This 11 minute Flashes of Insight conversation asks whether the experience for Church ministers is an opportunity for the theology of reconciliation to grow into change.

It considers restorative justice a matter of putting things back together as they were, as it were by plastering Humpty Dumpty back together, or is it actually a way of going forward to something new?

Key issues in the discussion include

• is whether ‘putting Humpty Dumpty back together again is actually desirable?'
• how to go about restorative justice
• how well do we do restorative justice when as ministers, we may not have the capacity to reconcile
• how as ministers do ‘we do wrong'
• ministers and a capacity for empathy
• whether the theology of reconciliation is up to the task of facing restorative justice

Dr Pita Sharples, Maori Party Co-Leader, supported Kelston's initiative saying that 'schools have to reflect and respect the culture of our kids to make them feel welcome and connected' and noting that karakia, 'is a vital part of our lifestyle.'

Pita was probably talking about Maori lifestyle but even so, our collective, multi-cultural Kiwi world is well on the way to being an eclectic blend of cultural and religious rituals.

I was thinking about all this during a Matariki service last week at the hospital where I work as a chaplain. My colleague, another Anglican priest who happens to be Maori, led the service.

God, the Christian version and a combination of older models, was addressed in the karakia nestled amidst chanting, singing, good humour, tree planting and a cuppa afterwards. It was heart warming.

However, if we'd tried to celebrate a Christian festival honouring the changing of the seasons and the sacredness of the Earth, few, if any would have felt obligated to turn up. Instead it would have been seen as religious, an attempt to force an unwanted and irrelevant belief system on others.

In one sense what Dr Sharples says is true. However, it's also true that communities focused on Christianity, Judaism or Islam would not be able to introduce their prayers into a state school as Kelston has done because we have enshrined religious prejudice in law.

This is why church schools in New Zealand are now the only places teaching an intellectually rigorous curriculum of religious studies, values, ethics and philosophy; remarkably useful subjects for growing citizens of a diverse world.

Religions grew out of human struggles with life, the quest for an understanding of the 'more than' of our existence. Continue reading

Sources

• Sande Ramage in Spirited Crone
• Image: Marist Messenger

Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and blogger.

Festivals need to promise good times, strutting their stuff with music, laughter, food, entertainment and, if we allow them to, speaking subtly of a deeper connectivity, that becomes apparent through the creativity of the human spirit.

The ancient Artemisia festival had it all. People gathered from all over Turkey to enjoy food, wine, music, games and theatrical contests in honour of the Goddess. As well as providing a boost for the economy it was an opportunity to flutter eyelashes and flex muscles to impress a potential mate. Definitely a crowd puller, even Pliny the Roman writer thought so.

No petitions have been sent heavenward asking for your safekeeping. Not even any candles lit on your behalf.

Her question penetrated. I turned to talk to her but instead found myself looking back in time and wondering about how the symbolism of the cross had permeated my life.

In my world, the cross offered rescue from a difficult eternity. The execution of an innocent man meant that my eternal life would be blissful instead of tormented. As a young person I accepted that sacrificial exchange.

I eventually questioned that, along with a literal heaven or hell but it took longer to wonder about the desirability of eternal life. Why would I when my society still tries to live forever?

Previously fuelled by the imaginings of theologians and religious artists, this egocentricity is now given credibility by medical science. But it's still a dream state. An illusion that the essential me matters so much it must be kept alive for as long as possible.
In the Christian church we're in Lent, the run up to Easter, a journey that encourages the contemplation of death and imaginings about eternity.

We get 40 days to contemplate the story of a Jewish man, profiled as human and divine. We explore his outspokenness and compassion, his challenges to the prevailing religious system and his horrible death by crucifixion. It's an outstanding story, rich, nuanced and multi-dimensional.

When I grew up, we weren't encouraged to ask questions about belief so I didn't realise that the death of a man/god on a cross was an exploration of mortality that had appeared before in human history.

Nor did I explore the cross. Much later I wondered if it might be an archetypal image that arises in the collective unconscious. Symbolically sitting at the intersection of the material world and the unseen, spiritual realm, constantly irritating sensibilities as perception is rattled. A growth spot where meaning can flourish. Continue reading

• Sande Ramage in Spirited Crone

Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and blogger.

Par for the course now but this was Paris during the Second World War. A world in turmoil meant people were thinking for themselves, taking up with new liberation movements and deciding not to come to church.

Like any church facing hard times, good ideas were fallen upon with enthusiasm. So when news of a priest grafting alongside the dockworkers in Marseilles hit town, the worker-priest model got legs fast.

Broadly speaking, the idea was that priests and monks were to take the good news of Christ with them as they moved out of religious houses to live and work with the ordinary folk of France.

The inevitable happened. Priests fell in love, got married, joined trade unions, the communist party and all manner of trouble-making groups. In short, the communities they had become part of transformed them.

What's more, the official good news seemed superfluous. The light already existed in the people they thought they'd come to help. As though Christ had sneaked in with no permission from the church and strangely enough, didn't realise Christianity owned him.

This is exactly my experience as a hospital chaplain. God, the Divine, the Light, the Christos, however you language this underpinning of human existence, this presence, it exists in the most basic of human interactions.

Spiritual presence that becomes apparent in offerings like cleaning up folk who can't control their bowels, in wiping blood off the floor, in carting equipment, in attending to birthing and dying, and sometimes even in arguments about budgets. It lives without fanfare, often without words and definitely without adherence to any particular faith tradition.

Get too close to those everyday actions in an effort to describe their interconnectedness and you will be blinded by their ordinary functionality, and appear ridiculous in your quest for understanding. Spirituality is a shy beast, tentative but passionate.

Being near, like the worker-priests were, offering space and acceptance, pointing to the ancient spiritual traditions without expecting belief or commitment is enough, but not always for the authorities. By the 1950's worker-priests were considered to be out of control and the project was stopped.

There's always tension around spirituality and organizations because Spirit is about liminality, walking the thin places where the Divine is sensed and known. Ways of being that are at odds with institutional creeds and mission statements.

Church or health organizations can offer an environment that encourages this fragile mysticism in motion, or exert controls that push it under.

To suppress it maintains the fiction that being religious has to be about belief instead of awakening to what lies deep within.

Source

'I believe we have a duty to leave the world a better place than we found it,' says Miliband. 'I believe we cannot shrug our shoulders at injustice and just say 'that's the way the world is and I believe that we can overcome any odds if we come together as people.'

The second son of Jewish refugees who came to Britain during World War II, Miliband expresses his search for justice outside of synagogue and void of God language or religious story. A bit like the one in six American Jews who are now called The Unaffiliated by a study reported in tabletmag.com.

Being unaffiliated is on the rise worldwide. The latest Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life indicates that around 20% of Americans have no religious affiliation (the highest percentages in Pew Research Centre polling) although many still consider themselves religious or spiritual in some way. Read more

Sources

• spirited crone/Sande Ramage
• Image: The Guardian

Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and blogger.

"Making meaning is seen as one of the important elements of spirituality," writes Sande Ramage, which is not a problem at all for patients who recover, but finding meaning when there seems to be no cure "can leave patients and healthcare professionals alike feeling helpless".

In order to cope with helplessness it's possible to adopt a solely scientific approach to suffering, an approach that is challenged in a book called Time to Care, by Dr Robin Youngson. He says that beyond what medicine offers, 'the most profound healing comes from a bond of shared humanity.'

• Read Sande Ramage's article
• Image: UAB Pastoral Care

Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and blogger

Organisations have a life of their own, a strange combination of power and vulnerability, dreams and missions, factions that control various parts of their functioning, ways of ritualizing what's important and an overwhelming entanglement in a culture that has grown them, and to which they owe some allegiance. It's a balancing act.

Continue reading Sande Ramage's Blog

Sande Ramage is an Anglican priest and Blogger