening to what both the boys and the adults had to say, her job being to collect the ‘stories’ and hold up a mirror for men to see where NZ is in relation to its male youth, and where it can go from here.

Don’t come to this book expecting a polite, restrained conversation between males of different ages and a woman who has a particular gift of getting through to men. Lashlie asks, and allows, all manner of questions. The answers come straight from the shoulder, often with the language of the street included, and often revealing some shocking attitudes – especially for people closeted in a Christian ‘world’ where the male youth are, generally speaking, polite and wellmannered. n

Shall We Dance – now available on DVD. Review: Mike Crowl

S

ome of the stuffier critics didn’t like Shall We Dance very much, partly because the Japanese movie it’s based on was very good. But the exuberance in the Hollywood version is heartwarming, and it’s a delight to see people dancing on screen again.

The sharp rhythms of the rumba scene (“The rumba is the vertical expression of a horizontal wish”) and the exhilaration of the Ballroom Dancing Contest remind us of just how good Hollywood can be when it puts its dancing shoes on.

The story concerns a man in mid-life crisis (Richard Gere), who suddenly decides to take up dancing, partly because of the mysterious woman he sees in the dance studio window, but even more because he needs to break out of his quiet desperation.

Jennifer Lopez is the woman in the window: the loss of her dancing partner and her status has crushed her, and she’s struggling to break out of what almost amounts to depression. Although there’s one very sexy dance between her and the hero towards the end, she’s not interested

I BELIEVE within the CHURCH Described as “a personal witness” this book

by Bishop Peter Cullinane enables readers to discover their own story within the bigger picture of incarnation, redemption and human destiny.

Easy to read.

Quality paper with colour illustrations. Ideal gift for RCIA candidates. $12.95 + $2 p/p.

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in him sexually. This is a surprisingly moral film, and Dance is this woman’s first love, not some middle-aged office worker called John Clark (!)

Susan Sarandon has a rather off-centre role as Clark’s wife: she thinks her husband is having an affair, wants to hold their marriage together, finds out he isn’t, and is yet puzzled by his attraction to dancing. But she has the best scene in the movie when she tells the divorced detective who’s been trailing her husband what it means to be married. Marriage, she tells him, makes you a ‘witness’ to one other person’s life, gives them a reality they lack, gives them someone who cares about the important and mundane things in their life. Marriage says: “Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness.”

There’s plenty of joy in this movie, lots of humour, a little crudity, and several well-rounded characters – including a private investigator with a penchant for quoting famous lines in a new context.

Oh, and did I mention the music?

Great music. n We will find those books for you Books mentioned in this paper, or any other books you can’t find, can be ordered from:

O C Books

Use our email to order – or to receive our fortnightly email newsletter Tollfree 0800 886 226 99 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin Ph/Fax (03) 477 9919 email: shop@ocbooks.co.nz

Visit our website http://www.ocbooks.co.nz

Tui Motu InterIslands 29

comment

Justice for Slobodan Milosevic Die he or justice must.

I

Crosscurrents

– Paradise Lost

n June 2001 former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic was delivered to the International Court in The Hague, charged with crimes against humanity. Now, almost five years later, he is found dead in his cell, accused for his undeniable crimes but never having to face judgment. What is the penalty here on earth for men like Milosevic, Mugabe, Saddam Hussein and the perpetrators of the atrocities in the Sudan? A prosecuting lawyer in The Hague said that Milosevic’s death would leave a “strange sense of limbo”.

To unravel the Kosovo war and to isolate the crimes of the main protagonists (including the United Nation’s forces) is difficult. Josip Tito, a former resistance leader of the peoples of that region, often said that Yugoslavia had six republics, five nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and only one party.

Milosevic incited a series of ethnic conflicts that brought death and des­ truction to thousands. In The Hague’s preliminary hearings he was unre­ pentant of his crimes and refused to recognise his accusers. The trial was becoming a prolonged showcase, testing the patience of the court and exposing the complexities of international law.

John Honoré

must be served and retribution sought but to what degree?

The antithesis of punishment is forgiveness. But are not the crimes of such men beyond forgiveness? How is mercy to flourish without making a mockery of justice? Truly, the problem of evil and how to deal with it leaves a “strange sense of limbo”.

Israel a rogue state

I

srael’s storming of a prison in Jericho reeks of collaboration with British and American forces who withdrew their monitors and thus enabled the Israeli army to demolish the prison.

It held the suspected killers of an Israeli Cabinet minister. They are now imprisoned in Israel where, Prime Minister Olmert has the audacity to say, they will get a fair trial.

The cycle of violence starts again and marks a return to despair for Palestinian civilians. Predictably, the outrage ignited calls for retaliation against the Israelis. The three Western plagues of imperialism, colonialism and Zionism have returned in force to the Middle East.

Yet justice must be seen to be done and a trial must be staged in order that the rule of law be upheld. In truth, if the life of Saddam Hussein were to end in the same way, it would save his jailers having to enrage many Iraqis by killing him. How will they execute him? By firing squad, hanging, beheading? Is death ‘too good’ for such a villain?

The politics of Olmert have no regard for any possible peace process. The Declaration of Independence read by David Ben Gurion in 1948 stated that Israel would “uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens”. This has never happened. Israel possesses an arsenal of nuclear weapons and is now threatening a missile strike against Iran, with the approval of George W. Bush, of course.

Slobodan Milosevic’s demonic disregard for the life of others branded him as an arch criminal who must be punished for the good of society. Nevertheless, if the law is vengeful or vindictive, then it reflects badly on that society. Justice

For the past 30 years, Israel has been violating all the United Nations resolutions referring to it and has never once been sanctioned. With impunity, it violates every law of humanity against Palestinian civilians by ethnic

30 Tui Motu InterIslands

cleansing, assassination, destruction of property and confiscation of water. It is a litany of atrocities that will lead to another round of anti-semitism or the downfall of Israel itself. For how long can Israel ignore the rest of the world?

Tertiary ‘business model’

C

anterbury University is at the centre of a debate which its Pro-Vice-Chancellor describes as the “transition to a more accountable model”. This cannot be achieved “without some reduction in academic staff numbers”. His language says it all. Professors in other departments are challenging his concepts of universities as places of higher learning.

The College of Arts is not paying its way so there will be redundancies.

However, Economics, Management Science (!) and Masters of Business Administration are paying their way.

The arts faculty with subjects like English, American Studies, French, Russian and Classics no longer fits the business model. Profit is the name of the game. So forget that stuff about a liberal education.

Over the last ten years, this column­ ist has attended courses in the Arts Faculty and has witnessed its decline.

The qualifications of the lecturers and the standard of teaching has been eroded by the fear of redundancy and the constant need to fight for the recognition and the survival of the disciplines. The number of students has fallen. There are not many Asian students in languages and classics.

According to the Pro-Vice-Chancellor, student demand is what drives the University. For a fee of $660, I could study Greek Philosophy. The same course would cost an international student $2,786. The CEO of the University does not take long to figure out which student he wants. Tertiary education is now a business. Forget the title Pro-Vice-Chancellor. n

A word from Rome – and its spokesman

O

ne of my best discoveries on the Internet in recent years has been the weekly column, The Word from Rome, written by John L. Allen. Imagine my delight when last month I learnt that he would be speaking in Auckland the day after being guest speaker at the launching in Sydney of a pastoral letter of the Australian bishops on the church and the media.

I was not disappointed at what Mr Allen had to say. He gave an insightful overview of the shape the pontificate of Benedict XVI has taken and of the direction in which it seems to be heading.

Who is John L Allen? Arguably the best informed reporter in English on Vatican affairs. Full marks to the director of Catholic Communications and to the editor of New Zealand Catholic for snaring him after his visit to Australia and getting him to visit our land however briefly. Since he began his weekly bulletin some five years ago, he has become widely recognised as a reliable and balanced reporter of the Roman scene.

In his column the week following, he reported on his impressions of New Zealand. He saw our country as “a distant Pacific outpost where the Anglo-Saxon work ethic has fused with a laid-back island ethos, producing a culture of hardworking people who come off as remarkably unflappable and unpretentious”. In a nation of a little over four million, where the barriers that insulate leaders from their people are not nearly as thick as elsewhere, he observed that it’s remarkably difficult to put on airs.

He instanced this by saying that he found Cardinal Williams, whom he interviewed while here, to be one of the most unassuming Princes of the Church he was ever likely to meet.

The cardinal came to meet the visiting journalist wearing an open-collar shirt and casual slacks. Momentarily stuck in

Roman protocol, Allen ask if it was OK to remove his suit jacket. The cardinal laughed and said the only reason he didn’t come down in shorts is because he thought Allen might have a camera.

L

istening to him speak in Auckland, I gathered that John Allen was tickled at the idea that he, a reporter on Roman affairs, found himself in the country that of all nations on the planet was the most distant from Rome. But he certainly serves to keep us informed despite the distance.

I have for several years been receiving by email John Allen’s weekly report. I have passed on to several enquirers information as to the way to get on the mailing list. No need to do this any more. Among the many excellent features of the newly revised website of New Zealand Catholic is availability each week of John’s column.

Go to the website Look down the left column to “Opinion”, then to “John Allen”. Click on that, and at the bottom of the page that comes up, click on “Read John Allen’s Column”.

The current week’s report will appear.

That is not all. “Archives” at the top of the current report will give you access to all the past numbers. Go back two weeks to February 24, and read the full interview with Cardinal Williams. Go back to October of last year and get day-by-day comments on the Synod of the Eucharist.

I feel out of character writing this month’s column in such a positive tone. But I cannot help hoping that more of you will henceforth share the pleasure and enlightenment I have had weekly by reading what John L Allen has to report. n

Humphrey O’Leary Fr Humphrey O’Leary is rector of the Redemptorist cvommunity in Glendowie, Auckland

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Tui Motu InterIslands 31

on the stile

The church exclusive Eve Adams

I

love the story about the spring of water that arises from the earth, is discovered and then fenced and restricted, only to eventually dry up and appear somewhere else. I am sure I’m not the first to wonder at the parallels so easily drawn with the state of our at times seemingly ‘dry’ church, and the fences it has erected and carefully guarded over the centuries.

My discomfort about these fences plays a significant part in my current ambiguity regarding the church.

With Easter drawing close, I wonder whether as a Catholic Church we are more a restricted club than a gospel breathing living entity. These calendar celebrations have always heralded vexed questions for me. I have immediate family and many close friends who are committed to Christ and a gospel life,

and who have embodied Christ to me in times of need, in too many ways to count. Yet, not being Catholic, they are unwelcome to celebrate with me at the communion table in our so-called ‘catholic’ church. This causes me a great deal of pain, not to mention shame.

And yet denying other denominations should come as no surprise when the church cannot even welcome to the table its own divorced/remarried members. The church is supposed to represent family, and yet I think most families do a lot better in the forgiveness/compassion and glass house/stone stakes than the church appears to. If our own families didn’t invite us to the table after the emotional rollercoaster that divorce inevitably is, and just expected us to stand by and

watch while everyone else ate, then most of us would walk away from that family immeasurably hurt. I think the fact that some divorced people stay in the church at all after this sort of treatment shows where the true weight of forgiveness and humility lies, and it is not with the institution.

According to www.catholic.com the Eucharist is an “intimate encounter with Christ”. When we consider the example that Christ continually gave; who he ate with, who he chose to sit with, who he called to discipleship, who he talked with and on and on, then I believe that its clear who he stands next to when willing people are refused at his table because of our fences. This Easter the fences are too high for me and I am choosing to celebrate the miracle of the resurrection not in the Catholic Church, but at dawn on our local beach, with friends, and no fences. I may even see a spring of water rise from the sand. n

Director Catholic Social Services • • •

Key Leadership Position Community Wellbeing Focus Wellington Catholic Social Services is the agency within the Archdiocese of Wellington which provides counselling to individuals, couples and families, delivers community social work, violence prevention and school-based self-development programmes and which provides a community outreach on behalf of the Archdiocese.

The present Director is stepping down after many years and Catholic Social Services is now seeking applications from suitably experienced professionals for the position.

Reporting to a Board of Directors, operating within Archdiocesan policies and heading a highly committed and capable team of 10, the Director will:

• • • • •

Take responsibility for the effective leadership and coordination of the activities of Catholic Social Services; Provide professional direction for the various programmes offered by Catholic Social Services; Possess significant social services management experience and key skills in people management, community liaison and networking within the social services sector; Be an excellent communicator with well developed interpersonal skills, an understanding of bi-cultural and multi-cultural environments and a commitment to the aims and objectives of Catholic Social Services; Hold an appropriate tertiary qualification in counselling, social work or a related discipline.

This is a challenging and demanding management position. The appointee will have the chance to play a key role in the development of Catholic Social Services and of the Archdiocese of Wellington.

Contact Mike Hurdle or Catharina Vossen at MICAH Partners for more information on phone: 0-4-499 4749, mobile: 021-552 929, fax: 0-4-499 7375 or e-mail: contact@micahpartners.co.nz or send your resume by Friday 21 April 2006 to PO Box 499, Wellington.

32 Tui Motu InterIslands