Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

One of the opportunities Selwyn College presents its residents with - as witnessed by our glittering alumni (!) - is the chance to grow into positions of leadership, both individually and within the community.

When students return from the mid-Semester break we’ll soon be into the electioneering and extravagant promises of would-be SCSA Executive members for 2009. We’ve just gone through the process for OUSA, and a couple of former residents were prominent in those races also.

But what kind of leaders are we trying to encourage?

There’s a passage in the gospels during the Last Supper when the soon-to-be leadership of the Church, the Disciples, break into a squabble about which of them is to be seen as “the greatest”.

Jesus replies by saying “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them … but not so with you;
rather the greatest among you must become like the youngest,
and the leader like one who serves.”

“Servant leadership” has become a bit of a “brand” in the (US) business world in recent decades, after a publication by Robert Greenleaf. But that doesn’t mean it’s not to be taken seriously.

Certainly the idea that we takes seriously and together both leadership and service deserves more airtime than we usually give it.

We are reminded in Jesus’ words that those considered great in the empires and ages of this earth often lack the true greatness they project.

You may have heard Coldplay’s recent song Viva la vida with the protagonist reflecting on the loneliness and emptiness of who he has become since he “ruled the world”.

C. S. Lewis offers a glimpse of true greatness and true discipleship in The Great Divorce, a little story about a busload of the dead who visit the outskirts of both hell and heaven.

Near Paradise the narrator comes across a great procession of song and luminescence,
and a woman of unbearable beauty. The observer assumes it must be the Virgin Mary.

“Not at all,” his guide says. “It’s someone ye’ll never have heard of. Her name on earth was Sarah Smith … She is one of the great ones. Ye have heard that fame in this country and fame on Earth are two quite different things.”
It emerges that this woman, altogether ordinary in the world’s eyes, was the kind of soul whose love for people, and even animals, made them better at what they were meant to be.
The guide says, “… her motherhood was of a different kind. Those on whom it fell went back to their natural parents loving them more. Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers.
But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives…
In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them … It is like when you throw a stone into a pool, and the concentric waves spread out further and further. Who knows where it will end? … But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.”

Rather a lot to ask from a student body, but food for thought for an institution that would make a difference in its community, in this time, and perhaps into eternity!

This weekend marks the return leg of the annual Selwyn-College House cultural and - in this instance - sporting exchange.

Inasmuch as the Knox-Selwyn competition has its roots in denominational distinction (Knox was established as a Presbyterian hall, Selwyn as Anglican), the College House connection is that both have an Anglican heritage.

What do those foundations mean today?

Well, there’s a tradition that all three Colleges share, incorporating both a connection with the institutional Church in terms of governance, a model of pastoral care that includes some sort of chaplaincy role, and at least occasional services that explicitly acknowledge the Christian dimension to the Colleges’ story.

And of course such resonances emerge elsewhere, like lightning arcing and earthing its energy at seemingly random points at Selwyn: the rituals of initiation and the year’s beginning, some of which have mythic and quasi-religious overtones (I’m looking at you, Verne); the echoes (as the Warden has noted) of water and pilgrimage…

Of course, there’s always been a bit of Selwyn’s culture that probably evolved in stark and explicit contrast to its apparent ecclesiastical accouterments - I remember the story around my uncle’s winning of the Turner Tossing Trophy (once a drinking contest), a feat met with some pride by my clergyman grandfather, who clearly didn’t know what the contest entailed…

It’s been a weird, fragmented week on Campus. Last week was Islamic Awareness Week. Queer Awareness Week. And Disability Awareness Week.

That’s a lot of multi-directional Awareness to be going on with.

If you happened to be disabled, gay and Muslim, you hit the jackpot!

Actually, two out of three would make a certain amount of sense if you’ve seen the latest Adam Sandler movie “You Don’t Mess With The Zohan”. It features Palestinian-American actor Maysoon Zayid (I heard her interviewed recently on “Sunday Night Safran”). She’s a comedienne. A Muslim. With cerebral palsy.

She also spends three months of each year working with children. Refugees with disabilities, in Palestine.

We’re very good at categorizing one another. And it can often blinker us to seeing a full person standing in front of us.

I was told a story the other day that’s stuck with me.

A (real, known) woman in another NZ city, very active in the Church, enormously gifted and respected, personally and professionally.

She has a severe lifelong speech impediment.

In the course of her work, she is approached by an earnest young Christian, who tells her he needs to pray for her.

“What for?” she asks.

“That the Lord will set you free from your handicap.”

She looks at him and replies, rather wonderfully, “You’re too late. The Lord set me free from my handicap many years ago. But he obviously hasn’t yet set you free from my handicap. So perhaps I need to pray for you.”

I had a Biblical Studies lecturer who regularly spouted his pet phrase: “context is king!” Roughly translated: you have to know where something fits, in order to understand it on its own terms, and in its fullest sense.

Have you ever wondered about the origins of the College motto?

It’s taken from a work by Lucretius (great Roman poet, c.99 - c.55 BC), De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things].

And happily it has an Olympian (if not geopolitical) feel to it:

“Augescunt aliae gentes, aliae minuuntur,
inque brevi spatio mutantur saecla animantum
et quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt.”

“Some nations increase, others are reduced,
And in a short time the generations of living creatures are changed
And like runners they pass on the torch of life”.

…with Google, any of us can pretend to be convincingly learned!

Yesterday was the Christian feast of the Transfiguration – Jesus “shining” and seen in literally a new light on a mountaintop. It’s always struck me as a supreme irony, a deeply poignant coincidence, that that day shares its commemoration with another, much more recent event …and how much images from the one are echoed in the other.

Dazzling white. Terrifying cloud. From the cloud a sound. And then being alone, and a silence.

On the Feast of the Transfiguration in 1945 the Enola Gay flew high above the city of Hiroshima, and the world entered unequivocally the atomic age. When the dazzling light and brilliance of human innovation cast a shadow that is with us still.

There is a perhaps apocryphal tale that those who worked on the first atomic bomb believed that their work would be used over Mount Fuji, that mountain that appears in almost every piece of traditional Japanese art, in order to demonstrate the power of this new weapon.

Instead, on this day in 1945, Hiroshima became forever infamous, as the place where a bright light, “no ordinary sun”, a distinctive mushroom cloud, and after the thunderous noise, God alone knows what voice from heaven - speaking volumes about fallen humanity - at that first “ground zero”, a silence.

Not for fear of telling of what was witnessed, but the sound of simply nothing left alive.

In the Letter that bears Peter’s name, we are invited to use the Transfiguration, as “a lamp shining in a dark place”. They don’t come any darker than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945.

The College motto speaks of “passing on” the torch of life: vitai lampada tradunt. And a few weeks ago we wondered together at our Semester 2 recommencement service what that might mean in the dark of midwinter.

The Olympic torch relay is coming to its culmination. And we wonder what that will mean for a host nation where there is more than a little repression and shadow.

Hone Tuwhere’s poem, “No Ordinary Sun”, with its image of the tree, I suspect is making a reference to the Cross in the midst of nuclear desolation. Perhaps it’s a reference to T.S. Eliot’s Little Gidding from his “Four Quartets” written during the War, but three years before Hiroshima, as he remembers a village with a religious Community long-since destroyed.

Apparently the Japanese character used for “transfigure” is the same as that for “disfigure”.

Transfiguration and disfiguration. Christians claim that somehow in disfiguration on the cross God’s glory is revealed. Not only is suffering the means of reconciliation, but the transfiguring of suffering itself is attested.

Leonard Wilson was Bishop of Singapore during World War II. A Prisoner of War, removed from his interment camp for months and tortured by the Japanese on suspicion of being a spy. He survived, and after the war returned to Singapore where he was confronted with a former torturer who came to be Confirmed as a Christian. Because he had seen something in his victim that had changed him. “One of those who had stood with a rope in his hand, threatening and sadistic,” Wilson said, “ - I have seldom seen so great a change in a man. He looked gentle and peaceful. His face was completely changed by the power of Christ.”

The first Ground Zero is now a Peace Park.

We are called, as we reflect on the disfiguring pain of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as we hold in prayer all the violence and waste of conflict in our age, we are called to hold before ourselves and our world the possibility of transfiguration.

Change.

Redemption.

So here we are on the cusp of the Olympics in Beijing, and only a few short weeks away from Selwyn’s epic on-field oval-balled confrontation with Knox. Given the likelihood that more people are playing or watching sport in any given week than in NZ churches, synagogues, mosques and temples combined, there’s a interesting conversation to be had about spirituality and sport.

The highs, the low, the agonies and ecstasies, fierce denominationalism of a kind… it’s all there in what might be vying for the title of NZ’s “real” religion. There’s certainly an interest out there in the interweb (here for example) - and an English University even has a centre for the study of these disciplines’ meeting.

The great distinction of course is around attitudes to the body. One celebrates it, while the other seems to often portray our physicality as little more than a pupal stage before we emerge, soulful butterflys into the hereafter.

Ecological awareness has in recent decades allowed some sort of association of the clearly physical world with an overtly spiritual dimension of ourselves - as individuals and as humanity. The Olympics hold out the hope of a distinct and evocative “spirit” among competitors and colleagues alike. We like to think there’s something more than simply sport going on at the Games, and perhaps there is.

I’d be interested in your thoughts.