Post quake

Several people have asked about Christchurch. Lets see well it has been a painful journey. My grandmother died two weeks before the quake, for that I am grateful. My other grandmother lost it and is in a home, my brothers partner was killed in the CTV building.

Church wise there are 26+ churches including the cathedral gone in Christchurch including my home church, the church I was Christened in, and my previous church. At times I am fine with what has occured, then at times I find my self shocked beyond belief, my jaw tight with grief and unsaid words.

God and I are closer though and I believe my faith is stronger than ever. I will try and attach a pic of my Church Holy Trinity Avonside and a piece written from the Women's Studies Network News Letter in March this year.

From Women's Studies News Letter

Back in college a month after the February quake, I still find it hard to comprehend what it is that has happened to my home in Christchurch. I, like many, was initially traumatised by the news of the earthquake. We waited desperately for news from home, the extent of the devastation still unfolding in the city.

Under the weight of constant aftershocks, anxiety and sleep deprivation, it became increasingly apparent that coping mechanisms in Christchurch were crumbling. The opportunity to be a part of the St Johns College relief team to the Maori Mission in Christchurch was an absolute gift. Before moving to college, I had volunteered in social service agencies for over twenty years and knew the city well. However, the

experience of ministering to community within the midst of an emergency, which in effect was still unfolding, challenged me anew to examine how I both experienced and reflected Christ in a disaster.

Although I had experienced the rolling aftershocks, and seen the impact on the city after the initial quake, nothing could prepare me for the shock of standing in front of

my home church. There I was, holding in the palm of my hand, a piece of what was left of the building, the place where I had prayed I would one day be ordained.

In that moment of contemplation, standing on my sacred ground, my solid ground, the words of theologian Jon Sobrino flooded into my being:

“There is a lot to do when an earthquake strikes, but the first thing- without which nothing else we do is enough- is to let ourselves be affected by the tragedy, not to turn away or soften it. This is not a way of promoting masochism, or demanding what is psychologically impossible. It simply requires an initial moment of honesty toward the reality.”[1]

Surrendering that moment towards the honesty of what was occurring allowed me to be fully present in my ministry.

During my time in Christchurch, the full blessing of my experience of Clinical Pastoral Education became increasingly apparent. If for no other reason than the removal of my initial hesitation at being alongside people in trauma, I was exceedingly grateful for those days ministering in Middlemore’s Psychiatric Unit. Yes, the physical building of my church had been reduced to rubble, but that little piece of it, which only

I knew was resting in my pocket, became a touchstone as I worked for the

next few days; my solid ground when meeting with those for whom there was little certainty. A gentle reminder perhaps, that though a building is a building, solid ground is not necessarily that on which I stand, but on that which is my sure footing in the realm of God. This love, that in those tired moments (when it would be easy to join those around me whom. had fallen into quiet chaos and fear) is the love on which I firmly stand. That grounding faith, in those moments, holding me as I hold those fearful and uncertain, as we stand together on the solid ground of God’s enduring love.

On the last night of our time in Christchurch I find myself once more standing in the grounds of my church with my father and my brother. In the last light of day is revealed the great church window, shining untouched through the rubble.

Such emotion bubbles up

on attempting to understand this trip

-this place

a liquefaction of competing thoughts - emotions

foreign, familiar

- pure and tainted.

Questions that few have the breath to answer

ambush the weary

demanding some logical pattern

amidst that which resists form.

How can one in such a place not ask what it is the land demands

when she rolls over in desperation

shaking loose the shackles of archaic churches

waking long dead church fathers.

To one born of old eyes

such questions find a safe harbour behind my teeth

until the only sound that feels safe leaving my mouth

- a lament, is cried into the ground.

“Where is your sacred ground?

Where is your place to stand?”

In the end all that can be done is to dig a hole

and give these questions up to the earth.

It is in the reflected in the at the end of a long day

arms of God where solace is to be found in this place,

through a pile of church rubble

a window unharmed displaying the colours of Gods enduring love

---

[1][1] Jon Sobrino, Where is God? Earthquake, Terrorism, Barbarity, and Hope (New York: Orbis Books, 2004), 7.

3rd Year approaching ordination

I have noticed a change coming over St John’s College community as we approach the end of the year – and more importantly as many of us approach ordination. I have in past years been aware of the shift that ripples through this place. We are a community, we worship early in the morning, break fast together, study together, have Eucharist together, lunch together, we live next to each other, we socialise, our children are bought into the world and grow up here, they play together, and we all love and struggle and suffer together. In many respects I have never been so intimately entwined in a community as I am here. As such nothing that affects one in the community, can not at some level be felt by another. This year with so many heading toward ordination I wonder if the feeling is compounded?

Or is perhaps it is just my own fall into introversion as I approach my deaconing. In some respects it is odd to me to be leaving here to be ordained in another place, another Island away from my community. I will travel to Christchurch, God willing be ordained in the Church of St Michael and All Angels (as the Cathedral is no more since the earthquakes). I will work in the community, in the east of Christchurch for five weeks with quake survivors and then return here, different and yet the same.

As I approach ordination the questions of worthiness ripple and round the community and through me. We have become a quieter people at present. I am happy that some of the people from here will travel with my husband and I to my ordination, my dean, the priest in charge of my formation, students. People who have been an intricate part of my formation and journey. Two worlds for a short while will touch each other (I wonder what they will think of each other?)

In the meantime I notice myself caught between the difficulties of acquiring the documentation needed to be ordained when ones church has been destroyed and all records are in the red zone, and my own internal shift. I notice it most when I take bible study for the Pacific Island and African Women at College. There we enter Tambore time when we engage with scripture and the intimacies of human interaction across nations. In this sacred space I confess my increased need to nurture my community, to set up sewing sessions so no one to be deaconed or priested - however tight for cash (the perpetual student problem) without a stole.

I confess too my sudden desire to look at wedding dresses. Although I buy them at auction to cut up for stoles, I am aware that there is a subtext here, a mirroring of the bride of Christ, a sense that in my ordination I will be wedded to the Church in a new way.

Such are the noticings of this a woman on the edge of ordination, on an evening where there is a soft rain and the smell of blossom heavy in the air.