Shaken by our lack of faith
Ihad just emptied out all the old water in the big bottles a couple of days before the 6.2 earthquake hit. As I poured some new water in, I could hear my mother whisper from the grave, ‘‘about bloody time’’. Dad would often refer to Mum, tongue-in-cheek, as ‘‘your sainted mother’’ or as ‘‘Fay the Farsighted’’. Long before the big bangs of 2010-11 Mum was in the habit of lining the perimeter of the garage in hundreds of recycled filled water bottles. Friends would happen upon the water bottles and ask what on earth they were for. When I explained that they were in case of a national disaster, they sniggered and thought how quaint.
If she had lived a few months more, Mum’s farsightedness would have paid off when the Canterbury quakes hit and she would have been accorded the survival respect she so richly deserved.
Mum was an extremely anxious person and took no refuge in prayer but was firm in the belief that those who prayed to Jesus or God were rather pathetic and feeble-minded.
Dad, being a lay preacher, was on the receiving end of quite a bit of her scorn but took it with his usual good grace. My sainted mother may have been abusive of my father’s faith but she still did the flowers at the church and attended services because of the aesthetics and the hymns. Interior style was important to her.
Mum would classify me doubly weak and foolish because I rarely attend church but I do pray to God and enter shamelessly into lame-arse bargaining when in a tight spot before reverting to wishy-washy Don’t Knowism.
Idon’t believe there is nothing because nothing is always something, life and death is a mystery, and there are no certainties. Bobs each way on the race aren’t a bad way to be when your faith runs like a hairy dog. So when Speaker of the House Trevor Mallard removed reference to Jesus Christ in the Parliamentary Prayer but kept God in, I thought that it was fair enough, sort of, kind of, maybe.
Some saw it as yet another back-down to other religions infiltrating our society, and that giving away Christianity’s first-in-the-pecking-order status was a wicked waste of a long-held advantage.
Secularists applauded and believed the move was long overdue and that Mallard hadn’t gone far enough. They would have liked him to toss out the God reference as well.
That there is still a prayer at all before the Members of Parliament lay into each other like a pack of wolves is quite bizarre. Standing up and sanctimoniously closing your eyes to pray before getting out the knives is really quite ridiculous and antithetical to the spirit, as it were, of prayer.
I suppose it’s the thought that counts. And the proceedings do call for some kind of introduction. If there were to be no God reference at all then perhaps a James K Baxter or Denis Glover poem, or a reading from Janet Frame or Robin Hyde?
It could be left up to each MP to bring their talent along, a la beauty pageant style to perform their turn at a curtain-raiser. I’m thinking some interpretative dance with Gerry Brownlee leading the newbie backbenchers in barber shop quartet harmonies?
Watch that space, it’s a work in progress. Or perhaps we tempt the gods with our tamperings. Remember last week when Parliament was evacuated on orders from Civil Defence after being shaken out for a few seconds from a 6.2 earthquake?
That’ll teach them to remove Jesus from the Parliamentary Prayer.