Before Karen Kemp was ordained priest in the honeyed-wood intimacy of the Chapel of Tarore on Saturday afternoon – that chapel is the spiritual anchor of the Ngatiawa River Monastery, in the Tararua foothhills behind Waikanae – Archbishop Philip Richardson thanked her for coming home.

Karen and her family have just returned from the UK so she can take up her new post as Dean of Tikanga Pakeha students at St John’s College.

Karen’s appointment to that post is a pivotal one, explained Archbishop Philip.

But there wouldn't be anyone at the Chapel of Tarore on Saturday who didn't sense another, deeper homecoming for Karen, too.

In part, that’s about her quest for identity – an issue that has always loomed large for Karen.

She’d grown up in Chile – her parents, Ted and Margaret Good, now Anglican priests themselves, had gone there to serve as Salvation Army missionaries, and they’d lived through the Pinochet coup and its aftermath.

After eight further years in Australia (and her family’s shift to things Anglican) Karen had returned to the south of Chile to work as a nurse among the Mapuche people. That was before she tackled her first theological studies back here in NZ – and then headed to Mongolia with her husband Hugh for a further three-year missionary stint. Whew.

Then, there were 12 years in Palmerston North, where for much of that time Hugh was Dean of the Manawatu Centre of the Bible College of New Zealand – and where Karen reeled in her MA, lectured at the Bible College, was a chaplain at UCOL (a Palmerston North-based polytech) and responsible for youth ministry at All Saints, Palmerston North.

It was during that Palmy time that she forged links with Ngatiawa, which became a turangawaewaefor her, and which served as both as an anchor and springboard for the years that she and Hugh and their three daughters – Anjali, Miki and Anya – have just served in the UK.

Both Karen and Hugh had taught theology in the UK, and last year Karen was ordained deacon at Gloucester Cathedral.

Her ordination to the priesthood on Saturday was a homecoming in yet another way, too.

Karen had long since plunged deep into ministry, of course – those years on the mission field and in Palmy will tell you that – but at the same time she’d had to step back, on countless occasions, from doing what she felt would be natural: celebrating the Eucharist.

For 16 years, she’d wrestled with the theology of ordination. Along the way, growing numbers of folk had gently encouraged her to consider whether she was, in fact, being called to ordained ministry – and on Saturday afternoon, there was a palpable sense that she’d arrived at the blessed end of that journey.

Rule of Life

The Chapel of Tarore and Gloucester's medieval cathedral are undeniably poles apart, both geographically and culturally.

But both played key parts on Karen’s journey to priesthood.

“At the heart of both,” she has written, “is a rule of life which both sustains and compels my sense of call and priestly vocation.

“They are contextual expressions of the call to discipleship, ministry and mission in today’s world.

“These two places are ‘thin places’ for me: places where I have met God in very particular ways at crucial points in my journey.”

So there was rich emotion on Saturday – but leavened with some light touches, too.

For instance: Archbishop Philip commented that Karen’s role was a provincial one, and he thanked Justin Duckworth, as Bishop of Wellington, for ordaining her.

To which Bishop Justin responded that he would have had a “bishop-sized tantrum” had he not been asked to do so.

Sweet song at the altar

Just as Gloucester Cathedral and the Chapel of Tarore are two landmarks on Karen’s journey towards the priesthood, so on Saturday God Himself seemed to be confirming how special were the things we were witnessing.

Because as the ordination began, a plump tui, with its ruff of white neck feathers, perched in a shrub barely a metre behind the altar window. The early Pakeha settlers called the tui The parson bird, of course – and is there any other bird which sings so sweetly of Aotearoa?

And at the culmination of the Eucharist, when Bishop Justin, and Tony Gerritsen (the Principal of St John's College) had moved out to the back deck to distribute communion to folk there, a monarch butterfly gracefully pirouetted around the serving party.

Celebrating, it seemed, with the rest of us.

The Rev Karen Kemp will be installed as Dean of the Tikanga Pakeha students on Sunday, February 9. And the next issue of Taonga magazine will carry an interview with her.