This is the introduction of John Bluck’s paper to the
Association of Christian Spiritual Director’s conference in August 2004
I began my life as an ordinand or seminarian at 18 and would fall asleep at early morning chapel services, in the midst of receiving profound spiritual advice. My contemporaries who stayed awake went on to live holy lives while I wandered off into various spiritual wildernesses, rescued by inspiration from ecumenism, social action, human encounter movements and other brands of religious intensity. I never quite made the cut for the charismatic movement, though I tried hard and remain vaguely disappointed that I didn’t taste the undoubtedly exciting fruits of that tree that flowered so brightly in the seventies, and we’ve been singing about, a little wistfully, ever since.
It was much later, after wandering around the world and back, that I ran into a school of spirituality that I’d been living inside all my life without realising. Call it Kiwi spirituality, or Pakeha, or Tau Iwi if you must, or indigenous. Certainly call it incarnational, and nothing less than ecumenical. Whatever else it is, it’s home grown, it belongs to nowhere else but in the ground beneath our feet and it’s all right here.
We began talking about this spirituality in the earliest years of Pakeha settlement and it’s grown through several self conscious forms, from a highly romanticised Victorian version in oil paintings full of brooding mountains that Wordsworth could have scribbled off an ode to with ease, through to idealised noble savages, the “tui” and “bellbird” school of poetry, the rugged bush felling, camp oven cooking pioneers who were good, keen and lonely, through to the stirrings of a national identity, monocultural with Maori decoration, then forged in war, depression, economic crisis, and finally coming of age, though still adolescent.
This spirituality can be traced through our literature and art and even our cinema, but you’re hard pressed to find it in the theology of our churches, which remained colonial and import dependent for well into the 1960’s, long after the rest of the society gave away import licencing and controls. And if you listen to the choruses we sing still and the adulation we heap on visiting American preachers and authors, you might well wonder if there’s still some way to go in trusting our own spiritual voices.
I started coming to terms with Kiwi spirituality when I settled again in New Zealand in the early 80’s at a time when Maori sovereignty and identity was being clearly staked out in the public domain, as a mainstream issue that couldn’t be sidelined any longer. The signs were everywhere around me: Bastion Point, the land marches, the momentum gathering around the Waitangi Tribunal, and in the Anglican Church, the preparations for a Tikanga based church and a prayer book that addressed a God who awaited me here rather than somewhere else. Couple all that with the challenge that came from the Christian feminist movement (women I knew ten years before as easy going colleagues were now monitoring my pronouns and holding me personally responsible for the sins of patriarchy), and I found myself a stranger in a familiar land. There was nothing else to do but set about trying to give an account of the hope that was in me, in a whole new way.
Back then, we started talking about Kiwi spirituality in bold generalisations. The sheer novelty of talking about it at all allowed us that luxury. “Struggle and hope” described it well and a little collection of essays called “Long, white and cloudy” confessed to the open ended and often fuzzy way we talked.
I wouldn’t use that title now. It’s long, white and a little clearer now, and the lines around spiritual identity and belonging are much sharper.
We’ve pushed the debate about separate, distinct and definable identities to their limit and the postmodern worldview that says such contrasts are artificial and overplayed is catching up with us. Hybrid identities are overtaking old separations. Younger Maori see no contradiction in claiming the Pakeha part of their whakapapa even as they support an iwi claim under the Treaty. Androgynous images muddle gender separations in popular music and art. The freedom that Generation X enjoys in holding multiple and changing loyalties to brand names and institutions all conspires to make our statements of faith and our places of belonging harder than ever to pin down. World views, credal statements, canon laws and authority figures that define the big picture become obsolete the minute they pretend to have the last word. The only person to dares to claim that is Pam Corkery.
Any sort of exclusive claim on truth of any sort is written off by the postmodern way of seeing the world. Any lingering hope that the church, or any faith tradition for that matter, might have a corner on the spirituality market is surely dismissed by the sight of multi national corporations selling their products as spiritual assets, be that an airline ticket, a bottle of Steinlager or drive in a new Nissan.
In that setting, national let alone indigenous ownership of anything is constantly undermined by a global culture that homogenises everything into a mongrel mix, available to anyone who can pay the price. Consumerism has no scruples and respects no boundaries.
And yet, amazingly enough, despite all those hybridising, homogenising forces at work, we see proudly owned, passionately expressed beliefs and identities commanding attention and respect. Consider the success of moves like “Whale Rider’, poetry like Glen Colquhoun’s “Playing God” collection, the transformative power of Kura Kaupapa schools, and even the pride most cynical and worldly wise New Zealanders feel when they see underdogs like the Silver Ferns or the Tall Blacks triumph against the odds. These are very local, very particular, very focussed expressions of energy, skill and belief. Yet they speak universally while they last and even after they have been superseded and changed into something quite different, their legacy lives on.
A clearly lived out, well owned and proudly held spirituality for Aotearoa can have that sort of transformative power, regardless of whether it’s experienced by people who stand inside or outside the familiar circle of religion, even when they are unable to find any traction from the traditional language and disciplines of church. But for that to happen, we need, I believe, to shift gear in the way we express that spirituality, namely from the general to the particular, the conceptual to the concrete and from fixed categories to fluid processes, the tightly defined to the openly dynamic, from hoping to find the big picture out there somewhere to trusting that there is truth enough and more to be going on with in the bits and pieces right here in front of us.
My claim then is that when it comes to a spirituality for Aotearoa that embraces our struggles and hopes, God is to be found in the detail, in the fine print of this gospel–culture contract that we inherit and constantly need to rewrite.
And we look to the detail not in order to check up on whether some universal laws of theological grammar are being followed, but rather because God is in that detail in every fragment of it, in every dot on every “ i “ and every cross bar on every “ t “. We’re accustomed to looking through telescopes to find evidence of the divine spirit in the universe. Let’s spend some time looking through the microscope as well, to find that same spirit in the smallest detail of the most local, the most ordinary, the closest to home. To do that, you have to trust the ground on which you stand to be worth the effort of such close scrutiny.
And equally if not more importantly, let’s expect to find God in the way those details connect. For it’s in those interconnections that we find new reasons for getting excited about the God in whom we live and move and have our being in Aotearoa.
Comments