Vale, Kevin Craik OAM

Perspective. Was today an awful day or a beautiful day?

I could say that it was lonely and boring, walking 5 hours on my own along the side of a road, walking here rather than on the gravel of the official path which to use Mykey's words, is like walking on Lego with my ever growing blisters. 

Or I could say that I got to walk in the utter silence of the waking morning, stopping at intervals to notice the stars fade, the colour of the sky morph, and the distant jagged mountains reveal themselves. I arrived early into the town of Saragun, the half way point of the Camino to have lunch, the meet up again with Anders for a beer in the afternoon sun, then check into an albergue run by the Marist Brothers where for the princely sum of E20 I have my own room for the first time. 

I choose the latter. 

The silence and aloneness was important today because my friend and mentor Kevin Craik died, and his funeral was today. Not much can sway me from my year by year recollections, but Kevin's story is so much a part of my story that he deserves all of today. 

 

 

Kevin was the single most important person in encouraging me into ministry, both by the organisations he established, and his own direct support. 

When I was 16 I went to the Black Stump Christian Music Festival of which Kevin was a driving behind the scenes force. I still marvel on recollection that my mum let me go away for 3 days to an unsupervised rock music event 200km away, but it was one of the key events of my life. My growing relationship with God was something which I thought I had with my eyes closed in prayer, but Black Stump showed me a bigger God who was interested in every part of my life and every part of the world. Black Stump was music, and community, and social justice and worship and teaching. It was going from a mosh pit at a metal concert to a DJ playing trance to an artsy play to a line up for donuts at 1am. Faith was part of all of life.

The following January, as a follow up to Black Stump I went to the Australian Christian Music Festival in Cooma. I thought I was going to learn how to play guitar better, but I came away learning more about a great God who is worth worshipping. Kevin had been running the Music Seminar for 20+ years in the ski lodge which he had mortgaged his house to buy from the Snowy Mountains Authority which no longer needed it for worker housing. 

After a week of teaching and worship and dinners and workshops we had the final worship session on the last day. And I remember watching the band of professional musicians playing this incredibly tight and joyful music up on stage, and the whole congregation belting out the lyrics in praise and breaking into spontaneous harmony. And I prayed in all earnestness "God, why don't you do something to make my church back at Woy Woy (where the music was led by blue haired old ladies playing the organ) more like this?" And God said to me with one of the clearest things I've ever heard from God, but without words "why don't you do something?". And in that moment I said yes. 

That was the yes which would eventually lead to priesthood, but the yes I was saying at the time was to go home and start a band to play as much rock music as we could get away with at Mass on Sunday nights. So I got some friends together, and we started. We weren't very good. My girlfriend was the singer and when we broke up she quit the band, so I started leading the singing and my voice was still breaking, but the band did eventually grow, and get better over the next three years. Friendships developed in the band and more friends joined in and a youth group spontaneously developed (which I in turn took back to Black Stump). 

So I was discovering that I could make a difference in the church if I said yes to God and trusted him. I could build a community and could help people worship God. This is where I was most fully alive And this is what led, by the end of school to a fairly strong desire to become a priest. 

I continued to go to the Cooma music seminar every year but by the end of my first year in seminary I had no income and could not afford it, so I went as a member of the serving team with another 25 or so young adults and teenagers.  It was incredibly tiring work but fun. 

On the night before the final session of the music seminar Kevin asked me to give my testimony on stage about how God had called me through the music seminar. I was so tired and didn't have much time to prepare. But I did it anyway. 

The thing was the much of the passion and desire to make a difference in the church had faded. In my first year of seminary I discovered that I was quite different to everyone else. Nobody else was as evangelical or charismatic. Nobody else spoke with my confidence about being certain that they were called by God to make a difference in the church. So I focused on pulling my head in, fitting in, and becoming more normal. 

But as I got up on the stage and began to speak the Spirit just took over. As I told the story I've written above I heard my own words coming from my own mouth and was convicted afresh. Yes, God has called me, is calling me, and I want to respond with my whole heart no matter the cost. 

I went back to seminary in second year different, more alive, and I don't think I've ever really lost it. 

This was the first time Kevin took a risk on me, giving me, a Catholic, whom he'd never heard speak in public before, a microphone up on stage in a predominantly protestant gathering. It could have gone badly. 

And Kevin continued over the coming years to give me opportunities in ministry which I would never otherwise have. For two years I coordinated the team of ministers who prayed with people who responded to the altar call at Black Stump. For two years I was the chaplain to the volunteer team at Music Seminar.  

For all these things Kevin took a risk in promoting a Catholic to take leadership in a largely Baptist & evangelical Anglican event. Perhaps Kevin took brickbats for me and never told me, but never once did I get any blowback about this, because the kind of people whom Kevin nurtured around him were the kind of people who saw all churches as working together for the glory of God, not working against each other. That has shaped my understanding of ecumenism ever since. 

Through these events, and in the years that followed when I would just go to visit Kevin and his wife Jan, I discovered that I could never get away without him praying for me. "Let's have a word of prayer" was his constant invitation, and so I learned to not be in a hurry to leave, and in time we would pray for each other. This has shaped my practice with every pastoral opportunity be it counselling, marriage prep, funeral prep etc, to pray at the end of the conversation so that it is more intentionally the work of Jesus, not of us. 

At my diaconate ordination in 1999 Kevin helped vest me with my new vestments, the best symbol I could find for all the encouragement he had been to me. 

Kevin's health declined in recent years, and when I visited him in hospital this year he told me that he had pancreatic cancer. "I am going to meet the Lord very soon" he told me with a smile "and I am very much looking forward to that day". 

That day came last week, and his funeral was today. 

Kevin knew that he wouldn't live another six weeks, so when I visited him in the week before I left for Spain we said, and prayed our goodbyes, one of the most difficult goodbyes I have ever said. "I'll see you in Heaven" I said, as I walked towards the door. "I'll look forward to seeing you there" was his reply. 

This is what I remembered as the sun rose on a chilly morning. And I wondered at how God has worked through Kevin in my life, and in fact in the lives of more people than I will ever know. Where would I be if not for Kevin? What would my life have turned out to be? 

In the stillness, and the aloneness, I wept. Not just a few tears but the kind that fill up a handkerchief with snot. I needed this lonely day to let this happen, which couldn't have happened in the initial days of the Camino in which I was surrounded my people as I walked. There was something beautifully cathartic about letting it all out, in joy, in gratitude, that this 30+  year long relationship had been, more than that it is now over. Because it isn't over. My priesthood and my ministry are a legacy of Kevin's great faithfulness to God, as are the lives and ministries of countless others whom Kevin influenced in his long life. 

As I give thanks to God for the first 25 years of priesthood, I hope that I will make Kevin proud with my next 25. 

PS: I've just listened to the stream of Kevin's funeral. There was a poem with the refrain "I'm drinking from my teacup because my cup has overflowed". That captures it well, I think.