March 3, 2026 • 26 mins
Niki Harré is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Auckland. She writes, researches and teaches about values-based practice, environmental sustainability, the future of universities and living well together on our shared planet. Her new book is titled The Calling
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from News Talk sed B.
Follow this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio,
Real Conversation, Real Connection. It's Real Life with John Cowan
on Hughes Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Today and welcome to Real Life. I'm John Cown. Doctor
Nicki Harrey is head of a School of psychology at
Auckland University and a few years ago she did an experiment,
despite having no religious faith herself. She became a priest
for a year and she's written a book of her
experience called The Calling, and it's subtitled A Year of
Exploring what the secular World can learn from Religion. And
(00:53):
she joins me tonight, welcome NICKI, thank you. Okay, I
can't hear you and my headphones. Nick okay, And I
think that's been sorted out. Did you actually have a
religious background at.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Aornicky, No, No, Our family was atheist. We lived in
Suva when I was a child, so I was surrounded
by Christianity being of a certain.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Age, probably Hindus as well.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
There were many Hindus as well. That's right, that's right.
But ourselves as a family didn't have a religion, and
that goes back to my grandparents.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Actually.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Okay, so where did the interest in religion come from?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Well, it was a slow process. I've long been interested
in value spased practice and in questions about how we
live well together, and more recently, ten years ago or so,
I started to look to some religious philosophy to think
about those questions, and over time I got this idea
(01:54):
that I actually really was a priest, even though I'm
a university lecturer and an atheist. And part of that
was I wanted to have conversations with people about what
really matters, and I wanted to have open ended conversations.
One of the things I think is really interesting about
(02:15):
religious provocations is that quite often the questions aren't answered,
they're just asked.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Hold on, you're saying provocations.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Yeah, provocations. It's a word I picked up at Rhythms
of Grace, which is a church that I tended for
a year when I did this project. And the concept
of a provocation is that you make a suggestion, you
work around a topic, but you don't close it off.
You don't know what the answer is. And I think
(02:44):
in the secular world we've become keen on declaring what
the solution is to a particular problem. So I wanted
something more open ended, something in which humility, service, contribution duty,
those kind of ideas seem to be floating around.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
There's a few things that are sort of catching me
on angles, like I would have thought that. You know,
scientists and psychologists haven't always been the best friends of Christianity,
and they've sometimes accused them of having closed off answers.
This is the set, This is a set diet of
what you are to consume and believe in nothing else.
(03:25):
And you're saying, actually, no, the Christianity that you've encountered
anyway likes to actually get people thinking and mull over
these things and push on through.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it. When when I was
growing up, there was if you're a Christian, you believed
in this stories, the stories that we know. If you
were not Christian, you didn't believe, and that was a
divide a belief or not belief. And I think a
lot of atheists still think that religion hinges on the
sort of intellectual propositions.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
But does it not. Maybe maybe I'm defining myself as
one of those people that you're saying that I have
got it outmoded.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I think the intellectual propositions are there, But what interested
me was the focus outwards, the focus on what is.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
Beyond and beyond and beyond.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
So for example, I might be talking with you now,
but we are holding the listeners to in this conversation.
As a university academic, I'm really aware that I serve
the people of Alto. They are the people that I
need to hold in every encounter I have, whether it's
with a staff member or a student or so on.
(04:41):
So I think what religion does. Christianity in my experience,
is it's always pushing people to go further beyond, further beyond,
further beyond, and the stories, the narrative, the dogma, if
you like, is sitting there. But to me, that's not
the essence of a religious orientation.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, So what were some of the things that you
saw being practiced at Rhythms of Grace, which is a
a non denominational church here in Auckland. What was some
of the things you saw there that you thought this
is something that secular people need or would value or
would benefit from. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, part of it is gathering in community, So there's
this constant gathering in a lot of it is humility.
I think humility and awareness of the unknown were really
in the atmosphere. People often talked about those in their
families who are sick or dying or facing major life challenges.
(05:45):
And what plu me away actually about that was that
it would always be said with a gratitude towards the nurses,
the doctors, the people involved. The hope would be for
the person concerned to have courage to find their way.
And so there was some kind of gentleness, but also
(06:07):
a facing up to the fact that life is unknown,
that bad things happen to good people, and that we
will never get our heads around this. So part of
that is also a collective, if you like, bearing witness
to this thing we call life.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Okay, so you did quite a bit of groundwork here.
You went to a church, you read lots of books
and spoke to Christians. But then you decided to plunge
into being a priest for a whole year. Now, you said,
before you know, you thought you were a priest already.
But I've seen priesthood defined as being a sort of
(06:44):
like an intermediary between God and people in helping them
to progress in their journey of faith. So you obviously
had a slightly different definition of priest in your mind
as you leached into this experiment of being one.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, I would say, for me, with a priest without God,
and maybe we'll get to the question of whether that's
even remotely feasible. But anyway, starting out, I had this
idea that a priest holds these two things at once,
the personal community in front of them and this outward
focus on the common good and the life of our planet.
(07:21):
So to me, that was the thing that I was
trying to capture, is that dual focus, and to do
that in my own services, in which I tried to
do provocations, talks, we had blessings, we had reflection, we
had discussion with each other, all without the word God,
(07:43):
but always with this idea of what's the bigger picture here?
Speaker 4 (07:47):
How do we sit within that?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
So you decided to set aside this year, and so
what did you do? You've mentioned that you had some
type of meetings. I'll be interested to know where we
had found people that would want to come and join
a meeting like this, But so what are some of
the things that you thought, this is what I'm going
to do in this year.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Well, the first thing I did was I had through vowels.
So I took it upon myself to structure my life
around simplicity. So I had a uniform, I wore only
gray and black clothes and spent quite a bit of
time constructing that. And I would also, as part of
my simplicity, vow by nothing non essential. So I was
(08:26):
allowed to buy food, painkillers, you know, regular groceriies.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
But and if anything.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Significant that I needed, like my cell phone broke, I'd
be allowed to replace it, but nothing. In addition to that,
it was very, very easy to live simply. The second
one was hospitality, So I was to greet people went
out and about.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Now, is this something that comes naturally to you anyway?
Speaker 4 (08:49):
No, it does not. It does not.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
So that's why I had to have a vowel of hospitality.
My husband is the one that knows everyone on the
street and greets people. Me I scurry inside, hoping that
I'm not seen. And so it was actually quite a
challenge to put myself out there and to force myself
to walk past people rather than duck around the corner
and so on.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
And I had this.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Generosity of hospitality. How did this work out for you
and daily practice. What did you do well?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
I run, and so it was also the COVID era.
It was twenty twenty one, so there were lots of lockdowns.
So I was running around my suburb, going to the
local supermarket, those kinds of things. So whenever I came
across somebody, I would say hello, no matter who they were.
But if they were somebody I knew, well, then I
would say that in such a way that invited them
(09:42):
to talk if they wanted to do that. So it
was what I think of was really low grade hospitality,
but it was still a challenge for me as an introvert.
I also tried to be way more open than I
usually am to things like spontaneous invitations and people's needs.
I have a planned john for each day, for each week,
and I intend.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
To stick to it.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
So hospitality can be a bit threatening if by hospitalit
you mean opening your heart to the needs of others
as the others need them, not according to your own agenda.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
It strikes me, as you know, one of the principal
religions in the world we live in is stay busy. Yeah,
and what you're talking about is something almost the opposite
of that.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
That is so true. That is so true.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
When we have these busy schedules and every minute is planned,
it's it's really hard to just open up to another
person when they come towards you.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah. I remember being told by I think it was
a youth worker. They said, if someone wants to talk
or something like that, lean on something and throw your
jacket over your shoulder or something, meaning I'm not going
you know, I've got you are the most important thing
in the world at the moment. I'm not going to
hurry off. I haven't got you know. My schedule is
now open for you. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah, that's that's amazing if you can give somebody that.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, so you I have a third valved vowel, which
was was pause.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
It took me a while to find a name for that.
But the of course I knew about prayer, but I
had this tricky problem of not believing in God.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
So who them do?
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
So I actually wanted to pray because again, as I've
said before, this outward focus was one of the main
things I was interested in. So I struggled to find
a way to do what I thought of as a
prayer substitute. But when I ran, I stopped listening to
podcasts on my run, started looking at the light during
during for the for the entire year, I also, in
(11:50):
the end developed a meditation routine. Even though I had
initially been so resistant to meditation. I thought it was
uncomfortable because.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's sort of going in rather than going out, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
That's right, because quite often it's like listening to your breathing,
you know, fairly shoulders let go of this and that.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
And staying still.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I'm an you know, I'm not the kind of person
that's it's still very easily. But meditation, I think taught
me a great deal about how to be in a
space with nothing right.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
So you had these vowels and you arranged meetings.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
And then I had I set up a website called
secular priest dot org, and I had they weren't meetings, John,
there were services.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Services.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
They had services, okay, And they were three Sundays a month,
and followed they were at five pm for an hour,
and then on the Wednesday, I do an online version
at seven am, just for half an hour. And so
again I'd do this talk, this propacation, we'd have blessings,
we'd have.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Food in your sense.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Well, I wrote a blessing about gratitude, mostly towards the
people that support us, the people that are in the room,
towards this incredible, bountiful planet that we all share. And
so that was the essence of the blessings was great.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
So I noticed in your book you even you were
grateful to someone and you and you just sort of,
you know, parenthetically, bless her sort of just sort of
slips into the text, and I'm just sort of wondering,
what do you mean, because that's sort of like, in
a religious sense, an invitation for God to do something
good to this person. So when you bless someone, I would.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Say gratitude is the essence of that. Actually, it's it's
thank you, thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Okay, well, look we've used up our first half of
a session, and I want to come back to finding
out whether you got closer to sorting out how you
lived life, how you face death, how you face all
these other things, some of the things that you gained
from this time, and perhaps some of the things that
you can pass on to other people. My guest tonight
(14:01):
is doctor Niki Harrow, who lived a year as a
secular priest trying to discover what secular people could mine
from Christian practices. I'll be back with you in a second.
This is real life. I'm John Cown and you're listening
to news Talk said.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
B intelligent interviews with interesting people. It's real life on
news Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Welcome back to real life. I'm John Cown talking to
doctor Nicki Harray, who's spent a year as a secular
priest trying to work out what there might be within
Christian practices that secular people could could usefully take as well.
You've picked that song. Has it always been a song
you've liked?
Speaker 4 (14:55):
I have liked it for a long time.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
We sang it together at the second of my services
and the room really resonated with it, and I particularly
love the line I tried my best. It was much
because that's what your thumbs up this Pope project.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Okay, Now we were talking about some of the things
that you did, and I'm wondering what you what you've
taken from the values of some of these things. What
about the value of ritual What did you did? You
did you as you created rituals and participated in being
a celebrant or whatever, and you did as in your
(15:34):
role as a secular priest, What did you make of ritual?
Speaker 3 (15:37):
I think richel has has many functions. One of the
times I felt the most priestly was when I did
a baby naming ceremony right and it was very formal.
Although it was in the family home with just the
extended family around, and there was the most extraordinary sense
in the air, it was completely secular that we were
(16:00):
doing this not just for the two boys that we
were knowning that day, but for all children everywhere. And
something about the ritual, which I had constructed so wasn't
even a traditional ancient one, but I said it with
as much gravitas as I could use. And I had
really carefully picked the language, and they weren't just words
(16:22):
I'd invented by myself. I drew them from various places,
and I think in that room where we welcomed those
boys and remembered children everywhere, it took the ritual to
do that, to go through something that had a certain
formality to it.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Apart from perhaps Mari karakia and greetings, where Mari culture
is now very much grafted into New Zealand culture, there's
not much ritual there isn't. And you know, I'm a
celebrant at funerals and weddings and things, and there's aspects
(17:03):
of ritual in that, but usually people don't aren't familiar
with it, and don't need it. How can we graft
this back into our culture and what do you think
it might do for people?
Speaker 4 (17:13):
It's terribly hard to graft it back in.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
I mean, one of the things I was so aware
of in my made up as a made up priest
for a year was lacking that tradition, not just in
terms of my own practice, but not being in a
community of people that also had the tradition.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
It's shared, not knowledge that this is what you do exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I mean, I spent three days reading the Gospels at
one point during the project, and one of the things
I am so aware of with the Gospels is part
of their power is that so many people have read
and interpreted and used them over and over and over again.
So there's a collective imagination associated with those stories that
(17:56):
you just can't create by deciding that we need this.
So I think by abandoning religion, which New Zealanders have
done in droves. Fifty two percent of people in the
twenty twenty three sensus indicated they had no religion. We
have taken out ritual to our detriment, but I don't
(18:17):
think it's easy to put it straight back on. One
of the things that I think is really useful is silence,
just moments of silence. There's something quite airy and beautiful
about being quiet, and particularly if you close your eyes
with other people around you. And an advantage of that
in a secular setting is it doesn't have any content
(18:38):
that might offend or upset people.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I see Anzac Day parades and services as being particularly
moving and possibly because of that silence and the ritual
of the people saying the ode and the bugle big
played and things like that, usually in a completely secular context.
And yes, you're right, it is moving and it binds
(19:01):
people together in a very very real way. Interacting pastorally
with people. Were people to the idea of bearing their
private hells to you? Yeah? Well, I uh, and how
did you find that? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:16):
I set up these things called personal conversations, so on
my website people were able to come to me to
have a conversation about how they could deepen their contribution
to our collective lives. And I ended up having thirty
nine personal conversations with twenty different people. So many people
had repeat conversations. I had ten, for example, with one person,
(19:39):
and people were pretty open to that and interested in that.
All people came to me with all sorts of different issues.
I'd expected mostly to be talking about the state of
our planet because I've got a long history and environmental activism,
so there was a little bit of that. But people
always everywhere struggle with this question of how do I live,
(20:02):
how do I care for my family, but how do
I also care for the common good? It's a perennium
all struggle.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Actually, life isn't straightforward. I think we all need a
bit of help and finding our way along, and so
be able to talk to someone, you know, even if
it's just reflecting back what they're thinking, it's so so valuable.
Elephant in the room, of course, is you're doing all
this without a concept of a divine A priest is
usually when they're counseling someone, there's three in the conversation.
(20:31):
There's the person being counseled, the counselor, and there's and
they're usually inviting God into the conversation as well. How
accurate do you think your experiment was if you're doing
all these things that Christians do but without a sense
of a.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Divine I think that not having a sense of the
divine or God was a fatal flaw actually, quite frankly,
in my project. I think that this. I did an
interview with rod Oram, who sadly died in twenty twenty.
GRCT guy, Yeah, amazing person, and one of the things
(21:11):
he said in that interview was how if you're not
struggling to come to terms with the concept of God,
which he also referred to as Infinity, as something just
far bigger and more mysterious than us. He said, you're
falling short. You're falling short because human beings, we can
(21:33):
practically assess and analyze issues and try and tackle them
one by one, but we'll never quite get there. And
I think he's right. I think he's right, but I
don't know how to I don't know how to focus
on that without this concept of God, because to me,
God is still a product of the human imagination. And
(21:56):
I don't mean that in any way to diminish the
concept of God, because I think maybe as human beings,
that imaginative project of if you like creating a sense
of God is really crucial to our lives together. But
if you don't believe in God, then how do you
do that? It's I think the concepts like complexity, the unknown, humility,
(22:24):
all of those do get quite close to that notion.
And sometimes when I'm been talking with Christians, because one
of the absolute highlights of this project was having such
deep interest in conversations with Christians. Sometimes when I'm talking
with Christians and I'm talking about my you know, complexity
or whatever it is, and they're talking about God, I
(22:46):
get this feeling we're talking about the same thing.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Right, did you get the feeling that there are some
things that Christians have that they don't know that they've got,
and that perhaps at risk of not appreciating it or
even losing it.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Absolutely, I think I had, you know, one of the
women that I got to know really well, and sometimes
in conversations she would say, yeah, but this community in
this place, in that place and the other place.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
And I'm like, ah, but it isn't the same as
a church.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
And it was almost like me trying to convince her
of the X factor in Christianity, because if you.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Are what are those things of X factor things that
you think that Christians have that they really should cherish them. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
Well, it's like, if you have a concept of God
or the divine, there's just always something bigger than this
material reality, even than the people that you love right
here and now, there's always that thing beyond that you're
accountable to. That you're accountable to this, to the story,
(23:49):
to this entity, to being a good person over and
above what it does immediately for yourself or those around you.
And I think that adds a certain quality to these communities,
into interactions.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Okay, Now, there has been almost shall we say it, tradition,
almost of people that don't believe in God, thinking that
Christians are somewhat simple or defective in their logic or whatever.
As your impression of Christians changed during this project.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
It's a good question, because I wouldn't say I ever
held you.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
No, No, I think you're far too nice a person
to do that.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
But let's put it this way.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
I was and still sometimes am, deeply puzzled by the
concept of holding a story that to me has material
impossibilities built into it, like that Jesus rose from the dead,
that Mary was a virgin, when Jesus was born, so
I don't. I still don't quite understand how people hold
(24:58):
those and are still basically have the same scientific understanding
of the world as I do. It's like it's like
more than rather than just one or the other. So
that to me is still a bit of a mystery.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
But again, as I said at the beginning, it's it's
I've moved away from this emphasis on belief as a
key aspect of religion.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Right. Well, we're playing out with some music that you've selected.
It's a beautiful voice of brother. I think his name
brother is I can't remember how to say his proper name.
Was it Israel come a coma Zoli or something sure?
And it's Somewhere over the Rainbow, a favorite.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Song, one of my favorite songs.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
It's a beautiful song. It's been wonderful talking to you,
interesting to hear your perspectives, and I very much appreciate
you taking the time. Your book is out in March
twenty sixth, I think March twelfth, March twelfth, and it's
called The Calling, and I've been enjoyed browsing it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
For more from news talks, there'd be listen live on
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Real Conversation, Real Connection. It's Real Life with John Cowan
on Hughes Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Today and welcome to Real Life. I'm John Cown. Doctor
Nicki Harrey is head of a School of psychology at
Auckland University and a few years ago she did an experiment,
despite having no religious faith herself. She became a priest
for a year and she's written a book of her
experience called The Calling, and it's subtitled A Year of
Exploring what the secular World can learn from Religion. And
(00:53):
she joins me tonight, welcome NICKI, thank you. Okay, I
can't hear you and my headphones. Nick okay, And I
think that's been sorted out. Did you actually have a
religious background at.
Speaker 3 (01:06):
Aornicky, No, No, Our family was atheist. We lived in
Suva when I was a child, so I was surrounded
by Christianity being of a certain.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
Age, probably Hindus as well.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
There were many Hindus as well. That's right, that's right.
But ourselves as a family didn't have a religion, and
that goes back to my grandparents.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Actually.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Okay, so where did the interest in religion come from?
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Well, it was a slow process. I've long been interested
in value spased practice and in questions about how we
live well together, and more recently, ten years ago or so,
I started to look to some religious philosophy to think
about those questions, and over time I got this idea
(01:54):
that I actually really was a priest, even though I'm
a university lecturer and an atheist. And part of that
was I wanted to have conversations with people about what
really matters, and I wanted to have open ended conversations.
One of the things I think is really interesting about
(02:15):
religious provocations is that quite often the questions aren't answered,
they're just asked.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Hold on, you're saying provocations.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
Yeah, provocations. It's a word I picked up at Rhythms
of Grace, which is a church that I tended for
a year when I did this project. And the concept
of a provocation is that you make a suggestion, you
work around a topic, but you don't close it off.
You don't know what the answer is. And I think
(02:44):
in the secular world we've become keen on declaring what
the solution is to a particular problem. So I wanted
something more open ended, something in which humility, service, contribution duty,
those kind of ideas seem to be floating around.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
There's a few things that are sort of catching me
on angles, like I would have thought that. You know,
scientists and psychologists haven't always been the best friends of Christianity,
and they've sometimes accused them of having closed off answers.
This is the set, This is a set diet of
what you are to consume and believe in nothing else.
(03:25):
And you're saying, actually, no, the Christianity that you've encountered
anyway likes to actually get people thinking and mull over
these things and push on through.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it. When when I was
growing up, there was if you're a Christian, you believed
in this stories, the stories that we know. If you
were not Christian, you didn't believe, and that was a
divide a belief or not belief. And I think a
lot of atheists still think that religion hinges on the
sort of intellectual propositions.
Speaker 2 (03:59):
But does it not. Maybe maybe I'm defining myself as
one of those people that you're saying that I have
got it outmoded.
Speaker 4 (04:09):
Yeah, I think.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
I think the intellectual propositions are there, But what interested
me was the focus outwards, the focus on what is.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
Beyond and beyond and beyond.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
So for example, I might be talking with you now,
but we are holding the listeners to in this conversation.
As a university academic, I'm really aware that I serve
the people of Alto. They are the people that I
need to hold in every encounter I have, whether it's
with a staff member or a student or so on.
(04:41):
So I think what religion does. Christianity in my experience,
is it's always pushing people to go further beyond, further beyond,
further beyond, and the stories, the narrative, the dogma, if
you like, is sitting there. But to me, that's not
the essence of a religious orientation.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
Okay, So what were some of the things that you
saw being practiced at Rhythms of Grace, which is a
a non denominational church here in Auckland. What was some
of the things you saw there that you thought this
is something that secular people need or would value or
would benefit from. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
Well, part of it is gathering in community, So there's
this constant gathering in a lot of it is humility.
I think humility and awareness of the unknown were really
in the atmosphere. People often talked about those in their
families who are sick or dying or facing major life challenges.
(05:45):
And what plu me away actually about that was that
it would always be said with a gratitude towards the nurses,
the doctors, the people involved. The hope would be for
the person concerned to have courage to find their way.
And so there was some kind of gentleness, but also
(06:07):
a facing up to the fact that life is unknown,
that bad things happen to good people, and that we
will never get our heads around this. So part of
that is also a collective, if you like, bearing witness
to this thing we call life.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Okay, so you did quite a bit of groundwork here.
You went to a church, you read lots of books
and spoke to Christians. But then you decided to plunge
into being a priest for a whole year. Now, you said,
before you know, you thought you were a priest already.
But I've seen priesthood defined as being a sort of
(06:44):
like an intermediary between God and people in helping them
to progress in their journey of faith. So you obviously
had a slightly different definition of priest in your mind
as you leached into this experiment of being one.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Yeah, I would say, for me, with a priest without God,
and maybe we'll get to the question of whether that's
even remotely feasible. But anyway, starting out, I had this
idea that a priest holds these two things at once,
the personal community in front of them and this outward
focus on the common good and the life of our planet.
(07:21):
So to me, that was the thing that I was
trying to capture, is that dual focus, and to do
that in my own services, in which I tried to
do provocations, talks, we had blessings, we had reflection, we
had discussion with each other, all without the word God,
(07:43):
but always with this idea of what's the bigger picture here?
Speaker 4 (07:47):
How do we sit within that?
Speaker 2 (07:48):
So you decided to set aside this year, and so
what did you do? You've mentioned that you had some
type of meetings. I'll be interested to know where we
had found people that would want to come and join
a meeting like this, But so what are some of
the things that you thought, this is what I'm going
to do in this year.
Speaker 3 (08:06):
Well, the first thing I did was I had through vowels.
So I took it upon myself to structure my life
around simplicity. So I had a uniform, I wore only
gray and black clothes and spent quite a bit of
time constructing that. And I would also, as part of
my simplicity, vow by nothing non essential. So I was
(08:26):
allowed to buy food, painkillers, you know, regular groceriies.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
But and if anything.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Significant that I needed, like my cell phone broke, I'd
be allowed to replace it, but nothing. In addition to that,
it was very, very easy to live simply. The second
one was hospitality, So I was to greet people went
out and about.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Now, is this something that comes naturally to you anyway?
Speaker 4 (08:49):
No, it does not. It does not.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
So that's why I had to have a vowel of hospitality.
My husband is the one that knows everyone on the
street and greets people. Me I scurry inside, hoping that
I'm not seen. And so it was actually quite a
challenge to put myself out there and to force myself
to walk past people rather than duck around the corner
and so on.
Speaker 4 (09:11):
And I had this.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
Generosity of hospitality. How did this work out for you
and daily practice. What did you do well?
Speaker 3 (09:22):
I run, and so it was also the COVID era.
It was twenty twenty one, so there were lots of lockdowns.
So I was running around my suburb, going to the
local supermarket, those kinds of things. So whenever I came
across somebody, I would say hello, no matter who they were.
But if they were somebody I knew, well, then I
would say that in such a way that invited them
(09:42):
to talk if they wanted to do that. So it
was what I think of was really low grade hospitality,
but it was still a challenge for me as an introvert.
I also tried to be way more open than I
usually am to things like spontaneous invitations and people's needs.
I have a planned john for each day, for each week,
and I intend.
Speaker 4 (10:03):
To stick to it.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
So hospitality can be a bit threatening if by hospitalit
you mean opening your heart to the needs of others
as the others need them, not according to your own agenda.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
It strikes me, as you know, one of the principal
religions in the world we live in is stay busy. Yeah,
and what you're talking about is something almost the opposite
of that.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
That is so true. That is so true.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
When we have these busy schedules and every minute is planned,
it's it's really hard to just open up to another
person when they come towards you.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Yeah. I remember being told by I think it was
a youth worker. They said, if someone wants to talk
or something like that, lean on something and throw your
jacket over your shoulder or something, meaning I'm not going
you know, I've got you are the most important thing
in the world at the moment. I'm not going to
hurry off. I haven't got you know. My schedule is
now open for you. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:02):
Yeah, that's that's amazing if you can give somebody that.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, so you I have a third valved vowel, which
was was pause.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
It took me a while to find a name for that.
But the of course I knew about prayer, but I
had this tricky problem of not believing in God.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
So who them do?
Speaker 4 (11:25):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (11:27):
So I actually wanted to pray because again, as I've
said before, this outward focus was one of the main
things I was interested in. So I struggled to find
a way to do what I thought of as a
prayer substitute. But when I ran, I stopped listening to
podcasts on my run, started looking at the light during
during for the for the entire year, I also, in
(11:50):
the end developed a meditation routine. Even though I had
initially been so resistant to meditation. I thought it was
uncomfortable because.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
That's sort of going in rather than going out, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
That's right, because quite often it's like listening to your breathing,
you know, fairly shoulders let go of this and that.
Speaker 4 (12:07):
And staying still.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
I'm an you know, I'm not the kind of person
that's it's still very easily. But meditation, I think taught
me a great deal about how to be in a
space with nothing right.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
So you had these vowels and you arranged meetings.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
And then I had I set up a website called
secular priest dot org, and I had they weren't meetings, John,
there were services.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Services.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
They had services, okay, And they were three Sundays a month,
and followed they were at five pm for an hour,
and then on the Wednesday, I do an online version
at seven am, just for half an hour. And so
again I'd do this talk, this propacation, we'd have blessings,
we'd have.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Food in your sense.
Speaker 3 (12:56):
Well, I wrote a blessing about gratitude, mostly towards the
people that support us, the people that are in the room,
towards this incredible, bountiful planet that we all share. And
so that was the essence of the blessings was great.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
So I noticed in your book you even you were
grateful to someone and you and you just sort of,
you know, parenthetically, bless her sort of just sort of
slips into the text, and I'm just sort of wondering,
what do you mean, because that's sort of like, in
a religious sense, an invitation for God to do something
good to this person. So when you bless someone, I would.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Say gratitude is the essence of that. Actually, it's it's
thank you, thank you for being here.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Okay, well, look we've used up our first half of
a session, and I want to come back to finding
out whether you got closer to sorting out how you
lived life, how you face death, how you face all
these other things, some of the things that you gained
from this time, and perhaps some of the things that
you can pass on to other people. My guest tonight
(14:01):
is doctor Niki Harrow, who lived a year as a
secular priest trying to discover what secular people could mine
from Christian practices. I'll be back with you in a second.
This is real life. I'm John Cown and you're listening
to news Talk said.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
B intelligent interviews with interesting people. It's real life on
news Talk SEDB.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
Welcome back to real life. I'm John Cown talking to
doctor Nicki Harray, who's spent a year as a secular
priest trying to work out what there might be within
Christian practices that secular people could could usefully take as well.
You've picked that song. Has it always been a song
you've liked?
Speaker 4 (14:55):
I have liked it for a long time.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
We sang it together at the second of my services
and the room really resonated with it, and I particularly
love the line I tried my best. It was much
because that's what your thumbs up this Pope project.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
Okay, Now we were talking about some of the things
that you did, and I'm wondering what you what you've
taken from the values of some of these things. What
about the value of ritual What did you did? You
did you as you created rituals and participated in being
a celebrant or whatever, and you did as in your
(15:34):
role as a secular priest, What did you make of ritual?
Speaker 3 (15:37):
I think richel has has many functions. One of the
times I felt the most priestly was when I did
a baby naming ceremony right and it was very formal.
Although it was in the family home with just the
extended family around, and there was the most extraordinary sense
in the air, it was completely secular that we were
(16:00):
doing this not just for the two boys that we
were knowning that day, but for all children everywhere. And
something about the ritual, which I had constructed so wasn't
even a traditional ancient one, but I said it with
as much gravitas as I could use. And I had
really carefully picked the language, and they weren't just words
(16:22):
I'd invented by myself. I drew them from various places,
and I think in that room where we welcomed those
boys and remembered children everywhere, it took the ritual to
do that, to go through something that had a certain
formality to it.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
Apart from perhaps Mari karakia and greetings, where Mari culture
is now very much grafted into New Zealand culture, there's
not much ritual there isn't. And you know, I'm a
celebrant at funerals and weddings and things, and there's aspects
(17:03):
of ritual in that, but usually people don't aren't familiar
with it, and don't need it. How can we graft
this back into our culture and what do you think
it might do for people?
Speaker 4 (17:13):
It's terribly hard to graft it back in.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
I mean, one of the things I was so aware
of in my made up as a made up priest
for a year was lacking that tradition, not just in
terms of my own practice, but not being in a
community of people that also had the tradition.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
It's shared, not knowledge that this is what you do exactly.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I mean, I spent three days reading the Gospels at
one point during the project, and one of the things
I am so aware of with the Gospels is part
of their power is that so many people have read
and interpreted and used them over and over and over again.
So there's a collective imagination associated with those stories that
(17:56):
you just can't create by deciding that we need this.
So I think by abandoning religion, which New Zealanders have
done in droves. Fifty two percent of people in the
twenty twenty three sensus indicated they had no religion. We
have taken out ritual to our detriment, but I don't
(18:17):
think it's easy to put it straight back on. One
of the things that I think is really useful is silence,
just moments of silence. There's something quite airy and beautiful
about being quiet, and particularly if you close your eyes
with other people around you. And an advantage of that
in a secular setting is it doesn't have any content
(18:38):
that might offend or upset people.
Speaker 2 (18:40):
I see Anzac Day parades and services as being particularly
moving and possibly because of that silence and the ritual
of the people saying the ode and the bugle big
played and things like that, usually in a completely secular context.
And yes, you're right, it is moving and it binds
(19:01):
people together in a very very real way. Interacting pastorally
with people. Were people to the idea of bearing their
private hells to you? Yeah? Well, I uh, and how
did you find that? Yeah?
Speaker 3 (19:16):
I set up these things called personal conversations, so on
my website people were able to come to me to
have a conversation about how they could deepen their contribution
to our collective lives. And I ended up having thirty
nine personal conversations with twenty different people. So many people
had repeat conversations. I had ten, for example, with one person,
(19:39):
and people were pretty open to that and interested in that.
All people came to me with all sorts of different issues.
I'd expected mostly to be talking about the state of
our planet because I've got a long history and environmental activism,
so there was a little bit of that. But people
always everywhere struggle with this question of how do I live,
(20:02):
how do I care for my family, but how do
I also care for the common good? It's a perennium
all struggle.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
Actually, life isn't straightforward. I think we all need a
bit of help and finding our way along, and so
be able to talk to someone, you know, even if
it's just reflecting back what they're thinking, it's so so valuable.
Elephant in the room, of course, is you're doing all
this without a concept of a divine A priest is
usually when they're counseling someone, there's three in the conversation.
(20:31):
There's the person being counseled, the counselor, and there's and
they're usually inviting God into the conversation as well. How
accurate do you think your experiment was if you're doing
all these things that Christians do but without a sense
of a.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
Divine I think that not having a sense of the
divine or God was a fatal flaw actually, quite frankly,
in my project. I think that this. I did an
interview with rod Oram, who sadly died in twenty twenty.
GRCT guy, Yeah, amazing person, and one of the things
(21:11):
he said in that interview was how if you're not
struggling to come to terms with the concept of God,
which he also referred to as Infinity, as something just
far bigger and more mysterious than us. He said, you're
falling short. You're falling short because human beings, we can
(21:33):
practically assess and analyze issues and try and tackle them
one by one, but we'll never quite get there. And
I think he's right. I think he's right, but I
don't know how to I don't know how to focus
on that without this concept of God, because to me,
God is still a product of the human imagination. And
(21:56):
I don't mean that in any way to diminish the
concept of God, because I think maybe as human beings,
that imaginative project of if you like creating a sense
of God is really crucial to our lives together. But
if you don't believe in God, then how do you
do that? It's I think the concepts like complexity, the unknown, humility,
(22:24):
all of those do get quite close to that notion.
And sometimes when I'm been talking with Christians, because one
of the absolute highlights of this project was having such
deep interest in conversations with Christians. Sometimes when I'm talking
with Christians and I'm talking about my you know, complexity
or whatever it is, and they're talking about God, I
(22:46):
get this feeling we're talking about the same thing.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
Right, did you get the feeling that there are some
things that Christians have that they don't know that they've got,
and that perhaps at risk of not appreciating it or
even losing it.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
Absolutely, I think I had, you know, one of the
women that I got to know really well, and sometimes
in conversations she would say, yeah, but this community in
this place, in that place and the other place.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
And I'm like, ah, but it isn't the same as
a church.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
And it was almost like me trying to convince her
of the X factor in Christianity, because if you.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
Are what are those things of X factor things that
you think that Christians have that they really should cherish them. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:26):
Well, it's like, if you have a concept of God
or the divine, there's just always something bigger than this
material reality, even than the people that you love right
here and now, there's always that thing beyond that you're
accountable to. That you're accountable to this, to the story,
(23:49):
to this entity, to being a good person over and
above what it does immediately for yourself or those around you.
And I think that adds a certain quality to these communities,
into interactions.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Okay, Now, there has been almost shall we say it, tradition,
almost of people that don't believe in God, thinking that
Christians are somewhat simple or defective in their logic or whatever.
As your impression of Christians changed during this project.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
It's a good question, because I wouldn't say I ever
held you.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
No, No, I think you're far too nice a person
to do that.
Speaker 4 (24:29):
But let's put it this way.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
I was and still sometimes am, deeply puzzled by the
concept of holding a story that to me has material
impossibilities built into it, like that Jesus rose from the dead,
that Mary was a virgin, when Jesus was born, so
I don't. I still don't quite understand how people hold
(24:58):
those and are still basically have the same scientific understanding
of the world as I do. It's like it's like
more than rather than just one or the other. So
that to me is still a bit of a mystery.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (25:16):
But again, as I said at the beginning, it's it's
I've moved away from this emphasis on belief as a
key aspect of religion.
Speaker 2 (25:23):
Right. Well, we're playing out with some music that you've selected.
It's a beautiful voice of brother. I think his name
brother is I can't remember how to say his proper name.
Was it Israel come a coma Zoli or something sure?
And it's Somewhere over the Rainbow, a favorite.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
Song, one of my favorite songs.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
It's a beautiful song. It's been wonderful talking to you,
interesting to hear your perspectives, and I very much appreciate
you taking the time. Your book is out in March
twenty sixth, I think March twelfth, March twelfth, and it's
called The Calling, and I've been enjoyed browsing it.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
For more from news talks, there'd be listen live on
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