Yet the long history of American—mostly Protestant—hymnody, set to the cadence of the King James Bible, is embedded in our collective religious consciousness. (Think Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" or "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.")

From there it moved into folk music, most notably Pete Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!" and a huge chunk of Bob Dylan's ever-expanding catalog.

We are living in the twilight age of significant singer-songwriters who have worked in a biblical idiom.

Willie Nelson just celebrated his 90th birthday with a two-day series of tribute concerts at the Hollywood Bowl. Bob Dylan turned 82 last month; Paul McCartney will be 81 this month.

Paul Simon, another octogenarian songwriter, has just released a new album entitled "Seven Psalms."

The Psalter is the Bible's songbook, and tradition attributes most of the Psalms to King David, whom the Bible dubs "the sweet singer of Israel."

And while Paul Simon is not known for a large number of biblically inspired songs ("Bridge Over Troubled Water" being the notable exception), he has touched upon biblical and religious themes before.

I refer the reader to "Jonah" from the 1980 LP "One Trick Pony," or his use of the melody from the old hymn "O Sacred Head Now Wounded" for his 1973 song "American Tune," or the heartbreaking yet uplifting story of the refugee family who finds shelter in the church from life and death in "The Coast," from 1990's transcendent "Rhythm of the Saints."

This list can be easily extended.

"Seven Psalms" is different, though.

The entire 33-minute record is one musical piece without pause, with sparse instrumentation and production, built around minor chords.

Its sad and reflective music suits Simon's wobbly high tenor.

John Pareles describes the record as "a last testament" in The New York Times, and while it has an air of finality in terms of this world, it hints at an open door that leads into much larger rooms.

The Psalter, strictly speaking, is not God's word to us, but rather our words about God, and as such it is rich in metaphors for the divine: rock, tower, light, shepherd, a mother's comforting breast.

Like its namesake, "Seven Psalms" piles up its own imagery for God, encompassing the biblical God of both comfort and destruction:

The Lord is my engineer
The Lord is the earth I ride on
The Lord is the face in the atmosphere
The path I slip and I slide on

The Covid virus is the Lord
The Lord is the ocean rising
The Lord is a terrible swift sword
A simple truth surviving
In this cosmic vision, Simon also sees the Lord in the human world in terms of stewardship, vulnerability and care. One such example is this repeated stanza that the radical priest in "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" would no doubt approve of:

The Lord is a virgin forest
The Lord is a forest ranger
The Lord is a meal for the poorest of the poor
A welcome door to the stranger

But it is the last ten minutes of the record, beginning with the movement entitled "The Sacred Harp," where "Seven Psalms" takes flight.

Here, Simon's wife, Edie Brickell—a wonderful singer in her own right—joins in counterpoint and harmony as Simon paints a picture of the two of them picking up a hitchhiking, unhoused young couple.

The girl says, "We're refugees of sorts/ From my hometown/ They don't like different there/ They would have moved us down," while the boy says nothing, struggling with the unnamed but all-too-common traumatic exclusions that occur in this country. Continue reading

Seven Psalms

0​1 The Lord
02 Love Is Like a Braid
03 My Professional Opinion
04 Your Forgiveness
05 Trail of Volcanoes
06 The Sacred Harp
07 Wait

Seven Psalms

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• qobuz

• Thomas M. Bolin is a theology and religious studies professor at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis.

Communities are shoring up seawalls with old tyres.

I was raised on the beautiful island of Tonga.

When I was a child, my parents and grandparents would come out every morning to look at the horizon. They would look at the clouds and see the patterns to understand what laid before us that day.

Nowadays, things are different.

Children playing and swimming at the beaches see the patterns in the clouds and run back to alert us to a disaster.

This is now becoming a regular occurrence.

After storms, I visit my people and I am always lifted by their resilience and their spirit of helping each other.

But when I delve deeper, they share their real emotions, which are full of pain, heartache and fear.

You see, in the Pacific our people are strong. We are resilient, but even we have our limits. And we have reached our limit.

Nowadays, when I wake up in the morning and look out to sea, I see two clouds. Two dark and looming clouds. One is climate change. This cloud brings rising sea levels, more frequent cyclones and king tides like we have never seen before.

It is joined by another cloud. This one is debt. Increasingly frequent and severe weather means that Pacific Island nations are struggling to rebuild. We feel like we are going backwards.

Vital infrastructure such as homes, bridges, farms and fisheries, take years to rebuild while crops and livestock take a similar period to restore. It is extremely expensive, and it is money we simply don't have.

Last year at the United Nations climate talks, nations agreed on a Loss and Damage fund; a fund created to compensate developing countries impacted by climate change, like my home of Tonga in the Pacific Island nations.

We don't contribute much to climate change. In fact, we contribute less than 0.5 per cent of all global emissions. But we certainly pay for it in our futures, and the futures of our children. We need compensation for this injustice.

The Loss and Damage fund is an important step towards climate justice, but we can't forget that the 2009 pledge to spend $100 billion a year in climate aid has still not been met. In fact, the pledge to spend $100 billion a year is far from achieved.

Right now, the Pacific region needs nearly US $1 billion per year in financing to adapt our infrastructure to climate change. We receive much less than this. Continue reading

• Cardinal Soane Patita Paini Mafi is Bishop of Tonga

Usually, the gold is in a simple statement and sometimes it is quite ancient. Always it is right for the moment we discover it.

This is the way God works.

I still cherish a vein of gold from a wise desert Abba of the third century. It is a truth so simple I had not considered it.

He wrote, "We are part angel and part animal".

When I read that, my heart laughed. Of course! Angel and animal! It is the tension between the two states that effects growth.

For all of us who struggle with our animal nature, it is a blessing to contemplate that this is necessary for the development of the angel self which is our beautiful soul.

It seems trite to remind ourselves that our primal animal instinct is for survival. So much of our behaviour, socially good or bad, is linked to self-protection.

Aggression, procreation, war, patriotism, greed, law and order, anger, justice, injustice, reward, revenge - all of this and much more can be traced back to our primal instinct for survival.

All exist in some form in what we call the animal kingdom.

I am part of that animal kingdom.

But the ancient Desert Father was right.

There is more to our make-up.

In you, in me, in every human being on this planet, there is a spark of God we call a soul.

It has a gentle voice, and it grows in conversation with our animal self.

While the animal voice tends to be loud and fear-based, the angel voice is soft and about love.

We live with this inner dialogue.

Daily we ask ourselves, is this action or reaction coming from fear or from love.

This sounds simple, almost childishly so.

It's what Jesus talked about when the mothers of Salam brought their children to him. Remember that reading?

The disciples tried to send the children away, but Jesus said, "Forbid them not, for of such in the Kingdom of Heaven".

Later, he said, "Except you become as little children you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven".

I notice the word "become".

Jesus did not tell his disciples to remain as children.

"Becoming" is a long growth journey of tension between animal and angel, between the selfish instinct and the unselfish inclination, between fear and love.

The stages of spiritual growth can seem complex.

Scripture gives us many parables about spiritual growth. The mustard seed. The yeast in the bread. The story of the talents.

My favourite image comes from that Desert Father whose name I have forgotten.

Every person I see is a human-animal carrying a sacred presence.

Whether we are aware of it or not, we are all living tabernacles.

• Joy Cowley

The rental market in Wellington was so tough, they said, in this season. Did we have anywhere they could stay? Even if it just was a single room, it would be better than outside.

In another of our churches, a mother with two children is desperate. Her partner, hoping to enter through the refugee family reunification process, lodged his application last December.

Immigration New Zealand has halted the processing of cases until our borders open, and his case sits stagnant in a backlog of cases that has no end date in sight.

At our local port, chaplains working with seafarers are in despair at the epidemic of loneliness, exclusion and mental health issues overwhelming the sailors they interact with.

Many crews orbiting New Zealand ports have already been on their ships for more than a year, three or four months beyond their contracts, and have no repatriation in sight to their home countries.

Unlike airline crews, seafarers from foreign ships are required to have 28 continuous days onboard without symptoms before they will be granted shore leave.

With most ships having no wi-fi, their only contact with home is often through welfare centres such as the Mission to Seafarers. With 90 per cent of New Zealand's imports and exports​ arriving by ship, this group, who contribute significantly to our wellbeing, are forgotten and unloved.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, we have proved that we are a nation that is creative, kind, able to solve complex problems and work together for common good.

Yet since we eradicated community transmission, we have seen some disappointing responses emerge in our reaction to those who are seeking to enter our borders; not based on common good or kindness, but on fear.

Are we really going to turn our backs not even on those who orbit our borders, but on our own citizens, existing and new?

This fear is natural - we want to preserve the safe environment we worked hard for - but the drive for self-preservation is coming at a huge cost for so many vulnerable people.

The kindness we have exhibited as a nation over this year is only as good as our kindness to the most vulnerable.

As a response of gratitude to our team of 5 million, should we hunker down and become insular, or should we be generous with what we have? What is the appropriate response for gratitude?

Our Anglican family (often in partnership with many other national and local faith-based and secular organisations) is working both in front-line and advocacy spaces in this area.

One of the core tenets of our Christian faith, and of all major faiths, is strong teachings to love and embrace others, even those we don't know or love.

We ask that the Government and public institutions embody the principles of kindness and compassion for which Aotearoa became globally known this year. For example:

• Make a public re-commitment to our refugee quotas, within the limitations of current international logistics. The Red Cross has indicated that is well set up to receive people from refugee backgrounds in a quarantine situation in its Mangere centre.
• Take a proactive stance in processing the applications of family reunification cases, rather than waiting until the border reopens to do so. In this way, families can have some certainty and can look forward in hope.
• Make immediate funding available to enable the provision of the basic needs of forgotten seafarers.

Fear is not fair.

We are not asking our government or our citizens to take unnecessary risks.

But using our kindness, compassion and good systems and structures, we can make a huge difference to the lives of those marginalised both within our land, and standing at our gates.

We must not be afraid of countering the narrative that "we need to look after our own".

We might be at the bottom of the world, but we are part of a global community, and we are blessed with an environment and infrastructure that can care well for the deep needs of others when together we think of creative solutions.

The contribution that refugee, migrant and seafaring communities make to our social and economic tapestry is clear, and we must not allow fear and self-interest stand in the way of the values of kindness and compassion.

• Justin Duckworth is the Anglican Archbishop of Wellington. First published in Stuff. Republished with the permission of the author.

Preaching at a packed Holy Sepulchre Church in Newton, Archbishop Justin Welby said the Church has "so often lived in fear and often does so now".

"Fear causes our quarrels, whether it is sexuality or the future of the Church, fear makes us inward looking and, frankly, pathetic," the Archbishop of Canterbury said.

Fear breaks down relationships within the Church and around the world and it blocks reconciliation, he said, adding that politics often, but not always, works through fear.

He said we need to pray for our politicians.

Archbishop Welby cited conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, Ukraine and Israel/Palestine as propelling the world towards fear, which leads to self-protection and worsening actions.

But for the Christian, "there is only one reason for courage, for hope, for love, and that is God, the God of cross and resurrection".

"And that one reason overwhelms every other reason for fear," he stated.

Therefore the Christian is called to action.

"Action must be wise, because it has foreseen the consequences, and it must be courageous, or it will fail," Archbishop Welby said.

"We find evil in people, in groups like ISIL, in economies, and we see fear to be confronted in privileging the local over the global, today over the next generation."

Archbishop Welby said listening to debate in the UK Parliament on climate change highlighted this intergenerational fear.

"The fear is giving up something now for a generation yet unborn, who, for all we know, might not be very grateful."

But action must be based on prayer, and Archbishop Welby said his first priority as Archbishop of Canterbury is "to encourage a renewal of prayer and communities of prayer".

"Because it is in prayer that we come face to face with that figure on the cross, and recognise him as God himself," he explained.

He said his other priorities are fostering mission and witness, as well as reconciliation in the Anglican communion and he is encouraged by what he has seen so far on all these fronts.

Archbishop Welby's short visit marked 200 years since the first proclamation of the Christian Gospel in New Zealand.

New Zealand is the 30th out of 37 Anglican provinces he has visited in his current capacity.

Sources

• Anglican Taonga
• Newstalk ZB
• Scoop
• Michael Otto
• Image: Anglican Taonga

Almost 15 years ago, the Australian Government received Bringing Them Home: The ‘Stolen Children' Report. As far as I know, it is the only report ever which made politicians on both sides of the House, weep - such was the sadness of its contents. The report told of the removal of a whole generation of young people from their Indigenous parents, and of the placing of those young people in the care of white people: families, Churches, and Government institutions. However, another reading of the text indicates that what were also stolen were the identities of the young people: the loss of their traditional stories and beliefs; their cultural norms and values; their true sense of self.

There are comparisons to be made here with the notion of Catholic identity: who is trying to steal what? I believe that by focussing on ‘the who', we can more easily see ‘the what'. Garry Everett elaborates by naming five ‘whos': relativism, corporatisation, technology leading to lack of discernment, competition and fear. Read more

• Source: The Good Oil
• Image: Prince of Peace Catholic School, Plano TX

Garry Everett has spent all his professional life, as well as much of retirement, as an educator, and mostly of adults. Garry's enduring interests lie in family, Scripture, theology, and Church renewal. At a local level he is involved in social justice, ecumenism and Mercy Partners, a new Public Juridic Person. He is also a member of his parish council and parish St Vincent de Paul Conference.