Old soldiers never die

Meeting friends in faraway places can be exhilirating, but there's a bitter-sweet feeling when you know you're very unlikely to meet again. I spent almost all of yesterday in the company of Helen and Siupeli Taliai. Siupeli (the name means 'jubilee' because he was born in 1926, the centenary of Tongan christianity) is much the older of the two and at 86 is beginning to slow down. He was in many ways the ablest Tongan minister of his generation, but thirty-two years ago he was virtually expelled from Tonga after a period of conflict with the then President of the Church. He had (and still has) an uncompromising way of confronting what he believes to be wrong. It hasn't always won him friends, but today he is an elder statesman figure for those who want to see change in the Tongan Church and State. In both Tongan and English he has a powerful command of rhetoric - his speech after my ordination is still a vivid memory.

As if wanting to squeeze every last drop of energy from life he has been furiously writing - two out of three volumes have now come out giving (in Tongan) a commentary on every hymn in the Tongan hymn book. Between them, Helen and Siupeli must know more than anyone alive about that tradition, still extant in Tonga and wherever Tongan missionaries have gone.

Most of the hymns originated with James Egan Moulton, the Victorian missionary and creative genius who founded the school of which Siupeli was later the Principal and translated the Bible into Tongan. Siupeli (whose own grandfather went into exile out of loyatly to Moulton in the 1870s) keeps alive Moulton's memory and has many of his publications. This was the Victorian export model of christianity. As well as the life of Christ, his students learnt mathematics, astronomy, history (topics like 'the life of Peter the Great', 'ancient Greece'), science (how an airship works), Tongan legends and English literature  (Tongan translations of Milton and John Bunyan).

Notice the little kava bowl in the bottom left of the picture - for the ceremonial (and to my taste revolting) Tongan drink.