Time and Timelessness

By David Kitchingman in All Sorts

a reflection on what qualities should be timeless, mused on Rakiura

Time and Timelessness
A Rakiura reflection
At Easter I spent some time on Stewart Island. Or did I? In a place like that time doesn't count so much. On Rakiura, the place of "glowing skies", time may not stand still but it surely slows down. It gives one time to mull over time.
Grahame Sydney, Brian Turner and Owen Marshall were very bold when they brought out their book on Central Otago under the title Timeless Land. The heaving hills of golden tussock may seem that way, but time there was before the tussock and, if the wilding pines have their way, time will come when a green tide returns. Timelessness (ever since the big bang) is a seductive but suspect notion.
So with Stewart Island. In some respects it's a time capsule left over from the period before Gondwanaland broke up, and then Foveaux Strait "sank" after the ice ages, preventing southern beech forest from spreading to the new island. An island not at all frozen in the sense of the "Frozen Continent", but partly frozen in time.
On a much shorter timescale has come the impact of human habitation. Obvious of course around Oban township, but inconspicuous elsewhere. On the three-day "Great Walk" we were constantly in bush or on beach, but in a few spots were directed to the remains of the sawmilling era. What superhuman and horse-power effort it took to make those temporary dents on the landscape, now reduced to rusting relics of boilers and haulers. In the bush itself we looked down on tiny rimu saplings and could only imagine what it might be like to return in a few hundred years' time.
Back in Oban, a chance to pick up again on the measures of human life and times. A little ute drove along the main street, its tray covered with fern fronds. Two mourners accompanying a casket dangled their feet off the back of the tray. Some of the niceties of mainland road rules have yet to cross the Strait. I had time to pop into a gift shop only to be asked by the proprietor a short time later if I would look after the shop (open till and all) while she popped across the road to see somebody. It seemed a glimpse into olden times.
More modern perhaps was the reaction I got in the hotel when a fellow tramper somehow picked up on my intention to attend the Presbyterian Church service the next day. He couldn't resist baiting me in mocking tones as "Archbishop". Next day, Easter Sunday, the incognito archbishop did go to the lovely red and white, 100 plus year-old wooden church on the hill. Its spire, I think, carries a navigational beacon to help guide the ferries and fishing boats coming into Halfmoon Bay.
Inside the church I took a trip down memory lane. A few copies of Touchstone and a Charles Wesley hymn ("And can it be?") were familiar enough. The preacher had come over for the weekend from New Zealand (a term Islanders use a bit for the mainland). Perhaps a futuristic aspect to the service was the lack of any scripture reading. The rest was firmly in the not so distant past.
Apparently the preacher had visited a building yard on his arrival for Easter and asked for some old timber and nails with which to make a cross. His sermon made it clear that for him time had begun on a particular day and month of 1989 - the day of his conversion, when he accepted that Christ had paid the price of his sins. We too could be born again on 31 March 2013 if we trusted in the substitutionary death of our Saviour.
During the last hymn, "Just as I am", we were invited to nail onto the cross pieces of paper, on which could be written specific mistakes or burdens in our lives that we wanted to be carried away. The hymn singing was punctuated by pulses of loud bangs as several (including the preacher) among the forty or so present wielded the hammer.
Church and Bible have quite a yen for timelessness. "For ever (and ever)" and "everlasting" take up a page or so of any Bible concordance. The church prides itself on its constancy. Those who long for it to make some changes seem to wait in vain. Timelessness all but takes over. The fixation of tradition is like a giant tectonic plate. Only an inordinate passage of time or razor-sharp observation can allow any movement to be detected.
Late on my last day on the island I had two to three spare hours, enough, I hoped, to walk to the Wohlers Monument over the hill to Ringaringa Point. The monument marks the burial place of Johann Wohlers and his wife Eliza. Johann was a German missionary to southern Maori for more than 40 years, based on nearby Ruapuke Island from 1844.
I had thought that the long twilight of the south would be my guide, and it did its best. But the glow in the sky could not quite last the distance. When only about five minutes distance from the monument I realised that I needed to turn back or I could get lost in the bush without a torch. Time was not on my side. Eventually it never is.
I had to be content with my reading about this man, "almost the antithesis of most people's idea of a nineteenth century missionary". I had consulted his biography, Brother Wohlers by his great-granddaughter, Sheila Natusch, and a little summary of her work by Neville Peat in Rakiura Heritage. Wohlers, Peat quoted, "was 'made of stern stuff' although tolerant, compassionate and full of humour".
As I thought more about it, my confusion about time started to ease. Something began to seem almost as clear as the waters around Stewart Island. Timelessness does not belong to any entities - lands, peoples, enterprises, churches, and the like - but perhaps it lingers longest among qualities. Qualities such as resoluteness, tolerance, compassion and humour. Even our scriptures, which may not last forever, tell of similar qualities that will never end.
All in all, it was a good time on Stewart Island/Rakiura.
David Kitchingman