Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

On Christmas Day I announced my impending resignation to those few souls still left in North Dunedin at that time of year. I hope to be moving to a position in Fiji around Easter, but that seems still a little up in the air.

The bigger issue remains - and I’m sure will be there for some of our new soon-to-be 2009 residents at Selwyn… that place you’re at - as am I, which is an ending and a beginning. A sense of coming closure and the impending expanse of the future. Leaving “home”, and making that somewhere else. A bit of grief and a good dose of excitement.

New possibilities, full of wonderful opportunity and ringed with a little trepidation.

Such is life, with all its twists and turns. Such is the realm of the spirit too sometimes.

When I was at College (meaning High School), we had one - and only one - term-by-term Bible reading: the Parable of the Talents: three servants, differently weighted but equally prestigious (financial) gifts entrusted to them. Two invest and profit; one “plants” his in the ground: no risk, no return. Goodness knows what we make of that given recent financial madness… Suffice to say, the latter servant is not well regarded by his Boss.

Anyway, I hated that parable at school, but on Sunday found myself seated in an unfamiliar place, and looking straight at the window at All Saints that depicts it, in all of its Victorian sentimentality. I was forced to admit that, yes, it is a bit of a metaphor - full of opportunity and trepidation - that rings true. I think that’s why I feel at such tension with it: there’s a challenge there.

The servant who “plants” his Talents (a financial measure, maybe 10 years’ average wage - and the whole image I think a comic one to a farming society: peopl who know that money doesn’t grow on trees), does so out of fear. His instincts are to keep things safe at all costs, and be able to say at the end of the process - “Look, I didn’t risk, I didn’t lose anything, we’re sweet. I give you back just what you gave me”.

An ending and a beginning, indistinguishable.

Not what we’re called to, at any stage of our lives.

Selwyn, study, friends and relationships - all are going to stretch us, take us somewhere, make us someone, different. If we let that happen. Richer, in a purely non-financial sense at least, I hope.

Maybe that will come as well, maybe not.

Ends and beginnings.

T.S. Eliot writes famously (in “Little Gidding”, one of his Four Quartets)

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Whether you’re studying evolutionary biology or existentialist philosphy, or maybe even theology,
something there rings true.

I look forward to meeting many of you at Selwyn in the first part of 2009.