Blogs • Revd Tim Hurd (Former Chaplain)

The prospect of spending some time overseas makes you think about what national days mean.

Sure, Waitangi Day may be a great excuse for a pub crawl in London, and - bizarrely - for Sales in Fiji (multiculturalism: so many cultural holiday sales to exploit!), but what does it mean to us, right here and now?

Of course, the papers and TV are full of such musings, but as part of the Anglican Church family, and named for it’s first NZ Bishop, Selwyn College might like to think about such things.

Those who drafted the Treaty at Waitangi were Anglicans. It was Anglican missionaries who had enough Reo to translate them, however imperfectly. Governor Hobson was an Anglican.

In recent years - 17 and counting - the Anglican Church has tried to model in its governance a partnership that acknowledges the Treaty. It means we sometimes have to talk a lot at meetings - sometimes frankly, other times with infuriating obliqueness. Sometimes we have to agree we can’t. Some of us choose to use the structure as a way of hiding from real encounters with real Treaty partners.

Nonetheless, it has been a really useful part of the journey as far as I can see. We’re forced to identify elephants, historical and present, in the metaphorical room. Pakeha have been invited to think about who and what we really are, apart from “the majority”, as a culture and a partner.

And we discover together some of the richness of the cloth from which our “now” is woven. (The Anglican symbol in this country is the “flax cross”, which tries to depict something of that).

As a theological student, a friend and I offered a presentation on identity and meaning in the very tongue-in-cheek persona of a pakeha-angst-ridden Folk duo, called “Generation Xile” (even before Flight of the Conchords!)

The keynote song was, deliberately, awful. But maybe the parting shot was not so pretending-to-be-insightful-but-actually-saying-very-little as I intended.

You may call me melancholy, / “A rose by any other name…”
And was the Treaty Hobson’s folly?
When he said “we are one people” did he mean,
“we are the same”?

Identity and partnership.

Just some of what might be up for exploration, Selwyn 2009.

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.