One of my childhood memories is of family outings at Muriwai, a popular beach on Auckland’s west coast. Along with its surf, Muriwai is known for its gannet colony, which nests on a couple of large rocks jutting out into the sea at the southern end of the beach. The rocks form a channel through which the surf seethes and rushes.
I must have visited Muriwai around the time that Colin McCahon was living there in the 1970s. I only became aware of this a few years ago, when I attended an art exhibition that included several of McCahon’s Muriwai paintings. One of these in particular – “A Necessary Protection Landscape (1972)” – grabbed my attention.
Like a lot of McCahon’s later works, it’s an abstract painting in black and white. Two dominant rectangular shapes to the left and right of the painting depict the Muriwai rocks. Grey cloud and spray above the rocks merges with the surf between the rocks to form a Tau cross, named after a letter in the Greek alphabet and representative of a gate or opening. A multitude of black shapes above the rocks and in the foreground represent gannets in flight and diving into the sea.
I like the contrast that is formed between the solidity of the rock and the wild tumult of wind and water. Both have their place as metaphors for faith.
The image of the rock reminds me of Isaiah’s exhortation: “Listen to me, you that pursue righteousness, you that seek the Lord, look to the rock from which you were hewn, and to the quarry from which you were dug” (Isaiah 51:1). And it reminds me of the wisdom of Jesus’ parable about the house that is built on the rock.
The rushing wind and tumultuous sea remind me of the Holy Spirit – dynamic, freeing and exhilarating, as at Pentecost, bringing about something altogether new. James K Baxter’s “Song to the Holy Spirit” evokes a similar sentiment:
Lord, Holy Spirit
You blow like the wind in a thousand paddocks
Inside and outside the fences
You blow where you wish to blow.
The gannets, like the Church perhaps, must relate to both these realities. The rock constitutes their place of nurture and shelter, but they cannot stay there. They are born to fly, to glide on ever-fresh wind currents and plunge into the sea in search of fish before returning to the rock.
Some might say that the Presbyterian Church, like a number of our sister Churches, is too rock-bound and constrained by tradition, has grown unaccustomed to flying, suffers from institutional inertia and is demoralised after decades of decline. Others might say that in our desperation to somehow reverse institutional decline we are in very real danger of embracing change for the sake of change and losing touch with the rock from which we have been hewn. For these people, T S Eliot’s lament, penned back in 1934 (“Choruses from the Rock”), rings true:
The endless cycle of idea and action,
endless invention, endless experiment,
brings knowledge of speech, but not
of silence; knowledge of words, and ignorance of
the Word.
How might we address these concerns?
I’m not convinced there is a simple formula that we can apply. For me, it’s about reaffirming our primary focal point. In McCahon’s painting this takes the form of the Cross, which holds together in a subtle yet integrated way the elements of rock, wind and sea. Surely the logic of the Cross provides the doctrinal rock upon which our Church stands, as well as its impetus for mission. And if this is indeed the case, can there be a more urgent task for our churches, presbyteries and UDCs than to allow this logic to revitalise our thinking, inform our decisions and shape our ways of being church?
Grace and peace to you all.