Colourful Dreamer

This third part is about our time at St Georges College participating on the "Footsteps of Jesus" and Jordan pilgrimages. At the beginning of the "Footsteps of Jesus" pilgrimage, Dr Rodney Aist the course director invited us to be disciple learners; to be like Peter and available to be flipped around, re-orientated, ready to revise our assumptions and expectations and to be prepared to think big. The place of fruitfulness, he said, is the place of risk.  And as we sat alone in the heat in the Judean wilderness as Jesus sat for 40 days I was asked “who are you as a Franciscan priest and what is mine to do? I would return to this over the next two weeks in places like Capernaum and continue to wrestle with it. Really, this is why I am even re-reading all this stuff and blogging about it. So here are some further reflections as I re-read my blog posts.  White Jesus was everywhere – confrontingly so, in a place where Jesus was clearly not white.  Being constantly conf...

The first three weeks of this pilgrimage had been a time of preparation – letting go, learning to pay attention to divine calling, sacred time, place and people, and to saunter with purpose. It was now time for JFOC-IPTOC. Chris, Sue, and I put a lot of work into this time. It was as powerful for me as I hoped. I am so grateful for the time of lectio divina each morning around our principles and how that fed into the shape of those 9 days. Our time together was shaped around the three broad themes: 1. Listening to our Sources 2. Listening to the Cry of the World 3. Sharing our Good News. Thank you to Paula who reminded us that prayer is at the heart of being Franciscan, immersing us in the scriptures that we might hear the whispers of the Spirit and be shaped into a people living humility and love, offering peace. This was Francis’s way, and we are invited to follow in his footsteps. And I was struck that these earliest Franciscans were not to bear arms or to take oaths of loyalty...

Here my final reflections on that amazing time on sabbatical in 2023. They are in three parts because they were not brief. I want to start by again saying how much in need I was for this. Covid was hard on many people, and it was hard on clergy. We had to learn how use online technology, how to pivot, and how to care for people while not meeting them. There was a constant need to innovate, when really, we live for routine and predictability. And here in Aotearoa we had it pretty easy. We were much more open and without Covid than many other parts of the world. But the threat was there, the fear. And when we came back to in person church that had its own stresses, especially with vaccine passes and how to manage those. And our attendance patterns had changed, and it felt like we had taken a few steps backwards. It just felt harder. So many of us were exhausted at the end. It is sad that our church leadership paid so little attention to this. We were expected to keep on going. Along wi...