An Ordination Sermon
preached in the Diocese of Montreal - 199?

John 21:15-22

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon
son of John, do you love me more than these?”

“Yes, Lord,” he said, “You know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”
Again Jesus said, “Simon, son of John, do you truly love me?”
He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”
The third time he said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time “Do you love me?”
He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger
you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old
you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead
you where you do not want to go”
Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.
Then he said to him, “Follow me!”
Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them
(This is the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and
had said “Lord, who is going to betray you?”)
When Peter saw him he asked, “Lord what about him?”
Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return,
what is that to you? You must follow me.”



Peter turns around and sees John walking after them
a few paces behind
humming one of his new hymns

What about him? Peter asks
Does he have to feed the sheep as well?
Does he have to follow too?
Does he also have to die in service?

There is a child’s question here
a question about Justice.
Am I the only one who has to do this?
What about him, what about her?

There is an adult’s fear of loneliness as well
will I have company?

And the answer – the grown up answer is – yes and no

Yes you are the only one who has to do ‘this’ and
No, you will not always have company while you’re doing it.

But maybe I need to backtrack:
Most of my early essays were filled with the words ‘this’ or ‘these’
circled by the professor
because it was no longer clear from the context what ‘this’ of ‘these’ referred to.

Jesus asks Peter – Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?
These ‘what’?
More than ‘this’ life?
represented by the items of a fisherman’s life
scattered around on the beach –
these nets,
these spools of braided line,
these floats?

Or – do you love me more than these other disciples love me?
You, Peter, pre-eminent among my followers.
Do you love me more than these others do?

The question arising between a man and a woman, - a parent and a child could be playful or maybe it probes at some perceived weakness.

Do you love me (of course you do)
Do you love me (I want to hear you say it)
Do you love me (I suspect that you do not)
Do you love me (I wonder if you know what that means)

I’ll roll the dice and will hold that:

1. When Jesus asked Peter if he loved him more than these that he was referring to the other disciples gathered with them on the beach.

2. He asks the question three times because Peter has denied him three times and

3. That when he asked Peter whether or not he loved him he was wondering if Peter knew what that meant.

Because it is not clear
that we always know what love means.

The general moves to the particular. The general
whether it is love (in general),
ministry (in general),
the life of human beings (in general)
is something that can be talked about but never experienced.

You will never meet humans in general
you will meet Stan and Doris and Tabitha and Rex.

Or work in a neighbourhood which is typically working class
or typically old money.
You will work in this or that parish
with its particular population and its particular history.

God (in general) is the god of the philosophers
the idea of god,
the possibility of God.
We know almost nothing about God in general

The glory of the Incarnation is that God wrapped himself up in the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth and achieves His highest moment not in the solitary being of a point of light but tied up with the smells and sounds of the Middle East
the dust of the road,
the quiet of the Garden,
guests at a wedding,
the crowded roads of Jerusalem at Passover.

And so the story of one man and three women
trained in all the generalities of ministry
moves to the starting gate in a race
where the course ahead is not of any set length
and the path is as yet undetermined.

You want to be here
we take that datum as something assured.

You are suited to ministry and
will become more adapted to it with time
we take this as probable.

You are needed
this is certain,
whether or not the mainstream seems to want you or not.

(Look at the representation of clergy
in movies and on television.
There’s not one of them that has a chin!)

But it will not be only your inner core of parishioners who will call on you.
This seemingly unfriendly mainstream will also dial your number at all hours of the night and will call upon your counsels in the wee hours in ways you might not imagine.

The request will be similar in most cases.
What does the fact of God’s love mean here?
What does it mean for me?
In this moment in my life
and in the life of my family?
What does Christ say about this?
What does the Bible say about this?
Where is God in all of this?
In all this grief – in all this change?
In this weakness of mine
with respect to this son of mine?
This illness of mine?
This loss that I have incurred?
Will you translate the generalities of the Bible,
the generalities of the Mass,
the generalities that my child is taught in Church school
into something which can give me life?

Does this beautiful field of wheat,
blond, expansive and everlasting
ever become a loaf of bread?

And then ministry, like love, will become knowable and known:

When you can attach a time and a location and a situation and faces to the word
when you can remember the smell of the place
the expressions on the faces.
When you run afoul of the particular place
and make a significant mistake
and come to know why.

When you know that you have the choice of extending your personality
and your energy and your time
into the lives and fortunes of other human beings
and you decide to do so.

You do so not because you are impelled by some Ghostly force
(that would not be a gift on your behalf but rather an empty reflex)
but because you choose to
you want to
you feel you must.

That love is voluntary is evidenced by the fact
that not all are loving.
Love is a choice
and you will encounter families, marriages, institutions
and even the ministries of some of your colleagues
where the path of love has not been taken.

When there is a price to be paid
and there is a price to be paid
for wrapping yourself in the life and the environment of another person.
Acts of love take their toll on your person
on your time,
on your innocence
and on your sleep.

When another person is changed by an act of love
and you yourself are changed by it.

You must love yourself – and take seriously your own horizons.
You are not called to suffer for suffering’s sake but for Christ’s sake.

You must love your families.
Don’t be professional with them. Let them be who they are
in all circumstances
and at all times.

But don’t take this as an invitation to be reserved.
We must take it as axiomatic that you are up for a little adventure
the demolishing of a few horizons
you want to see things go ‘boom’
You have a healthy and godly curiosity about what people are like on the inside,
you entertain the fancy that maybe – just maybe – the parish or the ministry you serve might turn a corner and bring the whole Church with it
and that you might have had some small part to play in that transformation.
And why not?

I’ve heard plenty or ordination sermons which describe to the candidates all the limits which exist to what they can and ought to do in ministry.
That it won’t be all they have expected it to be
that they must remember to sleep and eat lots of whole grains.
God knows that we’ve waited long enough for something more than this:
that we should simply preserve ourselves at all costs.

We’ve been there – we’ve done that
and now we propose that we are ready for something more.
That we would be able to participate in what God is about in the world.
At the risk of seeming foolish, or credulous
at the risk of falling flat on our faces.

John likens it, in the larger story, to fishing
We have cast our nets the better portion of the night
and have gained only questionable purchase
on anything remotely resembling a school of fish.

So why not now – with you – in your particularities of history and personality?
Why not in those particular ministries to which you will be called –
that in your ministries at the beginning of a new millennium,
you would cast your nets for the five hundredth time
this time at a different angle
and at the behest of something akin to a voice which you hear within yourselves
that something would, in fact, pull back –
that to your surprise your net would actually grab on to something
and you would find yourselves hauling in a miraculous catch of fish?

We wait the unfolding
(in time and space and within the company of real men, women and children)
of love made manifest
in your words and your actions
in your failures and in your successes.

Will you have company – in the church,
yes and among your colleagues as well.
Can anyone answer for you and live the particularities of your situation of ministry? None can – these choices for and against love, for and against risk,
these choices are in your hands.
It will cost you everything.

But do remember that Peter is not told to go forth
but rather to follow.
And the abandonment of self which he embarks on
is not an abandonment of self to the void, or to nothingness,
but an abandonment of self to the care of Christ who walks out before him.

That you would abandon yourselves
to the tasks of love
and the mystery of the history of God in the world

Saltspring Island, British Columbia



Okay. So it is paradise. Weather has been lovely - being serenaded by a chorus of frogs every night has been the icing on the cake. The parents are having a 50th wedding anniversary which is the occasion for the visit. Family are all arriving in the next day or two so there are decorations to put up, music to sort and caterers to cajole.


Everybody here has a hobby. A number of people sail or play golf. A few do pottery or fancy woodwork. There's a fellow down the road from my folks who raises Tibetan Yaks. I find myself wondering whether this was a long term goal of his - the sort of thing one does after having spent 20 years selling stocks and bonds - was there ever a dreamy expression on his face as he looked out of his office window. Yaks, he said, that'll be just the ticket!

So now all of a sudden I'm wondering whether I''ve been shooting below the mark with my little flock of ten hens and a cockerel in Penicuik. Yaks! Maybe a few Yaks in the Rectory garden would be just the ticket. A memorable way to put the church on the map. The rector of Penicuik - right, him, the fellow with the Yaks!

Holidays

Following a (hopefully) stonking good Pentecost service on Sunday (baptisms and red helium balloons!) we are hopping on an airplane for a flight to the country of my birth. For those of you who haven't been to Canada I helpfully regurgitate the following public information video on real Canadian life.

Don't let anyone tell you that Canada has changed and that most of the country lives in quite typical North American suburban bliss. That's bollocks! Canada is still the land of great expanses, Indians, French Canadian trappers, Mounties, the lot. We've got 'em all. The mounties still sing to girls in the forest. I don't know where they hide the orchestra - probably behind trees.



Saltspring Island (where my folks live) is perhaps populated a tad more extensively by retired folk wearing pastel golf shirts. I shall post a few pics when I get there.

Flesh and Spirits. New Album by the Gena Rowlands Band. The title song. One one hand it's about somebody staring dreamily at a waitress. On the other hand there's lots of philosophy there. Flesh and Spirit - the limits and frailty of flesh but their ability to be a vehicle for Spirit. Good stuff.

Ah! A reasonable day. A warm wind. A Scottish vista. Holidays in the offing. Electricity bill paid. Concord between the sexes. Concord with one's children.

"Loud and Clear"

- Pink and Noseworthy (Shanee Pink and Mark Noseworthy - what did you think the band's name meant?!?!

Is anybody else going to the Churches' Media Conference at Swanwick from June 11th - 13th? If you are then please drop me a line beforehand and we'll get together and drink a few, erm, Lemonades! The list of contributors looks very interesting.

Just a brief message of hope to musicians in their fifties that creative life doesn't end there.

Da Vinci Horse Manure

There was a medieval 'fayre' on the grounds of Rosslyn Chapel this afternoon. It's only a couple of miles down the road from where I live. We've had a few weeks of great weather - generally our quota for the year - and we decided to chance it. It was rained-out, of course, and we huddled under umbrellas and queued for a burger and watched the rather sad spectacle of damp folk in period costume pretending to fight with swords. A number of people took refuge over at the Chapel itself with its new Welcome Centre and Souvenir Shop. The Rosslyn Trust has spent a lot of money on the place since 'the film' came out and people are flocking to the site from around the world. Here it is only May and there were already several cars in the parking lot sporting number plates from other countries. It now costs £7 to visit. There were three of us and it seemed a little steep just to stay dry. Members of the Scottish Episcopal congregation which actually meets in Rosslyn Chapel on Sunday mornings were in one of the tents outside running a cake stall - overpowered by the bright colours and heraldry of an adjacent stall with a group pretending to represent the Knights Templar. I didn't see much evidence of communication between them. It was that sort of day.

The owners of the neighbouring farm who share an access with Rosslyn Chapel have presumably had their fill of the esoterica addicts all filing up the lane wearing newly-purchased tartan scarves and announcing proudly that their grandparents were 'Scotch' (or perhaps French and therefore indirectly related to Mary Magdalene). The sign above, which they placed at their gate in full view of the tourists, pretty well sums up the situation.

Rotating Celestial Bodies



The music is from the String Quartet #2 by Alan Hovhaness

Something I didn't know:

Every planet in our solar system except for Venus and Uranus rotates counter-clockwise as seen from above the North Pole; that is to say, from west to east. This is the same direction in which all the planets orbit the sun. Uranus was likely hit by a very large planetoid early in its history, causing it to rotate "on its side," 90 degrees away from its orbital motion. Venus rotates backwards compared to the other planets, also likely due to an early asteroid hit which disturbed its original rotation.

Janos Starker - Still Alive



I heard Starker play Kodaly's complete Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello at the Banff Festival in 1976. Why is the Third Movement here today? Apart from it just seeming like a 'cello sort of day' here in Penicuik, it was a day of 'putting pieces together'. Rostropovich died a few weeks back so I've been thinking about cellists. Madpriest has been talking about ferrets. So I'm thinking about cellists and ferrets. What unites cellists and ferrets? Well, sir, I wrote a story once upon a time which contained both Janos Starker and a ferret. It was prompted by the concert I saw at the Banff Festival - the way Starker lifts his bow at the end of the movement as if to tell you that the piece of music is over - as if you might not know. I had come down to the Banff School of Fine Arts after having finished high school in the Yukon Territory - not exactly Canada's cultural heartland. I felt terribly outclassed by everybody there at the School and imagined that these little cues were meant for dummies like me. Years later I wrote the story. It still needs some work.

Dog Blogging

(with side-order of chicken)

It's been done elsewhere, I know, and with great effect! Fellowship and bonhomie ensue, people comment and say nice things that I don't deserve just because I have a cute mutt. This is Clio. I know it's a cat's name (or maybe a car's name) but it seemed to fit and she answers to it. I've made terrible decisions over the years but Clio (the dog not the name) was one of the better ones.

I'm not clever enough to add captions so this is probably pretty low-class dog blogging. I know where the start button is on my computer and the Blogger software basically writes my posts for me.

But I am awfully proud of my Labrador Retriever - the bane of rabbits, pheasants and postmen - but comparitively well behaved with chickens and sheep. Okay, one small fatal glitch with my favourite Speckledy hen Christmas before last. Unpleasantness and much chiding followed. Okay - and one small pursuit of sheep but she was led astray by another more feral dog. She's almost three years old and is awaiting a hip X-ray to see if we're going to go the way of puppies or not. Three's a good age for motherhood.

Mstislav Rostropovich
March 27, 1927 – April 27, 2007

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