Caravan of Selves 8: 43-49 Years 1989 -1994

When I arrived back from my Sabbatical there was no hint of the awkwardness of the time before I left. Soon after my return I was invited by the new Principal (Dr John Hitchen) to consider setting up a department in Spiritual Formation! This was a complete surprise and a wonderful opportunity. I felt totally inadequate but as John Hitchen said, "You are more equipped to do this than anyone else!"

So I began with a small initial class called Personal Spirituality. The following year I added a second course Spirituality for Ministry and in the third year Contemporary Trends in Spirituality.

Third year class (who were the first group to do all three years)
L-R Rilma, Liz, Shaz, Sheila, Gail, Kathryn, Dawn (on study leave from Australia), Soo Hoong

The Personal Spirituality course quickly became very popular and class sizes were soon up to 50 students which I felt was really too big for the kind of teaching I most wanted to do. But it was encouraging all the same! I introduced a silent retreat for the third years. This was a five day retreat with daily spiritual direction, held at Mercy Spiritual Life Centre. Over the years David Crawley and Margaret Marshall helped me run these retreats and offer spiritual direction.

Class retreat about 1994 I think

I also began running weekend Creative Prayer Retreats at Arjay House in Torbay. These were open to any students. After a few years I encouraged third year students to experience running these retreats themselves with my guidance. They did a wonderful job and I learned a lot from them!

I was gradually able to shift my teaching load more specifically into the Spiritual Formation department as those classes developed.

Faculty retreat 1994 I think

At the same time as this wonderful opportunity was developing Mum's health was declining through another stroke and a broken hip. It was a long road to her death in 1992. She had moved through all the stages of care at Parkwood Retirement Village in Waikanae and died in the hospital there.

In spite of the deep satisfaction and enjoyment I had in these years of developing the spiritual formation department I was still grappling with the stressful atmosphere of constant "busyness" in the academic environment. Once again I found my self wondering if I could stay long term at BCNZ. I had wonderful friends in the faculty and the college was in good heart. It was my own inner sense of something not being quite right for who I was becoming. A series of taped talks by Richard Rohr on The Spirituality of Subtraction made a significant impact. 

I am quite prone to melancholy and in 1993 I wondered to myself if this was depression or maybe even burnout. I wrote: "I often feel weary and a kind of restless boredom. Weariness is not from overwork or lack of sleep. More a kind of repression of both joy and pain." I don't think at the time I had heard something the poet David Whyte quoted in a talk about his own burnout: 

“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest? … The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.” In retrospect I think this fitted my experience.

 

I sought out a counsellor: Anthea Harper at Christian Care Centre. Two friends of each of us had independently said they thought we would get on well together so it seemed a way to find out! The two months of counselling were very helpful especially the question: "What sort of woman do you want to become?" One sentence of my longer response to this question was: "A woman who has the courage to do and say less in order for what is said and done to mean more."

After the counselling relationship finished Anthea wanted to interview me about the similarities and differences between counselling and spiritual direction. This was the subject of her Masters in Counselling dissertation. So this time she came to my office at BCNZ. After these encounters with each other we decided our friends were right - we certainly had a lot in common and soon became good friends.
Here we are on Barry Tetley's Yacht on the Waitemata Harbour. (Barry was a faculty member at BCNZ and he, with his wife Christine, took us out sailing a couple of times.)

In 1994 I asked if I could reduce my BCNZ work to four days a week in order to give more time to my growing spiritual direction practice. This was agreed to and was a significant step towards claiming my "wholeheartedness". It was a complete surprise in December of that year to be asked if I would consider taking on the role of Associate Principal of BCNZ. Writing this now it still seems unbelievable - but I still have the official letter asking me to consider this.

So in the seven years 1988-1994 things had moved from wondering if I was even acceptable at BCNZ to being asked to consider an associate principal role. It may sound a bit of an anti-climax to say that I declined the invitation! But clearly my heart was set on "doing less, not more".

A very significant PS: On my return from Sabbatical one of the things I did was "try out" a church I had heard about which I sensed would support and encourage my evolving spirituality: Ponsonby Baptist Church. I am still a very committed and grateful part of that community thirty years later! I will no doubt write more about that in coming posts.