When tragedy strikes

A lot of my friends over the last five years have started or extended their families. While there were a few scares along the way, each pregnancy and birth has produced children that are healthy and developing well. So often has this been the case that it seemed that every birth would turn out this way.

But this all changed this week with some really awful news. As I mentioned in my last post I'm doing some basic Italian classes as something different this year. Our tutor was pregnant and well into the third trimester. As of last week everything seemed to be going well. But we arrived at this week's class to find the tutor missing. We were told that she had just given birth, but the baby had died.

In the short time she had taken to us we had all warmed to her. She was so full of life, so passionate about the subject she was teaching, and so looking forward to the new addition to her family.

It was a tragedy. Neither she nor her family deserved this. Its not right and its not fair, but it happened. And when faced with such loss and pain what can you say?

Its only words

I am doing something new this year - trying to learn a new language, Italian to be precise, the language of love (or is that French?). Actually it will be just a few phrases, enough to order a beer, or find my way to the hotel.

I am enjoying the challenge, even if I suck. I am finding that you need rubber lips and things are never as intuitive as you think they should be.

But as I try to learn how to introduce myself to strangers and tell them who my am, I am struck by how much I take my ability to communicate for granted. Words are powerful; they help us to connect with others, to share experiences, thoughts, ideas, and feelings. Words can build up, or they can destroy.

I believe in the power of words. I try to provide positive words to my friends, my family and those I work with. But I know that there are times when my words are not positive. Sometimes I let fly with words that afterwards I'd prefer not to have been said.

I believe in a God though who is never like that. His words of encouragement sometimes astound me. Sometimes he gives me words for other people, sometimes they are delivered by others to me. And sometimes he speaks to me in the strangest places. Like a couple of days ago I was painting the outside of my house, one of my long term projects that are keeping my busy at the moment. And as I was brushing on the exterior gloss with as much skill as my amateur efforts allow I was letting my mind wander. It was during this stream of consciousness moment that I felt a little voice inside me tell me "hold onto the dream that has been placed inside of me". Which during the current period of reflection I am going through is just what I wanted to hear. for I had been wondering whether I should abandon some dreams that I'd been waiting for, in some cases for years, dreams which seem to be, for all intents and purposes, dead and buried with no hope of resurrection.

Of course with such words of encouragement there always the challenge to trust and truthfulness. There are always the questions as to whether what I've heard is the real thing of the figment of an overly active imagination (Or maybe inhaling too many paint fumes).

So there is a time of testing, a time of further waiting to see if the word is true or not. I wish there was a short cut, a way of seeing before the event with absolute certainty. But then if I had absolute certainty there would be no room for faith.

Among the paint fumes

While the weather allows it I’ve been doing a bit of house painting. It can be a rather mindless task at times, all the preparation and sanding, but it allows a kind disconnected dissociated state to emerge where one’s mind can wander into those recesses that it has never been for a long time.

And during those dissociated periods I’ve been trying to take stock of my life, where I’ve been and where I am going. Heavy stuff eh, but then as I look back on some of my recent posts I would say that I have been doing some deep thinking recently, not that I’ve come up with any definitive answers. It can bee a bit like searching for the meaning to life, the universe and everything. It might not be 42 as in the book. But even finding the answer is meaningless until I've figured out what the question is.

Sounds like I’ve been letting the paint fumes get to my head a bit too much. Too much time to think and let my mind wander. But there you have it. This is where my head is at at the moment. And in the midst of these hazy moments I keep on trying to figure out why life is the way it is and not the way I'd planned it all those years ago before I became burnt out and cynical.

Break is over. Time to head back to the paint brush. I'll try not to breath too many fumes this time. I promise!

Happy Valentines

It's overly commercial. But still its a good thing to celebrate. So for those who have just found love, or to those who have seen that love grow through the seasons of life, who may have weathered many storms but find themselves more deeply in love than the day they first met.

Happy Valentines

Come, take my hand and walk with me
Through the fields
By the light of the moon
Ah look and see
The stars dance and sing
In sweet harmony

Come take my hand and walk with me
All that I am
I give to you
My hopes, my dreams,
My heart too

Come take my hand and walk with me
Together let us discover the mystery
That is love
Where two become one

Come take my hand and walk with me
Until my strengths fades and my eyes grow dim
And then may my final words only be
Of the love I found in thee

Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match

It is truly amazing how banal radio contests are. And when you get close to Valentines Day the banality stakes goes up several notches. This stuck early one morning as my alarm radio blared forth switching on the radio in the shrill attempt to tell me its “time to get up!”

And in the early hours of that morning the announcers, in an overly gregarious tone that just shouldn’t be allowed, announced their latest contest with a Valentines twist. They would find three eligible (as in single) guys, knock on the door of an equally eligible female and then have her question the guys and decided who she would go out with, fully paid by the radio station.

Now why am I relating this rather forgettable tale from the depth of my sleep deprivation? Is it lack of coffee? Have I run out of things to say? Or is it something worse?

Well maybe the later. For one of the throwaway lines used to introduce the competition caught my interest. It was along the lines of “we all know how difficult it is for singles to find someone”. Now this is in an age when we are overwhelmed by choice. In fact that is the hallmark of the modern consumer lead society. And there are now more avenues than ever before for finding that someone. Just witness the growth in the internet.

Yet despite the freedom and choice now on offer how many are able to find a relationship that is truly satisfying? We are social beings, built for intimacy. But the fragmentation of modern society is pushing people further apart. The irony is that we are connected and more accessible than ever before. But the quality of communication is shallow, failing to engage the heart and the soul.

Relationships and intimacy have become commercialised. Partners are chosen and discarded on the basis of what can be gained from the other. Money, power, looks, job, position and charisma are all that matters. Competitions and reality shows like the Bachelor/Bachelorette point to the desire for attachment, while demeaning its value.

Elaine Storkey, in her commentary on the current quest for intimacy wrote that “our society has failed to observe that intimacy comes from God”. Therefore the desire for intimacy cannot ultimately be met anywhere else but from God.

The Christian community representing God’s love on earth should be where love in all its forms can be found and expressed. A place of intimacy, caring and support. Yet even in the church there seems to be a crisis in intimacy. Many within find themselves disconnected from each other and from God. Being a Christian has not proved to be an antidote to the desperate search for relationship.

Storkley observes that for humans love is not and option but a requirement. How that requirement is met will be one of the major challenges in the 21st century, both inside and outside the Church. While the church has the answer in God who is the source of all love, it needs to put that love into action.

Non-realism and the radical theology of Lloyd Geering

Recently I’ve been doing a bit of reading. Not the usual bed time story but some fairly heavy reading on the work of one NZ’s leading and controversial theologians Lloyd Geering. Geering infamously was the subject of a heresy trial in the late 60s for denying among other things the reality of the virgin birth. Geering was exonerated and over the last forty years has developed his controversial theories on the nature of god and religion.

In developing his ideas Geering was heavily influenced by three major ideas. The first, based 20th centenary analysis of language (which in turn is based on the ideas of Emmanuel Kant) is that we construct our own world, influenced by language and culture. The second is a progressive view of history strongly influenced by the axial theory of Karl Jaspers. The third theme is projectionism influenced by Freud and Feuerbach in which humans are assumed to project onto God our deepest longings and desires.

From these strands Geering concludes that God is a myth. For Geering myth has its place. It helps us to make sense of our world and societies to have a common set of values. However in the modern age the idea of a supernatural god is a myth that is no longer relevant. As a result orthodox theology is in the process of terminal decline. And unless Christianity adapts to the modern world it will die. In this Geering echoes the thinking of other luminaries of the post theistic Christianity such as Don Cupitt of the Sea of Faith Movement and Bishop Spong. The belief in a supernatural god, a spirit realm and in Jesus as being both fully human and divine is, according to such thinkers untenable in the 21st century.

Yet contrary to the assertions of Geering that supernaturalist belief is declining, most people still cling to “premodern” beliefs in some kind of spiritual entity. And the Christian community is not fading away, but in many parts of the world, particularly in Africa and South America is growing strongly.

Geering, despite his undoubted intelligence, represents the last gasp of liberal theology. Christianity without God is not Christianity. By denying the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, Geering is stripping Christianity of its power, reducing it to a variant of secular humanism. Such a movement is doomed to die for it shares with humanism its fundamental weakness, namely the inability to regenerate the human heart. Nor is it particularly new. It is based on a radical nominalism, a heresy that has been in existence for centuries.

Geering, like his fellow liberal theologians is a study in the failure of the human intellect, when it divorces itself from the God who created it. All its utterances become nothing more than a clanging cymbal, full of noise signifying nothing.

Khe Sanh

A had a strange experience last night. I caught this documentary on the “most hated family in America”. The family had formed themselves into a church of about 60-70 members and part of their Christian duty set up anti-homosexual protests outside the funerals of veterans killed in the Iraq war. Their justification for their protests was that the veteran’s death was part of God’s judgement due to America’s depravity and sin.

Now you may think that this kind of fanatical religious bigotry is found only in American cults. Not so. I grew up in an extremely conservative church in NZ that among other things believed that the Maori should have been wiped out by the colonists, and that God’s wrath was about to be poured out upon the sinful world. Only the elect, i.e. us would escape God’s judgement.

I was only able to watch a few minutes. It brought back too many painful memories of the emotional and spiritual abuse. For those growing up in the church of my youth, every aspect of our lives was controlled, down to who we could date and who we could marry. The pastor was considered to be omnicompetent and could veto any proposed match. Even before we could go out on a “date” we had to get the pastors permission. We constantly lived in fear. Fear of doing the wrong thing, of being seen as a dissident, of missing out and ending up in the lake of fire. We lived a life of shallow compliance, believing that obedience was the way to godliness.

Strange how even years/decades later watching something like this can bring back memories long since forgotten. Not that I expect anyone who has not been through a similar experience to understand. When I first came out I tried to talk about it with the new Christian community that I had become involved with, but all I met was a wall of disbelief, and a look that asked “are you an alien?”

In one sense I am. I still feel disconnected, rootless. I am still waiting for God to redeem the years that the locusts have eaten. I have yet to meet anyone who is able to go the extra mile, who is able to understand or at least listen, who will not walk away when I want to go deeper. There is God you might say, but for most of my life God has been on mute. He still seems so distant, so far away, so disinterested. While so much of my life is better, there is the realization that it is still not what I planned or hoped for.

Looking at the children and teenagers growing up in the “most hated church in America”, I wonder how many will come to their senses and leave, and if they do will they be able to get a life worth living. Will they find friends who accept them, will they find love, a normal life, a normal family. Or will they drift, living a life of quiet desperation, never quite belonging anywhere.

In writing this I am reminded of a song popularised by Cold Chisel. It was a song of and about the disaffected Vet Nam vets. While I cannot enter into their experiences, many of the emotions they felt of alienation and not belonging are ones I can relate to.


Khe Sanh (by Don Walker)
I left my heart to the sappers round Khe Sanh
And my soul was sold with my cigarettes to the blackmarket man
I've had the Vietnam cold turkey
From the ocean to the Silver City
And it's only other vets could understand

About the long forgotten dockside guarantees
How there were no V-dayheroes in 1973
How we sailed into Sydney Harbour
Saw an old friend but couldn't kiss her
She was lined, and I was home to the lucky land

. . .

So I worked across the country end to end
Tried to find a place to settle down, where my mixed up life could mend
Held a job on an oil-rig
Flying choppers when I could
But the nightlife nearly drove me round the bend

And I've travelled round the world from year to year
And each one found me aimless, one more year the more for wear
And I've been back to South East Asia
But the answer sure ain't there
But I'm drifting north, to check things out again