The Holy Family Parish Methven

The Ladies of the Women's Catholic League














The Children of Our Lady of the Snow School.

The Holy Family parish in Methven is much larger than Rakaia as the town has a population over 1500. There is a school also attached to the parish called Our Lady of the Snows. Methven is a growing town as it is a ski town. It has a senior school of 500 pupils and they are garnered from a very wide area. The Mount Hut Ski Field is very near and you can literally drive up to it in an ordinary car during the summer, but during the winter you would need chains on your four wheel drive. I did drive nearly all the way but stopped near the top as it looked a bit precarious and a long way down. You get lovely views of the Canterbury plains on a lovely clear day. Its funny that when you go up mountains one always feels like praying because one suddenly feels so small and insignificant against the vast beauty and size of nature. Here one realises that a little bird has much more power than you do as it soars up and around on the thermals. But what gives me a different power is that I can understand that, the bird can’t.

Writing about birds what makes me smile here is how they play chicken with the traffic, just flying out of the way in time. But some don’t and mostly the bigger birds. When the early English settlers came here they brought many species of our birds with them. Sparrows, black birds thrushes chaffinches and magpies. It is so nice to wake up in the morning to the sound of the dawn chorus with hundreds of sparrows chirping away.

Methven has a lot of Motels and Backpackers hostels for the skiers and during the summer months the trampers. Over here the ramblers are called trampers as they trample through the bush. Over the right side of the mountain there is the Rakia Gorge and a most beautiful lake called Lake Collridge. The colour has to be seen to believed, it is a blue turquoise. The reason it is like this is because the Lake is so deep and that the melting ice that fills it up also has a blue tinge to it.

Though the Holy Family is a smallish parish with 60-80 people it has a very active Catholic Women’s League. (CWL) who do many things in the village and see that the sick and the house bound receive Holy Communion. They meet twice a week to pray the rosary and have a Holy Hour every week and pray for intentions that have been given to them. They have been praying for a priest and their prayers have been answered to a certain degree. A Father Kennedy who is retired wants to live in Methven and is willing to celebrate Mass everyday for them, but he doesn’t, understandably want to be the parish priest as he is over eight. At the moment they usually only have one Mass every fortnight. While I have been here they have Mass two or three times a week. What is lovely for them is that both Rakia and Methven will have a Christmas Mass because of my presence in the Pastoral Area of Mid Canterbury. The Holy Family Church is big and could hold at least three hundred. Though the normal congregation of 60-80 are lost on a Sunday, when they have a funeral it gets fairly packed. Because it is such a small community everyone knows everyone, so if someone dies there is a tradition that most of the community turn up.

Our Lady of the Snows’ school is a lovely little school, which was started by the Mercy sisters. However there is only 31 Children attending which is a worry. Here in New Zealand they allocate teachers by the number of pupils who attend. At the moment there are four teachers but if no new pupils start at the beginning of the school year they will lose a teacher, which then makes it harder to attract new children. This is a shame as they have lots of space to play and its right next to the Church. It is marvellous to see the children so relaxed and free and easy, playing mostly in their bare feet. There is a lovely homily feeling about the School. They come to the Mass on Tuesday morning when it is celebrated and I also gave the Children who had made their First Communion an Advent Reconciliation Service which I will start doing for Our Lady’s School when I get back.