God is dead: Was Time magazine premature?

You might be surprised to know that the interventionist God is not dead. Time magazine’s famous 1966 cover story reporting on Neitzche’s thesis that striving, self centred man had killed God could, in this 21st century, add that God has been replaced by the medical profession.

Should we be so unfortunate to crash a vehicle and find ourselves teetering on the edge of death, the omni medical god will descend from the heavens, courtesy of a rescue helicopter to save us from the great unknown. Unless we have completed an advance directive with clear instructions about health care or, like Dr Albert Cutter, (an emergency medicine specialist) have tattooed ‘do not resuscitate’ on our chests, the medical profession will do all in their power to make us live because, they say it is the right thing to do.

Four weeks ago, my brother ‘Adam’ crashed his fully laden truck and trailer into a stationery object about 10kms from where I now live and work. He is now in the intensive care unit of the local hospital with extensive body injuries, which are healing, and a serious head injury, the extent of which is unknown.

Clinicians tell me that every effort must be made to ensure Adam is able to recover to whatever extent he can. This might mean living a completely normal life or the possibility of being in 24 hour, 7 day a week supported care where he might have a reasonable chance of happiness. Reasonable and happiness remain undefined.

As I plod through the days and regularly sit by Adam’s bed, although apparently unrecognizable to him, I wonder a great deal about what is the right thing to do, who decided that and what ethical framework our medical profession work to under these circumstances. I have asked for a copy of this framework both verbally and in writing but so far, nothing has emerged other than telling me that saving people is the right thing to do. Within that context, I can’t help feeling that this is a game of chance; a gamble if you like, with pretty high stakes.

It would be great if Adam regained all his abilities to function and had an even better life than before. I’d be first there with the champers to celebrate the re-emergence but tinged with an ongoing concern about the amount of money that it takes to make a resurrection like that happen. As an old health bureaucrat I know only too well where the bulk of the health dollar is spent, as we try to cater to more and more demanding consumers with increasingly complex and expensive technologies.

Perhaps more likely scenario is that Adam will not be able to function as before and need significant care. As a consultant said the other day, ‘well Sande, they’re not going to just drop him off at your place in an ambulance’. The state will take care of it all through the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC). Understood, but that’s only a small part of the equation.

There are complicated feelings and memories, connections and disconnects that lurk in the swirl of dimensions, present and past, that hold Adam and I, unknown and unseen by the omni medical god. We all have them; layered lives that are peeled back to expose our vulnerabilities when we are helpless and afraid of the dark.

Would it have been better for Adam to have died in the crash than to be abandoned by me to the state if he dribbles and drools in fits of despair and rage because his brain is unable to mend?

What kind of world have we created with our individualistic, consumer driven life styles, existing in nuclear family units unable to cope with the kind of disaster that occurs every hour, every day, everywhere?

What kind of power have we given to scientists in our drive for everlasting life? And more importantly, why are we obsessed with extending life? Just because we can, ought we to?

The Charter for Compassion was released this week. Perhaps we could incorporate the concept of compassion into discussions on saving life. That might substantially change what we consider is the right thing to do.

Charter for Compassion

Charter for Compassion

God of tentative connections - a prayer, sort of

My first real writing was as a kid, not read but heard on an evangelical 'dial a prayer' service, which my unreliable memory says was in the early 70s. If I had intellectualised God in those days I probably would have come up with the old guy in the sky but my deep inexpressible knowing was different. Less hard edged, more like the story of Svetaketu in the Hindu tradition where the One blends with each of us until we hardly know where anything begins or ends. I guess I just wrote 'unknowingly' into the space.

Since then and through many images of God, I've pulled back from writing prayers. Perhaps its because I've been absorbed into the institutional church having to hold space in that environment with relentless demands of liturgy and sermons. Endless words, tumbling over each other, rolling down the aisles, mending, breaking, catching, opening minds(we hope), closing (oh dear!), until, at times, I haven't been able to find any more words. That's an achievement then, being stunned into candles, ritual and blessed silence.

Through it all, prayer has always been for me about questions. Not questions that have to be answered, more a kind of wondering about life in all its confusion and struggle, that just sits there in the space that might, or might not, be One.

I found this prayer in my files as I was meant to be writing something else and procrastinating by trying unsuccessfully to bring order to the shambles in my computer folders. I wrote it for all of us confused by the scary new mode of internet mate meeting. The big question hanging there has to be then, if google does that for people, why can't it sort out my computer files?


God of tentative connections
holder of our fragility.
Thin skin so susceptible to tearing;
theirs unknown,
apart from small descriptors, hints.

This strange coupling processed by google,
thin as a slice of cyber cheddar
takes time, like the cheese
another kind,
more elegant but less refined.

Eternal Spirit, Energiser
force of life
blowing undirected
hopelessly out of control
throwing lives to the surface, unprotected
random timing, haphazard geography.

The challenge is there …
take the random pieces,
feel the edges, move them about
slide them into position
there - perhaps here - no?
Well, where then
… to make something of it all.

God in tentative connections
it is in our vulnerability that we grow.
O God, live my unbelief.

Interesting, but as I've posted this and then reviewed it, I've found myself deliberately changing what are now remnants of 'request' language. My hope is that I can keep prayer in my life by incrementally moving away from being a petitioner towards someone who wonders in the presence of that which is more than me. Taking these small steps after a lifetime lived in the shadow of the overwhelming God is, perhaps, a way to grow into a more adult spirited being.

Reality Bites: What use is a priest in contemporary New Zealand?

Originally published in:
thinking outside the square: church in middle earth
Edited by Ree Bodde & Hugh Kempster
St Columba’s Press & Journeyings
Auckland 2003

Strangely this piece still resonates for me and has a call that I find difficult to decipher....


Many of us live in a world without recourse to a god who bounces in and out of history at will or on demand. We have to take it straight, with no hope of eventual paradise. And salvation, if indeed the notion of salvation is desirable to yearn after, does not come as a gift wrapped sacrificial act, instead it’s more likely to rely on the spasmodic energy of a few, pitching in erratically to pursue the idea of a more just and peaceful world.
The specter of a literal salvific God and the utterance of what we have come to know as the great commission, haunt Christianity, or more particularly those people who find themselves moving further and further from the centre of the institutional church. Proclaiming the word is all very well if you happen to see this kind of theology as an answer to the world’s problems, or indeed any kind of answer at all; or if you see that it might be necessary to have people believe and adhere to one religious story over and above another.
Alternatively, if you have dispensed with the theistic God, you might think the world is how it is because humanity has repetitively made it so. Theology then becomes a wonderful tool we have developed for thinking through the human story, within the context of this earth, identifying what is of most meaning to us, and constructing a set of principles to live by that reflects this process and our subsequent understandings. Following this path forces us to think again about our religious constructions, words, and concepts like Church and priest, and to be prepared to reimagine them in our contemporary context.

If you were walking past this row of cafes, you’d never know Origin was about more than drinking and eating. Not much bigger than a large living room or small shop, Origin is longer than it is wide, its length accentuated by the wooden bar running the length of the room. This glistening shelf offers an invitation to lean, in the proprietary, overblown way we do when, in reality, we are timid, heart racing, afraid of making connections and sure no-one will ever notice us, let alone want to talk.
Part way down the room a woman laughs at something the bartender has said as the wine is deftly poured, the glass moved in reach of her hand. She crosses her legs, hooking one stiletto shod foot on the rung of the high stool. Her other shoe is idly flicked on and off as she again becomes engrossed in her book.
Towards the back, the room opens up into a larger gathering space dominated by a large oval table. Around the table a group of four are engrossed in robust discussion, so engaged with each other they are all but oblivious to their surroundings. Veer a little to the right and you step out into the courtyard. An elegant, inviting space. Paved in the alfresco style and bordered by raised gardens, lush with lavender that fills the air with a delicate perfume. At night, flames from wall sconces light the space, their warmth intensifying the fragrance.
Inexorably, all eyes are drawn to the centre of the courtyard, where water bubbles gently in the bowl of an ornate birdbath. It appears ancient, like something you might find in the ruin of a Roman temple. Heavy, solid, it shouts permanence, continuation.
Warmed with brilliant sunshine in summer and shielded from the worst excesses of winter weather; this courtyard plays host to celebrations of new babies, relationships, or a job promotion. Often it is just somewhere to sit, poring over the newspaper; soaking up the coffee and the atmosphere.
Tragedies are marked here too. Deaths, divorces and separations that need words, warmth, and ritual as much as the celebrations do. Origin is a gathering place for locals, some who call in regularly, others who come by once a year to remember Anzac Day, and perhaps Christmas. Others you will only see at funerals.
Sylvia Duncan is the one to ask about all this. That woman has a phenomenal memory for the people and stories that enliven the rites performed here. She knows who’s connected to whom and who it was who used to live with that Allan Taylor before he found himself and moved in with Miriam Collin’s boy. Sylvia can tell you a baby’s lineage quicker than a Google search and, as well, she knows where that baby is now and how famous, or infamous, they’ve become.
On a busy Friday night you can squeeze about a 100, maybe 120 in the place, that’s including the courtyard. There’s often music and parties have been known to spontaneously break out. Of course there’s football on Sky; but just as often there’s a writer reading from their latest book, or the jazz group from the local high school fundraising for their next overseas competition.
Maryanne Selby, former wife of Judge Selby, not that that ought to be of any consequence (I mention it only because Tom, the judge, is a regular here too and it does pay to be aware of who has been attached to whom); anyway, Maryanne and a few of her friends run a hot topics evening. Most everything is discussed; the latest was how to implement the new prostitution law without guilt. There were some innovative suggestions, as you would expect from a group who has already traversed the ground from tips for gay parenting to recycling as an act of compassion.
Some Sunday evenings, there’s a story telling group. Ordinary people telling stories of their lives, recognizing the differences and similarities between each one, while connecting their own to the web of human tales that somehow hold time and space together.
Then there are the bartenders, wrapped around with those long black aprons, the new kind of café uniform we’ve come to recognise as heralding warmth, service and hospitality. They pour the wine, pick up glasses, serve food, and manage those who’ve had a bit too much to drink. On balance, more times than not, they remember names, events, and stories that have been told before and will be heard again.
These bartenders know how important story telling is; they see it as one of the ways humans signify their belonging, or their dislocation. They also know how difficult it is for many of us to feel, for more than brief, fragmented moments that we belong anywhere.
Theologically educated, informed on current issues, and committed to ongoing spiritual development, these bartenders are the new religious. Some of them are priests; others have no institutional mark on them. Whatever their allegiance, all are believers in the sacrament of everyday life. Knowing that the sacred is found, not necessarily in grand religious gestures played out at the altar of the Eucharistic theatre, instead in the day to day lives of ordinary men and women as they drink and eat together.
These new religious facilitate the daily rituals of gathering with food and wine. As part of this, they know who is sick, whose marriage is on the rocks, and whose kids have just been busted for possession. Senses attuned to the stories; they offer brief comments, adept in the art of the casual intervention that encourages, challenges, and points to moments of hope.
Origin is another way of being Church, a sacred space where radical hospitality is on offer and reality can bite in the ongoing stories of people who visit a lot, a little, or hardly ever.

Previously, the institutional church and in particular the clergy, were keepers of the truth, charged with bringing others into the believers’ fold. There was a sense that the more we added to the flock, the better off we would be. Success equalled numbers and vigorous growth. To a certain extent that view continues to day. Vicars talk of being subtly driven by the need to bring more people in to keep their parish afloat. Evangelists preach of a revival, which literally means, more people who believe what we believe, or think we believe, it not being absolutely clear what we are meant to believe anymore, or, if the person next to us believes the same thing anyway.
Things have changed. Belief in God is not the simplistic thing it was once held to be. Indeed, God, a word, concept, subject, object, verb, or whatever, is now up for spirited debate and possible resuscitation quite outside the control of the institutional church. What is terrifying is the possibility that the institution, with its back against the wall, might get over excited and want to take charge of the process. Militant, it used to be called, having too many answers to questions of belief and not enough doubt; sure it holds the truth and is intent on everyone else believing it too.
These days I see a changing role and mission for the Church and its clergy, which is driven out of some of my own experience. Growing up in the 1950s I was most influenced by two significant life factors. The first was being adopted in the Pakeha system, which effectively cuts children off from their birth parents; this system ensures that we understand much about belonging, simply because we have such trouble knowing that we do. This uncertainty was powerfully reinforced for me by a second factor, being raised in a home where the Bible was seen as the inerrant word of God. You could believe and be saved, or face the unpleasant consequences of turning your back on Jesus, who, judging by the picture on our dining room wall, seemed to be perpetually knocking on shut doors. You were either in or out, there was no middle ground.
Like others who are uncertain of their fit, I spend my life wandering the borders, never quite sure where I belong or even if it’s a possibility. Sometimes though, I recognise the need to stake a claim to belonging, which is how I come to be standing here marking out my place around the edges of the institutional church. This is an intentional position, from where I can skate up and down on the boundaries, so blurring them that it becomes impossible for anyone to hold a sustainable position about what or whom is in or out.
After a life-enhancing theological education, courtesy of the Anglican Church, I find myself sitting with the group who delight in the godstuff, seeing it as a necessary human construction, most often done through language and story, requiring reinvention for each particular person and place. To me, the theological enterprise is not a religious add on, instead it is an integral function of society, necessary for the spiritual development of all people.
Throughout my theological training I was influenced by the model of French worker-priests, who, in the 1930s and 40s, moved out of religious houses and churches to live and work with ‘the people’. For some it meant taking on political struggles, for others, it was being surprised when engaging in relationships they thought were beyond them.
One of the great learnings that we have from these courageous men is their realisation that the good news, the yearning for justice, peace, truth and love, is pre-existent in the wider community, way ahead of their best efforts to give their own version away. ‘What use is a priest or religious?’, they might have asked themselves, as it slowly dawned that being-with, has to be about joining in the daily round of ordinary living until it becomes inseparable from oneself. It’s about belonging.
Belonging has to be a given for humanity. There must be no question that all of us have a place here. Consequently, the good news ought not to be about making a dividing line between who’s in or out, instead it has to be a way of living expectantly, knowing that if we keep at it, justice and love will break out, sometimes, for small moments, in inconsequential places.
As the worker-priests found, much of the world is already striving towards these ideals, without calling themselves Christian or even thinking they are part of a religious enterprise. And where once the clergy would have believed themselves to be the keepers of the one true word, the only story, and holding the responsibility for keeping it afloat, the new-religious, in the tradition of worker-priests, have a different perspective.
For them, the Christian story is one story, or set of stories, among many. These stories are powerful descriptors of human nature, delving into the wanderings of families and clans, kings and queens, the good and the downright wicked; they show the struggle of humanity to imagine how a more just and loving world could come about. Put another way, it’s the great celluloid of humanity, with a cast of billions, where everyone has a role adding their unique splash of colour as the frames evolve across the screen of time.
So, instead of being holders and purveyors of the word, the new-religious have a role in firstly, encouraging the voices of ordinary people to be heard through their stories; then in recognizing and naming the good news in the stories of others. Pointing it out, encouraging the good news amongst our communities, and describing it in ways that people can understand (all people, that is, not just those who are part of gathered institutional church communities).
The new-religious are engaged in freeing us up from the psychological torment of wondering whether or not we belong, by encouraging the development of our sacred stories through active participation in ordinary life, here, now and wherever we find ourselves.

Miranda smiled. She could hear the laughter of the courtyard crowd but had missed the point of the amusement. They must have him down pat, she thought, reaching out to straighten the glasses, an espresso machine hissing gently beside her.
Steve Wadsworth had been an unusual chap. Not that interested in being part of anything too social. He’d preferred to watch from the sidelines, regularly. Most nights you could find him at Origin. With something to eat and a couple of glasses of merlot, Steven would be willing to talk. Not great big significant conversations, more a bit of a natter about the football, or what those Ryan kids were up to this week.
Brendan Ryan was his favourite. It didn’t matter what Brendan did, Steve would be eager to hear, smiling and nodding even when Brendan had given his brother a bash, which was something he did quite often. ‘Chip off the old bloc’, Steve muttered one day when Miranda had described the latest antic. ‘Old block?’ Miranda wondered, eyebrows raised slightly and head tilted to the side. ‘Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter’, stuttered Steven downing his coffee and making ready to leave.
Once the tumour had taken the strength out of Steve’s legs, Brendan was with him every day after school. Right on the dot of five, he would show up at Origin to let the others know how it was with Steve that day. On football days, Brendan’s mum would go; no explanation to anyone about why they were there or what their relationship was to Steve.
Last Monday, Brendan arrived early, tears forging silvery tracks down his cheeks. ‘Steve’s gone’, he whispered, shoulders heaving as Andrew stepped out from behind the bar, gently maneuvering him to an outside table. It had been quite a week, what with the story finally coming out about who belonged to who and why it had all been a secret for so long.
Sylvia Duncan must have known but kept it to herself mused Miranda as she turned to greet the first mourners peeling off the back of the crowd while Andrew finished the blessing. ‘There’ll be an empty space here now ’, blustered Dave Toomey, never one for wasting words. He sniffed loudly, wiping his reddened nose vigorously with a pristine white handkerchief before lifting his eyes to meet Miranda’s gaze. ‘He’ll be missed.’ ‘Mmm’, murmured Miranda, her mind flooded with memories of an unusual man and his story, which would, by the simple act of remembering, and by its repeated telling in varying combinations, become woven into the life of the Origin community.

Community is a word of theatrical proportions with operatic overtones, used pompously, as it often is, to describe any gathering or collection of people that is meant to have some significance. Building communities, preferably healthy and safe ones, is an ideal valued by contemporary New Zealand society and long promoted by the Church in a variety of ways.
You would think, to hear some people talk, that community was something they created from defunct scraps of human existence, instead of noticing that community exists in and of itself without ever needing to be dreamt up anew. Sometimes though, communities can look like lifeless bundles, a deflated version of our dreams for a successful life. But like individuals, communities need encouragement and recognition of the pre-existent life within them, in order to emerge in ways we can understand.
In a way, belief in a community is what makes it all work. Communities operate well, or not, in part, because of our belief in them at an intimate level; the level that ensures we have our heart in them. Put another way, we become a participant in some way or another, we belong. You don’t belong until you are prepared to believe you do. No-one can make you, or alternatively shut you out. People often have a regular round of gatherings, our lives dotted with favourite places and spaces. On a larger scale, communities already know about gathering, choosing the time and place. Sometimes its ad hoc, often because of a tragedy or a triumph; others times, like Anzac Day, there’s regularity to the gathering.
In some ways, through the collection of our gatherings, we are all responding to the rhythm of life in much the same way that the Church has developed a liturgical year. However, when individuals and communities gather, they have made the decision about what is of most meaning and how and when they will gather. Sadly, the institutional church, which has a history and an understanding of gathering to mark meaning, is more often than not absent in contemporary community rituals.
Take, for instance, Wigs on the Water. It is a bold, colourful celebration of diversity where for at least one day a year, drag queens get to strut their stuff, in the daylight at the Viaduct Basin, the most public and high profile spot in Auckland. As I sat in the brilliant sunshine, soaking up the entertainment and the atmosphere along with thousands of Aucklanders, I desperately wanted prayers and blessings to be offered as part of this ritual of belonging. My emotions ricocheted between anger and despair as I wondered at the huge gap that has appeared between institutional Christianity and ordinary New Zealanders; a gap that leaves us all wanting. Some people talk of church communities as being like an exclusive club, associated with, but apart from the day to day living of most of our population. A sharp dividing line is drawn between the sacred and the secular.
We might well ask then, at ordination, does the Church ordain people for the whole community, or does the institution only ordain people for the service of those gathered within a Christian framework? The current predominant Anglican model of gathered parish, within the ambit of the great commission, ensures that the ordained are trapped into serving the gathered and worrying about mission to the rest.
This is the context that drives me to struggle with the understanding of what a worker-priest could be these days. In some ways, it’s an aimless process, not knowing exactly what I’m doing, other than hanging about in bars and cafes. Sometimes I take my book, order up a chardonnay and just exist in the space. Other times, a conversation will begin across the bar or with the person sitting next to me. It’s not long before we ask each other what we do. I answer that one honestly and once people get over the surprise that their preconceived ideas of what a god person might look are outdated, many are eager to talk about deep things; what is of significant meaning to them. Most are willing to venture questions about the godstuff, careful to preface their input with a declaration that they have dropped institutional religion, but they still think there is something about living that could be called spirit, or wholeness, or even integration.
This feckless meandering of mine is teaching me about being and presence even if, sometimes, the longest conversation I have is ordering the wine. In a way, I’m a disinterested connector, with no interest in persuading my bar companion of any particular position or view, but being open to conversation, should it arise, about things that matter, when I’m in a situation that, if you can see what I mean, doesn’t matter in the slightest.
Some recent New Zealand writing describes the spiritual dimension of the self as a prime determinant of health, throwing health promotion, or the maintenance of wellness, right into the lap of the Church, should it decide to notice. It is suggested that there are four literary themes, which encapsulate the concept of spirituality. These are relationships, connectedness, meaning, and beliefs, or clarity of purpose. Relationships are to be had with the self, others, external spiritual forces, and the natural word. Our health is seen to rely on the degree of our connectedness within those relationships. Our individual understanding of life, our meaning, tends to be determined by our relationships, especially when the concept of hope is apparent through all of us working together for the betterment of the system.
The development of these three foundational life building blocks, enable us to construct a personal belief system which provides a structure for rationalization of life purpose and experience, in effect, the lens through which we see, understand and react. This describing of spirituality is all about a way of being, finding a place to stand, a place with meaning, and a sense of belonging. It is about the development of spirituality that leads to the well being of individuals and community. Interestingly, it throws a bridge over the troubled waters between a church rich in tradition, learning, ritual and understanding of human spirituality and New Zealanders who have quite reasonably walked away from that tradition when its expression has been out of step with out context.

‘Are you ready for the students tomorrow?’ asked Miranda replacing the magazines on the rack at the front of the bar. ‘I’m never ready for their disbelief’, muttered Andrew wandering out to the door. Miranda chewed her bottom lip in an effort to hold back from pointing out how dismissive Andrew had been when he was on placement here. Quickly, he turned to face her with an embarrassed look on his face. ‘I s’pose I was pretty awful as a student’, he said, starting to laugh. ‘Andrew, you were horrendous, wanting to talk about god all the time’, groaned Miranda. ‘The best thing that happened to you was meeting Steve and he wouldn’t let you talk about anything other than the football.’ ‘He’s going to be missed,’ said Andrew with a wry smile, ‘best contextual theology teacher I know.’

We are awash in a sea of literature and thought that either predicts the demise, or the imminent renewal, of the institutional church. I see this uncertainty, the tenuous connection with its own existence, as a positive state for the Church. Being too sure of itself has, historically, led to a pattern of domination over others and their thoughts. More recently, what looks like rejection by the majority in our part of the world, has brought on an overwhelming timidity, which turns us in on ourselves constantly preoccupied with fixing the internal workings of our structure instead of retaining a vision for the future.
The vision for a new world order, for the reconstruction of society that take the poor and the meek seriously and which tries to limit the worst acquisitiveness of humanity lives on, and is not reliant on theology which divides and conquers. Nor does it need a Church that insists on carrying out its story telling separate and apart from the wider community.
Once we dreamed of a heaven where all would be well, with a saviour god triumphant over all that life might demand of us. But stories, as we have come to understand, can be taken in many ways; it rather depends on where you hear it from and what our context is, which can lead to something of a muddle if the stories are held out to be the literal truth.
The Judeo Christian stories were great stories for their time and they still have a place in the ongoing reconstruction of our world. But they need to be told in the context of ordinary day to day living, intertwined with the ongoing stories of Moana and Jason and Emily and Karl and Sue and Dipak, and added to by the coming generations.

Miranda turned to look out across the road. ‘Did I tell you Sylvia Duncan has bought a space for her ashes in the remembrance wall?’
‘Really, what side?’
‘What do you think? She was quick to point out that a view of the sea for eternity wouldn’t do for her “thank you dear”. Sylvia wants a view of our front door to keep up with who’s doing what to whom!’
‘It’s ok, isn’t it?’ Andrew said, turning towards Miranda.
‘Ok?’ she enquired.
‘To be church this way.’
‘More than ok mate. Times have changed,’ she murmured, reaching round to undo her apron, ‘it’s about belonging.’
‘Belonging, with?’
‘Yeah, it means you’re there when the reality bites.’

In the same way that indigenous cultures, sometimes on the edge of extinction, have reclaimed their stories, language and heritage, Christianity has a reclamation job on its hands. Teetering on the brink of irrelevance, the survival and reinterpretation of this rich tradition and its stories of living may only be achieved by remembering and acting, not as though we have the mortgage on community, but as though we already belong to communities containing the pre-existent good news.
Humanity, despite all our whizz bang technology, remains much the same as always. We arrive in this earth, rootless and aimless, our life’s work to make some sense of it. And it’s in the moments of revelation, when we get a glimpse of our interconnectedness with the earth and everything around us that the realisation of our fragility makes us most vulnerable. Once, attending to that vulnerability included conversations with a god person. Nowadays, most Kiwis are hard pressed to know what a god person is, let alone intentionally instigate a conversation with one.
From where I sit, contemporary society still has a place for the priest, or as I’m starting to call it, the new-religious. A person who has a continuing understanding of theology, senses attuned to encouraging the stories around them, adept in the art of the casual intervention that encourages, challenges and points to emerging moments of hope.
However, tending the altar during the weekly recitation of the Eucharistic story is not going to make the new-religious available to the majority of Kiwis who are all engaged, somehow or another in trying to make sense of the spirituality. The institutional church and its clergy face some tough choices. Do we continue shuffling utensils at the altar until extinction, or are we prepared to undertake, what is commonly termed, a paradigm shift; a complex shifting of gears and windows so that the way we view the world, and our place in it, is changed beyond recognition?
Origin, where the new religious tend the bar and not the altar, is another way to be Church in contemporary New Zealand. Dare we try it?

Testing the tiger: A reflection on military chaplaincy

The sound of a rifle bolt being locked into position is distinctive. From my study adjoining the Linton Camp garrison church, I could hear dozens of them being activated as soldiers were being reacquainted with military life after the summer holidays.

I don’t know what it sounds like when a bullet explodes into a human being but some of those soldiers may well find out. The trauma of being involved in armed conflict is well documented as is the compassion of padres who stand alongside soldiers as bullets fly. For me there is no argument that all people caught in the insanity of war need a special form of care for the spirit, but is the current model of military chaplaincy the method for the church to pursue in the 21st century?

My year as an army chaplain has changed me. My initial, perhaps naïve, enthusiasm for the job diminished into gnawing anxiety as I struggled to come to grips with issues of institutional power and violence and the apparent collusion of the church and state in maintaining the status quo.

New people in any institution have a unique perspective before they have become overwhelmed by the power dynamics of the structure. They see differently before they have to insulate themselves with the multiple layers of corporate justification needed in order to function within organizational cultures. While I now speak with some hindsight, my observations stem from my first impressions as a new person in the military.

During that year I developed great respect and affection for both chaplains and military personnel who go about their jobs with dedication. My reflections then are not about individual people; instead they explore my own journey and theological wonderings that emerge from that.

Hitchhikers
As usual, I looked towards my new job with curious enthusiasm, keen to absorb new sights, smells and experiences. On a familiarization visit to the camp, a call came in for a padre to sort out ‘hitchhikers’ on a gun carriage that had been used for a funeral the day before.

Not being too sure what a hitchhiker was, I dashed off behind one of my new colleagues who was armed with stole, prayerbook and holy water, recently decanted from a plastic milk bottle, The senior chaplain called as we fled, ‘make sure they gather around.’ Impossible. At our appearance, the previously bustling yard was deserted in seconds. After some liturgical maneuvering with the prayerbook and a generous dousing of water, we pronounced the gun carriage hitchhiker free.

Mary Tagg in The Jesus Nut, her PhD thesis on military chaplaincy in New Zealand, says that military chaplain’s deal with the, ‘premeditated death of war which seeks meaning before the act, to allow killing to take place as well as during and after’. She also suggests that the role is, ‘the work of putting the soldiers in touch with their own spirituality and the recognition of their own mortality and what it means to them.’

There is no doubt that a gun carriage symbolises premeditated death, which is deep at the heart of the military purpose. Was this a ritual recognition of a particular way of seeing the spiritual dimension? Were any soldiers more in touch with their spirituality as a result of our actions? It didn’t feel likely to me, even though all the soldiers seemed to think life could return to normal as soon as the padres had finished. As I walked away I felt a fraud and the first stirrings of a complex, internal conflict were underway.

As I reflected over the following weeks and after officiating at a military funeral, I began to see that there was an unexplored anxiety about death lurking just under the surface. More than that, there was a deep questioning, not necessarily at the cognitive level, about the role of the military in death and consequently the role of each individual member of the military in intentional killing.

Military funerals are tightly controlled ritualistic events devoid of the celebrations of a life well lived that we are experiencing in civilian funerals. This funeral began at home, as the Regimental Sergeant Major dressed the casket with the soldier’s hat and medals. Beforehand, we had rehearsed every move that the pallbearers would make, how many steps would be taken, how the flag would be folded with mechanical precision, how heads would be held.

While I had considerable input into the words used during the service, I recognised that I was something of an automaton in a complex liturgical dance. All movements were rigid and proscribed with the high point being the playing of the Last Post, Bunyan’s admonition to remember them and the explosive rifle volley as the casket left the church to be loaded onto the gun carriage for the last march into the great night.

Although this soldier had died in a normal human way and not as the result of battle, the same ritualistic dance was assumed appropriate, almost as though the repetitive playing out of this rite might hold at bay the chaotic and unpredictable nature of death, especially that which the military might have to be involved in.

Using the padre in a shamanistic way to tidy up ‘loose ends’ when the gun carriage is returned to the garage is the final movement in this unexplored dance of death. When I tried to talk to soldiers and padres about this ritual that encompassed so much more than I was aware of on my initial introduction to it, I was unable to get a coherent explanation. There was much shrugging of shoulders and general acceptance that this is what we do and after all, it’s in the Vols, the interminable books of rules that guide every area of military life.

Loitering
Somewhat daunted by my initial gun carriage experience but with interest piqued, I struggled awkwardly into uniform. I eagerly enquired about my daily tasks and was encouraged to ‘loiter with intent’, to be available for any conversation that might emerge so that eventually, I would get ‘repeat business’. In other words, when anyone had a problem they would call for me.

I observed that my extroverted colleagues were excellent loiterers but as an introvert I needed to get more guidance about exactly what it was soldiers thought a padre was for, so I asked everyone I came into contact with. Most people, including some in senior positions, seemed a bit perplexed before coming out with, ‘welfare, definitely welfare’,
or, ‘you’re counsellors really aren’t you’,
or ‘helping people outside the command chain’,
and the biggie, ‘taking lollies on exercise’.

I became despondent. That didn’t make sense given that a range of counsellors were available; along with a number of civilians whose job it is to offer welfare services of all kinds. Is the role welfare because it is a fall back position in peacetime now that hardly anyone goes to church? Are chaplains still there in a significantly changed religious landscape, just because they had been carrying out this unexamined role forever?

There is enormous value in a compassionate and open pastoral approach where there is time to sit alongside people to just chew the fat or to offer a more direct intervention into a place of turmoil, but I did wonder if this work termed welfare could, and perhaps should, and even was being done by secular social workers and counsellors. And more than that, if it was considered important for a God person to be involved in this process, what was the point of them being in military uniform and consequently embedded in the system?

Bloody sacrifice
I turned to the worship centre for some inspiration. St Martin’s at Linton is the church which Engineers had energetically transported from the Makotuku, rebuilt and then deserted, apart from infrequent baptisms, weddings or funerals. Twice a month a congregation of about 10 -15 gathers, dominated by padres and their extended families, out of a camp population of over 1,000. A weekly Eucharist struggles to get one communicant. St Martin’s stands apart from camp central, cold, lonely, and generally empty, symbolizing New Zealand societal attitudes to organised religion.

What was I to make of this ritual laden military culture, which seemed to pay only lip service to the presence of Christian priests and ministers; instead using us as social workers and wheeling us out for prayers on parade where the running is made by liturgists who process light armoured vehicles and weaponry instead of crosses, bibles and religious icons?

I thought I’d go to the top. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury.
‘Priesthood…is crucially to do with the service of the space cleared by God; with the holding of a door into a place where a confused humanity is able to move slowly into the room made available, and understand that it is heard in all its variety, emotional turmoil and spiritual uncertainty.’

Yes, I think the pastoral process does some of that. Williams goes on to value the role of religious services where clergy are both servants of that cleared space and of their community’s need to express a common gratitude to God in a language they all understand and in a time given up to this and nothing else.

How does that fit with prayers on parade I wondered, where dress uniforms, ritual movements, awarding medals and the parading of weaponry seduce us with the idea that attempting to control our world with intentional violence is something to be valued? What was my role to be in that process when the Commanding Officer called on me as the padre to offer prayers? It was hard to believe, despite how hard I tried to convince myself, it was anything other than assuring the gathered troops, and the organisation, that God was on their side. Or put another way, there was no challenge from the God person that the idea of training to kill people for a living was in any way a problem.

Blood sacrifice is both dreaded and revered in the military. Every ANZAC Day the gospel of Mark is plundered to give religious credibility to the idea that physically dying for your mates in the course of armed conflict is to be idolized. This is difficult to address or unravel in the brief public moments offered to military clergy, because of the way the theology of blood sacrifice has become embedded into our culture quite separated from theological thinking that might help us have a more constructive view of the Easter story.

Perhaps it is not surprising that it has been so embedded, given that the use of force, symbolised by military activity, is one way humans try to bring substance to our species and make ourselves more important than we really are. Whereas the life of Jesus stands in direct contrast to this, minimizing the self as a dominant feature and challenging institutions to resist forcing their ‘self’ over and above another.

Increasingly, I was uncomfortable with how the institutional violence of the military machine, which intentionally offers blood sacrifice to the God of War and then elevates that to heroic status, fitted with the liturgy of the church where the deep magic of the Eucharist drama unfolds at its centre. The place where the mysteries of life and death are explored through the story of Christ, the vulnerable anti-hero who offers no resistance to violence.


The unadorned truth
When church attendance falls away the priest is left scrambling to find alternative methods for proclaiming the word (passing on the faith through stories) or presenting the prophetic picture (speaking of the real). One of the ways these tasks can be achieved is to speak out on issues of community concern through alternative channels.

Without trying very hard at all, I had one salutary experience with the chain of command through my attempt to comment on an issue of social change. A colleague had asked me if I would support her as a clergyperson on a television interview about voluntary euthanasia. I agreed to do this and let the Principal Army Chaplain know so that he would not be caught unawares. He checked it out with the PR and legal departments who were relaxed as long as I was not identified as an army chaplain, although they gave no reason for that stance. This suited me very well as my role was to have a theological input and the producers of the programme were happy to make no reference to my current employment. All was going well until the Chief of Army heard of my intention whereupon power was exercised in the most subtle and polite ways to ensure I changed my mind.

The military, like all organisations, has to be concerned about media scrutiny. This generally means that organisations live at the most superficial level, looking for good news stories that put them in the best light and limiting discussion or expression of anything that appears to question their purpose or activity. When you employ people who value the prophetic role as part of their vocation, this creates some problems.

To get another perspective on the situation I went to my Commanding Officer, a man with over 20 years in the military who was perceptive, interested in all this talk of spirit and with whom I could be honest. After we had enjoyed dissecting the whole saga, he leaned back in his chair and smiled, then laid out for me the reality that soldiering was a 24/7 business and that having a Queen’s Commission was a kind of all encompassing vocation, which over-rode everything else. He said later that it was a joke but I knew that it wasn’t. It was the unadorned truth, lying there on the table, eyeing me quizzically to see what I would do with it.

Thankfully, truth is patient and understanding. It has no need to persuade or push for recognition because it just is, living outside of our attempts to control or suppress it. Once spotted though, the awareness of it irritates and while I didn’t know what to do with it at that moment, I could see that there was a direct conflict between my employer’s purpose and my understanding of where I had pledged my loyalties when ordained. Caesar and God were at odds here.

Going back to source documents seemed a good idea to help me refocus. I consulted the DFO 65, a military document outlining chaplaincy services. I had a copy of Draft 12 from October 2007 which was yet to be ratified; however, it was very clear.

‘Chaplaincy resources of the New Zealand Defense Force (NZDF) exist for the spiritual and pastoral well being of all NZDF personnel and their dependants within New Zealand and overseas.

The Chaplains’ role is shaped around influencing the morale of all NZDF personnel in an effort to produce positive spiritual, moral and ethical outcomes in peace, crisis and war. In this context, chaplains seek to develop the faith, values and leadership of all serving personnel to enhance the capability of the NZDF.’

There was the unadorned truth again, staring out from the pages of a military manual. While this document goes on to outline in more detail roles and responsibilities in religious ministry, pastoral care, training, providing advice and administration functions, it was apparent to me that chaplains are not in the service of God but are in the New Zealand Defense Force to enhance the capability of the military machine.

The DFO had not been available to me on entry to the service but even if it had, I have to admit that I may have read it differently, tinged by the first flush of enthusiasm for a new job. I expect I would have glossed over this shy truth as a challenge to be engaged with instead of something which needed help to be brought into the light.

But there it was now. Not a joke. Not to be taken lightly. I was a Christian priest who had made ordination vows to serve God and here I was contradicting those vows by agreeing to be embedded in the military machine and so implicitly supporting its purpose.


Dueling Mythologies
Humans speak in many different ways, sometimes within the same sentence. By this I mean that we use words to describe concrete, material parts of our lives, ie: words like bread and butter, alongside words that refer to the way we experience life. To create different patterns or effects, we intersperse words or phrases that reach for that layered, more nebulous world, which is beyond our material existence but nevertheless real to us. We can call this God talk, incorporating mythological ideas to try to explain what we lack concrete words for.

During the age of rampant scientism there was little room for mythological talk and so the Western world, so influenced by the Judeo/Christian and Greek mythologies, slowly lost its ability to speak of deep truths through story. Indigenous cultures have never lost the ability to speak mythologically and the renaissance of these cultures gives us all an opportunity to learn to expand our discourse again in more layered and subtle ways.

This change is more complex than we might like to think. In the rush to get over colonising guilt, there is a tendency to fling ourselves on the pendulum of change, quite forgetting that the mythologies we might be absorbing will need investigation and new understanding in the same way as the ones currently out of favour have required.

In 1994, when the New Zealand Army was officially recognized as the tribal entity, Ngati Tumatauenga, it effectively replaced an existing, but waning mythology carried by the army chaplains, with an entirely different one without exploring the implications of that move.

Tumatauenga, is the god of war and mankind from the Maori pantheon of gods. He was one of the offspring of Ranginui (the sky father) and Papatuanuku (the earth mother). His brother Tawhirimatea, the god of the weather, was angry at the separation of his parents and waged war on his other brothers subduing some, but not Tumatauenga who was left to deal with him alone. Tumatauenga took revenge on his faithless brothers by devouring their children and remains at war with Tawhirimatea to this day.

The army says that Ngati Tumatauenga is a people bound together by the ethic of service, military professionalism, common values, traditions and purpose. However, the mythology of Tumatauenga is one that appears to value anger, revenge and violence, one diametrically opposed to the Christian mythology which has as a central feature the challenging of this cycle of repetitive, revengeful violence through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. As a non military colleague pointed out to me, this leaves army chaplains being subtly co-opted into the bondage against which they seek to testify.

This problem of dueling mythologies is not new. The 20th century theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, struggled to understand the implications of Greek and Christian mythologies working out their place in the psyche of a community. In ‘Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic’, he has this challenging perspective,
What makes me angry is the way I kowtow the chaplains as I visit the various camps. Here are the ministers of the gospel, just as I am. Just as I they are also, for the moment, priests of the great god Mars. As ministers of the Christian religion I have no particular respect for them. Yet I am overcome by a terrible inferiority complex when I deal with them. Such is the power of the uniform. Like myself, they have mixed the worship of the God of love and the God of battles. But unlike myself, they have adequate symbols of this double devotion. The little cross on the shoulder is the symbol of their Christian faith. The uniform itself is the symbol of their devotion to the God of battles. It is the uniform and not the cross which impresses me and others. I am impressed even when I know I ought not be.

Irrelevance
I was becoming more and more uncomfortable while my head buzzed with these complicated paradoxes and mysteries. While all this was going on, I had to find some way to construct my day if I had doubts about the efficacy of loitering and leaping over tall buildings to be just as good as the boys was a bit beyond me now.

Seeing as my Engineers weren’t going to come to church, I figured I’d have to take the festivals to them. Operation Easter came complete with palm crosses and Easter eggs while Operation Matariki’s popularity probably had more to do with the kumara chip snacks than with the bookmarks about new life!

After a few months though, despite extremely stimulating conversations with my Commanding Officer and struggling to find meaningful work that didn’t fall into the welfare or counselling areas, I concluded that I was pretty much an irrelevance or, as an Australian colleague put it, in the same category as lawyers and social workers – necessary evils who lived in a la la land that had no relationship with the real business of soldiering.

That will explain then why I could not find any mentions of chaplaincy or religion in the NZDF book of doctrine or the army’s ‘Way of the New Zealand Warrior’, although much was made of the value of Ngati Tumatauenga in that particular book. And as a new leadership project rolled out, I noted that there was not even a passing reference to spirituality.

Despite employing chaplains, religious truth seemed to be an irrelevance for the army although apparently this has not always been the case. As Mary Tagg reports, General Montgomery thought that there could be no inspirational leadership unless the commander had a proper sense of religious truth; be prepared to acknowledge it and to lead his troops in the light of that truth. Whether or not we agree with Montgomery’s version of religious truth or his methods, it illustrates well the different world in which we now live and move.

Reshaping
Indoctrination beckoned via the seven weeks Specialist Officers Induction Course at Waiouru, our own cold, forbidding desert. This course is designed to give specialist officers, nurses, doctors, psychologists, teachers and chaplains an understanding of the Army’s ethos and culture, provide them with basic military skills and introduce them to the competencies of a commissioned officer.

Reading the course documentation, all couched in military language and acronyms which always served to alienate me rather than aid understanding, it dawned on me that while the regular army saw the course as a doddle, I was going to struggle with the complete immersion in military life. I felt that role tension jarring again and my enthusiasm for this strange life dwindling but, ever optimistic, I packed my car with the enormous amount of gear required to be properly dressed on all military occasions. On arrival in a freezing Waiouru, I was shown to barracks with no heating. The boiler had broken down and remained that way until I left.

When someone new enters the military, the organisation sets about what it calls resocialisation or, as Mr Killology, Dave Grossman puts it, brutalization. Previously an officer in the United States military, Grossman is now a psychologist who explains brutalization as the process of breaking a person down and reshaping them to accept a new set of values that embrace destruction, violence and death as a way of life.

We endured mind numbing classes which began at 7.30am and sometimes stretched into the evening. We marched in formation from place to place, our rooms were inspected, and we raced to the parade ground for drill before dripping sweat at the gym to ensure we were on the way to meeting the required fitness level. The piece de resistance was to gain competence in the operation of a steyr, the New Zealand military’s choice of rifle.

Under the Geneva Convention, military chaplains are non-combatants and cannot be required to be armed, although may carry a side arm for defensive purposes. Chaplains in New Zealand are trained to handle weapons on the specialist officers’ course and for parts of that course they are required to have their weapon constantly with them. Weapons competency is then annually assessed. This is, I was told, so that I could disarm a weapon should I ever come across one that could be a danger to others. The irony of that did make me smile.

Despite the Convention, a strange situation had grown up in New Zealand where chaplains on deployment were sometimes put under considerable pressure to carry a steyr. Some caved and last year the inevitable happened when a chaplain was responsible for a U.D., an accidental unauthorized discharge of his weapon. No-one was hurt, in fact no-one else was around but he felt duty bound to report it, was quietly court martialled and fined the usual hefty amount.

As the days unfolded on the course, it fascinated me that well educated people exhibited almost total, unquestioning cooperation and showed no resistance to the regime. At a class meeting I made some suggestions about how we could more constructively go about our tasks and still achieve our purpose but conformity had already begun to set in and so I was seen as a problem. Alienation from the group got underway.

Capture
People respond in different ways to what is called the shock of capture and if you’ve been captured before, it can get messy. As my colleagues back at Linton never failed to remind me, the specialist officers’ indoctrination was a walk in the park compared to what troopies go through, however, my psyche didn’t care about that distinction.

On one level the orientation course was not overtly structured like a staged capture but when people have no choices about how to run their day, then the feeling of domination is inevitable and that, in its simplest terms, is what Grossman talks about. It’s the total immersion in a way of life contrary to ones own, with no recourse to an outside view and no ability to make choices about that life that enables it to subsume you, change your centre of being, your ethics, your will and your purpose so that you will accept, without question, whatever this new way of life demands of you.

The turning
One night, I awoke from the deepest sleep I had had in a week. My new electric blanket, a futile attempt to keep me warm in this freezing and what I perceived as a hostile environment, was soaked. Wide awake and utterly miserable, I cursed this latest failing of my body coming as it did, hard on the heels of endless tiredness, incessant crying, debilitating vomiting and diarrhea and the chronic pain associated with an inadequately diagnosed injury. Without any recourse to rocket science, I decided my body was trying to tell me something as it struggled to maintain equilibrium with my spirit in the long days full of barking, bossing and bracing up.

Up on the firing range a couple of days later as I faced the targets with my instructor reciting the liturgy of rifle drill, I started to cry; great body wrenching sobs from the unfathomable depths of my being. The emotion cascaded through me until I was left helpless and cringing on the ground clutching my rifle like a baby.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t shoot. I could. Although slow at dismantling and reassembling my weapon, I had been one of the best shots in our simulation centre run through, something to do with patience and the ability to control my breathing. It did cross my mind that panting babies into the world and caring for small children could be an excellent training ground for snipers.

A kind and patient Warrant Officer whose name I never knew, eventually got me off the range and out of the gaze of my course mates who, by then, had become somewhat embarrassed by my failure to be one of the team.

That evening, after many phone calls back to base, still not too clear about what was going on for me internally but with survival instinct on full alert and still cradling that steyr like a baby, I whispered a quiet ‘No Ma’am’, politely refusing the Major’s directive to enter the field phase in the morning. I was returned to my unit after a paltry two weeks of my course labeled, ‘did not complete’.

The soldiers in my unit were highly amused by this and teased me mercilessly but they weren’t at all bothered by it. Soldiers are very tolerant of chaplains, I suspect more concerned that they know how to listen and be compassionate than whether or not they can shoot well beside them.

I settled back into the workplace leaving others to get agitated about what to do with this chaplain who wasn’t completing the required competencies. While those machinations chugged on, I set about preparing for a presentation on my initial experiences of chaplaincy that I’d been asked to give to the national chaplains’ conference in September.

This earlier request by the Principal Defense Chaplain now became an oasis as I continued my reading, research and reflection on the military, army chaplaincy and my experience of it. However, the most disturbing part of this research was to find that almost no theological wondering had been done about military chaplaincy in New Zealand, although a number of historical and academic pieces had been produced.

One afternoon as I was outlining my conference presentation to my Commanding Officer, he offered to be part of it and so presented his views and questions about military chaplaincy to my colleagues, alongside me. My reflections were still fairly raw and I suspect our joint presentation was not quite what the Principal Chaplain had in mind when he first asked me to speak. Nevertheless, we were graciously heard and parts resonated with some of my colleagues, although there were still no signs that anyone wanted to think theologically about the hard questions.

The next day, a series of events meant that my CO was transferred out of the unit and the one person who had daily identified with the struggle of my journey in the military was gone. In late December, still confused, ambivalent and uncertain about what it all meant but feeling as though I lacked the support I needed to carry on, I decided to accept another school chaplain’s role and left the military.

Making meaning
I suppose I could just leave it at that and write it off as one more life experience but as I said at the beginning, this experience has changed me. It has been like an epiphany where my eyes were opened anew to the way the world is constructed, how frightening that it is for us and how hard it is to challenge, ensuring that we remain quietly compliant.

Although we might wish that we could compartmentalize our lives, drawing lines under anything painful that we don’t want to acknowledge is impossible. For it is struggling with the pain of existence, sometimes repetitively in a variety of settings, that can help us understand the multi dimensional nature of humanity.

It took months of confused reflection about my specialist officers’ course experience until I began to understand that capture by the military was never going to be an option. In trying to reshape me and make me its own, the army grazed the 40 year old wound I had as a result of being captured and brutalized as a young teenager.

Much of the trauma that young people experience as a result of brutalization is because they are not yet spiritually resilient, or put another way, not integrated beings. Their values still belong to their parents or, in the case of teenagers; they are sorting through the great seething mass of possibilities on offer. When attacked, victims can end up operating at a survival level, always looking for a safe haven, which can result in bargaining or colluding with their attackers. Until that phase is over, which may take decades, the long slow process of building a sound spiritual base is unable to unfold. By drawing that understanding through my army experience, I was able to see chaplaincy in an interesting new light.

My view is that military chaplaincy is like a brutalized teenager, having been captured by Caesar; in military terms, the profession of arms. It is submissive, its Spirit and Christian message undermined by the joint forces of Caesar using the usual power tactics to dominate, its own inattention to theological development and the disinterest of the wider church in exploring their role in this centuries old dysfunctional relationship.

One of the cleverest tactics in disabling chaplains is through making them Defense Force employees, putting them in uniform and giving them officer rank. By doing this, however hard they try, chaplains are almost indistinguishable from everyone else and subject to the same domestic trivia as all soldiers; pay debates, promotion squabbles and disciplinary procedures. This limits anyone’s ability to critique their employer and is especially difficult when your employer values conformity and unquestioning obedience. Disabling chaplains in this way suggests to me that the group is inherently dangerous to the organisation if allowed to operate on the loose.

Caesar, the state, the organisation, the institution, is symbolically the holder of power in any community or the defender of the status quo. The military operates at one extreme end of that continuum of power where their job is to apply the maximum amount of force on the enemy. Anything else, marching bands, flood relief and I daresay peacekeeping is a distraction for when there is no enemy.

A clergy person’s calling is different; to sit at the opposite end of that continuum of violence, where vulnerability, woundedness and the beauty of brokenness are valued. Our hero is grounded in his tradition but counter cultural, questioning institutional violence with the ultimate challenge of non-violent vulnerability.

That then is the danger to Caesar. If chaplains are faithful to this ultimate truth that stands outside any organisation’s power, they will always be at odds with the military, unable to enhance the capability of the NZDF, which raises the question of where chaplains need to work from in order to be congruent.

Dr Frank Glen, previously a military and police chaplain highlighted some of these difficulties in his post doctoral dissertation on the German military. He explains that after WWII Germany substantially revamped their chaplaincy service and now, instead of being military employees, chaplains work for the church and only wear uniform on deployment or exercise, with no rank.

There are obvious differences for us in New Zealand, as Germany has a state church, but I can see the value in this model as a way to separate the individual chaplain, and the chaplaincy service from the inevitability of being captured by principalities and powers diametrically opposed to the Christian story. Instead, negotiations about what the military wants from chaplaincy could be carried out at an organisational level where the issues that I am raising could be talked through before contracts are signed.

For anything to change though would require a great deal of soul searching within the churches that support military chaplaincy in New Zealand, for this relationship of church and state runs deep within our psyche, right back to Constantine’s institutionalization of the early church.

Many of the early Christian’s believed that violence of any sort was wrong but this didn’t last. In 410, when Rome was facing defeat at the hands of the Visigoths, non-Christians in the Roman Empire saw Rome’s vulnerability as being partly due to the reluctance of Christian’s to fight. It seems that, as a result, Augustine’s theory of a Just War was devised to ensure Christians could salve their consciences and contribute to state sanctioned violence. This they have been doing ever since, apart from conscientious objectors who have paid dearly for their stand.

To address the issue of military chaplaincy is to face up to more than change management in one form of ministry. For military chaplaincy is potentially a much more complex beast than it at first appears to be. My sense is that it is bound into a symbolic partnership that has to do with the dynamics of power and the exercise of force in our world. Put another way, society expects the military to do what it cannot do itself and what is an impossible job. That is the holding back of the forces of darkness and destruction that are first found as our shadow within and which we then turn into external enemies.

On the day I closed my study door and walked away from the military, I smiled as I noticed again one of the many posters saying ‘no to inter-personal violence’, which plaster the public noticeboards around Linton Camp. We can be amused at the irony but to think again about military chaplaincy is to explore our own role in the perpetuation of violence by the unthinking provision of service to the state.

To begin to explore this is to take a tiger by the tail, to hear it roar and feel the rip of its claws. Frightening in its strength and intensity, which is exactly how institutional power operates, to ensure we remain quiet, compliant and disassociated from our true being.

30 pieces of silver for war involvement?

Interesting article below about New Zealand's involvement in Afghanistan. My online comments were:

Aaron Lim wonders if there would be 'a generous dividend from the United States for an escalation in our involvement' in Afghanistan and presumably in other conflicts around the world. Should that, or our financial viability, be the only criteria on which to base direct or indirect involvement in the wars of the super powers around the world? This assumes we have already worked out what we feel and think about war in the post modern age whereas I suggest that no thinking has been done. Instead, a lot of emoting is evident in the remembrance of past conflicts, and the people involved in them, without thinking through what values we are basing our current decisions on. Sometimes the government and the military can get away with escalating their involvement by riding on the emotional ANZAC wave. To leave this unchallenged is to do a disservice to those soldiers who returned from world conflicts broken people with the sure and certain knowledge that war was no way to resolve conflict of any kind.



Aaron's article follows - if the DomPost blogit function worked on a regular basis, I'd have created the link!

Timing adds crunch to Afghan question Aaron Lim in the Dominion Post - 2 July 2009
OPINION: The Government's review of defence contributions to Afghanistan, due to be completed next month, comes at a critical juncture for the war.

Afghanistan was the first time Nato invoked Article 5 of the alliance, requiring collective defence of member states. In the aftermath of September 11, the Nato mission served as an important symbol of support for the United States.

But the fractured Nato effort, with countries narrowly defining the parameters of their participation, has led to a grim reality. Violence in Afghanistan today has reached its highest levels since the Taleban was driven from power.

The New Zealand Defence Force's recent gun-battle with insurgents in Bamiyan province highlights the precarious situation on the ground ahead of the Afghan elections next month.

This is the first time a patrol from the New Zealand Provincial Reconstruction Team has been engaged in an incident by gunfire.

The harsh reality of Afghanistan was reiterated this week after Kiwi forces narrowly escaped injury from an improvised explosive device.

New Zealand has committed approximately 140 personnel to Bamiyan until 2010. It is an area usually regarded as quiet and well away from the worst of the insurgency.

Afghanistan today is characterised by an expanding cross-border insurgency, ineffective governance and a substantial narcotics industry. In response to the situation, the Obama Administration has announced a parallel surge in civilian experts and troops.

A co-ordinated approach to nation- building and war-fighting will be central in turning tactical success against insurgents into strategic victory.

Not only has the Taleban re-emerged to reclaim parts of Afghanistan, the militants have also made disturbing advances in Pakistan.

The rise of al Qaeda's Taleban allies in the Swat Valley northwest of Islamabad has raised fears for Pakistan's stability and its nuclear arsenal.

The Afghan- Pakistan border region is now a single theatre of conflict. Pakistan's engagement will be critical in combating spiralling anarchy across both countries.

New Zealand has been asked to increase its contribution to the war in an effort to fight the very real possibility of regional chaos. The global context must underpin any discussion on war.

Wars are not isolated events. They are shaped by contemporary affairs. The financial crisis will have a clear impact on international security and political decision making.

Economic turmoil lacks the existential threat of al Qaeda or rogue nuclear weapons. But financial catastrophe can accelerate instability in already weak regimes.

With voters devastated by an economic implosion, politicians will also find it increasingly difficult to justify costly military deployments outside their immediate geography. The international community will be less forthcoming in committing more money or extra troops to the war this time around.
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New Zealand's economic outlook is no better than the rest of the world's. Expanding our military contribution to Afghanistan in a significant manner would require considerable financial alchemy. Measured against our military and economic assets, the current deployment represents a fair expenditure of blood and treasure.

The NZDF has, to its credit, been able to maintain a high operational tempo despite shortfalls in equipment, funding and personnel. There is, however, a limit on how far the No 8 wire spirit can augment scarce military resources.

For New Zealand, the need to contribute to global operations must be weighed against retaining a surplus capability for regional contingencies.

Defence capability is only one factor in the calculus of war. Public opinion is a decisive element in all conflicts.

While it is difficult to characterise Afghanistan as a popular war, it is not unpopular either.

It has not drawn the hysterical opposition that has become associated with Iraq. In New Zealand and other Western states, the media battle for public support has been reasonably successful. The mission in Afghanistan is largely perceived by the public to be legitimate.

Corporal Willie Apiata and his Victoria Cross played a significant role in shaping an honorable, yet humble, narrative of New Zealand's involvement in Afghanistan.

Afghanistan itself is where the information war is being lost against Taleban propaganda.

Ultimately the decision on New Zealand's involvement, including deploying the SAS, is a political one. The use of force serves a political purpose.

Interest and necessity must benchmark New Zealand's role in Afghanistan. Will there be a generous dividend from the United States for an escalation in our involvement?

In the current economic climate, it would not be difficult to find justifications for a hasty exit. But the temptation to categorise this conflict solely as "Obama's War" must be resisted.

A worst-case scenario is that the Afghan-Pakistan region descends into the anarchy of Somalia, but with nuclear weapons. That's everyone's problem.

* Aaron Lim is a Fairfax financial markets journalist. He has worked previously as a military analyst and in the financial markets.

Rip it up!

Rip it up – Rev’d Sande Ramage
St James, Mahora – Sunday 28 June 2009

Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett. Two quite different life stories have been jostling for position over the last few days. In a similar way, two distinct stories of death and despair rub up against each other in the gospel story today. (Mark 5: 21-43)

The 12 year old girl was lucky to have made it through her birth in 1st century Palestine and was now destined to be one of the 60% who were not going to make it past her teens. Early death was a grim reality of those times. So why is the wonder worker Jesus trying to beat the odds, or could the story be about something else?

On the face of it, the bleeding woman must have come from much stronger stock given her advanced age and her stoic endurance through 12 years of presumably messy, painful and persistent menstrual bleeding. As if that wasn’t enough, she also had to cope with being labelled unclean by the rules of the day, which alienated her from the rituals that formed and made sense of community life.

Despite trying every possible avenue to stop the bleeding, none of the fads recommended by her mates, or the potions on offer at Jerusalem’s health stores or the incantations of the healers or even any of Grandma’s famous remedies had worked. She tries a long shot to stop the craziness, sneaks up behind the latest wonder worker and quickly touches him. But she’s sprung – he feels something, he is alive to her pain and turns to talk with this frightened woman.

Initially she might have been euphoric, racing home to tell her girlfriends that this last ditch effort had worked. Then perhaps there were days living on cut glass as she wondered if the bleeding would return. After that, the arduous and embarrassing process of getting her clearance certificate before presenting herself to the religious leaders to get their stamp of approval. And through it all the gossip – she wasn’t really ill – it won’t last you know, a healing from that Jesus chap and so on ….

Perhaps it might have begun to dawn on her that the rules that had kept her out of society for 12 years might not be worth bothering about. My hope is that she got to the temple door with her certificate, came to her senses, ripped it up and walked away. And when Jesus heard about it – he would have said, ‘Yeah. go girl – that’s what healing is.’

I suspect that Farrah Fawcett knew about this kind of healing. One season posturing as a Charley’s Angel and featuring in every bloke’s fantasies before she was off to try her hand at more challenging roles. She was riveting and compelling as a beaten wife in The Burning Bed and as raped woman in Extremities. In both roles she challenged the way society is constructed, and in the process was not imprisoned by the slinky red swimsuit poster which is all that many people remember her for.

Let’s imagine today that the grown woman in the gospel represents the church bleeding to death in Aotearoa. We’ve moaned about the situation with our mates, listened to flash ideas from wonder workers, had a go at a few church growth programmes and suffered endless vestry meetings fighting about the diminishing budget.

Despite it all, you could say we are at the terminal stage of the illness, aware that the decline in church attendance is not a blip on the screen but an unstoppable avalanche. In 1961, Australian figures which are said to correspond to the New Zealand situation showed that 40% of the population attended church once a week. By 1999 that figure was down to 10% and we don’t have to be brilliant mathematicians to draw the inevitable conclusions about downward trends.

How interesting then that the 2009 Religion in New Zealand survey from Massey University show that a staggering 72% of New Zealanders have some form of belief in God (undefined) or a higher power. But go to church? Don’t be ridiculous, I’m spiritual, not religious.

David Tacey is an Australian academic who lectures in spirituality at La Trobe University in Melbourne and writes extensively about the subject. He says that spirituality is radically different to what it was in the past, when spirituality was felt to be the living heart or core of religion. Today, it is felt to be the living heart or core of the individual, and the location of spirituality has shifted from religious tradition to individual experience.

Overwhelmingly my students at Iona and previously at Rathkeale know almost nothing about the Christian tradition (even although they go to a church school) unless they were trained from birth at home, which is becoming less and less likely, or they are Roman Catholic. These young people so divorced from their Judeo/Christian cultural roots that Christianity is as mysterious and impenetrable to them as every other world religion is.

The idea of church as a community of justice is completely foreign to them and I can guarantee that even if they have social justice hearts, they won’t be coming to work that out at St James Mahora. But I can promise you that they are deeply spiritual beings struggling with the ache of existence in the same way that all humans have done across time and cultures.

One Australian school principal talks about how this innate spirituality is evidenced in young people ….
‘The age old obsession of young people with questions of justice and morality; the sense of being personally touched and helpless before intense beauty, pain, tradition or genuine greatness; the search for a frame of reference within which to make their own decisions; the need for a personal commitment to an ideal.’

Sounds remarkably familiar to me…. so too are the ancient church practises that my students, both boys and girls, adore. One is ritual; pageantry, processions, colour, incense, movement, chants, mystery and candles. They instinctively move into these ancient practises allowing themselves to be moved beyond words to an experience of the transcendent. They beg to do meditation in class. Please Rev’d Sande can we be still again? Some of them gather for Night Prayer; quiet, candle lit, the same liturgy every time – jostling for position to be the one at the end who recites Lord it is night before sitting around afterwards just holding and gazing into a candle.

There are many social and cultural factors that have contributed to this great disjuncture between the institutional church and the rise of the Spirit in our communities. But one of the significant factors is of our own making. Through my work as a chaplain I see that the church, like the religious leaders of 1st century Palestine, has tried to hold God captive within its systems and theologies. Despite recent moves towards openness, the perception is that it restricts access to God to certified people through approved rituals that are set in concrete.

In the stories today Jesus is not in the temple or the synagogue or under their control. He is offering life outside of the institution, reassuring people through simple touch that they are whole human beings in relationship with God, despite the rules and traditions that tried to tell them otherwise.

When we extended the story of the bleeding woman today we discovered that she might well have been surprised at the outcome of her healing. Similarly, if we reached out to touch this Jesus today, we may be surprised. We may find that what we think important about God and church and all that stuff may not matter at all. Or, it may be resurrected in quite a different form, out of our control, almost as though it has a life of its own, despite our best efforts to tame it.

Like the bleeding woman who had life beyond the purity rules, like the daughter of Jairus who just wouldn’t stay dead despite the statistics, like Farrah Fawcett whose creativity was not controlled by the fantasies of others, there is life in the Spirit beyond what we know now. But if you dare to reach out and touch this Jesus on the loose be prepared to rip up every rule book. The Jesus who turns at your touch may look quite different and behave in very challenging ways without the chains of the institutional church holding him prisoner.