Dave died on Monday 13th February 2012 at around 4.15pm.

The funeral is at Windsor Park Baptist Church in Mairangi Bay, on Thursday 16th at 1.00 pm.

We invite you to bring finger food to share afterwards.

No bought flowers please, if you want to bring some from your garden, that’s ok.

We will have a have a donation box for the hospice, who did an incredible job of caring for him.

(A.B. Patterson)

Even when the above was written, there was an emerging awareness of the sophistication of aboriginal theology, though there were few white Australians ever admitted to its secrets. Even so, it pleased Patterson’s audience to read of this simple and ignorant “shock headed blackfellow.”

I preface these notes with the poem because in a number of ways I relate to Frying Pan. I am setting out to forge a systematic personal theology and I am arrogant enough to attempt it without formal training, or even an understanding of what many fine intellects and spirits have achieved before me.

What is more, I am writing of my own spiritual experience. I am writing about phenomena that are personal and real to me. It seems to me pointless to speculate on matters that I cannot yet relate to my own experience. Like the notional Frying Pan, the limits of my experience will be obvious.

-o0o-

God is Love

God is Love. Love is God. What is not Love is not God. What is not Love is not God. If you have experienced Love you have experienced God. If there is an ultimate, creative force or energy or directing, organising principle in the universe, a God with a capital G, it is that of Love

For me, Love is the central feature of my theology. As I explore and reflect on my experience of it, my life becomes increasingly rich and increasingly satisfying.

For me, it seems appropriate to understand it always in relation to its polar opposite, fear/anger.

When I Love

When I love somebody or something, I am completely open to them. I feel perfectly safe. I am deeply and fully aware of the nature of that which I love. I am able to respond richly and fully and unconstrainedly and joyously.

I have no requirement of what I love that it change, the better to serve my purpose. I experience it as a complete example of itself.

Created in His Own Image

Genesis tells of a God who created us in his own image.

When I experience Love, I feel most myself, least divided. I feel most complete, most satisfied, most unified, most together, most at peace.

I believe that we are most truly ourselves when we are vehicles for Love.

Perfect Love Casteth Out All Fear

And vice versa. When we are afraid, we cannot be ourselves. We cannot allow anything we fear to be itself. Instead of love, issues of conformity, security, power and control take over — Fight or Flight.

Jesus was well aware of this. His disciples and followers believed he was the Messiah and the Messiah for them was a figure of awesome political power who would restore to the Jewish people their rightful place among nations. It has been argued that Judas’ motive in betraying Christ was to force his hand and oblige him to assert his power, strike his enemies down and convince the sceptics, or be himself destroyed. Christ kept putting the path of love before them in as many ways as he could. They could only conceive the Messiah in terms of Power and Control.

And these, I believe are the very antithesis of love.

Here and Now

Loving occurs in a kind of eternal present, our awareness changing from moment to moment, yet always complete, always responsive.

Various gurus of the age of therapy have spoken of this state. The Gestalt school called, it as I have done, the Here and Now. Bandler and Grinder, the N.L.P. authors spoke of it as Uptime, a form of heightened awareness and responsiveness, a highly sophisticated feedback loop which bypassed conscious thought processes.

I believe it is in this state of awareness that most useful therapeutic change is initiated, where habits are re-evaluated and updated.

Sin and the Knowledge of Good and Evil

I believe that Sin is any behaviour or state which separates us from God, from our Loving, from our true selves.

It is, effectively, any condition other than the Here and Now.

It is any condition in which we believe that we know how something should be or should not be, should have been or should not have been, and seek to control or manipulate it into something other than what is right now. Loving implies acceptance.

In the Bible, it is the knowledge of good and evil, the eating rather than the actual theft of the fruit, that causes Adam and Eve to be cast forth from the Garden of Eden.

Knowledge of a unitive existence eludes him while he persists in trying to access or formulate it using language, logic, etc. There are no separate elements to organise. Knowledge arrives and is contained non-verbally, preverbally, and one must learn to access it and store it in ways that are totally unprecedented in the rest of our experience.

We must give away pretty much our entire experience of the world as we have it, and of ourselves in that separate world—we must, perhaps, be born again—if we are to grow in mystical knowledge as we have previously grown in knowledge of our world of multiplicity. And as with “ordinary” language, the more use we make of it, the more subtle becomes the quality of the information available.

I see Darwin’s Theory of Evolution as essentially unassailable, despite the continuing howls of protest from the religious right who refuse to believe we are “descended from” monkeys, or share a common ancestor with them. Discoveries in genetics not available to Darwin in his time have borne out his insights in ways he could not have anticipated.

Where I differ from Dawkins is that, for him, any report of an experience that cannot find its place in a Darwinian universe is indefensible. Many of his criticisms—of the New Age, for example—are telling. For me, the mystical experience itself is central, and if it cannot be contained in a Darwinian universe that is only to suggest that there is something else beyond Darwin that we have to accommodate. (This is not to disagree with Dawkins that much of what is alleged to be beyond Darwin is nonsense – or clever marketing—just to suggest that not all of it is, if my own personal experience can be relied on.)

To begin with, let’s take a look at the implications of a Darwinian world for ethics and morality.

There is nowhere and nowhen in the history of the universe that life forms as we know them have been other than separate individuals competing with others of the same species and with other species to one end: to survive and reproduce. 99% of all species that have ever existed are now extinct.

Consequently, and despite all that we know as civilisation, the only meaningful way to interpret “good” and “evil” in Darwin’s universe must be in these terms: Does the activity concerned contribute to my personal chance of surviving and reproducing? Does it contribute to my genetic inheritance being passed on? Note that this may not be how we would want things to be, and it may not be the way we say it should be. It is a description of what actually happens.

We can legislate inside any group in any way that we want to prescribe behaviours, rights and duties, but even our most “civilised” or “humanitarian” systems of morality and ethics will ultimately stand or fall by these simple criteria. Do the groups that adopt them show any advantage in terms of survival and reproduction.

But even if we survive and reproduce in our own generation, that does not necessarily guarantee that our offspring will survive and reproduce in turn. The practices that accompanied our own survival may have generated an environment in which our offspring are doomed.

Evolution is not progressive except insofar as any more complex organism continues to enjoy an advantage in survival and reproduction by virtue of that complexity.

Without a constant environment, then, there can be no absolute standards of good and evil thus understood. Whatever works right now to ensure that I survive and reproduce is good. Whatever militates against it is evil. Short term rules!

It is true that there are aspects of life that appear to contradict this world of “Nature, red in tooth and claw”: instances of “altruism”, of self-sacrifice even, examples of symbiosis, that point to a degree of co-operation. These, however, largely vanish from significance when examined more closely, and if we regard the unit of evolution not as the species but as the gene. Genes that do not assist their possessors to survive and reproduce simply disappear from the gene pool.

Historically, genes, or gene combinations, that have been associated with the formation of supportive kinship groups have survived more consistently than those that have not. What we normally think of as “morality” are the principles that regulate behaviour inside kinship groups. Strictly speaking, morality thus understood, includes the behaviour of the members of a beehive, or a flock of sheep, or a migrating bird species, though we more usually reserve it to describe consciously chosen behaviours. Should we realistically look at some kind of continuum here Should we realistically look at some kind of continuum here in which behaviours are partly the result of natural selection, partly constructed or learned?

Once again, such kinship principles are not absolute. They depend in any given environment on their ability to increase the chances that members of that kinship group will survive and reproduce. The moral code in an inner city ghetto is very different from that which rules a small rural community.

(In this matter, without subscribing to the excesses of the postmoderns, I have reached a similar relativist position with regard to morality. However, I do not subscribe to the further belief that all moral systems are therefore “equally valid”. They are valid only to the extent that they assist their proponents to survive and reproduce. They have no special right to respect outside of that effectiveness, which, one might add, is, like virtue, its own reward.

It is the great fallacy of post-modernism to assert, if not directly, then by implication, that all modes of being have an equal right to survival and reproduction. Darwin himself might well raise a skeptical eyebrow, here.)

If we examine these kinship moral codes, we find that the concept of “neighbour” is important. “My neighbour” gets special treatment compared with someone who is not “my neighbour”. If we want to indulge a fancy, we can think in terms of the human body’s immune system.

Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan asks the question, “Who is my neighbour?” so as to widen the concept of neighbour beyond anything understood by the people of his time. Samaritans were not well regarded at all. They were the pits.

I will contend that Jesus was a mystic. Without going into questions of the Trinity and such, which might well have puzzled Jesus himself, I will contend that he had at the very least experienced the oneness of all being, and was on that basis challenging the insularity of prevailing moral codes. For Jesus, I believe, “my neighbour” was all of creation, including himself. “Love thy neighbour as thyself.”

He was not the first, or the only, person to report this experience, but a combination of circumstances have made him one of its great exemplars. He seems to have been aware of this himself when he promised the disciples that they should do “all that he did and more”. They might all be “sons of God”.

The three words that sum up the Sermon on the Mount, for example, make absolutely no sense outside of a mystical point of view: “Resist not evil.” To resist evil is to react to something or someone that is not me, and not “my neighbour”, something or someone hostile to me or my kinship group.

For someone living in the world of Darwin, it is common sense to resist “evil”, to resist anything and anyone that is seen as diminishing my chance of surviving and reproducing, and to make such terms as are available with anything that cannot be resisted or overcome. As I remarked earlier, there seems to be no time or place in the history of the universe that we can conceive of as any different.

For someone living in such a Darwinian world, the key word is power. Society is ultimately hierarchical, and beyond that the forces of nature, of earthquake and volcano, of flood and drought, of hurricane and lightning and fire, and so forth display a power before which we are ultimately helpless. It is this climate that has generated the religions of appeasement, attempts to negotiate with the powers that be, by way of offering and sacrifice.

A cynic might even frame the emergent priestly class as operating what amounts to an early form of protection racket. “Nice little place you’ve got here. Be a shame if the harvest failed….” Our gleeful cynic might even point to a tradition that held an entire community responsible for the shortcomings of any of its members who might have incurred the wrath of the gods. Later, this proved to be a problem for early Christians. Their fellow community members did not on the whole object to Christian worship as such—they were used to a wide pantheon of deities and demigods. But Christians, by their refusal to worship any but their own god, attracted crop failure, floods, plagues and so forth, sent by the wrathful gods they had refused to honour. And that was not well-received at all.

It is this strand of religion that has given us the theology of the crucifixion. God, as a supremely powerful being, required sacrifice, and the Jewish people had a special relationship with God that involved elaborate and ongoing rituals of sacrifice and purification. Joseph and Mary, we are told in one of the nativity stories, waited in Bethlehem for the required time following the birth of Jesus, before going to the temple in Jerusalem to make appropriate sacrifices, and then returning home to Nazareth. (The other story has them heading off in a hurry to Egypt for several years before returning home to Bethlehem.) Jesus was the son of God, perfect man, born of a virgin, whom God sent into the world as a once and for all sacrifice. Thus the concept of a “loving” God presented by Jesus was accommodated with an all powerful deity.

But this is not what Jesus himself taught. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

Leave Jesus aside for the moment. Consider that despite living in an undeniably Darwinian world of competition to survive and reproduce, despite there being no apparent time or place in which things could ever have been different, there have appeared throughout history, over thousands of years and thousands of kilometres and in hundreds of cultures, a series of men and women who have shared a mystical experience that almost invariably they report as being “more real” than everyday experience, an experience not of separation and of competition but of oneness.

This is the mystical paradox. This is the truth that when we know it shall set us free – whatever that might mean!

Joel Goldsmith, the founder of the Infinite Way teaching, and one of the great mystics of the 20th century, was frequently asked by his students to speak to them about the Sermon on the Mount—one of the central bodies of mystical teaching. Invariably he refused, saying that he knew no more than could be found in books on the subject which they could read for themselves. Then one day, as he was about to begin a lecture, an insight arrived and he began for the first time to teach his students about the Sermon on the Mount. And even then, even though he taught no more than could be found in books on the subject, now he taught with authority, from personal knowledge. Perhaps we might add, “and not as the scribes and Pharisees.”

My own quest, as a mystic, particularly since the pervasiveness of Darwinian “reality” came home to me, has been to locate this mystical experience, for surely there is no place or time in the Darwinian universe for it’s information about a oneness that we all share.

There is no place in Darwin’s universe for ideas about “all things working together for good for them that love God”. There is no place in Darwin’s universe for the admonition to “seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all things shall be added unto you.” There is no place for “God’s purpose”. There is no place for the “maya” of the eastern reports, the understanding that Darwin’s world is an illusion to be awoken from.

On the other hand, for the mystic, there is no place in his or her experience for concepts of “good” and “evil”, in a universe in which there is no “other”. There is no place for a moral system to rule our relationships with others when there are no others; where, as Joel Goldsmith put it, there is no such thing as “God and…”.  [NOTE:  In this respect it has to be noted that mystics seem to spend the vast majority of their lives in the same world as the rest of us, and are just as much a part of any moral system as the rest of us: just that they bring back to "ordinary" reality a transformative memory of where they've been.]

At this point we sooner or later approach the idea of an experience outside of time and space as we know them.

I became interested in atta (1) because  it costs considerably less when you buy it from an Indian grocer than does ordinary wholemeal flour bought from a supermarket; and (2) because I use a good deal of wholemeal flour making my own bread.

Unfortunately, it seems to inhibit yeast activity.   The bread dough did not rise as much and it did not rise as fast as it did when I used supermarket wholemeal.  Over several different recipes and styles of bread, the crumb was denser, and while quite edible, was clearly not what I wanted.  What to do with the 5kg bag of atta in the cupboard.

Well, ANZAC Day was nearly upon us, and there were biscuits—real ANZAC biscuits—to be baked.  After years of tradition, deviating not one iota from the official recipe, I decided, so to speak, to put my head above the trenches, and see what was to be seen.  I used atta instead of the prescribed white flour.

To be short, I got the best damned batch of ANZAC biscuits I’ve ever baked.  Dunking quality, in fact.

For those who want to try it, here’s the official recipe with atta substituted for white flour:  (PS  You don’t have to buy 5 kg.  You can get smaller quantities from the bins.)

• 1 cup medium rolled oats
• 1 cup desiccated coconut
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup atta
• 1 tablespoon golden syrup
• 125g butter
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 2 tablespoons water

1. Preheat oven to 160C
2. Combine the dry ingredients well in a large bowl.
3. Melt the butter, golden syrup and water together in a small saucepan.
4. Combine wet and dry ingredients and mix well.
5. Roll mix in your hands into balls about 2.5cm (1 inch) across and place on lightly greased oven tray, about 20 to a standard oven tray.  (Makes about 30-40 depending on size of the balls.)
6. Flatten somewhat with a fork.
7. Bake at 160C for 18 minutes in the centre of the oven. (People with fan ovens need to adjust appropriately.)
8. Allow to cool on a rack, before storing in appropriate container.

Next up for a try is shortbread.

Shortly after that he bought a  runabout which was powered by the engine from an old Bren Gun Carrier, and had a rooster tale about 6 foot high, but for a start we had a couple of dinghies, the first 8 feet long and the second 12 feet.

Both were kauri clinker boats from the yard of Freddy Brooks, whose farm is now a regional park on the Awhitu Peninsula. He was renowned for the seaworthiness of his small boats and later, in the bigger of the two, Dad and Roy Hull each caught swordfish at Mayor Island with the other crewing and managing the outboard.  When I read The Old Man and the Sea for the first time, I already knew about my dad’s adventures with a 314lb black marlin.

So, every school holidays, Dad would drive us up to the bach, and leave us there while he looked after the farm, and came and joined us when he could organise cover.  When I was about 14, Mum became very ill, and spent most of the year in hospital.  The bach was sold to pay the bills.  But those years in between are still magical, the characters as real as any that Bruce Mason brought to life onstage in The End of the Golden Weather.

The bach was an hour’s drive at least over winding gravel roads, and carsickness was almost inevitable.  Usually it was Mum and Dad in the cab of the truck, you’d call it a ute these days, but then it was a truck, a Ford, with high sides, and all of the bedding and clothes for the stay were wrapped up in blanket bundles and roped together, and us kids fitted in among them on the tray, usually with an adult for company.  Uncle Denis played a mean harmonica.

Anyhow, it had been nearly 30 years since I last visited, so I decided to combine a family visit to Waiuku with a day at the beach.  It was eery, looking at the landscape with two sets of eyes simultaneously, the old Pollock Store long gone, the dreaded Tram Gully section all paved and twice as wide as I remember, Zuill’s store on the Big Bay turn-off corner converted to a house – or replaced – difficult to recall exactly -  and hidden behind trees. And beach homes, growing thick on the ground as I headed down the hill to Big Bay.

I pulled up at the far end of the road, where a winding private driveway had replaced the old farm track that led up the hill and over to Orua Bay.  I checked for WE HATE DOGS signs, and there were none.  Alice approved and we set off down memory lane.  I could see flocks of wading birds down the beach further so I slipped the long lead on.

Alice discovered sand fleas.

The baches are a lot more substantial, and the lawns carefully manicured.  Along the beach further is a huge brick home and a man on a ride-on mower is cruising back and forth on a vast section. Alice is more interested in the water’s edge and so am I,  just for the moment.

Looks like there’s been a bit of a blow recently – the tiny mussels are usually found fastened securely to rocks at the far ends of the beach.  And the seaweed—that rings a bell or two.  Great seaweed tides I remember, when swimming was like wading through a swamp.

And here it all is again, great thick banks of it on the beach, drying out slowly and smelling.  Nothing like a smell to bring back memories. Nothing like a smell, full stop, says Alice.

Very good for the garden says my sister when I tell her about it.  We could have mulched several acres with this lot.

We carry on, and I search, at first in vain, for our old bach.  I can see what could be Austin Park’s old two storey fibrolite bach, but next to it where there used to be a small bach and a creek, there is now no creek, and a large, modern and sparkling beach residence. (I find out later the creek has been piped underground.) Next door is one that could be our old bach, but somebody’s photoshopped it.

It reminds me of the oldest hammer in the world, which had seen 47 new heads and several hundred new handles..  Basically, the floor plan is right, and the distance from the Parks’ old bach is about right.  The lupins have gone, the bunny grass has gone, the ice plant has gone and hibiscus are growing where no hibiscus ever grew in our time.  Aluminium joinery has replaced all the doors and windows, and the boat storage area-cum-extra sleeping space at the left hand end of the verandah is now fully enclosed. And somebody wastes valuable beach time mowing lawns.

We carry on, past a large flock of wading birds

Alice behaves herself admirably.  Up to the right as we near the end of the accessible beach is some iceplant at last.  It hasn’t all gone.

This was one of the best sand holders around when we lived here, and you can still find it here and there, on the Manukau and on the Kaipara.  Another bunch of memories flood in.

About half way along the beach, a large creek runs into the bay, and beyond that the beach is rocky and the baches are perched on the cliff where the Buttimore kids used to wait in ambush.

Just to the right of centre you can see a line running along the cliff about 2 metres up.  In our day, it was a ledge about a foot wide which we had to negotiate at high tide.  I am surprised to see anything of it left.  The creek is bigger and deeper than I remember, in contrast to most childhood things which tend to look smaller when we revisit them after many years.

Alice has a swim in the creek and we head back.

There were never as many waders here in our time, mainly seagulls and black backs.  Along by the van a couple of men are fishing and a bloke approaching my age is watching and we chat.  He’s been here for around 25 years, and I catch up on some of the familiar names.  Alice and I head back down to the campground and the beach store.

The clock on the first day of winter time says 11 o’clock, but my tummy says lunchtime and I order fish and chips.  They are superb.  I also inquire about prices for an overnight stay, which are very reasonable, and they are, he tells me, the only campground on the peninsula to accept dogs.  I had totally forgotten that Alice was a dog in the accepted sense of the word, and I found myself nodding.  It’s a dog-friendly beach and a dog-friendly campground.  What higher praise is there?

We have a half a day ahead of us and I decide to check out neighbouring beaches.  Graham’s Beach is stiff with campervans having lunch in the reserve alongside of NO CAMPING and WE HATE DOGS signs. We sniff loudly and head over to Orua Bay and find more of the same, but nowhere to park in any case.  There’s a good view out to Puponga Point with Cornwallis just over the hill.

It’s a rather wonderful cloud day.

We continue along the road to Wattle Bay and this one does all sorts of magical things to my memory.  The beach left by the receding tide is pristine.

I let Alice off the lead and she takes off for the sheer joy of it all,

even ignoring a wading bird along the way which quietly carries on about it’s business.

We carry on as far as the creek

I imagine this a descendant of one of the original trees that gave the beach its name.  Alice and I head back to the van and I put my feet up for a snooze for half an hour or so, and then we head back towards Waiuku and the wild west coast, stopping to check out the location  of Dad’s old farm at Te Toro.

We pause en route for a look at the old church at Awhitu Central

Right beside it is  a cenotaph, one of thousands like it throughout New Zealand, a memorial to those from the local district who served and those who died in the New Zealand armed services in two world wars.

Like most kiwis, I’m still reeling from the Christchurch earthquake and its 200 odd death toll, and it’s difficult at this remove to realise what the loss of 11,600 soldiers over six years must have meant to a small country.  Like the aftershocks in Christchurch, the deaths just kept on coming, around 200 a month, for year after year after year.

Westhead Rd takes us down to an overgrown public reserve, small size, and a piece of architecture right out of my childhood memories:

Back to Waiuku and out to the coast.  I reckon on some rissoles for dinner but the cold section of the fridge in the van is working so well the mince is solid.  Bacon and eggs and toast instead, and a cup of coffee.  Then off for a walk.  It’s a different piece of coast from Rimmers.  The sand is fine and black and hard – and invasive.  Even when vehicles are doing doughnuts, they hardly penetrate the surface.

Instead of sand dunes, there are soft clay cliffs bordering the beach, and the low tide beach is flat and wide.

We head south for half an hour and return.  The beach is popular and the carpark is usually occupied.  There is an active surf club with large headquarters. When Mum was alive, this beach was a regular haunt of hers for long walks and her house was full of shells and old glass fishing floats and strange bottles and other treasures.

We climb into the van and head back to Carol and Peter’s for the night.  It’s been a good weekend.

This one is about 5 inches across.

I love the way the white shades through into cream and then the dark orange yellow of the centre

This is another rose with a viciously sharp complement of thorns

Is this a mirror I see behind me?

Elizabeth David in one of her books delivers a blistering comment about cooks who attach the names of famous traditional dishes to their own grotesque formulations.

I found a recent example yesterday on the Herald’s online page which featured a recipe for “aioli”, featuring the following ingredients:

1 tbsp light mayonnaise
1 tbsp Greek yoghurt
2 small garlic cloves, crushed
1-2 tsp lemon juice

Like the boss’s daughter in the musical, Carousel,  “a skinny little lady with blood like water.” *

I recall many years ago encountering my first traditional aioli recipe which began, “Take 25 cloves of garlic…” and quantities of good olive oil. 25 cloves…..  I can still feel the waves of garlic making their way outwards from the surface of my skin.

The above may serve as an edible dip to enhance the “zucchini chips” it accompanied, but calling it an aioli is plain pretentious, even precious, like small girls in high heels and lipstick. (Mind you, much of the Herald’s cookery section would have trouble avoiding these descriptions.)

That said, the headline for this article may well invite a raised eyebrow or two. Tzatziki is a very specific Greek dish with exacting requirements. You can read all about it on the internet.

I am writing about some general principles of food combination that involve, briefly, yoghurt or kefir, cucumbers, olive oil, and garlic. Tzatziki is arguably the parent of this group of dishes, but I think a term such as Tzatziki Complex is probably more accurate for what I’m doing. (Elsewhere round the Mediterranean they add chopped walnuts, chopped dates and other magical ingredients.)

Right now in January, when the vege garden is beginning to run amok and my kefir grains are multiplying fiercely, the tzatziki complex provides a variety of ways these ingredients can be employed, at least for the month or so that the flush continues.

So, we start with about a cup of (unsweetened) Greek yoghurt, or partially strained kefir. Bought yoghurt is expensive for my purse and I usually make my own as required with an EasiYo kit. Alternatively, I have a plentiful supply of kefir grains and it is an easy matter to partially strain a quantity of kefir to the consistency of a thick yoghurt. I use a teatowel in a colander inside a large bowl.

The original contains dill and mint; and I’m short on both of those at present. Not to worry. Basil is growing apace, and it contains elements of both, so we’ll use that. Two or three sprigs, chopped fine.

Garlic is just about dry after lifting it on the longest day and leaving the sun to do its stuff, so that’s fine. We’ll try a clove or three, finely chopped, and adjust for taste later on. Raw garlic has quite a different effect in a dish from when it is cooked, much stronger, much more evident on your breath, and we need to bear this in mind. If you’re using Chinese garlic from the supermarket (about a third to a quarter the price of NZ garlic), you may find that the flavour is much much milder than that available from NZ grown garlic, so just be aware.

I like an onion presence, and since again it’s raw, just a small one, about 5cm across, no more. Grated. Great.

The olive oil is bog standard bulk variety. It gets rather lost in the overall flavour so I’m happy I didn’t use the Chrissy present extra virgin from Waiheke. I suspect that here it’s one of those ingredients which you might notice if it was absent, but that’s all. Anyway, about a tablespoonful.

Cucumber. Apple cucumber in my garden, and one largish one is sufficient to establish the cucumber flavour. But here, I’m going to stick my neck out and add a medium courgette—about 15-20cm—because I’m trying to use up the influx. Grate each of those, and add to the growing pile in the bowl.

Now, a scant teaspoon of salt, and a slightly smaller teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper, a half teaspoonful of caraway seed, lightly bruised, and, lacking a lemon at present, a half teaspoon of citric acid, which I think needs to be present to accompany the slight lactic acid sourness from the kefir.

Combine the lot with a fork and check for flavour. Place in a glass, stainless steel, or stoneware bowl, covered, in the fridge for an hour or so to chill; and serve on toast, no butter needed, but I’d probably go for Vogels toast or the stuff I make from my Dutch Oven Bread.

-o0o-

Anyway, there’s a rough outline to start with.  Over to you, and

Bon Appetit,

or should that be It’s a complex question.

* This is not the line that appears in the published lyrics, but it was the one that features in recordings and film, and the one I grew up with.

Matthew and Luke are the only two extant “records” of Jesus’ birth. Neither Mark’s gospel, nor, apparently, the source “Q”, which together provided the primary sources for Matthew and Luke, contained any information about Jesus’ birth. There is no reference made to it in John’s gospel nor in any of Paul’s letters. For Paul, in any case, Jesus’  birth, life and ministry were pretty much  irrelevant: it was Jesus death and resurrection that mattered.

Now, my guess is that the only accurate information available to the authors of Matthew and Luke about Jesus early years was that Jesus hailed from Nazareth in Galilee. But they did know that, if he was the Messiah, then according to Jewish prophecies, he was supposed to be born in Bethlehem, in Judea.

Both of them (but Matthew, in particular, addressing a primarily Jewish audience) were concerned to link Jesus with Jewish prophecy, to establish that he was the Messiah.

Now the Messiah was to be of the house of David. Matthew traces Jesus genealogy, via David, back to Abraham, the father of the Jews. (Luke goes back even further, again via David, right back to Adam, emphasising Jesus’ link with all humanity.)

The two lines of descent, though, are both through Joseph, which seems a trifle odd, when you think about it, and they differ quite markedly. They do not even agree on the name of Joseph’s father. Matthew’s genealogy has 41 generations back to David, Luke’s has 57.

Matthew tells of the wise men, the Magi, who come to visit Joseph and Mary in their house in Bethlehem, over which the star has finally come to rest. (Incidentally, what would have to happen to a star before you could walk outside at night and know which of your neighbours’ houses it was directly over.)

There is no mention of any shepherds, of any stable, of any manger, of any swaddling clothes, nor of any herald angels, singing or otherwise. Joseph and Mary are apparently residents of Bethlehem. (Jesus is described as a “young child”, so the timing of their visit may be a little after the actual birth, though he is also referred to as a “child” in Luke, at just over a month old.)

The wise men leave, and shortly afterward, Herod, tired of waiting for them to return, sends out his soldiers to Bethlehem to massacre every infant under the age of two. An angel appears to Joseph in a dream, warning him of the danger, and he and Mary set out for Egypt with Jesus, and they stay there until the danger is past. (There is no historical record anywhere, by the way, that bears out this story of the massacre, in Bethlehem or anywhere else at the time, and given it’s scale, and the quality of contemporary records, we might reasonably expect to find at least one. It may also seem strange to some of us that the angel’s warning was apparently not passed on to the parents of other small children in the area.)

When they were ready to return, Joseph and Mary decided that Bethlehem was perhaps still a risky place to stay, given that Herod’s son is still in power in Judea. So they set out for Galilee to the north and make their home there in Nazareth.

Luke’s story features the shepherds, watching their flocks by night, and the herald angels. Mid-winter, incidentally, is not a time that shepherds in the area would normally have been out on the hillsides with their flocks. (The timing of Christmas Day has more to do with the emperor Constantine, the Winter Solstice and the festival of the Sun God than it does with the birth of Jesus.) They find the baby, wrapped in swaddling clothes, in a manger in a stable because there is no room at the inn for Joseph and Mary. There is no mention of the wise men or of the star.

Joseph and Mary have travelled from Nazareth, where they live, to Bethlehem, the home of Joseph’s ancestors, to be counted in a census ordered by Caesar Augustus, of which census also, there is no historical record. Where we do have historical information about Roman census practice, there is no mention of the kind of accompanying social disruption occasioned by a requirement to return to the area one’s paternal ancestors lived in a thousand years previously.

In Luke’s account, Jesus was circumcised after eight days, in accordance with custom, and Jewish law prescribed that after 33 days,  a sacrifice be made in the Temple. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary wait out the 33 days, make the sacrifice, then return to Nazareth. There is no mention of any slaughter of the innocents such as Matthew describes. There is no flight to Egypt.

Now just because something is left out of an account does not mean it never happened, granted, but  such a massacre ought to be significant enough to make it into any account of his birth, and one would also expect to find some corroboration in contemporary Roman records, and from historians such as Flavius Josephus. One would expect also that a census of “the whole world” would attract some notice, somewhere, apart from it’s single mention in Luke. No such evidence exists, anywhere outside of Luke. Traditionally, “nativity” scenes have been a composite of the two stories where possible, and inconvenient details have simply been ignored.

In at least one respect however, the two accounts are in direct conflict: Luke tells us that Jesus’ birth occurred when Quirinius (Cyrenius) was governor of Syria. Matthew tells us that the birth occurred when Herod was king. We have accurate historical records that tell us that Herod had been dead for ten years (he died in 4 BCE) when Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6 CE.

As inspired and inerrant accounts of a single event, the best that can be said is that there does not seem to have been any collusion between the parties.

(My acknowledgements to Bart Ehrman, a prominent New Testament textual scholar, whose work is an excellent source of information on the early Church.)

A merry Christmas to all.  May all your troubles be trifles.