I’m just about to leave Australian soil after a seven night trip here, my first time back after relocating overseas with family in January 2015.

There is something funny about being home, but being away from home, of knowing a country is so much a part of your life, but only one part, of being separated from your motherland by thousands of miles, but knowing your mother still lives in your heart.

However, this trip, when you set aside the wonderful friends, the great hospitality, and the beautiful landscape, this trip has taught me, or perhaps reminded me, of a deeper longing.

This longing is for a place in the middle of the Pacific, miles from nowhere, on a foundation of lava and sand. This land is a land of pineapples and coconuts, macadamias and plumeria. At its heart beats a spirit of aloha, a breath-filled life which is unique and unmistakable.

Hawai’i, you have entered my aching heart, hugging and kissing memories and foundations built in Australia.
After fifteen months of gently loving me, you have given me more than I could ever have asked for, renewing and transforming my past, and encouraging my new future.

So, Australia, I still call you home, and you are, as always, in my heart. But you’ll have to get used to sharing that space with the most complicated, broken, beautiful place that I’ve ever known. That land of aloha across the seas.

It’s coming up on 11 months since Julia, Phoebe, James and I moved from Australia to beautiful Honolulu, Hawai’i.

Much learning, and translating! has gone on during this relatively short time.

I’m happy to report that I can now write the date in the U.S. format (MMDDYYYY) without having to translate in my head first.

However, it’s always small steps when it comes to ingrained, learnt-from-childhood behavior.

This morning at the Blood Bank of Hawaiʻi, having finished my monthly plasma/platelet donation, I was speaking with a born and bred local who identified as a Chinese-Hawaiian (her father was Chinese, her mother Hawaiian).

The woman shared with me that East, West, North, South were so unfamiliar to her (even though they are obviously taught at school) that they have no relevance or meaning (on O’ahu the geographical reference points are Diamond Head, Ewa, Mauka and Makai).

I was lost in thought about this conversation moments later, and found myself waiting for a bus on the wrong side of the street! My autopilot was set to the Australian direction of travel!

But all is well – I’m on the bus, heading back to my neighborhood of Makiki, wondering what other wonderful, conversation-based learning (and distraction!) will be gifted next.

Aloha,

Christopher+

It hit me in the middle of the night.
The crushing emptiness which comes from experiencing such human tragedy.  I’d been given a small, but not insignificant insight into what survivors and their families felt. Anger, confusion, fear.

But now comes hope and love. Just as New York City underwent a spiritual and social transformation post 9/11, I feel that this too has has been shared, again in a small, but not insignificant way.

I have no doubt that God was there that day in 2001, but not as an agent of violence or apathy, but in the hands and feet of those who cared for their neighbor and for their stranger.

I know that the Creator is asking me not to take this all on. It is too much for a human to comprehend. However, I can understand, in a new way, the depth of human resilience and the human races immense capacity for love.

My prayer is that I can integrate a fraction of that resilience and depth of love, and that I can share it with the world, and that the world may do the same for us all, that we may live in peace, a peace grounded in the wisdom of love.

People walked, and wept, stopped and stared. This was September 11, 2001 lived and re-lived by thousands from around the world.

Through the displays of the Tribute Center and Museum, and through the solemn waterfall of the Memorial pools, today humanity viewed the best of itself, and the worst of itself.

And the agony, yes, the tragedy comes, not just from the fact that the particular violence of 9/11 occurred, as real as that is, but from the fact that this violence continues to occur, in different forms, around the world.

Because of this, any freedom which I enjoy, any hope I can feel, is muted by the ongoing quest for power which humans continue to hold on to.

For this reason, I know that my freedom is, in fact, a type of bondage, because it exists in a world where this very freedom is contingent on the suffering of others.

Lord Christ, may you save us from ourselves, that as a race and people we may soon find the path to resurrection and life.

This blog post is written in response to:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/14/after-15-years-ive-given-up-driving-cabs-the-industry-has-no-shame

I absolutely loved my two and a half years as a full-time cabbie in Brisbane, Australia (2004-2006) I put that down to:

a) time of life – I started when I was 20 – I was young, and staying up through the night driving people around was easy and fun!
b) a fantastic taxi owner who I drove Business Class for, who treated me with dignity and respect and always made sure the cars were kept clean
c) the fantastic customers – the people who were funny, interesting, tragic, joyous and everything in between

However, sadly, everything in this article, as I can see it, is true.

I feel a sense of loss, knowing that the profession, as we knew it, is melting away, and many honorable taxi drivers and taxi owners will need to make the difficult transition onto other things. Nevertheless, this industry, in Queensland, Australia at least, despite all the government regulation, is fatally flawed.

As the bumper stickers say, “Proud to be a cabbie”? Yes I was: but I would find it hard to be now. These days, I’d be much more tempted to slap an “Uber Driver” sticker on my car.

This kind of thing really upsets me. You see it all the time, but it still makes me gag (from the March 2015 edition of Australia’s “Delicious” magazine).

How can you reconcile “a decade of joy” with the living conditions of the so called “humble pig”? (Picture from ASPCA)

Pigs: abused, despised, unloved.

Pork – a decade of despair.

“Mind the gap” will be familiar to those of you who live in urban centers which have public rail transit systems. Hawaii’s first ever rail system is currently being built, due for completion in 2019 (see: http://www.honolulutransit.org)

Growing up in Brisbane, Australia, I remember the white paint marked on the edges of the platform to assist passengers navigate the gap created between train and platform while the carriage is pulled up at a stop.

The gap is a relatively small one, usually no more than 5 or 7 inches (around 12-17cm) wide. Nevertheless people can be brought undone by such a thing, particularly if they are preschool age, or have mobility issues.

This morning, as I reflected on the Ministry of the Word within the Eucharist (comprised of the readings, and sermon), I thought about how similar gaps in our lives can bring us undone.

A gap between what was said, and what I heard, a gap between what could reasonably be expected of others, and what we expect others to do.

These gaps emerge slowly, but unlike the always constant gap between train and platform, these gaps of communication and expectation can widen; and quickly at that.

So this Lent let’s challenge ourselves to “Mind the Gap”. Although small, they need closing quickly, lest we find ourselves undone in the fall.

Blessings, Christopher+

Tomorrow it will be seven weeks since I relocated to Hawai’i with my wife, Julia and our children, Phoebe and James. Already I’m noticing some “strange things are happening” (as Randy Newman once put it!)

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There are zeeeeebras there as we climb the stairs of the school to which Phoebe attends with her friends, who are a wonderful eclectic mixture of people originating from all over the place.

And there are tomaytoes growing down there on the way to the church where it is commented that I am acclimating well, which of course pronounced ac-cla-mat-ing on my new island home.

All along I thought that I was acclimatising well, which would really be acclimatizing, if I put it the way that the locals do, which I do, with the help of a spell check or two.

But at least I’m finding my feet in the usual way, except, not you see, as there are changes afoot there as well if you’ll pardon the pun.

Those feet are now naked in church, during service time at least, but not to worry, there is still an alb and stole found on the priest, or the pastor, or the preacher, or teacher, or the Reverend, or Father, or Associate or other such name that I’m honored or honoured to be called.

So there are changes afoot as you can see, and I’ll hope you agree, despite this atrocious poetry parody, that in seven weeks much can change, to a greater or lesser degree.

You may even find me now in khaki.*

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*Khaki is pronounced down-under as “car-key”… I’m still struggling to say it in the American vernacular. Blessings from Hawai’i.

“The world doesn’t revolve around you.”

When my seemingly endless energy as a young boy had become just a wee too much, my father would often use this phrase.

I remember being lost in my own world, lost in a world of my own energy in a time of (almost frantic) discovery.

Now as a father, I too see my children, living in a world of their own. My daughter in particular, now the advanced age of three, delights in telling me, in her own way, that she has reached a goal. “I can do it myself”,  she says, as she climbs up a foot stool to wash her teeth.

So often we can be lost in a world of ourselves that we feel like we have reached some magical point, some end goal, some achievement that has never been accomplished before. We can think we know it all, rather than some of “the all”.

My prayer for myself, and for you this night, is that we together can celebrate our great achievements, our gifts, and our strengths, but never feel we have arrived.

Let us raise our eyes beyond ourselves, to a world beyond ourselves, to a new journey of discovery.