A Follower of Jesus
From Alpha to Omega in Faith
By Ewing C Stevens
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Ewing Stevens
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Contents
1. Childhood – how I came by my faith
2. Teenage years – influences on my religious understanding
3. How a five-year illness affected my understanding of religion
4. The decision to enter training for the Church ministry
5. The realities of parish life
6. Great changes for theology and the Church
Part Three: New Challenges, New Directions
16. Worldwide reaction to the Jesus story
17. Life after the Jesus story
18. Expanding my understanding of the social gospel
19. Another health crisis precedes a new life challenge
20. Family changes and a challenge of Christian journalism
21. Decision time for a middle-aged cleric
22. A closing door leads to a door opening in radio
23. A church in which I found some comfort
24. The ministry of secular radio
25. As an octogenarian clergyman, what do I believe?
It was Friday, 6 August 2010, about 4 a.m.
I awoke in the darkness. I’d been dreaming about a breakdown at the radio station where I work as a talkback host. Normally, things run pretty smoothly at the station, but in this dream everything that could go wrong had gone wrong! The callers couldn’t get through to have their say. The screen which registered calls had frozen and we’d gone off the air. I was surrounded by technicians desperately trying to sort out the problems. As they worked, I got up from my chair and walked out to the reception desk where the receptionist was talking with a visitor. The visitor had brought in a collection of antique articles for me. Amongst them were two small boxes of matches. These matches she explained to me were from her safe and intended for future generations. As I was turning back to the technicians and the broadcast desk I woke up.
My wife Annette lay sleeping beside me but she too was restless. I whispered, “Would you like a cup of tea?” She murmured: “I wouldn’t mind.” I went out to the kitchen, put the kettle on and turned the radio on to listen to Dudley Stace on Radio Live’s All Nighter talkback programme. I am no interpreter of dreams but as the kettle boiled I pondered about the meaning of the vivid dream I’d had. The message for me was that the boxes of precious matches represented the gift of life given to me by my father and mother. What happened to that gift depended on me and what I did with it amidst all the problems and ups and downs I encountered in this short time on earth.
The cup of tea and a couple of slices of toast had the desired effect and we both went back to sleep. No dreams this time!
I next woke at 6.45 a.m. As I lay on my side and looked out through the ranch slider door on our Waiheke Island bedroom, my eyes began to focus on a smudge in the sky. As my eyes focused better the smudge turned out to be a quarter moon peeking from behind the giant pine tree which grows on the boundary of our property. As I watched, the moon, ever so slowly and steadily, emerged from behind the branch into the open sky. As I lay there my mind went back to my childhood in Southland, New Zealand, lying on my back in the grass on a summer evening, contemplating the night sky in wonderment. In that moment, as I gazed out through the ranch slider, the same wonder came over me again. The movement of the moon reminded me that what had appeared to ancient humans as heavenly bodies, such as the sun and stars, moving around our earth, we now know, was exactly the other way round. Understanding the reality of where we fit into the universe on this earth, it wasn’t difficult on that August morning to imagine ourselves on a ship passing through space. We were passing the moon on one side and turning next to the reddening eastern sky, with the sun like another bigger island just over the horizon ahead of us as we moved smoothly over the sea of space.
This all started me thinking of my own life on this ship of earth, endlessly spinning in space, and what has emerged in the tiny space-time that I have been given to live. I realised that at eighty-five years of age I haven’t much time left on this ship of discovery. I got out of bed, put on my dressing gown and went down to my office and began to write. I wanted to put down in print some of the things I had concluded about this gift of life that I had been given by whatever powers or forces there may be at work in our universe. I wanted to do this, especially for my family and friends in regard to my thinking on faith and religion, since so much of my life has been absorbed with these matters. As I began to write I realised, first of all, that there is just as much room for wonder and amazement at the immensity of our universe as there was when I was a boy in the Southland village of Wallacetown, lying in the grass.
Chapter 1: Childhood – how I came by my faith
In childhood our beliefs, attitudes and views on religion and faith stem from the beliefs and attitudes of our parents in the main. If I had been born of Indian parents, for example, I would have grown up with child beliefs shaped perhaps by the predominant Hindu or Muslim religions, or even Sikh, Buddhist or Christian or Jain, depending on which religion my parents followed. If I had been born to Irish parents in the south of that country my beliefs would have been naturally of the Roman Catholic kind. It is all a matter of the accident of birth and the customs of the community into which we are born.
I was born in Invercargill in Southland, very much a Presbyterian city. To make matters more certain I was born the great-grandchild, on my father’s side, of a pioneer Presbyterian minister in Southland. The manifestation of the Christian faith I was moulded in and from which I took my earliest impression of religion was the Christian faith of the Presbyterian kind.
My mother and father were interested in religion to a minor extent but were not churchgoers. My father had developed a certain resistance to the Church through some experience he had had earlier in his life. I never fully understood what had happened. My mother’s parents, my grandparents, were from Anglican and Presbyterian backgrounds respectively, but as far as I knew had no active connection with a church. However, both my parents had the view that an inoculation of religion through Sunday school was good for their growing children.
Some of my early influences on religion and faith came through two maiden great-aunts on my father’s side. Their father, my great-grandfather on my father’s side, came to New Zealand from Scotland via a period spent as minister of a parish in Nova Scotia, Canada. In New Zealand, he was appointed in 1865 to the new parish of Wallacetown, which stretched from there to Queenstown, over 100 miles distant! He had arrived at Port Chalmers, Dunedin on a tiny ship, the Caribou. The Rev. Andrew Stevens and his wife Marianne (nee Campbell) had fifteen children in all, though some died in infancy. The Rev. Andrew served as minister of the Wallacetown parish until his retirement in 1881. Upon his retirement he took up residence in what came to be known as Retreat Cottage. When I was born in 1926, Retreat Cottage was the home of two of the Rev. Andrew’s daughters. They were my maiden great-aunts, Jinny and Amy. Aunt Jinny had been a Sunday school superintendent at the Wallacetown Presbyterian Church for a good number of years but when I knew her she was aged and in a wheelchair. Amy was still sprightly and attended to the household affairs. It was at Retreat Cottage that I had my first contact with formal Christian teaching.
Every Sunday my mother and father, along with my baby brother Keith and I, would make a kind of pilgrimage to Retreat Cottage. Our residence was at the northern end of Wallacetown and Retreat Cottage at the southern end. This meant a walk of some mile and a half each way in the days before we had a motor car.
The two great-aunts would welcome us with a cup of tea for Mum and Dad and wine biscuits with apple jelly all round! I have always associated the delicious taste of wine biscuits and apple jelly with my first lessons in Christian beliefs. For half an hour Aunt Jinny from her rocking chair by the fire would tell us Bible stories. She was the first person I knew who used visual aids in her teaching. She had some beautifully coloured turnover charts illustrating the Bible stories. David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den and Jesus teaching by the Sea of Galilee held our attention. I can’t ever remember her adding any moral lessons to the stories, but maybe she did and I have forgotten.
I can never remember my mother or father attending church. Father worked at the Underwood milk factory all his life and during the weekend busied himself with our small holding and the cows, the hens, the goats and all that went with them. My father, I discovered later, had joined the Masonic Lodge and that seemed to fill his need for ritual and religion. It was never spoken about and to our young minds it was a part of his life to which we had no entry.
In my early years I have memories of my father’s father, Alex, staying with us from time to time. He slept in the spare room and he didn’t live long enough for us to get to know him as young children. I understood he had been a lay preacher. He and my father’s mother had separated a long time before and nothing was ever said about my grandmother. It was only in my later teenage years that I met her. I was employed as a pharmacy apprentice in Pollok, the Chemist, in Tay Street, Invercargill. A woman came in, bought some product and then said: “I am your grandmother.” I responded, “I thought you were dead!” I got to know her a little. She told me she was Irish and was a nominal Roman Catholic. It has made me proud of my Irish, English, Scottish heritage. When I went home I challenged my father about having told me when I was younger that my grandmother, his mother, had died! It was a blazing row between an eighteen-year-old son and his father! He tried to explain to me that when the separation came they tried to think of her as dead. Grandmother took her baby daughter with her and the rest of the family stayed with my grandfather. Divorce in those days was such a disgrace it seemed that no one ever mentioned it. Whether the difference in religious background had anything to do with the break-up between a Presbyterian parson’s son and his Catholic wife I have no idea, but one can imagine it didn’t help with any hope of reconciliation. This experience probably was most influential in breeding in me the spirit of religious toleration. It was one of the most satisfying parts of my life when as a young minister of the Church I was able to help steer my father and his mother to reconciliation. In the end he was the one who visited her in the rest home where she spent the end of her life and he was with her when she died. Later still when I moved to Auckland, my wife and I met and developed a friendship with my aunt and her family. She was the little baby who left my grandfather’s home with her mother so long ago.
My first close brush with death and loss came with the passing of Grandfather Alex Stevens. He lay in state at our house before the funeral and we were allowed in to see him lying there. Ever since, I have believed children should not be shielded from death because it was the beginning of my own realisation that none of us are here forever and that this knowledge helps us later to deal with other deaths and even our own.
My mother’s parents were younger and so I had time to know them better as I used to stay with them in their Invercargill home very often during my teenage years. While I was playing secondary school rugby I stayed with them one night a week when we had evening practice. Granddad Croad had been a railway worker. His days in that job ended when he slipped under a shunting train and subsequently had his leg amputated. His amputation was not a big handicap even in his old age and he had learned to use his crutches well enough to keep a good garden and make splendid rhubarb and parsnip wine. Later in life as a teenager, it was also from time in my Croad grandparents’ home that I developed my enduring interest in politics. In the evenings that I spent with them I watched and listened as they huddled over their Gulbransen radio and made all kinds of comments as they listened to the broadcasts from Parliament. They had strong political views of a conservative nature. I can’t remember them ever commenting on religion, but no doubt they had their own convictions on those matters too, although I never gathered what they were.
After Aunt Jinny died her sister Amy came to live with us. I was then about seven years of age. My mother and father never attended church, but they must have considered it was their duty to ensure their children received some indoctrination in the Christian faith for their moral welfare. Later in life when training for the Presbyterian ministry I was reminded of those days by our New Testament professor John Allen. He said, during a lecture, that a Sunday school education was good in that it provided young people with something they could rebel against later in life as well as introducing them to the writings of the Bible. It gave young people some kind of religious and moral base from which to construct their own philosophy of life.
The fact that Mum and Dad weren’t at church meant that while I was still young I and my younger brother Keith had to sit with our Sunday school teachers during the church service part of the proceedings on Sundays while others sat with their parents. That did make us feel a bit like “outsiders” and certainly different. We missed feeling this as a family experience in other words.
Now at church we heard a lot about “God’s House”. So my young mind turned to thinking where God could be in his house! In those days the organist of the church, like most women attending, wore a hat. From where I sat in church with my childhood height I was unable to see anything of the person behind the organ except for her hat. This hat moved up and down and from side to side. In my child’s mind this thing that I saw above the organ must be God in his house. But as I grew and sat taller in the pew my image of God was shattered when I came to see the face under the moving hat. This meant I had to start thinking again.
I suppose in those Sunday school years I did absorb many religious ideas but now trying to think back I can’t remember any in detail.
It mainly consisted in regularly attending a social gathering voluntarily in contrast to attending primary school in a compulsory manner. We used to get stars in an attendance book and of course if you attended regularly there was an attendance prize at the end the year.
I’m sure those Sunday school days gave me my love of church music. The great hymns of the church were played and sung Sunday by Sunday, and I still enjoy that music, especially that of the great composers.
In those days Sunday school classes at our church were aligned with day school classes. So when you moved up a class at primary school you were moved up a class at Sunday school. Children were failed in school classes in those days so if you failed in a year of your school class you didn’t move up one at Sunday school either. From a religious angle that seems now to be a strange system. One of my school friends had failed a year. His aunt was in charge of the senior section of the Sunday school so she decided that I should stay back from advancing so I could keep Charlie company. I remember feeling a fair degree of resentment at the plan and thought it was unjust. However, I obviously got over it and put up with the situation. And maybe Charlie didn’t feel so bad. He still had his cobber with him!
As I said before, attendance on a regular basis was something that got through to me as being very important as far as life was concerned. On the other hand, my brother Keith and I were growing older so we didn’t always see the point of getting dressed up on Sunday morning. On one particularly fine Southland Sunday we decided to stay at home and play amongst the apple trees on our property. Just after midday, when we were in the midst of a game, around the corner of the house came our Sunday school superintendent. She had come to wish us well because she understood we were sick. That was the beginning of knowing what guilt felt like. I’m sure she was very gracious and wished us well. We were both at church the following Sunday.
What had these years in Sunday school and church imprinted on my young mind in regard to religion and faith?
First, I had come to realise that there were different denominations of the Christian faith. The magnitude of the religious differences including other world faiths and beliefs was still beyond my ken. I knew that sometimes at our church and included in the odd Sunday school lesson there were references to missionaries who went overseas to convert people who had never heard of Jesus. But I had never heard of Islam and Buddhism and so on.
Second, I had learned something about right and wrong according to Christian and Jewish teaching. I had learned to recite the Ten Commandments. Some of them I understood like “Honour your mother and father” and “You shall not kill” but some of the others were outside the realms of my experience. In regard to right and wrong I had learned about a heaven and a hell. In my church, thank goodness, there wasn’t too much emphasis on hell, but I had that uneasy feeling there was a devil somewhere out there ready to lead me to do wrong and then at the end of life grab me to take me to hell wherever that might be. No doubt at the time this provided a fairly strong incentive to do the right thing. Because life is so different today and education has dispelled so many of the old myths which many in the church in those days took literally, young people now need other incentives to do the right thing. Sadly, moral codes in our age have failed to provide young people with good alternatives to the incentive of heaven and hell.
My church experience at that stage had also taught me something about justice and fairness. There was a growing feeling that it wasn’t altogether what you were that counted in getting on in life but who you knew. There were those who could favour some as against others and this did make a difference. Life wasn’t always equal for all. Equality was influenced both by birth and by circumstance.
Chapter 2: Teenage years – influences on my religious understanding
Secondary school and the teenage years were to lead me into another stage in my faith and religious journey.
After those primary school years at Wallacetown it was off to Invercargill and the Southland Technical High School some eight miles away. I can’t quite remember why my parents chose this school for me but it probably had to do with our working-class background. My parents would have taken it for granted that I would follow a useful trade in life. That in any case was how I came to find myself as a thirteen-year-old in the TC3 class in engineering.
Living in the country, it meant taking the Wallacetown bus to the town each day and taking a cut lunch or on the odd occasion being given the privilege of buying a threepence pie instead.
Lunch hours were an hour long and I discovered that on one day a week a group called Crusaders met in one of the classrooms for a religious talk. My curiosity was aroused by some friends who attended so I went along.
The meeting was conducted by one of the teachers at the school, Clive Sage. Clive, whose nickname was Toi, must have been about thirty years of age when I began attending and he was to have a big part to play in the next development of my religious journey. I remember later asking him why he was called Toi. He replied that he knew when he went teaching that kids always had nicknames for teachers so he decided he might as well choose one they could use that he liked. Hence a Maori name, Toi.
Certainly, Toi Sage and the Crusaders introduced me to a brand of Christianity which I had never encountered up to this time. Toi, himself, had been brought up as Open Brethren as I found out later, but he never did mention this or ever try to persuade any of his group to join any particular church. His approach was totally interdenominational and although he encouraged us in any church attending we engaged in it didn’t seem to be his primary purpose.
His approach appeared to me as a teenager that Crusaders was both exciting and challenging. There was a constant emphasis on how we lived our daily lives: clear, clean, healthy and honest. We were called on to bear witness to any faith we had, in the school and outside school. There was a challenge not to fear being different and to be proud of who we were. One verse I remember being stressed in Crusaders was taken from St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, 6:17, “And so the Lord says, ‘You must leave them and separate yourselves from them.’” From my present viewpoint, without understanding the historical background to that verse, it could easily lead to an unhealthy exclusiveness and “better than you” attitude. This was the self-righteousness which Jesus in his teaching so roundly condemned.
A lot of Toi Sage’s appeal to boisterous teenage boys stemmed from his interest in outdoor life and his experience as a Scout leader. It was through Toi and the camps and trips he arranged for the Crusaders that I began to discover the wonder of God’s world of nature, as Toi called it. These camping experiences engendered a spirit of comradeship that was a most useful life experience. I well remember as a third former sharing with four other Crusaders and Toi the trek between Milford Sound and Queenstown via the Eglington Valley. The trip took us four days and introduced me to daily Bible readings and extempore prayer together at the huts we bunked in at nightfall. Then there was the second camp I enjoyed during those years; it was at Stewart Island. I think about twenty of us made that trip. It was the once and only time I have visited that glorious piece of New Zealand’s unspoiled natural landscape. I remember getting lost with a party in the forest and as night came on finding that we were simply going round in circles without knowing it. Toi’s bushcraft finally got us out just before midnight. An experience that lasts for a lifetime!
By the time I had reached the fourth form I was presented with the challenge of applying for the Crusader badge. We had it explained to us that this badge would only be awarded after a thorough examination of our worthiness to wear it. This merit was judged by how we answered a standard questionnaire about our understanding of the Christian faith. I can’t now remember the questions except the key one about being a Christian and why I believed I was one. I can’t recall how the question was worded but that was its intent. It did not ask the question in the way modern evangelical conservative churches would ask the question, such as: “Are you born again, where and how?” But whatever it was it sent me wondering about whether I was a Christian or not. One thing was for sure: I wanted to qualify for that badge! I broached the subject with my father. Although he no longer attended church and had something of a grudge against the organisation, I knew that as the grandson of a Presbyterian minister and the son of a lay preacher he would have some clues about it. Dad then explained to me that being a Christian meant being a follower of the teaching of Jesus Christ and becoming a son of God like Jesus. Nothing more, nothing less. He pointed me to John 1:12 in the Bible. In those days it was the authorised version of King James, of course. The verse states: “To as many as received him, to them gave he the power to become the sons of God, to them that believe on his name.” I then asked him, “What does it mean to ‘believe on his name’?” He then directed me to John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that those who believe on him should not perish but have eternal life.”
He went on to convince me that it was a belief system that made one a Christian and how we lived our life needed to stem from that belief.
I was convinced, and so I filled out my application form for the badge, handed it in to Toi and a month later I became the proud wearer of the Crusader badge.
The designers certainly knew what appealed to teenage boys. The badge itself bore the shield of faith as spoken about in Ephesians 6:11-12. That verse speaks about combat with the Devil’s evil tricks and fighting against spiritual forces in the world like soldiers. We were then living in the Second World War years and this active fighting approach appealed to us. No namby-pamby religion here! “Into the battle for Jesus” was a kind of catch-phrase that appealed to me at that time.
Of course the teenage years are very much defining years, deciding how we want to live as an adult. It’s a stage of life where most things are black and white with very few shades of grey. Compromise is often seen as weakness and no teenager wants to be seen as weak, even though so often they are trembling inside. It’s a stage where one is ready to wear the Christian faith very openly. That’s why the evangelical churches have always concentrated on these years to appeal to young people to “come out for the Lord”.
Recently, on the TV soap opera Coronation Street this rather brash stage of Christian belief has been shown in the teenage daughter of the street’s motor mechanic and his wife. She has a boyfriend and they both belong to a religious youth group. The daughter wants to show the parents that she is born again with different ideas about life. This and her rather self-righteous attitude makes her parents feel rather inferior in the matters of faith. But they think it’s probably a jolly good thing since she won’t “get into bad company”, their constant fear.
This is a period of life where decisions are constantly being made and where fundamentalist religious beliefs, not just Christian beliefs, score highest with converts. I remember attending a Crusader Camp at the Pounawea campsite near Balclutha. I’d invited my brother Keith to attend because I was keen that he experience this conversion. Keith, however, proved a tough nut to convince. That camp was a very serious and sombre one even to my mind compared with the ones conducted by Toi Sage. (Toi at this stage had left to go overseas on army service in the Pacific war). At this camp the chief speaker was a Presbyterian minister who had had a dispute with the church over the matter of church raffles to raise funds and had formed a breakaway congregation. He gave a talk in which he drew from a box all the things that separated people from God. There was the usual, drink bottle, cigarettes and so on, but then he got down to draught pieces and playing cards and there he lost most of us and my brother Keith included. Keith could not work out why God would be worried about him having a game of draughts or euchre.
After I left school from the sixth form I was accepted as a pharmacy apprentice by Pollok, the Chemist, in Tay Street, Invercargill. Bob Pollok was well known as a representative cricket player so our association spurred my interest in that sport. Once at work I was approached by the Crusader movement to act as an assistant to the then Crusader leader at my high school. The leader at that stage was a Baptist minister, and this association meant learning about his church and their beliefs. At the same time the father of a close school friend was Captain of the Invercargill Salvation Army citadel so I often went there to worship when in the city. These experiences very early led me to see the irrelevancy of Christian “denominationalism” and from that point on I became a supporter of Christian cooperation and union wherever possible.
My life, as with most people in their late teens, was very full on. Sport, rugby in the winter, both tennis and cricket in the summer, was high on my list of priorities. Then there was the constant study for pharmacy exams (by correspondence in those days) and two trips a year to Pharmacy College in Cambridge Terrace, Wellington. As well as assisting with the Crusader group during lunch time on one week day I had offered to start an evening Bible class in my home church at Wallacetown.
The latter proved to be an interesting venture. There was already a morning Bible class operating. It was poorly attended. In discussion with our minister, the Rev. Jim Olliver, I suggested that from my knowledge of teenagers they were not good at getting out of bed early on Sunday morning. Very little sport was played on a Sunday in those days. By the evening, though, they were awake and ready to go. Why not have an alternative class in the evening? He agreed we try it. Of course with my crusading spirit I was thinking of all the young unchurched people who lived in our village. I sincerely wanted to win them for Christ, as I put it. The evening Bible class soon ballooned up to about twenty members, which was quite amazing for such a small community. Most were young people who never went to church and from families like my own who had lost any church connection. For the two years or so that I led the group our study was based on the gospel of St Matthew. I believed passionately in the power of the Word of God as written in the Bible to change lives. As I see it now it must have been quite boring, but strangely the young people seemed to enjoy it. Perhaps it was because it was such a new thing for most of them and it was the fellowship they enjoyed that kept them coming. For myself, I was finally so grounded by the verse-by-verse exposition we went through that even now if I want to find something in the gospels I turn first to St Matthew. At this stage of my religious development I didn’t have any clear theological views of my own. The ones I operated on were those ideas I had absorbed through Crusaders and my church attendance. They were strictly of a fundamentalist kind, seeing everything necessary being delivered through the written word in the Bible. I was filled with compassion for those who did not owe allegiance to Jesus Christ and I had an overwhelming desire to see them brought into the fold.
I probably got from my father the conviction that as a Christian I should be, as Jesus was, open to the sinners of this world. There was a hymn we used to sing in church which had the line “shun evil companions”. I remember my father saying to me the line should have read “help evil companions”, never shun them. He used to say, “Jesus never did; why should we?” This of course was contrary to the theme from Crusaders, “Come out from among them and be ye separate.”
These late Second World War years saw several epidemics of poliomyelitis, known then as infantile paralysis. During those outbreaks schools were closed and the health department advised groups like Sunday schools and Bible classes to suspend classes. I remember spending a good few hours writing out and stencilling the lesson for the Bible class each week and posting it to the members during the period of the epidemic.
My experience of holding teenage groups in the church in the evenings and not in the mornings I am sure came out of this experience with the Wallacetown evening Bible class.
Certainly, I got through the teenage years very well, but there were many others who did not. They had conflicts very often with those they went to school with, their parents and with society in general. Unsure of themselves, very often they tried to bluff their way through and behaved beyond their years. Very often they came from a lower socioeconomic position and in a rich farming area they had real disadvantages both in education and social development. However, the gathering together at Bible class as we did over those years helped them to become more self-assured and to have an ambition to progress their lives. I will always count the Bible class and learning about young people at an early age as very valuable.
That experience at Wallacetown came to a sudden unheralded end in October 1946. You will hear more about that in the next chapter.
Chapter 3: How a five-year illness affected my understanding of religion
In the 1940s tuberculosis was still ravaging the lives of many people in the population. I myself had suffered from what the doctor called pneumonia at the end of the previous rugby season and was unable to play for at least a few weeks at that time. I remember going to see my doctor to ask him if whether I didn’t have tuberculosis. I had studied the bacteria and what happened with the infection. I felt certain in my own mind that I had contracted tuberculosis, given all the symptoms. However, when I went to see the doctor he examined my chest with a stethoscope and he pronounced me absolutely fit. In fact he said to me: “Ewing, your lungs are better than mine.” I asked him the wisdom of taking part in a tennis tournament after having been laid off for some weeks with pneumonia. He told me it would do me good and I should take part. It was a Labour Weekend tournament and so I participated. I felt extremely tired and had lost almost a stone in weight the previous month. I had an incessant cough and of course put it down to having pneumonia. In the morning after the tennis tournament I was getting ready for work when I haemorrhaged. The sight of blood certainly convinced me that I must have tuberculosis. I was rushed to Kew Hospital in Invercargill and that was the beginning of a six-year adjournment to my normal life pattern.
Lying in Kew Hospital unable to get out of bed, having been pronounced very sick, I had lots of time for reflection. My dreams of becoming an All Black rugby star were over. I knew that, but of what lay ahead I had no idea. In Kew Hospital with me were some very sick people, and death became part of my life. After about two months when my family received X-rays they discovered that my mother, then thirty-eight years of age, also had tuberculosis at a very advanced stage. So she came into the hospital in the women’s wing and she and I spent many hours talking to one another when our beds were pulled side by side.
It was in this period that faith meant a very great deal to me. What other meaning could someone at nineteen years of age take out of such an illness? I was convinced in my own mind that through this experience God would be working. I remember one verse that stuck in my mind from Matthew (24:13): “he who endures to the end will be saved”. Although I had no idea what the future would hold, my positive attitude would certainly play a big part in what was to follow in the next six years.
After about nine months in Kew Hospital I was transferred to Waipiata Sanatorium in Central Otago. In those days the sanatorium was reserved for people whom the doctors believed had some chance of recovery. However, because of the infection it was very difficult to find nursing staff willing to go up into the mountains south of Ranfurly to Waipiata for a lonely life assisting the sick. We received notice that I would only be admitted to the hospital if I could take a person to work in the hospital with me. My cousin Mervyn Stevens volunteered. I will forever be grateful to him for that service. Once his employment at the sanatorium had been confirmed they decided to take me in. For the previous nine months in Kew Hospital I had been on complete bed rest. That was the term they used for not moving out of the bed. All one could do was wash one’s hands and face and the nurses gave you a bed bath and changed your bed. When I got to the sanatorium I was still on complete bed rest and the same procedure ensued. It seems quaint by today’s medical standards, but in those days it was the only thing known as far as a cure was concerned. There had been experiments with gold injections over the years and it was just at the stage where surgery was beginning to play a part in recovery from tuberculosis, the surgery of removing part of the diseased lung altogether. At Kew Hospital they had begun treating patients with the surgical technique known as pneumothorax. This collapsed an infected lung by injecting air around the lung between the lung and the lung’s covering, very much like air being squeezed between a football and a football cover. The theory was that it allowed the lung to rest and restricted the breathing so that healing could take place over the cavities or holes that the bacilli had made in the lungs. I was on pneumothorax treatment shortly after my arrival at Kew Hospital and this continued in the sanatorium.
From a spiritual point of view it is hard to imagine the change that had taken place in one’s life. I went from a life full of teenage activity, sport, religion and study to one where the best term to describe it was to vegetate. This was in the hope that the body itself would take over and heal the wounds made by the disease. Slowly, over those years I progressed from complete bed rest to bed rest when one was able to sit up by the bed and finally to having a certain number of hours out of bed moving around. Finally, at the sanatorium I was well enough to work part-time as a nurse aide. I found the challenge excellent for my hope for the future. I sat the exams and finally qualified as a TB nurse, but just as I did so my own health started to fail again.
That period of training as a TB nurse was interesting from many points of view. I helped to institute a study group once a week for those who were interested in attending and who were interested in religion. Dr Kidd, who was the Medical Superintendent at the time, offered us the operating theatre at the Waipiata Sanatorium for our meetings. It was a strange place but that operating theatre had never been used as the operations were carried out both in Timaru and Dunedin Public Hospitals. This was an exciting time in the discovery of our walk in faith. Some of those who came to those meetings were sceptical of the Christian faith; others were totally convinced that it was the way of life they wished to follow. Whatever it was, we formed firm friendships right across all parties that have endured to the present day.
As I remember back now, some of the people who took part in that discussion group went on to become ministers of various churches. Another, Brian Henderson, became a broadcasting personality and TV presenter and host in Australia. Brian, then fresh from high school after developing TB, was a keen member of the group which set up a pirate radio station in the sanatorium. An engineer, Cod Reid, during his recovery produced a transmitter and we began broadcasting in the evenings from Cod Reid’s “shack” or bedroom. It was mainly music and request sessions and every now and again, on such occasions as Easter and Christmas, I was asked to speak on the Christmas message. As far as we knew, the broadcast only reached the edges of our sanatorium, but that was not the case. After six months the station was closed down by the Post Office. They had searched for nine months to find out where this broadcasting was taking place in a day when there was no private broadcasting in New Zealand. Finally, they discovered it was emanating from a station at the Waipiata Sanatorium. This was my first brush with broadcasting. The Otago Daily Times pointed out some years ago that this was probably New Zealand’s first pirate radio station!
After all those years of illness and looking forward to being discharged I received the news after another X-ray that I had developed miliary TB. Miliary TB is a form of TB that is characterised by a wide dissemination into the body and by the tiny size of the lesions. It is a form of the disease that presents special difficulties in the way it can be treated. Despite all the hopes and prayers, I had developed fresh infections in both lungs. I went back to complete bed rest and on to double pneumothorax treatment. It was just before the time when the world of the tuberculosis patient was about to change dramatically. Streptomycin had been discovered as an antibiotic which could attack the tuberculosis bacillus.