That looks like tagging on the stone walls of St Peter's Anglican
Church in Upper Riccarton.
Really, who would dare?
But when you get
closer, you realise that the spray- painted words actually read "danger"
and "stay clear".
There is hurricane fencing around much of this 110-year-old church,
even enclosing some of its historic graves.
There are fallen stones on
the ground.
There is a notice on the door that no-one is allowed inside.
This is a depressingly familiar sight in this city of ruined or
partly ruined churches. Since the February 22 earthquake, the
neighbouring St Peter's church hall has been the impromptu headquarters
of Anglicanism in Christchurch.
Bishop Victoria Matthews has set up a small office at the back of
the hall, as the Anglican Centre on Hereford St is in the red zone,
behind the cordon. She says the beautiful, wooden bishop's house, on
Bishop St off Bealey Ave, is still standing but unsafe to live in for
the time being.
Christ Church Cathedral's theologian in residence, The Rev Lynda
Patterson, is working out of St Barnabas in Fendalton. She and Cathedral
Dean Peter Beck have been running Sunday services on the grounds of
Fendalton Open-air School.
Makeshift services and mobile congregations have become the norm in Christchurch, in some cases since September.
People talk of church groups meeting in parks or on beaches, at least while the weather holds.
For Patterson, the first Fendalton Open-air School service was a
reminder that "the church is an awful lot more than the buildings".
"For
the cathedral community to come together again was immensely powerful,"
she says.
"There was huge emotion. The buildings may be down but the
church is not out." The post-quake greeting in Christchurch is "Where
were you?". And you learn that people are also keen to tell their
stories.
Matthews was in the Bicycle Thief restaurant on Latimer Square when
the February 22 quake hit; she quickly got under the table amidst a sea
of broken glass. Across the road, the Christchurch Club was severely
damaged.
By the time she saw that everyone had safely got out of the
Anglican Centre, Christ Church Cathedral had been cordoned.
Patterson was inside the cathedral. Books shook off walls; computers
came down. Staff held on to each other in doorways. She listened for
the bells in the tower; in other shakes, the bells had rung. This time
there was "just a long slow rumble" and she assumed the tower had fallen
by then. "Outside it was like a fog."
Staff and visitors had been ushered out. But for nearly two weeks,
there was an arduous wait as everyone suspected or assumed that not all
visitors had got out. The good news - there were no bodies inside the
cathedral - came to Peter Beck at 1am. Awake and emotional, he rang the
others.
Patterson had been expecting a call to help say prayers over the
dead. Instead, here was Beck on the phone, weeping tears of relief.
"In a really bleak week that was something of a ray of hope for us," she says.
In the preceding days, media had waited and hoped for someone to be
pulled out alive from the wreckage of the CTV building - waited for "a
miracle", some reporters said. No miracle came at that site.
As for whether the news about the cathedral can be considered a
miracle, Matthews has given that some thought. "I believe in miracles -
let me be very clear about that - but would I use the word miracle?" she
says. "No, I think it's a sheer gift."
She believes that the earthquake strengthening of the cathedral may
have held the tower up long enough for tourists to get out, although she
is aware that it seems to contradict Patterson's impression. Either
way, the small piece of good news came at just the right time.
"It came
at a point when my exhaustion was at a peak," Matthews says.
She was so exhausted that she slept through Peter Beck's 1am phone call.
But what attitude should the Anglican Church take to its own
buildings? Besides the cathedral, there has been major damage to St
Luke's on Kilmore St, St John's on Latimer Square, Holy Trinity in
Avonside, Holy Trinity in Lyttelton, St John's in Okains Bay and St
Cuthbert's in Governor's Bay.
There has also been damage to suburban
churches in Merivale, Riccarton, Shirley, Opawa, Mt Pleasant, New
Brighton and Redcliffs. Minor damage to churches in Woolston, Linwood
and Aranui means that they should be repaired reasonably soon.
Damage to Christchurch churches in the September 4 earthquake was
estimated at $100 million. Ansvar Insurance, which insures many of the
city's churches, expects the damage after February 22 to be much greater
than that.
Damage to the Christ Church Cathedral alone would be in the
tens of millions, according to Ansvar Insurance New Zealand manager
David Leather.
The likely rebuild of the cathedral is a symbolic act that has
received a lot of attention in conversations about damaged buildings,
but clearly some hard decisions will have to be made about
Christchurch's other Anglican churches.
It might be too soon to have those discussions in public, but both
Matthews and Patterson seem uncomfortable with the notion that this
disaster could be an opportunity for the Anglican Church to rebuild for
the smaller, more mobile congregations of the 21st century.
As
congregations are declining, do we need as many churches?
Matthews answers with a question: do they have too many churches or
not enough people going to them?
Patterson says that if you are building
for the future, you don't want to build for a worst- case scenario.
Matthews has an anecdote from the Canadian city of Edmonton, where
she served as bishop before Christchurch. Movie theatres had been in
decline so someone bravely bucked the trend with a mega- cinema, which
apparently included a dragon that breathed fire as you walked in: "The
most absurd movie theatre you have ever seen. It was out of this world."
So what is the ecclesiastical equivalent of 3-D? Matthews' point is that people want an event.
"Churches, for all their spiritual meaning, have historically been
an event. The High Mass, the choral singing, the pageantry. If we start
tearing down the beauty and building mean little churches, then we'll be
in trouble.
"You want to walk into a church and feel your spirit soar. If we
were better humans, we could do that by walking outside and we wouldn't
need it. But we need some help and churches help us."
Patterson worries that in pragmatic discussions about rebuilding the
city, we could lose sight of the need for beauty - the kind of unusual
beauty that the now-damaged stone churches lent the city.
"Beauty embraces us in our suffering," Matthews says.
The Catholic Bishop of Christchurch, Barry Jones, was on his way to
Hokitika when the February 22 quake hit. He was out of mobile range
until Arthur's Pass, where he turned round and came back. An unreal
event: he didn't feel the shake but returned to a blitzed city.
With the heavy concrete dome of the Cathedral of the Blessed
Sacrament making the building still too unstable to approach, the
diocese office next door on Barbadoes St has also been off- limits.
People are working from home on laptops; no-one can get in to
retrieve files and computers. When we spoke, Jones was still waiting to
hear if a crane would be able to lift the dome at a distance, allowing
engineers to assess the cathedral. "It's so dangerous that no-one can
actually get near it," he says.
"If there was another earthquake like
the one on February 22, the engineers think the dome would actually come
down. It's a death trap."
It's tragic and maybe defeatist to use the past tense, but it was a stunning building.
Jones refers those who never got around to going inside - including
this reporter - to a 360-degree tour on the diocese website, showing the
cathedral's interior in all its splendour.
In an ideal world, would
Jones want it restored to its previous condition?
"If it was feasible. It's an absolute treasure. But I'm not even beginning to think like that. It's just too soon."
As with the Anglican cathedral, the Cathedral of the Blessed
Sacrament is the high-profile casualty, but many other Catholic churches
have also been damaged.
A final prayer service has already been held at
St Mary's in New Brighton, which is to be demolished. Historic churches
in Sumner and Lyttelton have likewise been hit hard.
"I've heard people say that the Lyttelton one is so significant as a
heritage building that it will have to be restored," Jones says.
"That's not what the church has said but what I've heard heritage people
say. But I don't think the Sumner one, Our Lady Star of the Sea, can be
restored."
Parishioners who usually go to St Paul's in Dallington, St Joseph's
in Papanui and Holy Family in Burwood are also attending Mass elsewhere.
Jones seems to be more open than his Anglican counterparts to the idea
that the earthquake and subsequent demolitions and closures might give
his church a chance to redraw its map of Christchurch.
"Our churches have all been built in communities that wanted
churches where they were," he says, but "the point you raise is very
interesting".
And the Catholic Diocese of Christchurch is considering these kinds
of issues? "We are, absolutely." While the churches have good-sized
congregations, "the real issue is whether they are the right places to
have churches".
What would be the great symbol of earthquake damage to
Christchurch's Presbyterians?
Your first answer might be the Knox Church
on Bealey Ave, where the wooden frame still stands but the brick skin
has largely fallen off.
That church is probably repairable, says
Presbyterian moderator The Rev Martin Stewart, but the old, grand St
Paul's Trinity Pacific on Cashel St, deep inside the cordon, is "gone".
A fire did damage first, then two earthquakes. A church in Linwood
has also been demolished and one in St Albans will follow.
Meanwhile, a
New Brighton congregation is the one that has met on the beach.
Stewart's own church, St Stephen's in Bryndwr, will be out of action for
some time too. His congregation is making do with the church hall next
door. All these ruined stones, bricks and steeples.
"We have built the wrong kind of building, with the wrong kind of
materials, for this landscape," Stewart says. An English building style
was imported with spires responding to an old view of where God was to
be found.
"As tragic as it is, with the loss of these buildings, we also have
an opportunity to say 'Hang on a minute, what does it mean to be the
church?' Not just now but for the next 50 years."
Future church buildings might be spaces that work for worship but
are also community resources, he says. But how about as a place of
beauty?
Stewart sounds ambivalent: "A very expensive building just used for
an hour on Sunday is
hard to justify financially. We have to be
creative, yet there is something about walking into an old church
building, a sense of something bigger."
He agrees that an "interesting challenge" lies ahead, and not just
for his church. While some think that if you build a church, people will
come, Stewart's view is the reverse: how do you respond to the existing
needs and wants of a community? In the short term, that is about
getting people and resources into the quake-shattered eastern suburbs.
Stewart has also had the sense that Presbyterians, New Zealand's
third-largest Christian denomination, have been left out of coverage of
post-quake Christchurch.
And where was Stewart at 12.51pm on February 22?
He was in the dining room of Rochester and Rutherford Hall at
Canterbury University, where he does some part-time outreach work. The
quake didn't seem quite so dramatic in Ilam, but he has a son at
Unlimited Paenga Tawhiti and "his experience in the central city wasn't
very nice. Another son who works round the corner went to find him and
it took them a few hours to get out of the city."
Stewart runs a weblog as "Mart the Rev" and talks up his fondness
for the music of U2 and David Gilmour, meaning that he can seem like the
archetypal hip priest: worldly, a little feisty and a little suspicious
of the musty baggage of organised religion.
He was aghast when he
encountered German missionaries in Christchurch who were trying to push a
line that the earthquake was a response to sinfulness.
"How to kick
people when they're down, but also, what kind of God are they talking
about?" he says. "How dare they? We know that God is love. You turn God
into an ogre when you promulgate the idea that He caused this as a
judgment on us."
The idea that this was an act of God - "a shocker" of a phrase, he
says - could only come from those with an undeveloped Sunday school
faith.
Lynda Patterson heard the same kind of thing. She got emails asking
if God was angry about the prostitutes in Latimer Square, the presence
of the Wizard or even the floral carpet in the Cathedral.
"You can see people desperately struggling to understand," she says.
"There must be something we did wrong. I want to lose the idea of a
God who slaps us with a big stick. We believe in a God who is in among
the rubble suffering with us, not at a great distance pulling the
strings."
"It's not judgment," Matthews adds. "The very flippant answer I give
is, if this is God's judgment, what took Him so long?"
If there is a
lesson for believers, she says, it is simply that creation is more
fragile than we care to admit.
Catholic Bishop Barry Jones says he hasn't heard people asking whether the city's sinfulness brought disaster upon it.
"It's the mystery of evil - it's as old as the world," he says.
"We're just reading the book of Job. He's the innocent man and all sorts
of disasters happen to him. He says, 'Why is this happening to me when
I'm an innocent person?' That's as old as the Bible.
"There is an account in Luke's Gospel of a tower in a place called
Siloam falling on people and killing 18 of them. And Jesus talks about
that and says, 'Do you imagine they were worse sinners than anybody
else'? That's exactly what people imagined at that time.
"Our Lord was really clear about that. Bad things don't happen to people because they're bad people."
In his immaculate Fendalton home, with Catholic reading material by
Pope John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI and James K Baxter arranged on the
coffee table, Jones might seem more removed from the turmoil of daily
life than Stewart or even Matthews and Patterson. But he, too, has a
friendly, down-to-earth manner.
What does he make of the suggestion that the quake might make us
better people? The notion is that we have become, temporarily at least,
less materialistic and more considerate of neighbours and strangers.
"We have to say it's an event of evil; it's a natural disaster,"
Jones says. "But some of the reactions to it have been really healthy
and good and admirable. Can it continue? Well, what are the forces that
shape our society? Are they communal forces or are they from beyond,
from economics and culture and the media? We're part of a global culture
and global economic system and those forces seem to me to be really
powerful forces that shape how people think and behave."
Martin Stewart believes that any lasting change must come out of the
community rather than bureaucracy. He wonders, 'Are there ways to keep
up the contact we established with each other in the days after the
quake'?
Lynda Patterson was getting at this in a sermon she gave on March 6
about "acts of God".
She, too, was dismissive of the insurance company
phrase and thinks that the true acts of God have been in the community
response. The emergency workers, the student volunteers, the local dairy
owners who gave produce away - they were doing acts of God.
At those times, "it's possible to see God at work much more
clearly", she says. Another example: she lives on a street where there's
a gang house.
The gang members went door to door with bottles of water they bought
in Hornby and made sure everyone had enough. "I would call that very
close to an act of God."
Matthews has seen this, too. She met some of the Urban Search and
Rescue guys who were working out of Latimer Square. They told her that
their work had been a privilege.
"Although they didn't use the word,
they realised they had been made by God to help other people.
"The question I've got is, will it change us for a while or
permanently?" Matthews says. She admits to being a little more
pessimistic, remembering that when she first came to New Zealand, we
were in the depths of a recession.
"The theological question, and it is theological, is what will it
take for us to change?" she asks.
"Because we know that caring about
people is better. It's better for the people and it's actually better
for us. We were created to care and reach out. We were never created to
be selfish and not care. It doesn't make for a good human being."