WHY WE SUFFER AND HOW SUFFERING AND PRAYER CAN MAKE US LIKE GOD (Letter to Dom Post, June 1)

The reason ‘Why people suffer’ (Faith, hope and war chaplains, June 1), is sin. Not necessarily individual sin, but generic. Like Anthony Pantlitz who accepts that PTSD made him ‘a better chaplain’, when we accept suffering we become better people.

The key to accepting suffering, as Pantliz proves, is prayer. And although ‘yelling the 23rd Psalm’ is great when you’re scared, meditation works better. In meditation we can keep company with the God who accepted 33 years of hardship and a hideously painful death, and it works simply because we become like the people we spend time with.

You might call it a virtuous circle. In this prayer of meditation we get to know and fall in love with the God who suffered because he loves us. We learn how to suffer and to pray because we love him. And suffering with prayer makes us more like God.

"LET THEM GO TO WINZ" (Letter published in Dom Post, May 28)

The call from Auckland Action Against Poverty for lawyers to help thousands of beneficiaries in debt to Work and Income (Beneficiaries appeal debts, May 25) shines a new light on our Prime Minister’s statements on the dire need for homes for the homeless, and his plans for 26 hotels to house the rich.

On the day he flew to Paris for his daughter’s graduation he said, “There have always been homeless people.” And he has advice for these homeless people, too. "Let them go to Winz."

His utterances are becoming increasingly reminiscent of the late, unlamented Queen Marie-Antoinette, who said in regard to her subjects who lacked bread, "Let them eat cake".

I look forward to next year’s elections in the hope that like hers, heads will roll.

WILL PFIZER NOW SELL ITS LETHAL DRUGS FOR EUTHANASIA? (Letter to Dom Post, May 16)

Pfizer will score brownie points (Ban brings execution 'turning point', May 16) for deciding not to sell any more drugs for lethal injections for criminals in the US.

Call me cynical, but it occurs to me that there’s now a much bigger market for its death-dealing chemicals in despatching the frail, the elderly, the terminally ill and depressed people of the Netherlands, Switzerland and Oregon.

 

And in New Zealand too, if euthanasia enthusiasts here get their wicked way.

DISCRIMINATION IS NOTHING TO GET EXCITED ABOUT (Letter to Dom Post, May 11)

 

The Wellington City Council’s ban on teenagers and young adults’ birthday parties is indeed, as upset Mum Andrea complains, ‘a bit discriminatory’. And why not?

 

Discrimination is nothing to get excited about. Everyone has a right and a responsibility to discriminate the best course of action, even as to when to get out of bed in the morning.

 

In this case, the council sees its responsibility to protect ratepayers’ investment in their venues as outweighing the right of teenagers and young adults to cause damage to life, limb and property, and trouble for our overworked constabulary.

LOOSE CANNON FUELLED WITH NUCLEAR CANNONBALLS (Letter to Dom Post, April 10)

Any cursory glance at current headlines in The Dominion Post would seem to suggest it and the spectre of Trump, the ‘loose cannon’(Trump angry at speaker's snub, May 10) fuelled with nuclear cannonballs confirms it: in declaring 2016 a Year of Mercy, Pope Francis was right on the money. The world needs Divine Mercy now more than ever before.

 

Let us pray!

HELLBENT ON ASSISTED SUICIDE (Letter to Sunday Star-Times, May 5)

David Seymour and Jacinda Ardern (Time we got serious about assisted dying, April 1) are hellbent (I use that word advisedly) on what is actually assisted suicide. ‘Assisted dying’ is what happens in hospices, hospitals and rest homes. Nobody in New Zealand is ‘beyond the help of palliative care’.

 

In effect, Seymour and Ardern suggest normalising suicide, when youth suicide is already a huge concern. For the frail elderly and chronically ill whose maintenance is expensive, they want what would inevitably become not the right but the duty to die. They want doctors, whose purpose is to preserve life, to be able to end it.

 

In Holland, 97 dementia sufferers have now been killed by their doctors. The number of mentally ill patients killed in a year has trebled. Regulator Theo Boer, formerly an advocate for euthanasia, now says the Dutch were ‘terribly wrong’ to think they could control it.