There was something about the fresh air, the beating sun, the crashing waves, the scantingly clad men and women, the gross commercialisation of chocolate, the sandy beaches and the flies and mosquitos that made me wonder whether I had spent my Easter in a completely different country. To paraphrase the quote: Easter is another country; they do things differently there. Well, three friends and I ventured to the place where every Aucklander has their holiday home and room for the boat and the barbie: the Coromandel.

The Coromandel is famous for its, um, horticultural industry (you’re in business if you’re selling large powerful lamps that discreetly fit into a garage or basement) and, in the last few days, for poisoned honey pots.  It also had the most extraordinary weather I have ever experienced at Easter time. I always associate Easter with scarves and cold, crisp mornings and heaters and wooly jumpers.

Now, it might be because Easter is three weeks early (which would really mess with your theology if you thought about it for too long) or because Daylights Savings has been postponed in New Zealand (coincidentally by three weeks), but it was like the middle of a really hot, hot summer. Chocolate melted. Easter eggs are not meant to melt at Easter. It’s a sign when they do.

I am about to mark a significant milestone in my years’ on this planet so I can say with some certainty that this Easter was an abberation; or Al Gore is absolutely right and melting Easter eggs will forever be an inconvenient truth. Maybe next year I’ll pack my togs once more and head to the beaches with the rest of the chattering classes. Or maybe I will find those gloves and the heater and be assured and rested in the knowledge that Easter will once again be cold and crisp and that people will, by risk of contracting pnemonia, wear more clothes than a skimpy bikini or a pair of shorts.  

But just in case, I did go out and buy a new pair of swimming togs. I discovered that the ones I owned were prone to fall off in a big wave. They didn’t fall off, I hasten to add, but only because I grasped them firmly with both hands, which made it all the more challenging to swim. I’m very modest, you understand. These new togs are nuclear (they have a red tinge about them which says ‘radioactive’) and extremely likely to never fall down in full view of a crowded beach, which was a strong selling point frankly.  

So that was Easter - the middle of summer in March, card games late into the night, long walks along treacherous paths to places with charming names like ‘Cathedral Cove’ and ‘Sailor’s Grave’, and a constant battle between big powerful waves and me. I won, even if I almost lost my shorts, swallowed half the sea water and collected so much sand that even the clothes I didn’t have with me are covered with it. Easter’s another country; we did things differently there.  

Meditations | No Comments »

I’ve been spending every day this week meditating upon/pontificating/waxing lyrically about Easter on the radio waves. Anybody who listens to Radio Rhema just before the 6:00pm news and the cooking and/or eating of the dinner, can hear my dulcet tones talk about Mary Magdalene or Chinese martyrs or hope. Talking on radio - which I do quite a bit of - is a remarkably strange and out-of-body experience. There’s me and the host, an affable fellow, and quite possibly no-one or maybe a few people listening somewhere out there between the radio waves bouncing from one radio tower to another.

But I hope that it’s all worth it, that it’s not just me and Rob having a nightly chat before newstime and that people out there, even if it’s people who believed this anyway, can say ‘thank God it’s Friday’ tomorrow and mean it in a more meaningful and significant way than they might otherwise at the end of a week.

Morning coffee conversation at work today was interesting. There were those who bemoaned the fact that you can now buy hot cross buns without the crosses (which, as one of my colleagues rightly pointed out, are just fruit buns at three times the price) and there were others who bemoaned their taxpayer dollars being used to fund the large cross that sits atop Wellington’s Mt Victoria. But each person around the room, of every religious persuasion and none, knew that there was something greatly significant about the shops all being closed tomorrow and the fact that we get a long weekend as well.  

I wonder whether people think any further than the fact that the crosses aren’t on the buns or there’s a cross on a hill and think about, well, matters more suited to the season? One person who I know does, because I read his regular column and listen to his radio show, is Garrison Keillor. His experience, which you can read about here, might not be too dissimilar to others this Easter time who say, one way or another, thank God it’s Friday.

Christian writing, Meditations | No Comments »

Nothing epitomised the 1980s better than the film Wall Street, starring Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko. The theme of the movie? Greed is Good.

The latest Time magazine would indicate that the Millennial Generation is following in Gekko’s steps. How much they spend and what they spend it on is so different from their parents’ generation, that no wonder their parents (and boomers and Gen Xers in general) are having a hard time understanding how Millennial’s work. How can they spend so much money when they don’t have any money?

But let’s not just blame the Britney Spears-inspired, Facebook-using teeny-boppers. Look at any voluntary organisation and you’re going to find a generation gap. The late-Gen Xers/Gen Y’s aren’t there. They’re not giving time and they’re not giving money. Membership numbers and membership fees are dropping. After school/university/the OE, this generation hit the workforce and disappear into a world that was once so foreign to them that they promised themselves, in their halycon student days, that they would never sell out to.

This problem - of money and how to spend it - is one that two TSCF staff, Mark Grace and Nigel Pollock, and I are going to seek to somehow answer. The method will be through an edited book called Catalyst and the three of us met the other day to discuss the plan of attack. Mark and I will find people - probably not Gordon Gekko - to write about graduate life and the issues that graduates’ face.

And hopefully, once the book is published (later this year) we can be assured that it will not be shoplifted from an independent bookseller, which, according to an interiew with Cheryl Sucher from New York on the Kim Hill show, is a real problem.

Though the kind of books that tend to be shoplifted are contemporary classics: Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, Lolita. I somehow don’t see that this Catalyst book will make it onto that list. But I do hope that it will be read, if only so people figure out sooner rather than later (think Eliot Spitzer) that greed, in whatever form it takes, is not good.

Christian writing, Meditations | No Comments »

So I went to this cocktail function and my colleague made a joke about MI5 to a guy who actually works for the security service. Now, that was funny. I don’t know if my colleague knew that he was making jokes to a spook, and whether that’s such a good idea anyway. (I’ll come into the office on Monday and find that my colleague has been sent to Serbia or Inner Mongolia on some fact-finding mission and he won’t be back for a few decades.) But these kind of cocktail parties, where important people and spies gather in rooms where there are leather chairs and knowing looks and so much subterranean gossip that it makes Desperate Housewives look like the Country Women’s Institute, are the kind of cocktail parties I get paid to go to. I have been to so many I have lost count. Often the same people are there. Or those that aren’t there aren’t there because they have been summoned by Very Important People to discuss matters of national security, or to play golf, which often amount to the same thing.

And so we discuss all manner of important things, and find out gossip about people we have never met, and hear whispers and pretend we don’t. It’s all very subterfuge. To anybody who just walks into the room it would appear to be like any other cocktail party, with cheap wine and bad canapés, but often this is all a façade, a show, a bit of theatre. There are the main players, who talk to the people they want to talk about things they need to know. And there are the rest of us, who meet people whose names we promptly forget and know, just know, that we will see them again, next week, at the next cocktail party. Unless they are on the golf course or I am in Siberia.

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Listen to Andrew’s meditations for Easter, live on Radio Rhema, from the 17th-20th of March, at approx 5.50pm NZ time.

For frequencies go to www.rhema.co.nz

Christian writing, Meditations, On Radio, Other | No Comments »

Apologies to vegetarians and animal rights activists, but I confess there was a time when I felt a craving for all the theology I tried to devour to be thick and meaty; something into which one might sink one’s teeth. I still try to avoid thin soup - it has little taste and it does not nourish. Yet, there is a genre of theological reflection that is, in its own way, robust but it doesn’t threaten mental indigestion and theological constipation. Walking the Emmaus Journey is an example of that sort of book.

Indeed, clarity and accessibility have always been a mark of sustaining theology. By displaying those virtues while writing within the theological enterprise, Andrew Butcher is in good company. For example, Calvin wrote as a pastor, and Tom Wright, today’s consummate thick tome-writer, can also serve up offerings that are hearty without being full of footnotes. So can Pannenburg. Indeed the great Barth - another pastorally concerned theologian - wrote both the huge Church Dogmatics and the superb little book, The Humanity of God. Of course, Butcher’s aspirations lean much more in the direction of emulating Adrian Plass than Wolfhart Pannenburg! But Butcher shows a keen appreciation [of] profound theology. Hence, the book often provides insights that make a significant contribution to one’s food for the journey.

Walking the Emmaus Journey is a series of twenty-six short reflections in three sections: The Journey Begins; Who We Meet on the Journey; With Others on the Journey - each loosely derived from an aspect of Luke 24:13-35.

Butcher finds the profound in the mundane and writes about the light that may yet be discerned in the shadows. For Butcher, the mundane and even the painful aren’t merely to be endured, they can be occasions for celebration - not celebrated in themselves, but noted in thankful mode inasmuch as they point us to resurrection hope.

Of course, this life-is-a-journey metaphor is far from original. But Butcher isn’t seeking to be original, simply faithful. He writes because he wants to say again - albeit out of his unique experience - what has been said before. He writes to affirm the gospel handed on by the apostles and to bear witness to the way the good news of God, in Jesus Christ, sustains his life. As such, the book is an invitation to travel with Butcher as he seeks to journey with Jesus.

One of the most memorable ideas in the book is in the reflection “Ode to Joy” in which Butcher muses upon his participation in rehearsing the singing (and one point quacking like a duck!) of Beethoven’s choral symphony. “Music can be heard in the rests. The power of the music is when something is not being played, when there’s a pause, a breath, a moment of grace.” How true! Maranatha! With Butcher we await the appearing of the Lord of the Sabbath - we may expect to meet him in Walking the Emmaus Journey.

Reviewed by Gavin Drew in Stimulus: The New Zealand Journal of Christian Thought and Practice, Vol 16, Issue 1, Feb 2008.

Walking the Emmaus Journey is available from University Bookshop, Dunedin - use the ordering facility at www.unibooks.co.nz

Book reviews, Christian writing, Other, Published Writing | 1 Comment »

Last night, we went to see the Rob Reiner film The Bucket List

It’s a film about two terminally ill men who leave their hospital ward and set out to achieve a list of things before they die - hence the title: a list of things to do before they kick the bucket. It is a deeply moving film, which has its light moments set against moments of great tenderness.

It’s also an interesting film about hope. I’m currently writing a book about hope - it is very nearly finished. Is there a list on which we can write the things in life that give us hope? Are there people or places or experiences which, in their unique way, cause us to have hope in the face of despair? Is hope achieving what we write down on a bucket list?

The film’s website identifies a Facebook application of “My bucket list” that you can share with your friends. A novelty perhaps. A clever marketing cross-over maybe. But also an illustration of people searching for hope in places (hospitals, sickness, loneliness) where hope is harder to find?

Watch the film. It’s worth it. Take a box of tissues with you. And find hope.

Christian writing, Meditations | No Comments »