If the Waihopai 3 are allowed to go unpunished after disarming the Waihopai spybase in 2008, Crown prosecutor Austin Powell asserted yesterday, it will be "a mask for anarchy". This tired phrase - perhaps an evocative tabloid newspaper headline, but totally irrelevant to current civil proceedings after the activists were aquitted of criminal charges last year - was brilliantly reclaimed by defence lawyer Michael Knowles in his statement at yesterday's summary judgment hearing at the High Court in Wellington.
If you haven't popped into the Living Room of Humanity yet, today and tomorrow is definitely the time to do it... Here's what's on...
Sister Teresa (not a nun) has taken some beautiful photos throughout the week. I am having more technical difficulties with getting them up on here, but we have put some on Facebook. You can view them here even if you are not a Facebook member. The captions are quotes from our liturgy.
Father Peter Murnane's lunchtime lecture from yesterday on the Waihopai spybase, and the story of disarming it, was recorded and is now online thanks to the ever-helpful Peter Cowley, custodian here at St Andrew's.
Tonight Father Peter Murnane, a lifelong enemylover and another of the Waihopai 3, is arriving in town to come and join our vigil; and tomorrow at 12:15pm he will be giving a public lecture in the main sanctuary of St Andrews.
I'm very glad we eventually decided, as much from lack of organisation as anything, to go for a very loose programme (or non-programme). It seems to have made each moment and each person seem more special and more valuable, and it means that the ones who decide what we're doing are the people who are there at that time... no more, no less. Which is nice.
Yesterday morning, a Wikipedia-esque bonanza of shrinecraft was unleased, and a small group of rookie and experienced male and female 'Shrine Maidens' (or 'Shrine Hunds') transformed three old wardrobes, a whole lot of op-shop photo frames and miscellaneous National Geographic pictures into what Adi has dubbed 'The Living Room of Humanity'.
Yesterday we made a shrine (photos coming soon - You'll like it); today we made a liturgy. We cobbled it together from some John Dear stuff, some prayer books Margy brought downstairs and some other stuff we like.