Given my years as a university teacher in Religious Studies and membership of S. Michael & All Angels, an Anglo-Catholic parish in Christchurch with a rich heritage,[3] I recognised the signs of sacred space. Passing back through South Otago, we breathed in the wide, open spaces. At Brighton Beach, where James K. Baxter played as a boy, I breathed in the southern ocean. After the experience of open space, every limitation of God’s presence in the world grated. Back at S. Michael’s, the familiar seemed alien. Matai arches springing from the nave posts looked heavy and oppressive. The hymns we sang sounded ponderous. Unlike the classics in our hymn repertoire, which continue to breathe new life, these hymns were well past their ‘use-by’ date. They hemmed me in with their tired, dichotomous theology; their separation of God from the world.

Yet on this Sunday, the congregation sang responsively with the choir from Psalm 96: ‘Sing a new song unto the Lord for he lives in holiness and glory.’ Like all people of faith, we live in the gap between the ‘literature of aspiration’ and popular piety. I wanted to bridge that gap and quickly identified seven ways in which our worship could be made more human, and more divine.

Taking my cue from the liturgy, and thinking of both the rata in the bush canopy and the Hebrew prophets, I asked: ‘Where is this God, before whom the threshold of the temple shakes? Has God, and God’s glory, departed the sanctuary?’

Were more hymns, evoking this land and place, the answer? S. Michael’s was not known for its hospitality to contemporary hymns. Over the years, our organists have preferred the tried and proven. Some members of the parish choir sneered at hymns by New Zealand’s best-known hymn writers, like Colin Gibson and Shirley Murray.[4] After a year’s full-time poetry writing and editing, I found that I too was more critical of contemporary hymnody. Sometimes the music seemed to be grafted onto the words, and sometimes the words onto the music.

Only organic union, a concept long rejected by the ecumenical movement, could create a distinctive voice. I yearned to hear music in the poetry – subtle word plays, assonance, alliteration, and variation of pace – and poetry in the music. If David danced before the ark of the covenant, in ecstatic holy joy, why should our hymns not dance, from time to time? Why should exuberance evoke immediate fears that high church Anglicans were turning ‘Charismatic’ or becoming red-hot ‘Penties’ and might start speaking in tongues at any moment?

Our vicar, the Venerable Peter Williams, asked me to comb the best contemporary hymnals for suitable hymns for S. Michael’s. A bird’s eye view of New Zealand hymn writing confirmed that trends in contemporary poetry held sway in the church. In most of the hymns, there was a paring back of any lushness in language, a distrust of metaphor, and a rejection of the anthropomorphic. Colin Gibson’s ‘dolphin Christ’ was an exception.[5] On the other hand, quaint archaisms from the 1930s, long since eliminated in poetry, survived in our hymns, particularly in Christmas carols. In a substitution exercise, pohutakawa took the place of holly and ivy.[6]

The process of indigenization had a strong North Island flavour, and few South Islanders seemed to regard this as intellectual colonization. Much like the ‘Georgian’ poets of the 1920s,[7] some contemporary hymn writers seemed to take a ‘motif’ approach to nature, resulting in a certain sentimentality. James K. Baxter had written a ‘Song to the Holy Spirit’, but it was never intended to be sung.[8] This survey confirmed my view that poets needed to reclaim their place as the first theologians.

In a completely unexpected train of events, I started to write the hymns I yearned to sing. These hymns started to integrate parts of my life that hitherto had remained separate, in particular my love since childhood of the Canterbury landscape, seen through the eyes of painters like William Sutton (1917-2000), Doris Lusk (1916-1990), and Rita Angus (1908-1970). After six months of intensive prose writing for a Creative New Zealand grant submission, I felt dry and depleted. We decided to go to my parents’ bach at Purau Bay for a short break. It was the end of winter and Francis wanted to investigate the snowdrifts still visible from the valley. On a beautifully clear day,we trudged up towards Mt Herbert (920 m), which is about as high as Bethlehem. On reaching the top, Francis became ecstatic, whirling and bouncing around the tussocks. As he jumped, I saw the light ‘dancing’ inside his strawberry blond hair. When I looked down to the tussocks, I saw that the light was also dancing underneath the gleaming outer grasses in the mousy-coloured ‘undercut’, in the unprepossessing darkness. I immediately thought of the Light dancing, then Francis, then Jesus, then the little boy playing at Bethlehem: ‘You are the light dancing in tussocks / little boy born at Bethlehem’. Was this the start of a poem, after the months of drought?

I got up very early the next morning with a strong sense of purpose. Putting pen to paper, two more verses flowed. In one of those very rare moments in writing poetry, it was like taking dictation, yet I knew the words came from my own experience, now powerfully rendered as metaphor.

Having attended an illuminating seminar by Colin Gibson on Celtic Spirituality only six weeks earlier, on ‘Chasing the Wild Goose’, I decided to write this draft to a strict metrical pattern, as if writing a hymn. The meteorological emphasis seemed particularly Celtic. As soon as I got to a phone, I did a ‘Hone Tuwhare’,[9] ringing Colin Gibson in Dunedin and reciting my verses to him. Colin said immediately: ‘I can hear that!’. In less than three weeks, he sent us a gentle minuet setting, as an example of what could be done with these lyrics.

Although both musical, neither Bill nor I had written melodies or harmonies for hymns. Keen on jazz, Bill started to tinker around on our Sibelius music notation software, playing the music back from time to time. He settled on four beats in the bar, making it possible to have some highly syncopated rhythms to energise the music. This seemed to do justice to the violent wind and flood of the last two verses. While the computer had no difficulty playing a new time signature at every bar, I doubted whether many church pianists could cope. After many, many drafts, working back and forth between the rhythms of the music and the stresses of the text, we produced a singable hymn, Tussocks Dancing. Dr Peter Low, a friend and harpsichord practitioner, wrote an accompaniment, which helps the hymn to dance. He urged us not to be afraid of minor chords or dissonant harmonies. Peter’s accompaniment ends on a very energetic chord. A woodblock part helps the congregation sing the rhythms and could well be played by a child who can sight read.

Heartened by the response of parishioners and visitors at special services at S. Michael’s, where some of our hymns were sung for the first time, Bill and I decided to make them more widely available. Since February our website <www.godzonehymns.com> has played Tussocks Dancing, which is our gift to the Church in this country and beyond. Colin Gibson has described this first hymn as ‘very impressive’. Since the launch and blessing of the website by Peter Williams during this year’s Easter mass at S. Michael’s, people have been able to play the first verse of the nine other new hymns. These include Truth to power, a hymn commissioned by the Amnesty International Group at S. Michael’s for their Candle Day Service. Through Godzone Hymns, Bill and I are licensing the hymns, on an annual, renewable basis, for use in parishes, chaplaincies, schools, and by branches of movements such as the Student Christian Movement (Aotearoa/ New Zealand) and by independent women’s groups.

2-- On the forest remnants that have survived ‘the onslaught of man’, see Rhys Buckingham & John Hall- Jones, The Catlins: guidebook to the Catlins and surrounding districts, Invercargill, The Department of Conservation, 1987 [1st publ’d 1985], pp.17-33.

3-- See Marie Peters, Christchurch-St Michael’s: a study in Anglicanism in New Zealand, 1851-1972, Christchurch, The University of Canterbury, 1986. The literary figures Ngaio Marsh, Allen Curnow, and James K. Baxter all worshipped at S. Michael’s for a time, pp.184-85.

4-- See Colin Gibson, Singing love: a collection of new hymns, songs & carols for today's church, London/Auckland, Collins Liturgical, 1988; Shirley Murray, In every corner sing: the hymns of Shirley Erena Murray, 2nd ed., [1st ed. publ. Wellington, S. Murray, c1987], Carol Stream, Il., Hope Pub. Co., 1992.

5 --Colin Gibson, ‘Where the road runs out’, in Singing love, 1988, pp.16-17.

7-- For examples of Georgian poetry from this country, see Kowhai Gold: an anthology of contemporary New Zealand verse, chosen and edited by Quentin Pope, London, J.M. Dent and Sons, 1930. On subsequent criticisms of this poetry, see Roger Robinson, ‘Georgian’, in The Oxford companion to New Zealand literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie, Melbourne/Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp.199-200.

8-- James K. Baxter, ‘Song to the Holy Spirit’, [1973], in Collected Poems / James K. Baxter, edited by John Weir, repr. with corrections, [1st ed. pub’d 1980; repr. ed. 1981], Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1995, p.572.

9-- Hone Tuwhare (b.1922), Nga Puhi, is best known for his highly personal and, at times, political poetry. On Tuwhare’s practice of reading his new work to friends on the phone, even on their answering machines, see Janet Hunt, Hone Tuwhare: a biography, Auckland, Godwit, 1998, p.174

10 --See Alfred North Whitehead, ‘God and the world’, in Process theology: basic writings, edited by Ewert H. Cousins, New York, Newman Press, 1971, pp.85-99.