Video for March 13th, 2025
I’m in Blenheim, where they produce all that lovely New Zealand Wine today. It has been a bit of a challenge getting here. There are only a few roads across the South Island of New Zealand, and we found our route was blocked by a forest fire, necessitating an extra five hours of driving back to the coast. It's not quite the weather you expect for the second week of Lent. It being Lent, you would expect me to talk about spiritual disciplines, the value of self-restraint and spiritual growth. None are things our society values very much, thinking them a bit odd and extreme. True happiness, according to advertising at least consists in the accumulation of possessions, particularly those that demonstrate your fashionable discernment and social status. I don’t underestimate the challenge these traditional spiritual practices present to us in normal life. The Church where I became a Christian taught me the value of the ‘quiet time’, an uninterrupted time of prayer and Bible reading with the Lord at the beginning of every day, spiritual reading and times of retreat. As a student, that wasn’t very difficult to organise. It's not very hard to organise when you are retired. It's much less achievable in other phases of life -think being woken up by small children early in the morning or the farmer who must be up to milk the cows at five o’clock, or the shift worker whose life is simply exhausting. It's not surprising that church members often delegate the spiritual stuff to paid professionals while they get on with normal life.
The traditional spiritual practices emerged from the monastic movement as first practiced by the desert fathers and later refined by St. Augustine and St. Benedict. They were given a fresh impetus by Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, and by St. Francis in the thirteenth century, who at least acknowledged that spiritual practices needed to be practical outside the disciplines of the monastery. Modern spiritual writers make much of the desert fathers and the early monastics. Their spirituality is admirable. However (and this is probably heretical), whilst fuller accounts of their lives and practice display much that is holy and admirable, there is also behaviour that is eccentric or even plain bonkers. A lot of what they did and believed looks bizarre to modern eyes, certainly not the paradigms of holiness we might have expected.
We are confronted with a real challenge here. Research into spiritual growth and maturity consistently shows that growth into the likeness of Jesus depends on our spiritual practices, engagement with the community at a deep level, and our response to suffering. My experience here in New Zealand concurs with observations in the UK. Churches that tend to grow live out the ‘full fat’ Christianity that such disciplines and practices produce. But engaging with these spiritual practices beyond going to church on a Sunday is very difficult. We need to find models that we can take with us into the everyday.
So here is a practice or discipline that I have been growing in through some of the inevitable frustrations of travelling. Reframing five hours of extra driving as an opportunity to see more scenery, for which I’m grateful – the scenery is spectacular here – as you can see behind me. As Paul said – give thanks in all circumstances. I could cultivate the trust in God’s provision that had we continued the same route, something worse might have happened. It would be a spiritual discipline to pause, reflect and ask why these frustrations might make me so cross and irritable, and then to repent of that and ask for God’s help to cultivate the gift of patience. These could all be done in the moment, not requiring a special holy place. But little moments like these in the reality of everyday life could help us to become a little more like Jesus and interact with others in a more Jesus-like way.
As it happened, the final hour’s detour turned out to be rather glorious. I’ll fade out to a clip that Deborah took – I hope vicariously you might find it as exhilarating as I did.
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video.
+Richard