Faith Hope and Stubborn Pride: Searching for Heaven in Aotearoa and Australia

Abstract

When I first began this work, my aim was to provide a simple chronicle of my family, a potted history for my great nephews and nieces who had little knowledge of how their forebears had come to the Antipodes. The truth was I lacked much knowledge of those forebears myself. I did not know what I was to encounter. I began with a few resources but quickly found I needed many more. And the story expanded. I found I was no longer writing a chronicle; instead, I was telling the story of people with faith, people who came from a history of discrimination and prejudice who sought the freedom to worship as they saw fit in new lands. It was a story that resounded with my own personal experience, even while it went counter to it in many ways. What was apparent to me was that, while the faith of these people was strong, they did not seek to enforce it on others. They were humble with it. In the main, they did not seek great wealth. If it came their way, they accepted it but with little pretension or ostentation. A large number of these people came from the non-conformist churches founded in Britain by John Wesley and his followers. Some, once they were in New Zealand, still questioned the faith they had been born into. My maternal grandmother and grandfather became Unitarians in their youth, my grandmother coming from a Catholic background and my grandfather from an Anglican one, and they remained in this small church for the rest of their lives. The Unitarians were considered heretics when the church was first formed in the sixteenth century. Because the principal tenet of the church is a denial of the Trinity, that is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, some argue the church remains heretical and is not Christian at all. The battle of faith continues.