{"id":94,"date":"2008-03-15T03:07:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-14T17:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pbw.id.au\/blog\/uncategorized\/the-kiwis-pilgrimage\/"},"modified":"2016-09-21T20:03:26","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T10:03:26","slug":"the-kiwis-pilgrimage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2008\/03\/the-kiwis-pilgrimage\/","title":{"rendered":"The Kiwi’s pilgrimage"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about the Kiwi I met on the way to Medjugorje, and mentioned in a previous posting<\/a>. He’s had three incarnations in that post. In the first version, I mentioned meeting him on the ferry, and he did not appear again. I thought I was finished with the item, but I had an uneasy notion that it needed tidying up. The Kiwi was a loose end that I had to tuck away. So I went back, and took up the story of my unhappy co-tenancy with him at the boarding-house.<\/p>\n

He wasn’t finished with me yet. The whole piece had an unfinished feel to it (and, in a compositional sense, it still does.) I made some small changes to the ending, and thought, “That will do.” This morning, on the train, he started to nag me again. Since the trip, my opinion of him had been dismissively low. But this morning, as I took out my notebook to write something completely unrelated, I noticed<\/span> for the first time the places in which I had encountered him, and it dawned on me that he, too, had been on a pilgrimage.<\/p>\n

To hold this faith, which after all was the point of my visits to Medjugorje and Jerusalem in the first place, is to acknowledge the active presence of God in the world. It is, among other things, to refute coincidence; to realise that one’s life is a narrative, as, consequently, are all of the lives with which one’s own story intersects, in whose narratives one writes some lines, while each, in turn, scribbles in your scrapbook.<\/p>\n

I paid him little heed but that of embarrassment and avoidance, and even a few weeks ago, wrote dismissively of him. Yet he has returned to deliver his lesson. A touch more humility, a touch more charity, if you please. More wonder at the glories of your companions on the way. Here endeth, for the time being, the lesson. Deo gratias<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking about the Kiwi I met on the way to Medjugorje, and mentioned in a previous posting. He’s had three incarnations in that post. In the first version, I mentioned meeting him on the ferry, and he did not appear again. I thought I was finished with the item, but I had an … Continue reading “The Kiwi’s pilgrimage”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[29,18,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-belief","category-faith","category-culture"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8SCfl-1w","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":96,"url":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2008\/01\/a-visit-to-medjugorje\/","url_meta":{"origin":94,"position":0},"title":"A visit to Medjugorje","author":"pbw","date":"Wed 30th Jan '08","format":false,"excerpt":"In the autumn of 1996 I took a ferry from Ancona across the Adriatic to Split. There was a reasonable swell, into which we heaved through the night. I slept little in the \"aircraft style\" seats, keeping an eye on my knapsack, in which all of my travelling possessions, and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Faith"","block_context":{"text":"Faith","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/category\/belief\/faith\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":116,"url":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2007\/10\/heart-failure\/","url_meta":{"origin":94,"position":1},"title":"Heart failure","author":"pbw","date":"Sat 6th Oct '07","format":false,"excerpt":"I got a call from the counselling service of the John Tonge Centre yesterday. The autopsy report had finally been delivered. Congestive heart failure due to cardiac amyloidosis. There was no trauma to the brain. Jen's hunch had been correct. Dad's death was coincidental to the fall. In fact, the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Family"","block_context":{"text":"Family","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/category\/personal\/family\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":735,"url":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2019\/05\/the-willing-suspension-of-disbelief\/","url_meta":{"origin":94,"position":2},"title":"The Willing Suspension of Disbelief","author":"admin","date":"Tue 7th May '19","format":false,"excerpt":"[Published in Quadrant April 2019, and on Quadrant Online as Memoirs of an Abused Altar Boy, which included links to various documents.] \u2026so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Faith"","block_context":{"text":"Faith","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/category\/belief\/faith\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":118,"url":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2007\/10\/dad-died\/","url_meta":{"origin":94,"position":3},"title":"Dad died.","author":"pbw","date":"Sat 6th Oct '07","format":false,"excerpt":"Dad died on Tuesday the 22nd of May. He had a fall in the nursing home, where he was under house arrest due to his dementia, or, to be more precise, his inability to remember short to medium term events. He would wander, and lose track of the time and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Family"","block_context":{"text":"Family","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/category\/personal\/family\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":101,"url":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2008\/01\/emergence\/","url_meta":{"origin":94,"position":4},"title":"Emergence","author":"pbw","date":"Tue 1st Jan '08","format":false,"excerpt":"If I am not woken suddenly\u2014by an alarm clock, for example\u2014I often find myself in a state on the cusp between sleep and wakefulness; in reverie. And often in that oftenness some questions that have been in the back of my mind will find their way to the front. The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Introspection"","block_context":{"text":"Introspection","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/category\/personal\/introspection\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":73,"url":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/2012\/02\/mary-mckillop-and-kath\/","url_meta":{"origin":94,"position":5},"title":"Mary McKillop and Kath","author":"pbw","date":"Fri 24th Feb '12","format":false,"excerpt":"Not having a TV spares me many horrors, and gives me more time to waste in other ways: and it means that occasional small gems pass by me unseen. Not too long ago, television was the most ephemeral of media, with programs broadcast once and relegated to a spool of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Faith"","block_context":{"text":"Faith","link":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/category\/belief\/faith\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":166,"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pbw.id.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}