Disenchanted.

Another World: Oamaru’s whitestone Victorian Precinct is an enclave for aging alternative life-stylers. The air is filled with the scent of patchouli and hand-crafted leather. There are troll figurines and fairies for sale, alongside crystals and dream-catchers.

OAMARU likes to think of itself as the “steam-punk” capital of the world. It certainly has plenty of the whitestone Victorian and Edwardian architecture needed for such a project. It has also made room for the requisite collection of amiable eccentrics and creatives required to flesh-out the standard steam-punk narrative. As harmless games of dress-up go, Oamaru’s make-believe world seemed quirkily benign.

But, that was before Covid.

Walking around the North Otago town’s “Victorian Precinct” in early January, the anti-vaxxer vibe was unmistakable. It wasn’t just the signs welcoming “everyone” into the market stalls and boutiques that gave the anti-vax sentiment away, but the defiant stares their owners levelled at the tourists. Some of the retailers almost seemed to be daring the out-of-towners to make an issue of the fact that their QR codes had mysteriously gone missing.

Not that many visitors would have “made an issue” out of it – any more than a Springbok Tour protester would have “made an issue” of apartheid sport in a public bar back in 1981. Wrong sort of place. Wrong sort of people.

Oamaru’s whitestone Precinct is an enclave for aging alternative life-stylers. The air is filled with the scent of patchouli and hand-crafted leather. There are troll figurines and fairies for sale, alongside crystals and dream-catchers.

In the North Otago artist Donna Demente’s “Grainstore Gallery” it is difficult to resist the whiff of magic that permeates not just her paintings and papier mâché sculptures, but all the weird and wonderful nineteenth and twentieth century bric-a-brac among which her artworks nestle. For all its steam-punk machinery, the Precinct smacks more of Pre-Raphaelite sorcery and enchantment than Victorian science.

Donna Demente’s “Grainstore Gallery”, Victorian Precinct, Oamaru.

The intrusion of QR codes and Vaccination Passes into this world was never going to be welcomed with open arms. Even among the vaccinated, one suspects, there would have been a strong sense of disappointment. Like when some kill-joy suddenly turns on the electric lights at an intimate candle-lit party.

Covid-19 must have burst into the Precinct with all the sensitivity of a drugs bust. Rules and regulations, masks and jabs, and precious little tolerance for those whose understanding of health and wellbeing embraces wholesome food, sunlight, and midnight swims with dolphins. The eccentric steam-punk scientists may have accepted the rationality of mass inoculation, but a significant number of the hippies and herbalists clearly remain unconvinced.

Magic only works in circumstances where people are willing to suspend their disbelief and set their imagination free. The possibility of catching a dangerous disease – even among the ornate “Oamaru stone” facades of the Precinct – is simply not conducive to turning-on, tuning-in, and dropping-out of the workaday world.

What Covid meant was that just about everybody suddenly stopped “playing”. The childlike wonder which had been the common currency among those who stepped across the invisible boundary separating twenty-first century Oamaru from its nineteenth century forerunner was replaced with the impatience and intolerance of visitors determined to “stay safe”.

No wonder the aging hippies and herbalists, funky craftspeople, magical artists, and amateur baristas felt affronted and disrespected. No wonder some of them felt compelled to make a stand against the rules and regulations pouring out of Wellington.

And if the cotton-print stall-holders and bearded wood-carvers glared with barely concealed hostility at the loud and decidedly unenchanting Aucklanders – who could really blame them?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 13 January 2022.

News From Nowhere: If the Greens are to have a future, then they must listen to their past.

Taking Inspiration From The Past: Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanity’s past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword. Never has that need been greater. Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clio’s liberating sword through neoliberalism’s black and befouling heart.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE GREENS’ corruption by neoliberalism is that they simply cannot grasp how completely they’ve been seduced. At its heart, the problem is one of generational experience and perspective. The younger generation of Greens, the ones currently in control of the organisation, simply have no experiential connection to the zeitgeist out of which their movement was born. Their entire adult lives have been lived in the shadow of the neoliberal revolutions of the 1980s and 90s. What came before the revolution has been dismissed by its architects and disciples as existing outside the realm of common sense. Those who preach the values and aspirations of those pre-revolutionary times offer news from nowhere – and no one is listening.

They could, of course, learn the origin stories of radical environmentalism by entering imaginatively into the historical circumstances out of which it was born. Historians do this all the time. Watch Mary Beard’s television series on Ancient Rome and it will soon become clear how thoroughly an intelligent and inquisitive human-being is able to not only comprehend, but also inhabit, the past. Beard talks of being captured by the history of the Roman world from the moment she read Tacitus’ chilling judgement of his own people: “They make a desert and they call it peace.”

The problem with the generations that have grown up in the 40 years since Thatcher and Reagan destroyed the post-war social-democratic settlement, is that they have been convinced the past has nothing useful to teach them.

Like the early cartographers who wrote “Here Be Monsters” in the blank spaces of their maps, the neoliberal ideologues tell frightening tales about the times before their “Year Zero”. Anxious to dissuade those contemplating their own voyages of historical discovery, they warn that only bad and mad things lie beyond the well-charted shorelines of the present. Sadly, they have been remarkably successful. The past remains one of the very few foreign countries that millennial “influencers” have no interest in visiting – not least because “they do things differently there”.

One of the principal reasons for the neoliberals’ success is that their own ideologically-inspired break with the post-war world was strengthened immeasurably by the natural inclination of young people to dismiss the world in which their elders were raised as hopelessly passé. Ordinarily, such youthful disdain is reserved for the fashions, art and music of the recent past – so lacking in the manifestly superior tastes of the present. What the Neoliberals merged so successfully was this essentially harmless generational scorn with their own deep ideological hostility towards the ideas and institutions of the entire modern era.

When Baby Boomers like Catherine Delahunty and Sue Bradford condemn the younger generations of Greens for abandoning the foundational beliefs and principles of the Green Movement, all these younger Greens hear is an ideological version of “Taylor Swift can’t hold a candle to Joni Mitchell.” Or, “Where is your generation’s “Godfather”? Where’s your “Catcher in the Rye”? Your “Sergeant Pepper”? Social-democracy, the Club of Rome, Rachel Carson, Earth Day 1971: Catherine and Sue might just as well be touting the virtues of a dusty vinyl version of “Greatest Hits of the 1960s and 70s”. 

Okay Boomer.

Lacking a firm grasp of recent history, the generations at the end of the alphabet do not understand that while their parents and grandparents might have laughed at the “RSA Generation’s” stuffy conformism, and marched against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War and Apartheid sport, they had nothing but admiration for the extraordinary structures of social care which these earlier generations had built. Moreover, they were full of gratitude for the fact that their own lives would be fuller and more prosperous as a result. The Boomers grew up in the shadow of fascism and genocide. They knew what the generation preceding their own had beaten back – and they loved them for it.

Discouraged from accessing the past, the younger Greens will struggle to understand the extraordinary exhilaration of encountering their own movement for the first time. New Zealand was the first nation to encounter a “green” political party. Inspired by the Club of Rome’s “Limits To Growth”, the Values Party spoke, for the first time, of constructing a future guided by humility and restraint. To hear Tony Brunt and his successors talk about limiting economic growth, and expanding the time in which people could simply be themselves, was to envisage a world “beyond tomorrow”. This was news from a somewhere humankind had yet to reach.

Values Party political broadcast from the 1972 General Election.

The worst crime against History which the Neoliberals have committed, however, is to convince young people that the past was a stinking cesspit of privilege, prejudice and oppression. That their ancestors were monsters – wiping out indigenous peoples even as their axes and machines laid waste to the forests, lakes, rivers and streams which had sustained them for millennia. By painting the past as a hellscape of irredeemable horror, the tiny fraction of one percent who lord it over the rest of humanity, Paul Simon’s “loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires”, are robbing us of the means to rescue the future.

Is there horror in the past? Is it full of murder and rapine? Of course it is – but no more than the horror that daily disfigures the present. Nor are evil deeds all that the past has to show us. Amidst the horror there is heroism. Amidst the murder and rapine there is also empathy and courage, creativity and love.

Human-beings do not suffer injustice meekly, they rise against it again and again and again. Down through the centuries reformers and revolutionaries have dreamed dreams and seen visions. Slavery was abolished. Women were enfranchised. Children were removed from coalmines and cotton mills.

When the armed constabulary invaded Parihaka in 1881, not all Pakeha cheered – nowhere near all. In the end, Apartheid fell. Eventually, gay sex was decriminalised. The past is not simply a catalogue of horrors. It is also an endless source of inspiration and hope.

The Neoliberals would shut the younger generations off from that hope and inspiration. The neoliberals would have us believe that this is as good as it gets. They have – almost – convinced James Shaw and Marama Davidson that the future can only be reached with tiny steps. On a warming planet, rapidly running out of time, that is deadly advice.

Catherine and Sue, and all those who stand with them, are right: this is no time for tiny steps. Humankind has made giant leaps before – all the way to the moon. But the booster rockets that push us towards the future are fuelled by the knowledge of what human-beings have achieved in the past.

Clio, the Muse of History, is traditionally depicted perusing the book of humanity’s past glories. At need, however, she will put down her book and take up a sword.

Never has that need been greater.

Only when we remember who we are, where we have come from, and what we have achieved, will we find the strength to drive Clio’s liberating sword through neoliberalism’s black and befouling heart.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 11 January 2022.

Paradise Postponed.

The Future That Got Away: Rob Sitch's ineffectual idealist, Tony Woodfood (played by himself) attempts to convince a fellow "nation-builder" that Australia's utopian future will be somewhere around here, and about this big, if the planning application is successful, and Canberra doesn't change its mind. As his eponymous TV series makes clear, the rule is: Utopia tomorrow and Utopia yesterday – but never Utopia today!

THE DISCOVERY OF “UTOPIA” has been the highlight of my summer. Only eight years after the series first screened on Australian television, I have been savouring its humour and insights on Netflix.

If the classic television series “Yes Minister” showcased the arguments for the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s, then Utopia serves up its consequences forty years down the track.

The series creators and principal writers, Rob Sitch, Santo Cilauro and Tom Gleisner, have captured to perfection the excruciatingly solipsistic world of the professionals and managers who keep our neoliberal society and its institutions running.

The use of the word “running” is, of course, entirely ironic. At the heart of Utopia’s humour is the sheer impossibility of a neoliberal bureaucracy running anything at all – other than its own self-promotion. (Otherwise known as: “Communicating government policies to key stakeholders.”)

Tellingly, the writers of Utopia do not describe their work as “satirical”, preferring instead to call it “observational”. Judging by the shrieks of recognition from real-life employees working in institutions reality-adjacent to Utopia’s fictional “Nation Building Authority” (NBA) the writers’ claim is valid. Apparently, not even comic geniuses like Sitch can make up absurdities to equal the all-too-real absurdities of the contemporary white-collar office environment.

For those of us who have attempted to keep track of the success or failure of the multitude of government initiatives announced over the past few decades, however, Utopia makes for extremely uncomfortable viewing. In episode after episode, the viewer is confronted with massive infrastructure projects that defy every attempt by CEO Tony Woodford (played by Sitch himself) and Nat Russell, his long-suffering Chief Operations Officer, to convert them into reality.

Watching Utopia, it suddenly becomes clear why KiwiBuild’s ambitious promise to build 100,000 houses was never real. Like the fictional NBA, KiwiBuild was a political construct, fashioned by political publicists, to meet a very specific set of transitory political needs.

While the rest of us believed (rather naively as it turned out) that KiwiBuild was about constructing real houses from concrete, timber, glass and roofing iron, its creators always understood that what they were actually promoting were symbols. Symbolic houses are not built with hammers and nails, but with ideas – the most important of which is the idea that the Government is committed to doing something about middle-class homelessness.

This explains why, in Utopia, the two most effective characters are Media Manager, Rhonda Stewart, and consultant Karsten Leith, her ever-willing media and marketing content creator. In painful contrast to the NBA, these two institutional bulldozers are absolutely brilliant a getting things done. If the media needs to be seeded with the first tentative musings concerning a yet-to-be-approved scheme, then Rhonda is your woman. Should the Cabinet approve a scoping study, Karsten is right there to whip-up a glossy brochure, or wow everyone with a flashy promotional video.

Reality poses no obstacles to Rhonda and Karsten. Always keen to “push” the achievements of the NBA (keeping the billions flowing) these two media manipulators are constantly re-announcing projects and re-launching them. Told that a major building project had yet to pour a single slab of concrete, they work up a glitzy multi-ministered “launch” of the fence surrounding the building-site!

Nuts? Well, yes, it is. But just cast your mind back to the number of media events organised to mark the “progress” of KiwiBuild. There were the ministers in their hard-hats and hi-viz vests: silver shovels in hand; smiling bravely for the camera.

Symbols piled upon symbols, but never bricks upon bricks.

Being Aussies, Sitch and his fellow writers invite their older viewers to recall the grand, nation-building infrastructure projects of yesteryear. CEO Tony references the Snowy River Project of the early post-war period. New Zealanders of a certain age will, likewise, recall the great hydro-electric schemes on the Waikato and Waitaki rivers that punctuated the same era.

The point which the creators of Utopia are constantly making throughout its four series (so far) is that the institutional madness depicted on-screen is the inevitable outcome of a neoliberal system which has set its face ideologically against the idea that the fundamental role of the state and its bureaucratic apparatus is to serve the needs of its citizens – especially those services out of which the private sector finds it almost impossible to extract a profit.

In both Australia and New Zealand neoliberal advisers and administrators have gone to considerable lengths to ensure that even if politicians are tempted to “do something” about an issue of genuine public concern (housing, public transport, climate change) the legal and institutional machinery needed to make it happen is no longer at hand.

The most obvious victim of this process in the New Zealand context is the Ministry of Works. Imagine what this government might have achieved on the housing front if it had had at its disposal a state-owned and controlled construction organisation which was capable, historically, of throwing up entire towns – Otematata, Twizel – to house workers engaged in building vast hydro-electric dams and canals for the state-owned electricity generator.

But, the long-term future focus which state ownership makes possible simply does not compute in the minds of the twenty-first century’s politicians and bureaucrats. Even if the future-proofing of society is a concept enjoying massive public support, the dangers associated with giving the voters what they want are simply too great to be risked.

This is the inconvenient truth which Utopia’s plot-lines are constantly presenting to the viewer. People want nation building. The country urgently needs the massive infrastructure planning and investment required to future-proof their security and prosperity. But, what do the politicians and bureaucrats do? They set up a flash Nation Building Authority and install an idealistic CEO to run it. But they don’t let it actually do anything – other than announce plans and launch fences.

Perhaps the most objectionable character in Utopia is Jim Gibson, the Government’s liaison man. The squinting, leering Gibson (superbly played by Anthony Lehmann) is nothing more nor less than a neoliberal commissar. Always there to steer any project offering too many public goods into the hands of private profiteers. Always working behind Tony’s and Nat’s backs, hand-in-glove with Rhonda, to preserve the public’s faith in the NBA’s nation-building mission while making sure that no project ever gets beyond being re-announced and re-launched.

The big reveal, politically-speaking, in 2022 is whether our own CEO, Jacinda Ardern, proves herself to be an idealistic but ineffectual “Tony”, or an amoral, but surprisingly effective, “Rhonda”. Will New Zealand continue to go nowhere fast? Or, will its people continue to accept the endless re-launches and re-announcements of its media savvy prime minister?

Utopia tomorrow and Utopia yesterday – but never Utopia today.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 10 January 2022.

Majority Overruled.

The All-Too-Visible Hand: Most people are surprised to learn how recently this idea: that the greatest say rightly belongs to the greatest number; took root in human societies. While it is most unlikely that nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers would’ve followed a course of action to which most of its members were opposed, for most of the last 10,000 years the preferences of the majority haven’t amounted to a hill of skulls. Indeed, it is possible to argue that civilisation and oppression go hand-in-hand.

MAJORITY RULES. We simply take it for granted that what the most want, the most get. Whether it be the evening’s choice of Netflix viewing, or the allocation of parliamentary seats, the will of the majority prevails.

The alternative to majority rule – minority rule – is dismissed out of hand. The idea of a small number of people determining the future of a much greater number of people is simply unacceptable. Democracy, in its essence, is all about the numbers: who has them; and who does not.

Most people are surprised to learn how recently this idea: that the greatest say rightly belongs to the greatest number; took root in human societies. While it is most unlikely that nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers would’ve followed a course of action to which most of its members were opposed, for most of the last 10,000 years the preferences of the majority haven’t amounted to a hill of skulls. Indeed, it is possible to argue that civilisation and oppression go hand-in-hand.

Even the shining example of Ancient Athens – the supposed birthplace of Democracy – was predicated on the political exclusion of women and slaves. Only about a third of the great city-state’s adult population were actually permitted to participate in its government. The man who could convince slightly more than half of Athens’ active citizenry to adopt his policies had a fair chance of seeing them enacted. In order to prevail, however, he only needed to sway roughly one-sixth of Athens’ population. Not really a majority. Not really a democracy.

It was, however, a great improvement on the chiefly, monarchical, and imperial political systems that prevailed across most of our planet for all but three of the past one hundred centuries. While it is true that chiefs felt obliged to give heed to the tribe’s most fearless warriors and its best hunters; and that Kings and Emperors could not afford to ignore the wishes of their most powerful nobles; the idea that humble farmers and craftsmen had as much right to a say in things as the Lord in his manor and his heavily-armed knights, would have struck the latter as both ridiculous and dangerous.

In this belief, political rulers have always been strongly supported by their religious counterparts. God (or the Gods) had a strange way of replicating in the sphere of the spirit the same pyramidal hierarchies that characterised the material realm.

The road to destruction, it seems, is broad enough to accommodate the overwhelming majority of humankind. “Straight is the gate, and narrow the way that leadeth unto life,” said Jesus, “and few there be that find it.” Certainly, the overwhelming majority of the cast of the very scary Book of Revelation end up in the fiery lake. It would seem that Heaven, like the very best country clubs, takes some getting into.

And yet, all those despised masses, all those damned sinners, remained unwaveringly receptive to the idea that they, too, had a role to play in the drama of human existence. That the Majority is neither to be despised nor damned.

Perhaps the greatest burden in that struggle to play a role and have a say fell upon the shoulders of women. For those who hold up half the sky constitute the most enduring majority of them all. Indeed, as Athens proved, if women have no say, then you do not have a Democracy. In the words of that indefatigable Suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst:

“We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help to free the other half.”

In an era when it is common to hear “leftists” dismiss Democracy contemptuously as “the tyranny of the majority”: and where it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Majority, far from being, by democratic convention, always in the right; is, in the eyes of many of today’s fanatically self-righteous politicians, always in the wrong; then we would do well to dwell upon Emmeline’s words.

For although “bigot” may have replaced the word “sinner”, and “redneck” the word “serf”, it remains an inescapable truth that if the goal is to free the human race, then all of the human race – male, female, black, white, gay and straight – must be freed.

Knowing what freedom is, determining what freedom does, and receiving its blessings in proportion to their numbers.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 7 January 2022.

Riding 2022's Revolutionary Tiger.

Get Ready For A Wild Ride: 2022 will be dominated by two “C” words: “Covid” and “Co-Governance”. Both are certain to spawn variants of unpredictable virulence from the original strain. But, as happened with the Pandemic, the unfolding of the Co-Governance Debate is proceeding in ways determined by the decisions of Jacinda Ardern’s Government.

2022 WILL BE a revolutionary year. The deliberative processes begun in 2021 on how best to reconfigure the New Zealand state in conformity with the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples will expand and intensify throughout 2022. New Zealanders will not be able to escape the consequences of their government’s decision to set these processes in motion. Nor will that Government be able to stop what it has begun. Over the course of the next twelve months we will discover how well the people of Aotearoa-New Zealand can ride the revolutionary tiger.

Personally, I would not have unleashed the deliberations attendant upon the revolutionary He Puapua Report in the midst of a global pandemic. Profound structural and constitutional changes are, surely, best left for calmer circumstances, when the population is less distracted and agitated. Then again, revolutions could hardly have happened if the times in which they occurred were calm and devoid of social tensions. In Karl Marx’s trenchant aphorism: “Men make history – but they do not make it just as they please.”

The authors of He Puapua would have been wise to think about Marx’s words before applying their eager fingers to their collective keyboard. As the hapless King Louis XVI (1754-1793) discovered to his cost, asking the people what they want their rulers to do for them is fraught with all kinds of dangers. As any historian who has poured over the ordinary people of France’s Cahiers de doléances (Lists of Complaints) knows full well, once freed from his bottle, the Genie of Change will not be persuaded to return until the world is changed indeed.

2022, therefore, looks set to be dominated by two “C” words: “Covid” and “Co-Governance”. Both are certain to spawn variants of unpredictable virulence from the original strain. But, as happened with the Pandemic, the unfolding of the Co-Governance Debate is proceeding in ways determined by the decisions of Jacinda Ardern’s Government.

For many months now a group of distinguished Māori leaders have been formulating a detailed response to the ideas and proposals contained in He Puapua. This response, as per the Government’s wishes, will be presented to Ministers first. Only after its official receipt will the rest of the New Zealand population be asked for its view of how to best give expression to the principles of te Tiriti. You can put a ring around the prediction that the Māori and Pakeha views of how New Zealand should be governed will not be the same.

It is possible (but by no means certain) that the Māori response will be characterised by both its intellectual coherence and unmistakeable unity of purpose. If the principal Pakeha response is anything but a hot mess of outrage and anger, however, it will be a major miracle. Some Pakeha (many of them academics, public servants and, regrettably, journalists) will attempt to avoid doing the intellectual and cultural mahi inherent in the fraught processes of constitutional change by simply adopting the Māori proposals in toto. Others will decry the whole exercise as an unwanted and electorally unmandated pretext for sowing cultural division and conflict. They will not shrink from calling it treason, and branding its promoters – Māori and Pakeha – as traitors.

The great problem with the Government’s almost careless decision to foist this debate upon the nation is that, already, in the minds of just about all its participants, existential issues are at stake. Nothing less than the life, or death, of everything they hold dear is seen to turn on its outcome. Men and women will stop at very little to emerge victorious from such a struggle. History makes it chillingly clear that, if the end is a people’s survival, then all means are permissible.

What, then, is to be done? Having tossed the dragon’s teeth of co-governance into earth already ploughed-up by the divisions of Covid-19, how can Jacinda’s Government pluck from this nettle, danger, this flower, constitutional safety?

My own answer, for what it’s worth, is to make it clear that co-governance is just one more means towards the historic end that has always united the overwhelming majority of New Zealanders: a fair go for everyone.

A “revolution” that delivers co-governance to self-selecting ethnic elites, accountable to neither Māori nor Pakeha, will not stand.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 31 December 2021.

Merry Christmas!

Joseph nurses the baby, Jesus, while Mary reads in bed. From a surprisingly progressive Fifteenth Century Book of Hours!

Wishing all the readers of Bowalley Road a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Video courtesy of YouTube

This posting is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

The Mothers: A Christmas Story.

When Anne saw me she rushed forward and embraced me: her face flushed; her eyes shining; and I knew. Before she even spoke the words I had longed to hear for thirty years, I knew.

IT DISTRESSES ME to admit, even now, that among my neighbours there were those who counselled me to kill them. Mary, they said, had dishonoured my family – a family of wealth and influence. She had dishonoured me, they said, an upright man, caring and generous to the poor. To let such a daughter live, they said, would be an affront to the favour God had shown me.

Fools!

For my wife Anne, and for myself, there could be no greater proof of God’s favour than Mary, our daughter.

We had tried for so long, you see, so very long. The years went by, went by, and, yes, I did well. My business ventures flourished. But, none of it mattered. We were barren, you see, and so were our lives. The blessing and comfort of children, and grand-children, were denied us. Yes, I had gold and silver, and a fine house, and many servants. But the poorest of those servants had sons and daughters, and thus were richer by far than Anne and I.

I prayed – oh, how I prayed! I bargained with the Lord my God as if he were a wine merchant, or an owner of camels. If he would only relent and grant us the gift of a child, well, then he could name his price. I would do anything – everything – he asked of me. If only he would relent.

But he did not relent. The trees in our olive grove grew taller. The vine entwining our gate grew thicker, and Anne and I grew older. Too old, our neighbours whispered. The hope of children and grandchildren ceased to grow. It withered. And, eventually, it died.

It occurred to me that God might have been angered that I bargained with him like a common merchant. Had I grown too tall in my own eyes? Forgotten that man is no more than dust until God’s breath gives him life? I sat with Anne and shared these thoughts with her. In thirty years of marriage her counsel had never failed me.

“Do not chastise yourself so, my husband. I imagine God is used to bargains. But, if you would be at peace with Him, then why not go to Jerusalem, offer sacrifices, make amends?”

How I loved that woman! More then than ever. I covered her comfortingly familiar face with kisses and led her, smiling shyly, to our bedchamber.

Weeks passed, and I busied myself with the preparations for my journey to Jerusalem. All went well. The soldiers on the road were numerous, but well-disciplined. Pretty soon the great Temple of the Lord loomed above me. I purchased a single, snow-white dove. Made my amends with God.

As I stepped out onto the street a passing stranger paused and whispered at my ear: “The Golden Gate, she awaits you there.”

And so she did. When Anne saw me she rushed forward and embraced me: her face flushed; her eyes shining; and I knew. Before she even spoke the words I had longed to hear for thirty years, I knew.

And they bade me kill God’s gift. The fools!

For my daughter Mary did not lie – not even as a child. So, when she, too, became pregnant, and told me plainly that the child was not Joseph’s, the carpenter’s, I believed her. And when she told me of the stranger who, in a whisper, had told her who, and what, the baby in her womb truly was, then, once again, I knew. For when God whispers to us, we believe.

And now my son-in-law, Joseph, and his very pregnant wife, my beloved daughter, are ready to answer the Emperor’s summons to Bethlehem. I could have wished for a better season. Winter’s wind and rain make for difficult travelling. But Mary and her mother chide me for my constant fussing and worrying. Joseph, they remind me, is a strong man, equipped with a stout staff. The little donkey, upon whose back Mary and her precious burden are already seated, is mild-mannered and sure-footed.

Anne takes my hand in hers and squeezes it.

“Do you not remember, Joachim, those months when we rode out together? How we weathered the winter winds?”

How could I forget?

Mary smiles at her old parents.

“Be at peace” she whispers, “I am in the hand of God.”

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 December 2021.