17.07.05 - Holy and Human

Until five years ago there was a living link here in St Lukes with that stone on which Jacob had laid his head and later stood on its end to mark the holy place at which he had encountered God. I won??t give you the whole traditional story of what subsequently happened to that stone, except to say that it is said to have ended up first in Ireland in the fifth century before the common era, and then in Scotland in the fifth century of the common era.

In Ireland, the High Kings were crowned, seated on this stone. Then it was taken first to the Abbey on the island of Iona, and then to the Abbey of Scone (pronounced ?´skoon??) in Perthshire. At Iona and at Scone, it was the coronation seat for the kings of the Scots. In 1296 England??s King Edward I defeated the Scots in battle, and took the stone back to London. He had a chair built to contain the stone, and ever since, coronations in Westminster Abbey have taken place with the sovereign seated on the coronation chair above the Stone of Scone.

A 1328 treaty between the Scots and the English included the return of the stone to Scotland, but the English didn??t get around to it until 1996. On St Andrews Day that year the stone was placed in Edinburgh Castle along with the Scottish crown jewels. It will be loaned to Westminster Abbey whenever there is another coronation, but otherwise the Stone of Scone remains in Scotland as a symbol of Scots nationhood and independence.

But 1996 was not the first time that the stone had gone back to Scotland. On Christmas Day 1950, a group of Scottish nationalists went into Westminster Abbey and removed the 152kg stone from under the coronation chair, popped it in the boot of their car, and disappeared. Four months later, after ?± as you imagine ?± a huge hue and cry, it turned up in Scotland. No one was ever arrested for, or owned up to involvement.

In April 2000, at the funeral here in St Lukes of Scots-born and raised Mrs Julia Fleming, her son revealed that Julia had told him she was one of those involved in removing the stone from Westminster Abbey in 1950. Julia, a long-time member of St Lukes, quite unbeknownst to the rest of us, was our living link with the stone on which tradition says Jacob??s head rested while he dreamed of a portal between heaven and earth.

Some experts say the Stone of Scone ?± or Stone of Destiny, to give it its official name ?± is sandstone of a type found around Scone and in Ireland. But others, including a Yale geologist, say it couldn??t have come from any quarry in Scotland or Ireland, and just could be Middle Eastern in origin. Just how spooky is that?

One of the realities of living in a country that has been humanly inhabited for less than a thousand years is that for the vast majority of New Zealanders of European descent, there is nothing in this country that has a lingering and deep-seated link, by tradition or by fact, with anything of ancient spiritual or political significance. By and large, Pakeha have not caught on to M?ѬÅori spiritual values and significant places and objects. The kafuffle some years ago over the taniwha which local M?ѬÅori claimed lived in part of the Waikato River to be affected by straightening a portion of State Highway 1 saw many Pakeha quite bewildered if not down-right ignorant about the place of the "other" in day-to-day living. The closest many Pakeha New Zealanders get to thinking of places with a sense of the extra-ordinary about it is to talk about the "hallowed turf" of some sports ground such as Carisbrooke or Eden Park.

Is this something we lack in this young country, or is it an advantage? Is it a lack not to have anything that links us with an ancient past, with heroic forebears, with a historical or at least tradition-based claim that God is especially close here, or Jesus once walked there, or that Saint Somebody or other performed a miracle in such and such a spot?

Or is it to our advantage? Is it, with all the superstition often attached to ancient sacred places, perhaps one of the things our European forebears sought to leave behind them when they set out to create a new life at the other end of the planet? To be sure, some of our forebears sought to recreate little bits of the religious Motherland in the churches they built, but church attendance was never a popular or majority activity amongst New Zealanders. Even in the late nineteenth century an avowed atheist, Sir Robert Stout, could, at different times, be chief justice and prime minister of New Zealand.

Holy wells or holy islands, ancient sacred buildings or places aside, isn??t it an advantage for a young nation to be free of the kind of superstitions that surround nationhood in the Old Country? Such as the ravens at the Tower of London, and the belief that if they disappear so will the monarchy or England. Or the apes on the Rock of Gibraltar being carefully tended and preserved because of the belief that if they all disappeared the British Empire would too (it has anyway, with or without the apes). Or even to have your sense of nationhood and independence represented by a rectangular block of stone of debatable origin?

Most of us are aware of serious discussion from time to time over the past few decades about the lack of an indigenous Pakeha spirituality, let alone culture, in New Zealand. Over the past thirty or so years, when M?ѬÅori have experienced a cultural and spiritual renaissance, many Pakeha have lamented the lack of an equivalent for we Pakeha New Zealanders. Such spirituality as we have is almost entirely imported - either in the traditions and systems of our original denominations in the Old World, or recent revivals in such things as Celtic spirituality or imports from the United States. There have been some worthy attempts to introduce New Zealand-specific seasons and practices, but by-and-large these have never caught on.

Rather than lamenting the current lack of an indigenous spirituality, maybe we need to talk in terms of a reality, neither positive nor negative, of living with the inevitable outcome of being a young country with a minimalist history. Maybe we have to learn to give time for something to emerge, just as spiritualities and senses of holy place took generations to emerge in the countries of our origins and the country of origin for Christianity; and just as a M?ѬÅori spirituality took hundreds of years to develop as M?ѬÅori first settled and then grew in this land. We should give time for something distinctive to emerge ?± after all, we Pakeha have been here for only about two hundred years ?± a very short time in the history of spiritualities and religions.

In fact, I wonder, might we be at an advantage in New Zealand as compared to the Old World? Our British and European forebears were populating and creating New Zealand at the same time as traditional Christianity, and certainly the notion of Christendom, was beginning to collapse in the Old World. While vestiges of the old were carried into New Zealand in our churches, it hasn??t taken root as much as it was rooted in the Old World. Many of us who have gone back to the Old World to study or for visits have realised that in many ways there is little or nothing the Old World can teach us about religion and spirituality any more, and that even in our institutional church life in New Zealand we are by and large a couple of decades ahead.

As old religion with its millennia of tradition continues to collapse in the Old World, so in this young country the imported old religion falters ?± but there is less to collapse; there is only slightly over a century and a half of institutionalised religion to move on from. We are already, in so many other ways, seeking to create new realities in New Zealand in who we are as a people, why not also in religion?

What is important to remember, as has been said so many times before, while old religion is in the process of collapsing, a sense of spirituality and an awareness of the ?´Other?? is growing. The account of Jacob??s experience at Bethel is not really telling us about a particular place marked by a particular stone which has somehow ended up in Edinburgh. It is about recognising the ?´Other?? meeting people still, in other places in other cultures and in another time where, for a moment, there is a portal between the world of physical reality and the world of spiritual encounter.

It is probable that a significant aspect of such an encounter in Aotearoa New Zealand is likely to be found in out-of-doors experiences. Already there is a strong tradition among New Zealanders of speaking of experiencing the bush and mountains, rivers and sea in semi-spiritual tones. David Tacey, from La Trobe University in Melbourne, who teaches spirituality, speaks of a similar growth of a kind of eco-spirituality associated with the land in Australia which through the Aboriginal people has a much longer history of human habitation and awareness of the sacred than does New Zealand. In citing him in an article, Victoria University of Wellington??s Religious Studies Professor Paul Morris writes about the beginning of a theology and spirituality of the land in Aotearoa. Nature is the ?´thin space??, the potential portal between two worlds in the imaginations and experience of many New Zealanders. Morris quotes historian Michael King writing, "(As) Pakeha culture puts down even deeper roots into the soil of this country, and as those roots become more hallowed by the passage of time, those (spiritual) feelings will become more common and more intense."

When I read the description of the return of the Stone of Destiny to Scotland, with 10,000 people lining the Royal Mile between Holyrood Palace and Edinburgh Castle, the honour guards and the gun salutes, and a surge of nationalism mixed with a kind of mysticism over an allegedly ancient stone, I thought of the documentary screened on Anzac Day about last year??s return of the Unknown Warrior to New Zealand. I thought for instance of the music for that occasion, almost all of which was New Zealand-composed, such as a spine-tingling lament played by a lone piper mingling with the lone voice of a M?ѬÅori woman calling the warrior home. And I thought of the thousands who queued for hours to pay their respects as the warrior lay in state in Parliament buildings, and of the thousands who lined the streets of Wellington as he was taken to the National War Memorial to be interred.

There was something in all that, I thought as I watched, not just of an expression of national identity and remembrance of our war dead, but also an awareness of another dimension. Along with the military presence and the seamless ceremonial, there was a ?´thinness?? about it all, to use the Celtic notion of "thin place". The holy and the human were all but inseparable. People were participating in and being open to Something else, Something more ?± Something with a capital ?´s??.

My belief is that the pioneering pragmatism that was a necessary component of the first British and European settlers here, and their descendants, is slowly but surely bending to include a deeper apprehension of sacred place and holy presence. Done a generation or two earlier, the return of the Unknown Warrior could not have included the level of ?´thinness?? I for one felt was present in the 2004 experience. Maybe a generation or two on from now will have deeper roots, and deeper awareness of the Sacred than we do ?± whatever happens to formal institutional religiosity as we know and express it. Maybe rather than being the inheritors of a collapsing religious dimension, we in these times will turn out ?± in retrospect many years from now ?± to be the bridge between an old religiosity and a new spirituality. Maybe the people of our current generations who lament the absence of a Pakeha spirituality let alone culture, will prove to be the beginning of a new sense of spirit in this land.

So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel (which means ?´House of God??). Dreams and visions and portals between earth and heaven are not the preserve of generations in other times and other countries. They are ours as well, part of our experience in this time and in this country. Slowly we are beginning to recognise and to honour and claim these times and places. And in our hearts if not in reality, we put in place markers to identify the ?´House of God?? in the world of our experience.