Saw this over at UserFriendly. I have a couple of games that I continually come back to for their game play not graphics so this made me smile.

Back from Queensland now and in the more temperate Auckland climate. Christmas Day was hot and clear with a big thunderstorm in the evening. The carol service put on by the resort was more like a hour in a shopping mall than a time spent singing "religious" songs. Mostly contemporary jingles with a group of (loud) singers and dancers up front to jolly the crowd along. Odd really to sing songs of snow, winter and other northern hemisphere things while sitting on the lawn in shorts and tee-short feeling rather hot and slapping the odd mosquito. (Still the kids enjoyed it).

Christmas Day we went to a service in the open air chapel. Great possibilities for all sorts of things but the service was pretty trad and formulaic. A (retired?) minister ran the show and spoke about grace which was good. A couple of readings (one from Isaiah and one from John 1) were read by children (but too quietly for the outside venue) and a couple of people were asked to come out of the congregation to read prayers of intercession. The odd thing for me about the service was the constant referral to the Christmas story in Bethlehem yet that story wasn't actually ever told in the service (the readings didn't refer to it directly) so there was a sense for me of disconnection between the readings, prayers and the nativity story and its implications that I was expecting. However I did enjoy going to the chapel with many of my family as that doesn't happen at all very often with us all around the globe.

Anyway, we had a great holiday celebrating my Dad's 60th birthday and had a great family Christmas too. Hope yours went well too.

I saw this when I was trying to find a quote on the internet yesterday. Sort of sums up my year.

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be." from Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988)

It's also a thought for the new year.

Well, what do you know. They do have internet access at the beach.

Christmas Eve and Day services here are being held in an open air chapel set amongst mango trees. The juxtapostion of the nativity with that environment should provide some interesting thoughts for tomorrow. And carol singing on the lawn by the sea with wallabies (small kangaroos) wandering amongst us too.

It's been a very good week so far: my birthday, some days IT consulting and an end of year postgrad BBQ with lots of friends and their kids. Now it's time to pack and head off to sunny Queensland for Christmas to meet family from Melbourne, London and NZ (while the in-laws mind the house here).

So blogging will be off the agenda for the next week or so, unless there have WiFi on the beach :-)

Have a great Christmas. Christ's blessings to you and your house.

Neat site for all of you out there wanting to share and use iCal:iCalShare - Share Your iCalendars!

Been waiting a few says to blog about this but the video is now available online. TV2's Flipside (a semi-interactive youth news and issues programme) ran an interesting segment on rites of passage for young people back on 11 December. Not much depth to it but some interesting ideas to pursue:

• What are the contemporary rites of passage for young people today? (either individually or in their communities)
  
• A comment about a rite of passage being a "small death".
  
• Another comment about people making their own ritual and rites today.
  
• The lack of any mention of significant religious rites of passage, either today or in the past.
  
• The loss of traditional rites and rituals.
  

Might be a useful segment to introduce a group talking about their own rites of passage and their significance. Also the opportunity for Alt.W and other spiritual groups in helping everyday people form new, relevant and life-giving rites for all ages.

The video clip can be found here on the Flipside site: Flipside - Rites of Passage. Video is a bit erratic but the sound works okay. The blurb for the video is as follows:

We all go through different stages as we grow up and we mark these changes with events or rituals. There's the good old 21st, moving out of home, getting drunk for the first time? Vanessa takes a look at rites of passage. What they are, and why they're important to all of us.

Some comments on Christmas and commercialism.

The link will be valid for only a couple of weeks.Calvin & Hobbes

It didn't rain on Saturday (Yay!) so we went up the road to the Waitakere's with some friends and their family to go walking in the forest up there. It's great to be only 10-15 minutes drive from the Waitakere forest park. Anyway it was hot and muggy but the kids all trooped through the trees and down the hill to track down a 600 year old Kauri tree. The walk back up nearly did me in (very unfit) carrying my 1 year old son on my back and my 3 year old daughter (can't walk, Daddy!) back up to the Arataki car park. Great to be in amongst the bush though with great views and a sense of permanence of land and it's ability to recover from human activity. Viriditas.

Took a panoramic shot looking back south from Arataki over the Manakau Harbour. The land drops away from you sharply toward the reservoir giving a sense that you're floating over the bush. (Click on image for larger view)

Maggi Dawn made a couple of comments about Kiwi's on her blog that got me thinking. How much might the following factors create an environment where Alt.W is able to be explored and nutured in NZ? (I'm just a theologian/scientist thinking here not a sociologist or historian so I may be way off the mark)

• No state religion/church - NZ doesn't have a state religion or church in the same (any?) way that the Church of England, the Roman Catholic church or Eastern Orthodoxy have related to the State/Crown. Here is pretty much everyone for themselves with no central authority to sanction what is or is not orthodox (except within individual churches or denominations).
  
• NZ is a "new" country - 160+ years old if you follow European dating from the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). Maybe there's a desire to reconnect to lost "homeland" traditions, ritual and depth that opens doors for Alt.W to draw on.
  
• Contemporary NZ as post-Enlightenment project - Government, institutional and other structures were formed out of post-Enlightenment optimism, pragmatism and ideals. E.g. no (overt) religious education in NZ state schools until a recent shift to include more "spirtuality". (See the section on Antoine Marie Garin which notes "he could not accept the regulations in the Education Act 1856 which stipulated that religious education was to be free from all controversy and taught only at times when parents who objected could remove their children from the schools.). This sort of environment may have heightened the response to post or late-modernity with little non-modern resources to draw upon.
  
• Parallel Maori spirituality - Most Kiwi's have some knowledge that the Maori culture is rich in spirituality connected with the land and everyday life. Maybe there is a sense of wanting to draw from that and have that sort of spirituality as well.
  

Anyway just some immediate thoughts I had. Some like Steve may have more organised (and better researched) ideas.

Stinking hot here and really muggy. The fan's on full but it's not helping. No snow, holly or long dark nights here. So time for some Antipodean Christmas songs. I like Backblocks Nativity, especially the verse:

She sat on the foot of the fernstalk bed
And she watched, but she didn't understand
When they put those bundles at the baby's head
And this river nugget into his hand

Gold is the power of a man with a man
And incense the power of man with God
But myrrh is the bitter taste of death
And the sour-sweet smell of the upturned sod

Also don't forget to check out the other links at NZ Folk Song:

• An upside-down Christmas
  
• A Pukeko in a Ponga Tree
  
• One on a Tractor
  

Given how much it's rained here as well as being hot then the backblocks song with its rain isn't too far off the mark.

Saw a new Tui billboard today down in Henderson

"Let's go to Hamilton for New Year. Yeah right."

Made me laugh. (I spent five and a half years living in Hamilton (lovely place))

Popped over to the Uni bookshop while down in Christchurch which was a somewhat painful move financially (they had a sale on). Picked up the following new books:

• Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and Religion by John Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor


• Science and the Spiritual Quest: New Essays by Leading Scientists. Comes from Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. (Been wanting to get this for a while now)


• Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World by Stefan Helmreich

So a bit of "light reading" over Christmas.

Saw a link to this nativity activity on the Re:jesus web site. It's not bad:Nativity puzzle

Tui Beer run a billboard ad campaign in New Zealand based around their "Yeah right" slogan. A single blokey statement followed up by the response "Yeah right."

Favourites of mine include:

"We didn't need Mehrts."
"Aerial spraying is safe." (If you live in West Auckland or Hamilton then you'll understand)
"It's true - a guy in the pub told me."
"There is definitely money in the account."

With all the Christmas promotional stuff going on and the nice "sanitised" baby Jesus (blonde with blue eyes on the cards) being bandied about I thought I add my own billboard celebrating the birth of God as a Palestinian Jew 2000 years ago.



Now then, who's for a drink?

Children's nativity play today at our church with three of our children playing critical (at least in my eyes) parts - angel, shepherd and special effects (held the star). Lots of fun and all the normal gaffs and blunders that add the human element to the story.

But the story jars with our experience of the Christmas season here in NZ. The weather is getting hotter (Stats here); the trees greener (and the grass soon to be browner); people are beginning to wind up to Christmas and the big summer holiday afterwards; school children are looking forward to 5-6 weeks off school; and shops and churches are getting "festive".

So how to connect what happened in a small Middle Eastern town a couple of thousand years ago in the winter with a culture that's looking forward to barbeques, beaches and the bach (NZ holiday house)? What is the common ground, if any, between the experiences of a few shepherds, a teenage mother and some eggheads from the east and the average kiwi? How can the impact of the story - with its tension, terror, fanaticism, pilgrimage, wonder, joy and sheer humanity - be heard today? What is a distinctively NZ Christmas story with a corresponding theme of grace? And how can it be related over the cacophany of northern hemisphere images, carols and mind-set coupled with overwhelming demand to consume?

Will be thinking a lot about this.

Happy Advent.

Finished up at the STANZ theology conference and catching up with family yesterday and headed out to Charteris Bay to stay the night with friends over there. I love sitting and watching the sea and their house looks out over Lyttleton Harbour. Good food, good friends and a great view capped off a nice few days in Christchurch. Snapped a few pics of the view from their lounge and pasted them together below. You can get the bigger image if you click on it.



The conference went well with some interesting papers, including one on two metaphors for the Holy Spirit -- the Holy Spirit as the "ecstatic God" and the Holy Spirit as the "God of the edges." My paper was well received I think with some good feedback afterwoods from different people.

I've been putting together this conference paper on the spirituality of technology and focusing on the the spiritual narratives created by technologists to explain and inspire their work. Stuff like the appropriation of apocalyptic imagery to describe cyberspace as the Heavenly City, the linkage of VR to the Buddhist nature, and technopaganism.

Today I come across this web site: The Wild Divine Project Here we have the combination of a video game, biofeedback devices and Buddhist-like meditative practices. You play the game but you can only pass certain point if you can demonstrate (via biofeedback techniques) that you have mastered the body. Achieve a centred calmness and the game responds and you move on.

Sounds like a Sony Praystation to me.

Well my paper is written (finally - writing is like getting blood out of a stone for me), the slides are made and I'm set to head off today to Christchurch to the annual STANZ Talking Theology conference. Should be good as I get back to the first university I studied at and get to see family (including a new niece!) and friends.

Kevin Kelly puts together his "Cool Tools" list online. It's an eclectic collection of useful stuff including both old and new things (e.g. a book on raising chickens makes it in). A few of the more recent postings are on the main page and then many others in the category links.

Kevin Kelly -- Cool Tools

I saw this the other day when I was reading Paradises Lost by one of my favourite authors Ursula K. Le Guin

If nothing is very different from you, what is a little different from you is very different from you.

Seems to me to be a helpful slogan to remember in communities of faith. That which binds us together should overwhelm any of the minor differences that tend to tear us apart.