Keen observer of nature kept the faith
ROD was a parish minister at Waipiata before moving to the Urewera to work with the Maori Mission. He was then a parish minister at Taupo, Opoho, Ashburton (Melbourne), Leeston, and finally Knox, in Christchurch.
Living to the age of 104 bears some significance. Many have acknowledged that in terms of the longevity of Rod’s life. Born during the early years of World War 1 and before the Great Depression, Rod was able to remember the arrival of electricity to homes, including his own while living in Geraldine, and attending the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition of 1925 at Logan Park. Much ground was then, and has since, been covered.
For Rod, however, his longevity was something of a mixed blessing. Living for so long meant that Joan, his wife of 69 years, and the company of a community of good friends and colleagues were no longer with him.
Forever concerned with, and contemplative of, life’s quality, a long life could not outtrump a good and meaningful life. At the very end of his days, when there was reason to ask if he was in pain and needed relief from this, his answer, after considerable thought, was to suggest that it depended on what one meant by pain. To the very end, Rod would reach for a clear and meaningful annunciation.
Rod and brother Crawford followed in their father’s footsteps and attended Knox Theological College to train for the ministry. Rod specifically intended to work with the Maori Mission (later Te Hinota Maori ) at the conclusion of his training.
While at the University of Otago, he studied anthropology and was to later comment that this study furthered a belief in the importance of noticing and observing carefully what otherwise one might see or walk over without response.
Such careful and open observation was to characterise much of his approach to his life and work. It was at the conjunction of his natural environment and social world that Rod conducted his life, recognising the essential integrity of both.
As a young child, had I been asked what my father did, I might easily have said that he was an archaeologist and geologist. His ‘‘office’’ work and time in church on a Sunday observed as a minor player.
It was clear to me that Rod knew a thing or two about various geological, natural and humanproduced features. He could point out fossils and quartz crystals in clay banks, knew of the location of a pit of moa bones, and would identify the types of rock formations and stones that surrounded us.
We would hike to various old mining settlements and explore the ruins of many seemingly ancient buildings, and on walks up valleys, hills and mountains, Rod would point out the berries and leaves that could be eaten.
If, as children, we ever proclaimed that we were bored, we were promptly told to go outside and use our imaginations. On one family outing near Bannockburn, Rod invented a game. While he and Joan sat to talk, we children were sent off with instructions to gather something significant from the surrounding environment. We all brought back our finds and Rod proceeded to ruminate on each one’s importance.
When he finally identified which one he felt was the most significant, I remember it coming as something of a shock. It was not the cartridge case that somebody had found with its brass base that I coveted but rather a single round rabbit poo.
This was a typical invitation to stretch one’s appreciation and understanding of the world and perhaps to confound in order to provoke thought. I have ever since found occasion to try to assess the meaning of and reason for his choice.
At the conclusion of World War 2, Rod was able to fulfil his original intention and the family moved up north to the Urewera area to work with the Maori Mission of the Presbyterian Church.
Spending most of their time at Ruatahuna, Rod and the family developed a deep appreciation of and comfort with the language and the pattern and way of life among Tuhoe of the area.
During their time at Ruatahuna, the mission transitioned to being Te Hinota Maori, the Maori synod of the Presbyterian Church. Rod and a small group of likeminded people suggested that perhaps it was now time for Maori to determine in what capacity Pakeha may or may not be called to work with Te Hinota. This suggestion was not taken up at the time by the church administration.
For Rod, the sense of incongruity between his hopes for such change and the position of the wider church administration was a factor in his eventual decision to leave Ruatahuna and move back to parish work.
Rod’s theology and sense of justice evolved over his long life. He could clearly remember the period of time when he realised that for him the predominant and mainstream Christian concept of an afterlife was not tenable. Challenges to any reliance on a narrow or literal reading of the Bible or Christian thought were, for him, to become inevitable.
He was an unobtrusive yet compelling activist for social justice and supporter of those who questioned, or whose lives may have challenged, ideas based in arrogance, prejudice or selfrighteousness.
A series of Rod’s sermons from 1979 betray a concern with notions of development as this could relate to peace, the distribution of and care for the world’s resources, colonisation, justice and human dignity. They were concerned with how one could allow for and live a theology of engagement with the world and humanity in Aotearoa/ New Zealand.
Rod was a minister of the church who could very well have not been one yet followed the same path through another medium.
A selfconfessed ‘‘Jesus freak’’, he found inspiration in the possibility that a person or a people could radically engage with and change things for the better.