I was skimming through the Food For Faith archive last week and found a Radio New Zealand interview from March 2011. RNZ had phoned me on receiving the results of a survey which indicated that religion was becoming extinct. They asked what I thought, and I was able to share my experience of faith at the Christchurch earthquake memorial service a couple of weeks earlier.
Radio New Zealand: Empty Churches? Listen at this link.
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I would love to hear more on your experiences of that day John, I wasn’t there and the news coverage quite clearly missed a lot.
The memory of many of the details of the service has faded a bit Rob, however the overwhelming sense (which I do remember well) was the unity of the people who had gathered, aware that so much of what we had worked for, had crumbled: the homes, businesses and even families on which we had relied for our sense of stability…now fallen, and even with the tragic loss of people we loved. In the park that day there was a real sense of human vulnerability and dependance on the transcendent. This reality is captured superbly in Kathleen Gallagher’s book “Earthquakes & Butterflies”..