A Bit of a Change

By David Kitchingman in All Sorts

holiday experiences lead the writer to think about the importance of change in the physical world, society, individuals, god, and church.

A BIT OF A CHANGE
Over Christmas and New Year, I enjoyed a family holiday around much of the South Island, notable for wall-to-wall sunshine on the West Coast. That was a bit of a change! It even got me thinking about change.
You're more likely to notice change when you move around and out of your comfort zone. Little things, like one's first wash in the morning that alerts you to the greater hardness or softness of the water. And the sheer power of the midday sun. The earth intercepts only about one half of one billionth of the sun's energy output and most of the ultraviolet radiation is absorbed by the gas molecules of the atmosphere. But it took only a few minutes to inflict a burn on one of our number.
As for West Coast sunsets, being able to stare directly at the slow- motion descent of the sun below the ocean horizon is a special treat when you haven't done so for many years. No wonder sun worship was one of the earliest forms of theism.
It takes a little longer to sense that each place you visit is not only different from one's own patch of earth; it's also different from itself as it once was. In Greymouth I specially recalled my time there nearly 60 years ago. I was doing a long vacation student preaching supply from Trinity College, staying with Bruce and Margaret Gordon. During the weekdays it seemed the most natural thing on the earth (or rather under the earth) to get a readily available job as a trucker in the Liverpool State Mine. Access was only possible by steam train to Rewanui and then by a specially designed haulage system up a near-45o incline to the mine entrance. It took roughly as long to make the daily return trip to the underground coalface as it did to do the job itself. Even so, the mid-shift crib breaks in the dense darkness were always a welcome relief from shoving the loaded trucks. The mine and even the railway line have long since closed. And last month, the Roa Mine, the last underground coalmine on the Coast was closed. No one will ever do those jobs again on the Coast.
Some other mine memories were revived while staying at Granity north of Westport. We walked around Millerton up on the plateau north of Denniston. Millerton is still a township of sorts, though its "Information Centre" is a derelict cottage whose last resident it seems forgot his gumboots as he left. Among the relics of the former Millerton Mine, the most impressive were the ruins of the concrete bath house- some thirty to forty individual cubicles now at the mercy of cold showers as only the Coast can provide.
Yet the human scale of change is as nothing compared to geological change. Perhaps for most tourists the Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki are a static marvel. We may have seen them as kids and remember the blowholes. Now our grandchildren can enjoy them and may take their own grandchildren to visit. The rocks will barely have changed. But this is all only midpoint in their history. Some thirty million years ago these alternating hard and soft limestone layers of marine creatures and plant sediments were formed on the seabed about 2,000 metres below the surface. Come millions more years in the future, and the Pancake Rocks will be fully eroded back into the sea.
Another prime example of how enormous change can occur in slow motion, bit by bit, is provided by the West Coast glaciers. Zillions of individual snowflakes compressed into ice can carve mountain rock into deep valleys, and the glaciers themselves are in constant adjustment between the volume of the snowfield at the top and that of the meltwater at the bottom. The very word 'glacial' is used to suggest deceptive slowness. So, of all the instances and aspects of change that I came across on our holiday, the most evocative was revisiting St James Anglican Church in Franz Josef Village. Many of us will remember the nine penny 1946 New Zealand Peace stamp, with the view of the glacier through the church window. When built in 1931, it was a stroke of inspiration to insert that big plate glass window behind the cross and altar. Yet few, if any, parishioners could have anticipated then that in time the glacier would recede and be out of sight by 1954. As luck would have it, a temporary advance brought the terminal face once more into view in 1997, only to yield more recently to the longer term retreat in line with global warming.
As I return to another year of church life, observations occupational and geological merge into thoughts theological. That recent image through the altar window remains fixed in my mind (though 'fixed' is not quite the right word). Still a beautiful sight without doubt, but not as stunning as it once was. Every church has its own figurative altar window that conveys its world-view. If it hadn't been inspiring to begin with there wouldn't have been a church. But the vision should not be taken as eternally frozen in time, nor should the church's job description. The insistence on changelessness has become one of the pitfalls of religion. Only idols do not change. A living god is by definition in process, and those who worship such a god cannot be less so.
Two thousand years have passed since the three-decker universe of the early church and we still seem to take pride in the immutability of our faith. Continuity by all means, but indistinguishability becomes sterile. Despite deceptive advances from time to time, hints of revival as it were, there is always and everywhere a bit of a change taking place. A changing world, a changing society, changing individuals one by one, and even a changing god, all demand a changing church. A church that will not consider radical change to its time-honoured tasks runs the risk of being left behind like closed coalmines or glacial moraine, maybe very slowly but inexorably in due course. Cumulative bits of change must eventually bite deep.
David Kitchingman