On Thursday someone looked at me closely and asked if I was feeling OK. I
told her I was fine, just fed up with this cold. But, I added, I was about to
have time off in the Hokianga and if that didn’t fix me, they’d better starting
digging a hole for me.
Digging can be deferred for a while. Despite driving around 820 kms in the
past 5 days, I have more energy now than I had on Thursday.
A couple of years ago I did a series of posts about churches in the north.
This trip was more specifically about churches in the Hokianga. Apparantly
there are 60 of them. I think we found just under 20. Some of them I’d
visited before, the others were wonderful discoveries. My travel companion GB is a much more fervent blogger
than I am and I think intends to blog about all of them. I’ll just post about
the few that were new to me and where I had noticed any changes from two years
ago.
Last time I was at St Mary’s at Motuti, where the remains Bishop Jean
Baptiste Francois Pompallier were reinterred under the altar in 2002 (he’d died
and been buried in his native France in 1871), I’d wondered about the
significance of a large rock sitting in the church foyer. Now there is a sign
above it explaining it was unearthed during the $12 million refurbishment of St
Patrick’s Cathedral (in Auckland) and was gifted to the people of the Hokianga
on the 169th anniversary of Bishop Pompallier’s first Mass.
Outside the church are new Stations of the Cross. I’ve never seen them out
of doors before and was quite taken by them.
I thought each was a lovely work of art.
There was also a new outdoor crucifex.
Half the present church building was originally at Pompallier’s first mission
at Purukau. It was moved to Motuti in 1922. We weren’t actively looking for
the first mission site, didn’t even know it existed but a small sign
pointed the way and we followed, despite thinking a few times we must surely
have gone past it by now. I think that was the worst road we travelled on and
wheel tracks indicated only one other vehicle had travelled the road that day.
But we eventually reached it, and after following the not often treaded track, we came
to the little clearing by the water.
The little building under the trees has nothing to do with the mission. It looks like an abandoned hunter's hut.
Yes, I think I can detect it is the same church.
It's hard to imagine how these quiet little backwaters of the harbour could once have been such busy, bustling places.
