The Scottish Election


Scottish National Party 47 seats
Labour 46 seats
Liberal Democrats 16 seats
Conservatives 17 seats
Other 3 seats

Clearly the Powers of Darkness have not been kept at bay this time around. The Scottish National Party have squeaked ahead by a single seat. We can look forward now to several years of listening to how every problem in the world can only be solved if Scotland is truly independent. Once independence is achieved, the weather will improve, flowers will be brighter, the rocks and stones will ooze money.

Locally here in Tweeddale, the Lib Dem incumbent Jeremy Purvis has held the seat by 10,656 to 10,058 for the SNP's Christine Grahame. They both worked very hard and it's certainly been a squeaker.

Some comments I agree with from somebody called 'The Gray Monk'. Half of the opprobrium and maliciousness one sees coming from belligerent parties in ecclesiastical disputes (if it's not a case of shallow opportunism) seems based on the fear that we really are absolutely alone in working these things out for ourselves. The Church is the work of the Spirit of God. Calculating the number of people at a particular service has always been a lousy way of deciding whether the Church is doing the work of its Master.

It's terribly important that where there is to be a community meal or some other social occasion where a glass of wine (or two) might be served that it take place 'after' the communion service and not before. The Social Convenor in my congregation is asked to please take note.

Bringing the orchestra back from the dead




I have an old recording of a Canadian band playing something called the “Ha! Ha! Ha! Polka.” There appears to be a tuba, a piccolo, an accordion and (I think) a guitar - some sort of percussion as well. The recording is from the 20’s and is very scratchy. Were I to wind up an old gramophone in the church on a Sunday morning and lower the needle onto a spinning old shellac '78 record we would discover, hidden beneath the patina of cigarette smoke, finger prints and car pollution, the last evidence for the existence of these four individuals carved into little grooves in a soft medium. Somewhere along the line The Good Time Gang sang and played in front of an surprisingly simple machine which converted the vibrations of their voices and of the sound of their instruments into an inscription on the medium of the record disc. Get a microscope out and you’ll see those little ridges and bumps running inside the groove. As any audiophile will tell you, the ambient background makes itself heard too – not only the echo from the walls of the room but the very space is represented in the background noise – now decayed and marred by time but still present – meaning that you can, in fact, hear the room.

It wasn’t the only monument they left. I suppose there are gravestones somewhere. There could be relatives. But let’s play with the idea, shall we, that this little shellac disc is essentially ‘it’ – the only way in which the voices of these men - their words, the movement of their fingers over strings and keys, the wood, brass, reeds and even the very room they were in - will ever “leap again into life”. There we are, in church on a Sunday Morning and the Rector is playing an old record on a gramophone and the Good Time Gang are singing the Ha! Ha! Ha! Polka. In the third pew on the Gospel side of the church, one of our parishioners is feeling nostalgic. Her father had old ‘78’s like this – dance bands and ballads. Further back in the church, somebody who is very old feels a bit miffed since we’re all treating the music of his youth as if we were unearthing a dinosaur bone! “I’m not dead yet”, he mutters. We could ‘imagine’, along with the emerging music, the musicians themselves – in cheap suits - a not terribly good Canadian ensemble in Montreal or Toronto struggling to make ends meet in a day when better bands were getting all the good gigs. Albert the tuba player, with a flask in his tuba case and an eye for the ladies, Karl the piccolo player, chronically indebted – the only one who’d ever played ‘real music’ before some personal reversal sentenced him to a life in low clubs and speakeasies. All dead of course - a musician's life was never meant to be a long one.

When I was the Rector of the Advent in Montreal I was on my way out the front door of the church when I noticed a little cardboard box that somebody had left on the front steps of the church. It contained a small collection of very strange things which had belonged to a lady of considerable age – personal items and bric-a-brac. The word ‘Church’ was scrawled in red marker on the outside of the box. Somebody, clearly, had died and the family had been emptying out her apartment. They wanted this and that and may have argued over a few items but eventually the lady’s worldly belongings were boiled down to a box of things which nobody cared to possess. These were placed anonymously on our front steps in the hope that we could do something with them since it seemed a shame to just ‘bin them’. The Church can use them. Not! The box was binned, of course - almost immediately – the items were of no use to anybody. That’s the way it works. Our ‘artefact’ is never particularly noble, useful or beautiful but somebody in the family feels just a bit queer tossing the last bit of Granny’s life into the garbage. And so they pass the box on to the church in the hopes that her artefact may prove useful to somebody because they don’t want their grandma to just ‘dissolve’ or to go ‘poof’.

Our artefact - it could be a piece of graffiti in a prison cell or a note in a baptismal register indicating our birth in the parish of X or Y with a later note fifty pages later registering our death and inhumation in the parish cemetery.

The Jews in the time of the emperor Hadrian believed that there was a single part of the body which never corrupted. It was alleged to be a bone in the spine – variously described as being at the base of the spine or the base of the skull. They called it the ‘almond’ and they believed it could not be destroyed. From this almond seed God would remake the human person at the Day of Resurrection. A conversation is recorded between a Rabbi and the Emperor with respect to the ‘luz’ (almond in Aramaic) or indestructible bone in the spine:

"Once God has softened this bone with the Dew of Resurrection, it will become as yeast is to the dough, and from it the body will be built. The same body that decomposed will be reconstructed….'And the almond shall blossom' refers to the luz (nut) of the spinal column. Hadrian, (may his bones be crushed), asked Rabbi. Joshua ben Hananiah, saying: 'From which part of the body will the Holy One, blessed be He, in the Time to Come, cause man to sprout forth? ' He answered: ' From the nut of the spinal column.' Said he: 'How can you convince me?' He thereupon brought one before him; he put it in water, but it was not dissolved; he let it pass through millstones, but it was not ground; he put it in fire, but it was not burnt; he put it on an anvil and began beating it with a hammer, but the anvil was flattened out, and the hammer was split, but all this had no effect"

It was not until the middle ages that the presence in this indestructible artefact within our spines was demonstrated (to the rabbis’ satisfaction) definitively not to exist. The suspicion remains, however, that there must be some part of us which must be left – some bit, some spark, some unmeltable kernel. It is no surprise, then, that some men over time have yearned to possess, create and leave in their wake some artefact of their existence. Any leisurely walk through a city cemetery will provide us evidence of tombs inscribed with the names of great families, their conquests and triumphs. We all tend to go on rather too long with eulogies at the funeral of a family member. We attempt with our words to carve something on stone – to pin a remembrance to the river bed so that the current will not take it away.

Being 49 years old is close enough to 50 to give me pause. I can look around me and see a certain amount of evidence for my existence. I have a twenty-one year old daughter in Montreal with fond or at least mixed memories of me. She can tell me stories that even I have forgotten. I can Google myself on the internet and find rather a lot – most of it from my Montreal days. I can tell my daughter a story about when she was very little and when we lived in a small town in northern Quebec. The story brings back the smell of the place - the wilderness made up of stumpy black spruce anchored in endless bog, the smell of diesel fuel, babies brought to their baptism in traditional smoky-smelling native-tanned moosehide swaddling bags. Not all of the recreation will be completely accurate, but with attention and with love that world leaps into being.

Jesus appears in the midst of his disciples at ‘sundry times’ between the Resurrection and the Ascension. His words, his promises, his challenge to the world all vindicated by his Resurrection. He shows himself as the ‘first fruits’ of the Resurrection which is to come – one which includes us, and the fact of which give us the possibility of a wonderfully fearless life lived here in the flesh and in the world and the possibility of tremendous courage in the midst of trouble. I am not about to make a pillock of myself by embarking on what I might imagine the physics of Resurrection to be. It is, as Paul declares it to be, ‘a mystery’. But I would try to provoke a little extra courage on the part of each of us. We do not need to worry about leaving an artefact. If nobody remembers us much after we’re dead it doesn’t really matter. Let our house crumble! Let the grandchildren undervalue our worldly goods and pitch them into the skip. Let the gentle earth fill in the spaces where we built our houses and planted our cabbages. It really doesn’t matter. We’re back in the church – now - listening to the Good Time Gang playing their polka. Let’s start there.

Being created in the Image of God means that there are a few God-like things which even we are capable of. Adam can ‘name the animals’ – it’s one of the things God lets him do. And even as crooked little creatures we know what it is to pay attention to something. That gift of love and attention which we provide is the lion’s share of what brings the Good Time Gang to life in our minds for a brief period. It’s just a small spark, isn’t it, but we know it to be true nonetheless. Even as creatures and not the creator we know what it is to execute a rough analogue of life giving imagination.

This is God’s world and its existence is guaranteed not by the stony bits that endure all storms – by hard little molecules which can never be wiped out. Existence is God’s gift – life, both passing and eternal, issues from his love and his attention.

So what do we proclaim as the basis of our hope? Ourselves? Our molecules? Our bones? Our strength? Our resistance to change? You know as well as I do that, that with the exception of a few Pharoahs and perhaps Chaucer, time and change will eventually win out. Even their names will eventually be remembered no more.

No, we proclaim God’s love for men and women, girls and boys. We proclaim the presence of his Spirit within these little clay pots we call our bodies and our personalities and the small portions of time we recognize as our earthly lives. Our lives are sustained by him – our future in his hands – who fills all things, sustains all things and directs all things to their full and perfect Ends.

Be of good cheer. Christ is Risen – the Lord is Risen indeed, Alleluia!

The transformation of an altar.

If you've not yet seen The Lives of Others (Das Leben Der Anderen) then this is the week to see it. Not because the film will be withdrawn any time soon - it's playing in a large number of movie houses and I doubt there's any risk of it being suddenly withdrawn. No, it was the juxtaposition of Sunday's first reading - the story of the conversion of St Paul in the 9th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles - with the theme of the film which prompted me to suggest that you see it this week.

The main character, Gerd Weisler, is a senior Stasi agent in search of subversives within the artistic community in East Germany. The film is set in the year 1984. Mikhail Gorbachev has yet to come to power in the Soviet Union and there is, as yet, no respite from the normality of well-supported surveillance of potential dissidents within the artistic community. Weisler is shown at work during interrogations and while teaching students at a Stasi training school. A true zealot, his orthodoxy allows for none of the personal lapses and retreats into humour sometimes seen among his colleagues.

He is presented with the case of Georg Dreyman - 'one of our best playwrights' - and told that here is an individual above reproach - creative and popular but still a true believer in Socialism and the GDR. Weisler is dubious and takes on the project of finding out the truth - believing that there must be some chink in his armour somewhere.

As the surveillance progresses, it is the interrogator himself who finds himself vulnerable. His fellow officers of the The Ministry for State Security who claim that they are the 'sword and shield' of the people prove to be craven and sloppy individuals attempting to preserve their own niche in the bureaucracy. It becomes clear that Dreyman has been targeted by a government minister with romantic designs on the playwright's girlfriend. Weisler is offended by this intrusion of personal jealousy into the work of the State and so commits his first lapse in discipline, allowing Dreyman to become aware of the minister's interest. His own orthodoxy proves a fragile thing, however, and this first lapse ends up opening up the floodgates. Weisler begins to hear the words being spoken in the apartment he has wired with microphones rather than merely listening to them. His zealotry is exposed for what it is - fear and insecurity - and a better man begins begins to emerge within Gerd Weisler.

Those who are proud to be our 'sword and shield' and who spend their time inspecting the belief and practise of others for signs of weakness or impurity should wonder whether such a divided vocation has its origin in love or in fear.

I am enjoying myself far too much to blog this week. Easter was marvelous! The best Holy Week ever with joint services between the various congregations in our little town. Three well attended Good Friday services in our own church. Holy Saturday service well attended. Mostly all the right notes during the Exsultet. Ended up in the church garden with choir and congregation singing at the top of their lungs disturbing the neighbours. Came back into the church to get a good look at the sanctuary with its left-over cloud of incense and the smell of the flowers - candle lit and mysterious with the empty cross in the corner. A feast for the eyes and the heart. We had good weather for the sunrise service (not to be taken for granted in Scotland) which began in the graveyard of the local Church of Scotland in the centre of town and ended up on the hill behind the Episcopal church. Crown Him with Many Crowns sung loud enough to wake the neighbours who'd been disturbed the night before. Breakfast followed - the rectory hens had been laying furiously all week and there were enough eggs for everybody. Church now smelled of bacon rather than incense. Easter congregations well up over last year and a really good feeling in both. All is very well. See you next week.

R. Rabbit

Easter Eggs

My chickens were hoping to take advantage of the recent good weather to catch a few rays and generally relax after a tough winter. Think again, I said, this is a purpose driven flock! They have now been informed of the upcoming Easter morning breakfast following our sunrise service at St James'. They have grudgingly agreed to consume as many insects and greens as possible over the next ten days so as to produce the requisite number of proper tasting eggs with deep yellow/orange yolks. I'll start collecting them on Thursday. By Holy Saturday the next week I'll have a hundred and twenty - more or less. Enough for breakfast

It's a strange combination of folks from various churches (or no church) who we get out to our sunrise service. A mixed bag of young and old from our congregation - the youth group from the local Church of Scotland. A grandmother and her two wee granddaughters. We meet in the old church yard at St Mungo's - down the hill among the graves and in the darkness. We say a psalm and a few prayers. Others join us in dribs and drabs. The movement is then upward - up towards high ground - we say a few prayers, a mandolin is produced and we sing some songs.

The Easter drama took place in the same pink light of dawn as another small group of people moved around and tried to understand the import of what they've been told in part - daring to hope against hope.

So speaking of eggs. We're no longer used to a nice fresh egg straight from the henhouse. We phone up the rector after he's given us a half-dozen of the best eggs available in Christendom and we say "those eggs tasted different. You sure they were okay? The white of the egg wasn't perfectly clear. Part of the white was raised up high and the other bit was runny."

So - first of all - with respect to the eggs you bought at Tesco last time you went shopping - there was at least two weeks and probably three which separated their production at the business end of the chicken to the time they were placed on the shelf by the pimply lad in the green apron. In that three weeks the following things happened:

During the first day all the CO2 left the white of the egg. A perfectly fresh egg when cracked into a bowl will have a slightly cloudy white. That's how you know you're eating it within 24 hours of being laid. The cloudy raw eggwhite is a good thing. An egg has structures - there are two little cords which anchor the yolk inside the egg - called chalazae and in a fresh egg these are visible. There are always two of them. No, they're not embryoes or imperfections - they are supposed to be there. They'll be gone within three days so you'll never see them in a Tesco egg - only in a nice fresh egg laid by one of the Rector's hens who spends her day running around after beetles. You might see a small disk on the surface of the yolk - sure, flap your hands and worry a little more! No, this is not a developing embryo either. This is the place on the yolk - called the germinal disk wherein a fertilized egg would eventually develop an embryo once placed under a broody hen or in an incubator. You can find a germinal disk on a a fertilized egg - you can find one on a sterile egg. They're part of the egg you will never see as the Tesco egg slowly loses all its form and turns to undifferentiated goo sitting in the lorry, sitting in the warehouse, sitting at the back of the store and eventually sitting on the shelf. A fresh egg also has two types of albumen or egg-white. When you break one of my eggs onto a plate you'll see the runny bit which spreads out and the thick bit which has some height and maintains its form. Height is one of the hallmarks of a good fresh egg - the height of the thick eggwhite and the height of the yolk. My eggs stand out. They're outstanding. They stand at attention in the frying pan and on your plate. Eventually they stand at attention on your toast. Enjoy!

If you're not coming to the sunrise service at St James' Church then for goodness sake find a farmer near you and buy yourselves some proper eggs for your Easter lunch!

A song by The Nine Inch Nails sung by Johnny Cash towards the end of his life.

A story for Lent

It's not new but it seemed more appropriate than much of the dross I've posted of late.

Momofuko Ando, the inventor of 'Ramen Noodles' has died at the age of 96. His funeral took place last week. It is not known whether he owed his long life to a regular diet of his own noodles but the number of young men walking around in their underwear in garret flats, subsisting on a regular diet of cigarettes, beer and Ramen Noodles, before going on to steer the ship of state, build bridges, die for causes and write poetry must be significant. His passing should not go unnoticed.

I went to Sainsbury's some time ago and decided to stock up on a few dozen packages. I asked if they had 'Ramen noodles' and was looked at yet again with that bored expression from the boy in the apron as if I'd asked for something from Mars. They're called Ramen Noodles worldwide but not in Britain where 'instant noodles' seems to be the local name for them.

What you get when you Google your grandmother.....

Before she was married my Nana was a member of the Ingenues - an all girl band which was one of the models for the band featured in 'Some Like it Hot'. There have been a few still photos here and there - little snapshots of Nana arm in arm with a man in a fedora and a pencil moustache who wasn't Gramps. In the photo above, the girls are playing to dairy cows in the University of Wisconsin's cattle barn in an experiment designed to see if cows would give more milk when exposed to calming music.

I tried my hand at stand-up comedy once. I recognize the expression on the cows' faces.

For a girl from small town Iowa with a forbidding father, Nana's years touring the world with the Ingenues would have felt like freedom.

In the video at the bottom of the page, my grandmother is the young woman playing the cello (and the banjo and the bassoon) in the front row on the right. Hat tip to my sister Anne for finding this on the net.

This is just nice. I thought you'd enjoy it.

What we see at first glance may not be the way things actually are. We generally see our own faces staring back at us.

Somebody should invent a season wherein we spend more time on what we don't know than on what we think we know.

They have?

Pop Goes Your Heart!

So it's a slow news day. Things are filtering in slowly and I can't bear to wade through all the 'highly available' opinion which is mostly stilted so I'm pouring myself a nice glass of sloe gin (it's now ready!) and watching this cartoon. It's the sort of cartoon I always looked forward to when I was a child.

No you haven't missed the video. It's right below

Badger, Badger, Badger

In a slightly less jerky format

Kate heads out...

I've never worked in the American Church (other than a summer internship in Ketchikan, Alaska when I was in seminary) but I am filled with a tremendous admiration for +KJS not having lost the plot in the midst of all this bother. I'd have checked myself in for a 'little rest' long ago. Her comments and her approach to this conflict have, so far, been open and gracious.

It's where the rubber hits the road, isn't it - being in the midst of people who dislike and mistrust you - making your case surrounded by a host of opponents? There are many quick roads to resolution - one of which is to simply state the case aggressively and let the 'opposition' hang - another, to withdraw at a moment of your own choosing. But Christians - more than mere nationals - are citizens of something greater and Americans should not be immune to sobering lessons in international citizenship - even good Progressives.

It's not enough to present a faultless position and to leave such a meeting with one's Talent intact.

Part of me hopes very much that stasis is not preserved in Tanzania. But cutting the lines which connect one to the rest of the world and retreating to the 'known' has always been one of the arrows in the quiver of our American chums in centuries past and it doesn't work in the long run. The world is not built that way any more. There are no islands. The theologian Langdon Gilkey, writing about his experiences while interned by the Japanese in China where he'd been a schoolteacher at the outbreak of the war, writes in a journal article:

Since life's moral structure is continually distorted, more than intelligence and good intentions are needed, though modern idealistic culture does not believe this. In order to counter the conflict, disorder and violence that result from our imperfect responses to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, new and deeper commitments are necessary, hope even amid hopelessness is needed, and above all again, courage. Courage is the basis not only of the conquest of anxiety and fear, but also the ground of any reflective repentance, self-criticism, and reconciling gestures to those who threaten us. Justice and self-control may be as necessary as reason for creative community; but trust, humility and the capacity for love - what has frequently been called faith - are also needed.

It's that fear thing again!

The latest round in the great British 'get scared until we feel alive' game is the announcement today in The Times that doctors will require police or military protection when they walk around deciding who gets to live and who will be left to die once the Great Epidemic takes place - all this due to some dead turkeys south of the border in England. That the virus which will kill us hasn't even evolved yet is apparently just a detail. It's been a slow week for global warming. The latest roundup of muslim terrorists is a week old and starting to go green around the edges like something left in the fridge for too long. The second article in the Times this morning went one step farther. Doctors, it appears, will need their own guns. Will it be this bad? Of course it will. The British public clearly has no control. The people who survived the Blitz and the IRA and Margaret Thatcher were another race of men who bear no resemblance to the weaker and less worthy crowd which presently inhabits our island and can be depended on to murder any doctor who makes hard decisions.

When I was ten or eleven there was an American serial horror show on television called Dark Shadows. My sister and I weren't allowed to watch it because our youngest sister Ruth would have wanted to watch it as well and she was far too young. The show was genuinely scary and therefore far too good to miss so we simply invented homework parties at the homes of a couple of feral children we knew whose parents wouldn't take any notice. Feral friends are, of course, the salvation of bored suburban youngsters but that's the subject of another post.

So when Barnabas Collins was about to bite the neck of one of his victims or when Quentin Collins had finally been turned into a zombie and appeared from behind the door we children were able to feel something queer and primitive rising up in us. Something akin to what our ancestors would have felt in the presence of a genuine opponent or a wild animal. Fear is a thrill and we are short on bona fide thrills these days. With more money to spend than we've had before and with life expectancy rising we would need a frisson or two. The only thing falling as quickly as the genuine crime rate is the percentage of people who vote. You see, we're not passionate about very much and therein, I think, is the problem.

A problem which the media (like a helpful call-girl with nimble fingers) has identified and will be pleased to help us with.


Also: We could all fall into the sea!

Always 'on message' and never surprising...

One thing about people who are in the midst of a scrap is that they are all so bloody boring. We can blame the organism itself, I suppose, invariably draining the peripheral members of blood in order to keep the heart, brains and lungs alive. What works with the human body in cold water tends to be the ordre du jour as well for individuals and groups embroiled in conflict. They set priorities and decide to concentrate on only three or four things to the detriment of all else.

Known many divorcing people? Ever wished you had a large cork that you could jam into their mouths accompanied by a cartoonesque 'Ploink' when they start rattling on about the outgoing spouse ? Have you noticed the searching look in their eyes as they try and ferret out from you the only datum they require: Are you on my side or on the other side? Anything else you say - well sir, that's lost on them - an anecdote, story or reflection - an expression of joy or loss, anything winsome - it's all binned and the conversation is judged worthless unless they've acquired at least one useful increment in the case which they are building. Such individuals - the file-keepers, the wrongs-recorders, the letter-daters - they cut themselves off from any semblance of community in the long run - other than mutually-reinforcing groups of people who may have suffered the same fate.

As characters they become rather flat - always on message and never surprising.

Of particular concern is the way in which the world reduces itself, for such embattled folk, into only two shades. Like a mall security guard who is looking only for shoplifters, like an ocelot lying on a tree branch scanning the forest floor for something walking by which is edible - these folk aren't interested in the 'details'. There is simply dark and light. The job of the embattled warrior is not to 'describe' anything in its complexity it is to 'declare' in which corner it might be most usefully placed. The varied world we live in is rendered mere opportunity.

Nicholas Berdyaev describes such a narrowing of vision in a journal article he wrote in 1937

For the fanatic there does not exist a manifold world. This is a man, obsessed by one thing. He has a merciless and malevolent attitude towards all and everything except for this one thing.

If the opponents are best described as animals, dead stones or pagans then so be it. We have a job to do, which is to reduce the complex molecule into something simple and digestible. Unless the truth of a situation can be reduced to 'our truth' which is a 'useful truth' then we're not interested. Gone is the colour of life and the possibility for change - gone the possibility of the hidden being made real and or the subtle discovered in its previously unseen beauty. Gone now even the necessary repentence for anything other than a lack of vigour in pursuing the well trodden path towards a corporately determined enemy.

A Canadian attempts to keep his A-1 Credit Rating

From the Globe and Mail. Let there be no mistake about it - we're responsible folks in Canada and we'll always go that extra mile. There should be more of us in high places.

Of course there are plenty of choices to be made

All bets may be off as to what the results of next weeks Primates' meeting in Tanzania will be but it''s quite clear to Tom Wright that the manual on the table in front of them is the Windsor Report. It's just a matter of putting it into action. The documents are good documents. A lot of work has gone into them. It would be a shame if we'd wasted our time anywhere along the way. The Windsor report 'part deux' will consist of a series of action points. The Bishop of Durham, according to Ruth Gledhill , believes that:

The Primates have little choice but to follow Windsor at the meeting next week.

I've always been wary of anybody telling anybody else that they 'have no choice' but to follow this or that course of action. Such words, when uttered at a Synod or during labour negotiations are never descriptive. Nobody ever stops arguing because the geezer at the microphone has just accurately described the situation. There'd be no discussion if his point were self-evident.

So the Bishop of Durham's words are not designed to say how a body of people (split along several axes with a few of them being relative unknowns and subject to heaven-knows-what sort of pressure from lobbyists arriving with satchels, satellite phones and 'briefing packets for our African friends' or from pressure groups within their own constituencies) is going to act once they're together at a meeting. I'd have put my money on either chaos, nothing much at all, or perhaps something novel - a bit of fun and games with African Primates hiding chairs during the first hour of the meeting - but I would hope for something unexpected. I think that pushing the red button on the Windsor Report and watching things unfold as they 'must' would have been the last thing we'd see. I'd have given it slender odds, frankly.

When number three bishop in the C of E and a damned fine New Testament Scholar opines that the Primates and his own friend Rowan 'have no choice' but to take a certain course of action I cannot believe that he's being descriptive. He knows better than that and so does everybody else. These are 'prescriptive' statements. There are no less than five references in a relatively short article about how much hard work has gone into the Windsor Report - how complete it is and how beautiful are the staples and covers thereof. Tom Wright doesn't know what's going to happen in Tanzania either.

The course ahead is one of discovering possible common ground and preventing the worst possible outcomes. It's a time for making sure that, while substantial agreement is not possible right now, the field is not muddied too badly by the sheep and that avenues for future work are not closed absolutely. Unlikely allies will be encouraged to make agreements - some people will need to save face - compromises will have to be made - some will have to leave the meeting dissatisfied. All things, no doubt, that drive principled people (who have made a career of showing how one thing leads clearly to another if looked at correctly) to distraction. Any number of Rowan's spiritual forebears have had to square circles - clearly it will have to be done again. I don't think a reminder to the Primates or their handlers that they have no choice in the matter is either politic or particularly godly at this juncture - in fact it rather runs against the grain of what needs to happen at such a meeting viz. precisely that exercise of 'choice' which hauls people back from their respective precipices.

Not Standing Quite So Firmly

The battle has not been won, apparently. Somebody named Greg Griffiths at a website called Stand Firm (more temperate than Virtue Online, less temperate than Anglican Mainstream) is predicting that the so called 'global-south' and the American dissenters are going to lose badly at Tanzania. He doesn't use those terms - in fact he tells his opponents (and he names all sorts of his detractors by their Christian names in a rather amusing segment which I'll let you read for yourself at the URL above) that they've all tripped over their dinks (those that got 'em, anyway) - that they've gone too far, that their day is done, their dog is lame and their 'wagon is done fixed'. In the midst of threats and vitriol, however, these are his salient predictions:

1. There will be no crowning of a new American Primate at the meeting in Tanzania. This is certainly not what we heard earlier about how there was going be a chair somewhere and Robert Duncan was going to be sat upon it with a dwarf sitting at his feet, a bucket of mandarin oranges beside him and a girl fanning him with an ostrich feather. This was the only part of the meeting that I was looking forward to hearing about. The whole prospect of having people dash to the available chairs and someone thrust onto a throne was like a little bit of British history come back to life.

2. Rowan Williams will only 'ultimately' side with the global south. I'm assuming this means that he will not side with the global south in Tanzania. He will choose his words carefully at the upcoming meeting and then go home and have a cup of tea and think about who he's getting advice from.

3. Rowan Williams will never preside over the ejection of a Province from the Anglican Communion. There is no mechanism for this and this would not be his preferred course of action.

4. Defections from the defectors will occur after Tanzania fails to produce Elvis. Defectors are warned that Anglicanism will be renewed - again 'ultimately' (try telling Inland Revenue that you will 'ultimately' pay them) and that if these 'twice turned' ever want to come back they will be returning as from 'a rear echelon' - the relationship 'will not be the same'. These I take it are threats - an angry response to something which may or may not be happening among people known to Mr Griffiths. There are obviously some passionately held feelings here. We won't dwell on it.

5. Peter Akinola from Nigeria may not come to Lambeth 2008. I'm not sure how this squares with the ABC 'ultimately' siding with the global south. This may need to occur over a distance.

6. The American Presiding Bishop will have support. These supporters are grudgingly called 'the usual suspects' but the spectre of +KJS being left alone standing under the unanimous glare of the Primates is perhaps going to be too good to be true.

The article doesn't come across as one great concession to a rocky road ahead but the points it contains seem to indicate nothing else.

When politics goes sour.

Simon Jenkins is probably kidding. Maybe he's not.

"At times I can understand countries whose officer class, sitting in their barracks over brandy and cigars, finally lose their cool and send tanks into the streets to "defend the nation" against corrupt ministers and weak assemblies".

We could all fall into the sea!

So here I am planning to go out to British Columbia in May for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary and I find that B.C. is due to have its long-expected Uber-quake. I'll have to check the 'trip cancellation insurance' I bought to make sure that I get my money back if my family gets swallowed by the sea between now and then. Jeez, there's always something isn't there? Mind you - the Globe and Mail had it down as story number two. The gist of the report is that we're now able to predict earthquakes better - we know which areas might be worst affected by a tsunami when (not if) the quake eventually hits and, oh btw, here are the things you need to keep in your emergency kit. It's good to see a story which ends with something practical. It's great to see a newspaper which then moves on to the other stories.

I don't live there among the phlegmatic Canadians any more though. I live here with the Brits. Which brings me to my quick glance at the Times this morning where it is evident that

Fear Season Has Begun in the UK

We'll just pile them up, shall we? Global Warming, Bird Flu and Rabies from the Continent. What can we do? Sweet bugger all, apparently. Can we prevent it? Not really. Will it hurt? Oh yes, it will be terrible. Sit down and let me tell you how terrible it will be.

It will be horrifying. You've heard of mad dogs? Fits of aggression and foaming mouths - staggering about looking for something to bite. Imagine your little Billy affected like that. I know his Nursery teacher says he's a gentle soul but not then. Not after he's been brushed against by a dog owned by a man who lives next door to a Lithuanian who comes from a village where the postmaster says that somebody destroyed a mad dog just last year. Once bitten Billy will change - his breathing will grow hoarse and irregular. He'll foam at the mouth - he won't be himself. You'll see it in his eyes as he advances on you. You'll scream 'No Billy, go back! Don't try and bite Mummy, she loves you! Billy! Billy! Aaargh!. The streets of our villages usually filled with chubby teenager girls pushing prams and boys with shaved heads misbehaving outside Tescos will be filled with the screams of middle class mothers whose posh prams are now bereft of children since they've succumbed to the illness or have been shot by the Rabies Control Warden because the latest guidance
from the Scottish Executive is that 'you can't be too careful'.

If you ever find yourself doubting that 'fear is the only reality', no doubt Channel 4 will soon oblige us with a 'documentary' which intersperses dramatic testimony from Kazakh villagers about the attack of a rabid dog upon a woman washing her clothes by the river with a darkened images from a handheld camera running shakily along the corridor of an upscale British dwelling accompanied by the sounds of frenzied bubbly breathing (possibily Billy's) as somebody at the far end screams in terror and and slams the door shut.

Those of us who come from countries where Rabies is endemic can tell you that life continues very well in its presence. We have massive reservoirs of the disease in communities of Racoons, Skunks and Foxes. Our dogs are all vaccinated. Every once in a while a person needs to be vaccinated 'after' they've been bitten by a wild animal. We get by quite well, thank you.

Bird flu? Well it ranks high on the list of things to fear. I should declare my interests here because I raise hens and watched many months ago as people tiptoed up the lane quickly passed my henhouse in case a coughing chicken with a thermometer up its vent and a note from its GP should suddenly descend upon them. On the evidence on one dead Swan in Fife last year a local pram-pusher declared that my wee dog couldn't play with her dog because my dog had been in contact with chickens and, after all, 'You can't be too careful'. Yes actually you can be too careful. You might end up looking a utter pillock. Not looking like a pillock is usually one of the basic building blocks of life - one of its primal drives. Pillock Control Officers would have an easy sweep in most UK suburbs.

Problem is in this country that fear is about the only thrill people get any more. They are so frightened of living, of taking risks and of moving forward. These stories and the way these stories are presented seem akin to a calming opiate. Progress is unnecessary - such risks would be stupid - we may all be dead soon. And as for the media who dress the stories up? They're like clowns who appear periodically to 'set the mood'. They know their medium. They would rather thrust needles into their faces than neglect the worst case scenario. They're just providing a service to the feeble-minded. They get paid for doing that.

Lighten up folks - there's one death per birth. That's the way it works. Mozart never made his 30th birthday. While you're fretting and flapping like - well, like a sick swan from Fife - there's tons of good stuff you're not doing.

BLS over at The Topmost Apple has suggested that we post a couple of our favourite poems. I'd have loved to find an audio file for the following poem to include with it but haven't had any luck so far. Email me if you know of one.

* * * *

Limited
- Carl Sandburg

I am riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the men
and women laughing in the diners and sleepers shall
pass to ashes.)
I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and he
answers: “Omaha.”

Helsinki Complaints Choir

Do choirs complain? Of course they do! The Finns appear to have perfected the process. Enjoy

A job well done - sort of...

HM Revenue has my paperwork. They owe me just a little. Not enough to make the process worth it but enough to give one the satisfaction of being a good citizen and 'beholden to no man' These sorts of deadlines should happen to me more often. Not because I'll get anything done with a week to spare and then walk around proudly like the dog with two wotsits. I'll get it done 'just' in time like I always do.

A looming deadline for a tax return gives rise to many other unexpected improvements in one's lifestyle and environment. I will always find a hundred other things that want doing first. I tidied - nay scrubbed - my office. I went through the shelf in the bathroom and binned all those old razor blades and bits of soap. I tuned my mandolin. Finally I offered a desperate prayer to God in the realization that I was living a lie. I am indeed a lazy, self-sabotaging shit. So I sat down with the relevant papers and got the sucker done.

Now that my tax return is filed I really don't care if my desk is messy. The day seems brighter - there are a million things for a clergyman to do on his day off.

Whenever you reach for me.....

I am normally so proud to be a Canadian! I'll fly the flag and pour maple syrup over anything at all. I could even make a cogent case for why a rodent is a fitting national symbol for a country. Celine Dion may not be our greatest ambassador at the best of times. When people say 'Oh, you're a Canadian - so is Celine Dion" I wonder why they couldn't have mentioned Lester B. Pearson, Pierre Trudeau, Donald Sutherland or somebody else. A recent recording of Celine Dion favourites in a 'Gregorian' style really hits the nerve, though. Who are these people? Are they serious? Are they taking the piss?

There's really no question but that I have to order this from Amazon simply to say that I own my own copy - that something which so typified the empty and vacuous nature of the age I live in did not pass me unnoticed and unacquired.

Besides - she's a Canadian. So am I.

When you go to the Amazon site, check out the sound clips at the bottom of the page. My favourite is the first one - "The Power of Love" - all those long nights at the monastery with nothing but other monks, a roaring fire and a Muzak machine.

Wot, no schism?

Who let the Lutherans off the hook?

Mollie, over at 'Get Religion' asks why the disciplinary hearing. of an ECLA pastor is making such a tiny footpring in the press.

"I’m surprised the story hasn’t gotten more coverage, considering how obsessed the media are over the Episcopal Church’s significant issues with homosexuality and how to interpret Scripture."

"Michael" comments later and suggests that a comparison between the two denominations should be made.

"I think it would be interesting because the stories are actually so dissimilar. There is no significant insurgency in the ECLA, no mysterious Third World bishops, no larger questions about the global community, no angst over female priests. Instead, the dispute in the ELCA is largely about homosexualty with questions about scriptural interpretation as a faint overlay".

There is almost no reason at all for the ECLA to have avoided the 'righteous' hammering that has been dished out to the Episcopal Church in the USA. It has always surprised me. Back in my home country, the Anglican Church of Canada maintains excellent relations with the Lutherans. They've overtaken the United Church of Canada as 'partners of choice'. We exchange pastors. The Lutherans in Canada and the U.S. have high and low. They have evangelicals, charismatics and woolly liberals within the same denomination - often within the same Synods and I assume that this is the case as well in the U.S.A. So why no public schisms? Why no Lutheran Bishops with bushy eyebrows threatening to be parachuted in as the Great White Hope by the Larger Lutheran World? Why no Lutheran version of Peter Toon rising from his coffin on a nightly basis to bite necks? Why is no one nailing an extra thesis to the door of the Lutheran Church? Doesn't seem fair somehow.

I do note, however, that the big money which is available to finance schism, opprobrium and liberal/moderate bashing has not been made available to the Lutherans. If you go to the Institute for Religion and Democracy you'll see little action tabs marked 'Methodist, Presbyterian and Anglican'. Either the Lutherans were neglected because the 'L' box was inadvertently left in the car by somebody who'd rushed home to see if the oven was still on or because those wishing to foment True Religion in the Lutheran church forgot to apply for funding.

This happens in a lot of organizations - failure to apply for relevent funding is a legitimate grounds for dismissal of a chief executive or a development director. Somebody's head should clearly roll.

What an opportunity missed! There are world-wide fellowships there for the splitting. Lawyers and lobbyists aren't being paid their retainers. Lutheran bloggers are standing at the fringes of the Episcopal dispute red-cheeked with shame like boys who haven't been picked for the team. Look at these people - sitting at the same table! By default they seem to be saying that the question is manageable, a subject of discussion and a "dispute largely about homosexualty with questions (of) scriptural interpretation as a faint overlay".

Can you imagine!

Yes, I know the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan is dire and Iran is not far behind. I know Fidel Castro is ill and might not live. I know, I know. But my Sloe Gin is ready to drink! I've been looking at it steeping, mellowing and improving in great big sealer jars and it is delicious! Epiphany was the day. I cracked open the first sealer and it's just right. There were mockers who said it was going to be too sweet. They said I'd picked too early. Nah - It's just right. Less sugar and everybody would have had Deaconess faces.

It begins with Sloes. Sloes are in the same family as plums. They are the fruit of the Blackthorn bush - a hedging shrub here in the UK. Little white flowers are followed by blueberry sized fruits with single stones in them. They are practically inedible off the bush. Bite into one periodically just to remind yourself of that. Very sour. Not nice.

You pick yourself a few quarts of these and then you sit down in front of the fire with a wooden toothpick and you poke each and every one a couple of times. You get to the point eventually where you can pick up three sloes at a time. You fill a big (1.5 litre) sealer jar just a smidge over half full and then you pour the berries back out into a scale and weigh them. You add half that much sugar by weight, pour the berries back into the jar and then fill it with gin. This year I used Tesco Value gin at about 37% alcohol because it was cheapest (I filled six big sealer jars with sloe gin so I've got some to give away). Rumour has it that you should not scrimp on gin but should get the stronger variety at about 43% alcohol but I don't intend to be that picky or that spendthrift.


The gin will begin to colour after a day or two. You twirl the jam sealer a couple of times a day for the first three weeks and then every two or three days after that. Normally you pick your sloes in early October. You can't touch the stuff until Epiphany! Some people leave it sitting with berries in for six months or more. You can then decant it out into bottles and leave it for as long as you like. The colour will go if it's exposed to the light. It will taste great but look fairly dull and brown. As for me and my household, we will drink it .....right now.

Please leave your snake in the pew
at the end of the service!

Quoting Bill Leonard, Dean of the Divinity School of Wake Forest South Carolina, Terry Mattingly writes in a very old article which I came across by accident:

"What the serpent handlers keep saying to us -- whether we want to listen or not -- is that we all tend to emphasize the parts of the Bible that make us feel comfortable," said Leonard. "We try to make it a tame book. Whatever the serpent handlers teach us, they can teach us that the Bible cannot be domesticated."

Well this is true - it was Schweitzer's task in The Quest for the Historical Jesus, wasn't it - to emphasize the strangeness of the New Testament witness over against its domestication by 19th Century Liberalism. Look at the mess that has gotten us into! So maybe a little domestication is okay? No need to transfer absolutely everything over between the world of the text and our world as if there were absolutely no difference.

If you're not convinced - then book yourself off a Sunday morning - bone up on Mark 16:17-18 - replenish your stock of anti-venin and go see for yourself. Wikipedia give you a list of churches where snake handling is still practised.

Please note the Canadian entries on the list. British Columbia and Alberta frequently complain that Western Canada is under-represented in appointments to the Canadian Senate. Having each more snake-handling churches than South Carolina or Alabama is probably not helping the cause.

Alabama
Rock House Holiness Church on Sand Mountain in the rural northeast
Alberta, Canada
True Holiness Believers Gathering (Lethbridge)
Holiness Fire Church Of Lord Jesus With Signs Following (Edmonton)
British Columbia, Canada
The Right Hand Of Jesus With Signs Following Church (Kamloops)
Small Believers Of Light Church With Signs Following (Revelstoke)
Georgia
The Jesus Name Believers Holiness Church (Canton)
Holiness Church of God in Jesus' Name (Kingston)
Holiness Church Of Lord Jesus (Roopville)
Indiana
Hiway Holiness Church of God (Fort Wayne)
Kentucky
Crockett Church (Fields)
East London Holiness Church (London)
Michigan
Apostolic Church (Warren)
Ohio
Full Gospel Jesus Church (Cleveland)
Full Gospel Jesus Church (Columbus)
South Carolina
Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name (Greenville)
Tennessee
Holiness Church of God in Jesus Name (Carson Springs)
Sand Hill Church (Del Rio)
House of Prayer in Jesus Name (Morristown)
West Virginia
Church Of The Lord Jesus With Signs Following (Jolo)
Full Gospel Jesus Church (Micco)
Full Gospel Jesus Church (Kistler)

Don't know if I'm prepared to answer the inevitable question which is how somebody encounters an article on 'Snake Handling' by accident.

Quite struck today by headlines in my 'newspaper of choice'- the Times - which stated quite boldly 'Anglicans Block Gay Adoption'.

This is not what the letter from Canterbury and York to the Prime Minister was saying. It suggested, rather, that Church and voluntary organizations involved in the process of adoption should not be forced, under pain of falling afoul of antidiscrimination laws, to be agents of 'gay adoption' where issues of conscience and/or Church teaching were involved.

I'm wondering what goes on in the minds of headline writers when they write headlines in this manner:

1) Are they just rushed and needing to meet their mates at the pub and therefore any old thing will do.

2) Does the one headline motivate people in the newsstand to choose the Times over the Telegraph with its (slightly) more accurate headline of Churches unite against gay laws

3) Is there an actual motivation to make things look worse or more sinister than they are with respect to the meddling of bishops in social affairs? One would expect that of the Guardian but not the Times.

On a related note, the article by Mark Harris at Preludium had some excellent points about the role of press (and quasi-press - bloggers and pundits) in attempting to create realities rather than to merely describe them. Different media and a different angle, perhaps, but much of the same thing.

I find obituaries, in the main, to be terribly written. They are generally composed by a junior member of the newspaper staff according to a set formula. I have been suggesting to families, for some time now, that they try to write their own obituaries for departed family members. I tell them to use the cadences and rhythms which come most naturally to them. Our families have certainly risen to the challenge:

My husband's no longer alive.
He insisted that he could still drive.
In lieu of carnations
our church needs donations.
His funeral's on Tuesday at five.

Dear Mummy has gone off to heaven.
She died yesterday at eleven.
The funeral's not private
so try to arrive at
the funeral parlour at seven.

Did anyone know Alvin Fetter
the inveterate drunkard and debtor?
His family's bereft
but a few things are left.
If he owed you please send us a letter.

We're all feeling sorry for Ed,
especially now that he's dead.
We sure find it odd
and wonder why God
didn't go and take Grandma instead.

Getting right with Zeus

It appears that the Cult of Zeus is making a comeback in Greece. An organization called Ellinais has recently won a court battle to be established as an official religion. The right to celebrate weddings and other official acts will not be far off.

There has been huge hesitation on the part of the government to allow the group to repossess its ancient temples since these are all in a fairly broken-down state. Members of the Altar Guild are long dead or languishing in low-budget nursing homes. Rising damp is a ongoing concern and the recommendations of the last Quinquennial Review (117 B.C.) have not been acted on.

Nothing motivates religious bodies quite as much as the disposition of property, however, and the group appears quite adamant:

"We are Greeks and we demand from the government the right to use our temples," said high priestess Doreta Peppa.

A word from the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks about the 'recovery of civility' and its preservation in the midst of conflict.

"Verbal violence, the Bible suggests, is a prelude to physical violence. Those who cannot sustain a civil conversation will eventually find it impossible to sustain a civilisation. The sooner we recover civility, the better"

Is there some alternative to fighting fire with fire? The chief Rabbi thinks so and feels that there is an art of extending friendship across lines of dispute and in spite of profound differences of opinion.

Why Clergy Should Wear Clericals

I particularly liked the bullet points part way down which described the situations in life where clergy are likely *not* wearing clerical garb:

If the minister is a shyster who is fleecing his flock for their money, he is most often wearing a sports coat and tie.

Everybody arrives at their own happy medium. Apart from church services where I wear the appropriate vestments, I tend to wear my black shirt and collar on Sunday morning, School Assemblies, Hospital Visits, visits to people I don't know terribly well and most importantly

*drumroll*

When a police car is following me. I can slip my tab collar in in about five seconds flat.

I tend to pronounce the word 'Skwurl' which gets me in trouble around these parts. You gotta give 'em credit for trying - The United Church of Canada has come up with a site called Wonder Cafe. I've been chuckling about this video all week. Check out the poster campaign on the main site as well. Top marks for creativity....anyway.

http://wondercafe.ca

In the Diocese where I was ordained, one of the more cantankerous archdeacons reserved the right to teach all new priests how to celebrate Communion. We'd already been priested - most of us had said our first Mass at some point already but he started from the opinion that we'd done it badly. And so we were trundled up-Island for a weekend of browbeating. Apart from a morning spent poring over the Canons of the Diocese of British Columbia, we had to learn the various 'manual acts' - movements, gestures and hand positions - associated with the celebration of Holy Communion. One of these manual acts, of course, occurs at the epiclesis which appears, in our liturgy nowadays, as an element following the Eucharistic narrative (the story of what Jesus did and said when he took bread and wine at the last supper). The priest will place his hands over the elements with his thumbs interlocked and invoke the Holy Spirit over these gifts of bread and wine. I could have told the archdeacon that I knew all about that. I had already gotten quite a fright at that moment in the service at the Church of St John the Evangelist in Montreal during my training.


I was the subdeacon there for a while (looking vaguely like a scruffy young hippy who'd been mugged by angry sacristans and dressed up in a tunicle but that's another story) and it was my role to stand to one side of Father Slattery as he celebrated Mass, be prepared to remove the pall from atop the chalice at the appropriate moment, genuflect when he genuflected and to raise the edges of his chasuble during the Elevation. It was all new to me - the churches of my youth had been nothing like this and I wasn't yet convinced. That is, until we got to a point in the liturgy one Sunday morning where Father Slattery placed his hands with interlocked thumbs over the open chalice (unlike the illustration above where there is a pall covering the chalice).

St John the Evangelist in Montreal was, at one time, sinking into the mud. Cracks had begun to appear in some of the masonry as a result of the shifting foundations and questions emerged as to whether the building would survive the slow sink into the ground. Then they built the Metro - Montreal's subway system - in 1967. The line ran right under St John the Evangelist and the structural work managed to prop up the building to such a point that any further slippage was unlikely.

Father Slattery had just gotten to a particular point in the liturgy where he spread his hands over the elements on the altar when a train ran under the church. Things are more connected than we might think and the vibrations ran up from the train to the structure of the tunnel to the foundations of the church and to the altar and all that sat upon it. The clear mirror-like surface of the Communion wine rippled. I said to myself 'My God, it's true'.

Years later I am able to explain all this with recourse to the physics mentioned above. I do, however, still find myself filled with awe and expectation that God honours those particular moments in time when dumb things are presented to him with a reasonable hope that he will change and animate them.

And I will never forget at which particular point in the Mass that hope is expressed most clearly - almost defiantly - in words that beg some immediate answer.

See what the dog brought up!


So what's the deal with jellied salads? I didn't like them when I was young. I was forced to eat 'just a spoonful' and was told knowingly that I'd grow to like them with time. I remember them back in Winnipeg when I was small - most particularly the evolving configurations of Tomato Aspic - appearing regularly like successive incarnations of the Buddha at church suppers and family events. They were still on the table when we first moved to Victoria, B.C. in 1965 - glorious 'oeuvres' in scarlet, green, pink or dappled grey. And then nothing. *Poof* - they went out of style, or were declared 'infra-dig' by the leading women's magazine. They disappeared.

It was the sixties. The Summer of Love was just around the corner and there was no place anymore for the formality of these compositions - for bits of egg, meat or marshmallow suspended in a product which was meat-based but, please - made from what bit of the beast, exactly?

One wonders if there's not a prejudice against mixed things - the laws in the Old Testament proscribe garments made of mixed materials. American television is still remarkably coy about portraying the relationship of couples across the colour divide - even after the changes of the last 40 years. Recordings of a saxaphone playing baroque favourites just don't sell.

For my part, I never liked jellied salads simply because there were all these 'bits' and they were never frankly one thing or t'other. Children prefer stories with predictable endings. Try changing a predictable ending the next time you're reading to a small child. Listen to the protests. They detest ambiguity.


At the table, they are forever holding up a bit of food on their forks and asking 'what is this'? and 'do I like it'? Before they risk a taste they want to know which category it belongs to. We pretend that children maintain a natural openness to new experiences but that's a load of old bollocks. The child's question at table is that of a rigid purist.

Those of us who are old and compromised - we take ambiguity as a matter of course. We'll never be able to proclaim our purity and excellence in any one thing so we might as well empty the fridge of any leftovers not crowned with green fuzz and plunge them into goop and serve them up to our relatives.

When it comes to the shocked expression on the face of the wee boy looking at this wiggling green tower, we can only sigh:

"Just wait kid. One day, when the wife has left you and you've been overlooked for promotion and your knees don't work any more, you'll be scarfing down that stuff as if it were your last meal!"

Among the Canadian contributions to the world - apart from snowmobiles and plexiglass there is of course Glenn Gould - with all his neurosis and ability. He wouldn't let you touch his hands which he would keep dipped in a pail of hot water prior to any concert. He brought his own slumping little chair with him. He gave up public performance altogether quite early in his career. There are two famous recordings of the Goldberg Variations. One, recorded in mono in 1955 and another in 1982. I'm particularly partial to the earlier recording but to everyone his own. A video has been circulating on Youtube in the last few days with a version of the Aria and seven of the variations that more resembles the later recording and has Gould with all his eccentricities. He hummed while he played. He wouldn't stop. There are a few recordings of various works where this becomes problematic. In most cases you learn to live with it.

Not all my predecessors have been big fans of Santa Claus. They felt rather pressed to make a choice for or against the predominant commercial Christmas culture. Fair enough. The United Church of Canada has tried to at least bridge the gap betwen the two.

This is what the Scottish House of Bishops looks like prior to the retirement of our Primus, Bruce Cameron. Idris Jones of Glasgow and Galloway (second from the left) is our new Primus. The Diocese of Aberdeen and Orkney is still vacant. Their attempt to elect a new bishop 'failed to elect' and so the process begins all over again.