The Colour of Covenant
Colonialism, Racism, and the Soul’s Responsibility
The Remembering
Every generation must face the question: Who are we, and where did we come from?
For many of us, the answers are thinner than they should be. We grew up on borrowed land, speaking borrowed stories, assuming that belonging was something guaranteed rather than gifted. Yet beneath our daily lives runs a current of forgetting, of histories not told, names mispronounced, and wounds still open in the soil.
To remember is not to indulge guilt; it is to recover truth. It is to look into the mirror of history and recognise both the courage and the cruelty that brought us here. The remembering is not for blame. It is for healing.
The Unseen Inheritance
Few of us chose the attitudes we inherited. They arrived through the air we breathed, the quiet superiority, the unspoken assumptions that one culture’s ways were more civilised, more correct, more normal.
Racism, in this sense, is rarely personal hatred. It is the inherited blindness of privilege, the myth that our story is the centre of the map.
We may have imagined we were neutral observers of history, but neutrality is itself a position. To be born into power, comfort, and dominance is to stand on a hill built by others. Until we see that, the hill remains invisible, and so do those it overshadows.
Our task now is to unlearn the myth of innocence. Not through shame, but through honesty, through the gentle but relentless light of awareness.
Covenant and Conscience
In the history of this land, Aotearoa New Zealand, the Treaty of Waitangi was not meant to be a transaction. It was a covenant, a sacred agreement of mutual respect and shared stewardship.
But the covenant was broken. The ink of partnership quickly gave way to the machinery of empire, and the spiritual thread of relationship was replaced by the economics of possession.
To speak of covenant now is to speak not of politics but of conscience. A covenant is not a law we enforce; it is a promise we keep, a living posture of faithfulness, humility, and repair.
For those of us who call ourselves followers of Christ, this is not optional. He modelled lordship with a bowl and a towel, not a throne or a sword. He took the lowest place to reveal what true power looks like: service and humility.
If the Son of God could kneel, then surely the descendants of empire can too.
The Inner Work of Decolonisation
Decolonisation is not only a social project; it is inner work. It begins in the small, hidden places where bias lives, in our reactions, our language, our defensiveness. It invites us to see how empire has shaped our theology, our spirituality, even our imagination of God.
To decolonise the soul is to move from certainty to humility, from dominance to listening.
It means we learn to pronounce names properly, to honour stories not our own, to read the history we were never taught, and to hold that knowledge without collapsing into guilt or denial.
It is a slow conversion, from the head to the heart, from inherited blindness to embodied seeing. It is prayer in motion: the act of waking up kindly.
A Theology of the Bowl and the Towel
What does faithfulness look like in 2025?
Perhaps it looks like choosing to listen before we speak.
Perhaps it sounds like learning the melody of another language.
Perhaps it feels like letting our hearts break open enough to hold both grief and gratitude at once.
The Kingdom Jesus spoke of is not built through control but through compassion. It is not about being right but being real.
The bowl and towel are not symbols of weakness; they are the instruments of transformation. Each time we choose humility over pride, relationship over dominance, empathy over avoidance, we participate in the repair of the world.
We become, in our own small ways, people of the covenant again.
The Shared Horizon
Healing will not come from one grand gesture. It will come through countless small ones:
the listening ear, the open heart, the willingness to see the sacred in another’s story.
We are not asked to fix history, only to face it, to let it speak, to let it change us, and to walk forward together in its light.
If there is such a thing as redemption for nations, it will begin here: not in denial or division, but in the sacred art of carrying each other’s hearts.
Bruce & Sue Reflect
Sue: You know, Bruce, I used to think talking about colonisation was just for activists and politicians. But after reading this, I feel it’s more like soul talk, like being honest about the air we breathe.
Bruce: Yeah, that’s the thing, eh. We all grew up in that air. Didn’t ask for it, but it shaped us anyway. And if you don’t notice it, you just keep breathing it in, thinking it’s normal.
Sue: It’s confronting, though. I don’t want to sit in guilt forever, but I also don’t want to stay asleep.
Bruce: Nah, guilt doesn’t help much. But awareness does. It’s like when you’re gardening, you’ve got to see the weeds before you can pull ’em. And you’ve got to get the roots, not just the leaves.
Sue: I love that. Pulling weeds as a spiritual practice.
Bruce: That’s it. Quiet work, done with your hands in the dirt. No speeches, no grandstanding. Just noticing what’s there, owning it, and making room for something better to grow.
Sue: Maybe that’s how nations heal too, one honest act of noticing at a time.
Bruce: Could be. Maybe that’s the new covenant, turning up, listening, and walking alongside. Like Christ with a bowl and towel… just in gumboots.
A Blessing for the Remembering
May we walk gently on this land we did not make,
and listen to the stories that still rise from its soil.
May truth guide us, grace hold us, and love transform us.
Haere marie, haere tika, haere ngātahi.
(Go peacefully, walk rightly, walk together.)