It's that time again. The Annual Clergy Conference for stipendiary clergy in the Diocese of Edinburgh. This is not a holiday! No way, Jose! I suspect my parishioners may be nurturing visions of clergy sitting in groups telling jokes, drinking in the pub, griping about their lack of preferment, being nasty to the Dean and conspiring against the Bishop. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a priest I would not lie to you. Fact is - we simply get a good group rate at the Atholl Palace in Pitlochry. It just works out that way. It's just a place where we get together and work hard. We'd rather be at the Holiday Inn.

Things you can actually buy!

Andrew Brown makes reference to a geek gift he's looking forward to getting for Christmas. It's a t-shirt which actually measures the strength of the Wi-Fi signal where ever you happen to be walking at the time. I think the three AAA batteries sewn into the shirt might dangle uncomfortably and keep the garment from hanging properly. But if you're wearing one of these you're not exactly a slave to fashion, are you?

I don't know if anyone else has been adversely affected by the strikes at the Royal Mail but my new Canadian passport is hanging around formlessly in the void being played with by Schroedinger's Cat - probably languishing in a mail bag somewhere in the Edinburgh sorting office. It was sent on the 10th of October. My permission to remain in the UK runs out shortly and I need to bear said passport along with my person to the Immigration Office in Glasgow and apply for Further Leave to Remain. Something I can't do without my passport. Removal Orders and Deportation are really not my thing.

Needless to say I'm a tad anxious and desirous of your prayers for the successful arrival of this little blue booklet. All may pray - of whatever theological persuasion - making a joyful noise from the same songsheet!

Raspberry's Passport needs to be found.

V. Lord in your mercy,

R. Hear our prayer

The Rector's Warden from one of my congregations has just sent me this photograph saying that it reminded him of me. I don't see it. But then again as one of the world's truly execrable poets has said:

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us

To see oursel's as others see us!

I'm guessing the photographer was getting the message that the Winnie the Pooh costume he'd chosen for this particular shoot was less convincing wet and up close than it had been at a distance on the shore.

At my first couple of weddings here in the UK I was rather surprised by strange combinations of feathers sticking out of the heads of the female guests in attendance. They weren't hats, exactly. I've since found out that these things are called 'Fascinators'. They're all the rage in the UK, Oz and Middle Earth for weddings and posh sporting events.

Do we have them in Canada? I don't remember seeing them. Perhaps in Toronto. Nowhere we'd admit living, anyway.

They're little creations of feathers and sometimes a second element attached to a comb or morphed into the sort of 'mini hat' which Queen Victoria might have yearned for. Who knows - maybe there's a recipe:

Take one songbird, chop coarsely, apply sparingly to head

For those of you who are in the Territorial Army there's this little number in Army/Olive which can double up as sniper's headgear.

This is all occasioned, of course, by Rev'd Ruth's reflections on a recent wedding at St Mark's Portobello where she said that she wanted a Fascinator and wondering what sort of design would be appropriate. Oi! Ruthie! Set the challenge and we shall meet it.

The basic question is - do you want it to go with your cassock and surplice (in which case a black and white number could be found) or with your hair (God has richly blessed you with a rare hue of rich colour not always found upon the heads of clergy) in which case something purple might be more appropriate.

Clergy Conference will soon be upon us. I shall arrive with a selection and you can try them on and model them for us in the pub. Pictures shall be taken and offered to Scottish Episcopal Bloggers at a modest price.

Human Tetris

Tetris is one of the only computer games I've ever liked. I liked 'Pong' too but it's best played on a Commodore 64. The Japanese have come up with a version that can be played without a computer. Admittedly this is an odd thing for the Japanese to be doing but the results are pretty inspiring.



Thanks to Gareth Saunders for this clip

Time is running out!

Fr Knisely over at Entangled States is constantly coming up with interesting stuff. . The latest installment - quotes the following paragraph:

"'The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space. That's the conclusion of a group of Spanish astrophysicists who have calculated that observers inside such a Universe would see it expanding and accelerating away from them just before the flip. "

Going back to the original article doesn't help. I've as much chance of reading this as I have of flying to the moon. I suspect, though, that this could be serious. The astronomer in my congregation has noticed that the universe is expanding away from us. I hear he's not alone. That's why we get the 'red shift' in certain stars, right? So we must be 'just before the flip', non?

Is it even worth purchasing the 2008 Parsons Pocket Book? Should I get more furniture instead to fill the extra space?

Nick - you gotta help me!

The Times has the following report on the New Zealand reaction to the loss at rugby to the French:

Newspapers printed match reports in white type on a black background, reflecting the sombre mood. The foreign minister, Winston Peters, called the result a tragedy and suggested it could even drive distraught men to "beat up" their wives and children.

And we're talking about Kiwis here - they're supposed to be milder mannered than even the Canadians. Who'd a thunk it?

Without a false note

I was tremendously taken with the adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel 'Atonement' which I saw in Glasgow the other night. Even taking into consideration the denouement at the end of the film, the story remains a simple one. I read the novel a year or so ago and I am usually hesitant to see a film where I've enjoyed the book and cultivated a set of visual images to go with it. In this case the film adapts the novel well - I even found myself thinking I had seen certain parts of the film before.

The movie opens with words being typed on an old Corona and it is the power of uttered and written words which is at the centre of the film: Words spoken or written which can never be taken back.

We never simply record events. We inject ourselves into the story we are relating. The desire of a budding young writer - Briony Tallis - to have the world conform to her hopes and, ultimately, to her anger and jealousy forms the core of the plot. A community of men and women reel from the effect of a young girl's testimony and attempt, over time, to reestablish what has been broken by her words.

The film has been well crafted. I cannot think of a single regrettable image or badly crafted scene - not one false note. This was a very satisfying film.

Liberal Defence critic Denis Coderre was in Afghanistan yesterday talking to Canadian troops there. Would somebody please tell the honourable member that just because he's in the Opposition in Ottawa doesn't mean he has to grow a beard and look like the Taliban in Kandahar.

Yes you can be too careful!

A report commissioned by the Church of England advises us to leave our clerical collars at home because they make us a target for violent criminals. The whole question of the advisability of wearing clericals on the street has been discussed elsewhere. This is different - now we're into the realm of health and safety where we know that......

You can't be too careful

Let's deal with how the report begins. It begins with the pictures of murdered clergy.

It then goes on to state in one of the introductory paragraphs that a 2001 study found that "70% of clergy suffer from some sort of violence". That's a lot! Me, I've got the same package of plasters that I had back in Chibougamau in the late 80's. I'm not even sure that the adhesive works any more. Maybe I've been lucky. The author then states his own findings from 2006 that "48% of them (clergy) had suffered at least one violent incident in the preceding 12 months". Fine.

First you want to know what 'violence' in this context means. I'm just off the phone with somebody with whom I raised my voice. Was I being violent? I was being aggressive. What is violence anyway - being shouted at - given sideways glances? The definition given in the article ends up being pretty wide indeed

4.4 Often in a parish are one or two people who can use violence as described in footnote 2 above [which I can't find]. These can be people who have a grudge against the church, the vicar themselves [sic] or God. The vicar becomes the target of the abuse which can often take the form of anonymous letter writing to the bishop, attempts to discredit the vicar and accusations of improper behaviour. These are often long term problems that are seldom dealt with in a satisfactory manner according to those clergy who suffer from this sort of violence.

Ah. We're back in Britain again.

First - show pictures of four clergy murdered between 1996 and 2007. Truly horrifying stories, all of them.

Second - give statistics for a generalized form of violence which includes disgruntled Altar Guild presidents writing the Bishop under the name of Outraged of Penicuik and saying that the Rector is an utter shit who should never have been sent to the congregation in the first place. I'm sorry - that's not violence. That's the reality of ministry in some places (tho mercifully not Penicuik).

Thirdly - propose a series of over-the-top safeguards.

My favourite? From the appendix at the end:

All front doors should reach the European Standard ENV 1627

(This means that the door should withstand assault with crowbars for five minutes, withstand pressure on the lock of 600 kg and withstand pressure on the corners of 300 kg)

All I have to say is that on the day my Altar Guild starts to assault the front door for five minutes with crowbars I'm gonna start checking the Church Times in earnest for available positions.

------

On a more sober note. I had somebody decide to kill me once - back in the early nineties.

His marriage had broken apart, he was seriously manic depressive and we had found alternate accomodation for his wife and daughter when he had beaten them rather badly.

His plan was to lure me to the 17th floor apartment/hotel room he was living in and pitch me off the balcony. He was waaay manic when I arrived after his phone call. He was a round but still very well-built fellow and when I arrived he was sweating profusely and wearing nothing but a small pair of bikini briefs and kept telling me that it was too hot in the room and he wanted to talk to me on the balcony. "Not here" he snapped in a staccato voice, "on the balcony. On - the - balcony!"

I was clever enough not to advance into the room. I backed out slowly on a pretext and got the hell out of there.

I must admit that I had ignored any number of little warning bells in my head as I was driving over to his place. I shoulda known better. The next day he was threatening over the telephone to throw himself off the same balcony and I managed to do a two-telephone trick and have the Montreal cops sneak up and haul him down. On his way to the hospital he told the police about his plans to throw me off the day before.

I'm not sure that risk can ever be completely avoided or should be avoided, for that matter. The cultivation of good common sense pays great dividends, however. My one risky encounter with an unwell parishioner was cleary my own bloody fault.

My friend John Beach, that most excellent of Episcopal priests serving (with his lady wife Denise) as Rector of Emmanuel Church in Geneva, Switzerland (part of the American Convocation of Churches in Europe) has written a letter to his friends about a man named Hiram Bingham. John's letter is reprinted here with permission.

-------------

Dear ones,

Denise and I were at a conference in Nice last weekend and were struck by the beauty and soothing climate. After the conference, we attended the Chagall museum and were moved by the paintings of this French Jewish painter. It was in this museum, that I came upon the story of Hiram Bingham (for his biography you can look at his Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Bingham_IV).

Be certain to read about Hiram Bingham the IV, for there is a long line of impressive Hiram Binghams.

Anxious to limit immigration to the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. Bingham disobeyed his directives and issued between 2-3,000 visas over the course of the next year. Many of these were hidden in the American Episcopal church in Nice before they could be given transport.

When his superiors discovered what he had been doing, he was immediately fired. His family, however, was very influential, so he was given another post in Buenos Aires (then considered a hardship post) during which time he was instrumental in locating Nazi war criminals after the war. The state department become so fed up with his insubordination that he was fired from this position and moved to Salem, Connecticut where he disappeared into obscurity (I am told that Salem, Connecticut is an excellent place to disappear into obscurity). He arrived in the U.S. at age 44, and was never able to get a job for the rest of his life.

He tried several attempts to start small businesses, all of which failed. He died in Salem in 1988.

No one in Salem (not even his own children) were aware of his heroism until they were contacted by the Holocaust museum 5 years ago who wanted to commemorate Bingham. His own children were astonished when, over the course of 2001-2002 several memorials and a postage stamp were issued in his name.

Among the many people given visa, was Marc Chagall who was able to spend the war years in the U.S. Upon his return to Nice, he painted a series of oils paintings depicting the Exodus. I spent an hour looking at one in particular the Chagall museum on Monday. It shows the sinister forces in dark grey tones representing the Egyptian army chasing the Jews towards the Red Sea. One of can make out one person in the grey mass who is a bit separated from the rest, who has a yellow foot (the only bit of color on that part of the canvas). There is an ancient Midrash which states that the son of Pharaoh continued to think of Moses has a brother, so that his heart would not allow him to join in the genocide. The yellow foot was meant to represent the son of Pharaoh. It was also meant to represent Hiram Bingham. Chagall wrote in a letter found in Bingham’s attic where his confused children sought for documents for the holocaust museum. In it he stated that even in the hearts of those who are the beneficiaries of cruelty and injustice, a shred of human decency emerges and we can see that the darkness is not completely dark.

He referred to Bingham as a “bureaucrat par excellence”.

I spent a good while meditating on that yellow foot.

Love
John

Sunday 30 September
Pentecost 18

Amos 6:1a, 4-7
1 Timothy 6:6-19
Luke 16:19-31

I once encountered a Grizzly Bear in the southern Yukon Territory. I was all on my own – rather in the middle of nowhere. There had been other occasions when I’d been part of a group hunting moose that we’d seen signs of grizzly bears – their droppings and the places where one had dug under fallen trees. We’d felt quite confident and not a little emboldened by the presence of the rifles hanging on slings at our shoulder. I’d once seen a couple of grizzly bears fishing for salmon in the river. That time my mates and I were in a pickup truck and we pulled to the side of the road and watched the bears through binoculars from the safety of the truck.

The occasion of this solo encounter with a grizzly bear was merely a hike, however, and I was unarmed.

I am pleased to say that I was less than a hundred yards away from it and that I was completely unafraid. I could see the bear and it kept moving its head back and forth and sniffing the air so it was aware of me. Yes – your preacher this morning stands unafraid in the presence of grizzly bears. That's the kinda guy he is. Did I tell you, though, that there was a chasm nearly a hundred feet deep between myself and the bear?

I meant to put that in the sermon. I should have. I suppose that might moderate slightly any thoughts of my being particularly heroic.

Yes, I’m afraid I’m as prudent as anyone else. The only reason I was able to stand there looking at this bear with my good eyes and he was able to sniff the air, grunt twice and smell me with his very good nose without any fear or incurring of risk on my part was the presence of a deep chasm separating the bear and myself – sixty feet of it vertical rock leading down to a small river. One of those chasms. Not worth the bear’s efforts for the dubious reward of a skinny sixteen year old.

In Jesus’ parable the rich man is being tormented in Hades while poor Lazarus has finally been rewarded for his years of suffering by being at the side of Abraham in paradise – in the ‘bosom of Abraham’ as the song goes. The rich man asks whether Abraham could ask Lazarus to dip his finger in the cool water and come over to him to cool his tongue. Abraham tells him that this is not possible. The rich man has received his reward in the course of his earthly life. Besides, he says, a chasm has now been established between us and nobody can cross over.

There is not a little irony in this story. Not only that a rich man ends up in Hades and a poor man in paradise. This is meant to be a ‘tale’, by the way, not a comprehensive geography of what the afterlife will look like. No – the irony is that the chasm always existed between the rich man and Lazarus. As Lazarus was being stepped over, as Lazarus was being looked through, when the rich man assumed that the scraps from his table were going into the bin or being fed to the dog and was unaware that there was a human being unofficially attached to his household. There had always been a chasm. The invisible chasm became, eventually, visible.

Our parents may well have wanted to insulate us from the rough life. They may have taken a look at the catchment area for the local school before they bought their house. They had the best of intentions. They wanted us safe. There were always friends your parents like and friends they don’t. I’m aware that the town where I live contains four or five towns – that people sometimes keep to themselves and that our churches – most of them anyway – are drawn from certain pockets and not others. John Street in Penicuik is a bit of a chasm. We don’t always know our neighbours.

When we gather around the altar on a Sunday morning are we aware of the spiritual presence with and beside us of men and women in countries we will never visit who speak a language we will never learn but are doing the same thing on a Sunday morning as us? Our children are less likely to be able to navigate the family globe than we were. Gap years are often spent on Australian beaches. Travel is involved, I suppose.

The chasm is comfortable. It keeps the Grizzly bear at a distance. I just finished hacking back the hedge which surrounds the Rectory in Penicuik. It’s a job one avoids and my ladder and I sank rather dramatically into the Rose and Hawthorn at one point. They’re meant to be a little impassable. They guard our privacy. You can hear the neighbours or the dog walkers but you’re guaranteed of a certain distance and certain degree of solitude.

What should the rich man have done? What is being criticised here? Is Hades the final destination of every wealthy person who does not – St Francis-like – stride from the comfort of his mansion to embrace and care for lepers? Is it as simple as that? Is it just another way of saying that rich men fit into the Kingdom the way camels fit through the eyes of needles? Maybe - maybe not.

What is being criticised here is the absence of vision. The rich man, after all, is just a character in a story – the real men and women who are the object of Christ’s concern and pointed words are the men and women listening to the story – either there with him when he told it or in Church this morning or listening to this sermon on their radios while they’re making their coffee. You are the object of Christ’s concern. Your community contains a multiplicity of souls – and you know very few of them. The shirt you’re wearing this morning was possibly made by a young person in another country earning a miserable wage who has not had the benefits of a comprehensive education and you did not know that. Your best attempts to provide suitable playmates for your children may be increasing their loneliness and not diminishing it. You are one of the rich man’s five brothers who has not had a visit from Lazarus. You are Scrooge before Marley’s ghost comes to visit him. You don’t think you have anything in common with a whole lot of other people and the economic ice floe your living on – the social ice floe you’re living on – is growing smaller and smaller. That’s more like it. It’s not riches per se which is the problem – it’s ignorance and the ultimate loneliness which it engenders.

Before there can be any change or repentance there needs to be vision. The scales can fall from your eyes because some aspect of the story of another person’s life has finally pieced your hedge or crossed the chasm and reached your heart and mind. But that sort of thing sounds like an accident – like one of those things that might happen to some people if they’re lucky enough. Jesus does not appear to be asking you to play the lottery.

No – there is a clearer message here. You are part of a world which contains people not of your clan or language or colour or religion. They are citizens in the towns and the cities in which you live. They dig minerals out of the ground for you and they sew your shirts. Pretty well every government service we depend on was once an act of charity. We used to be better at benevolence than we are now. The working conditions we enjoy were struggled for by other generations at enormous cost to their safety and their liberty. We used to be better at advocacy than we are now. It’s out of style. But there is still an enormous army of volunteers at work in the world. They build schools in Mozambique, they provide medical services where there are none. That sort of vision which sees the fortunes of other people as being necessarily linked to our own lives is still alive. It’s just a rather slim portion of society that sees things that way.

Take a moment to look around you. What doesn’t seem right? What can be done about it? What are you going to do about it!

Some blogs from Burma

from a variety of sources including a Christian pastor.

These may well not be updated often or recently since the government is cracking down on internet access as well.

In most cases these are people who are normally in and out of Burma - students, foreign workers and one pastor - who are now receiving reports via phone calls, emails or text messages.

One reads these things, obviously, understanding that they are fragments and come from anonymous sources. Important, nonetheless.

Burma (Myanmar) Blog

Ko-Htike's Prosaic Collection

Ka Daung Nyin Thar

Yangon Thu

Mizzima News

The Irrawaddy

A Saturday Visit to Reverend Ruth

St Mark's Church in Portobello put on a music festival on Saturday afternoon. It worked out well for us. Mrs Rabbit-to-be had worked two shifts in a row and was finishing at about 8 in the morning. She came over and crashed chez moi until about 1:30 and, after coffee and a fag was chipper enough to go out and enjoy a sunny day and so we decided to show face at the Music Festival at St Mark's. I gather that one member of the congregation was well placed with a number of local music groups and was able to coax them into coming along.

Ruth's church is one of those churches where the pews have been ripped out (or 'removed' as I think the politer term has it) and it actually doesn't look that bad. The place didn't have that gutted look that some depewed churches have. I was favourably impressed. It's a funky little church to begin with - very square and built to resemble a temple.

We arrived just as a small band of men with tartan trousers, accordians and lowland pipes were finishing. They were succeeded by a string quartet and then by a collection of younger people in various combinations.

There were stalls. There was tea and fairy cakes. I picked up some DVDs. It was well worth the visit.

At one point somebody was speaking into a microphone introducing the next piece of music and the crowd kept on talking. Now I don't know whether Ruth's church was one of those listed in the SEC Red Book as 'requiring a strong hand' but she belted out the word 'quiet' in the sort of manner that reminds you that she has successfully raised sons and is well able to enforce order.

Well done Ruth - your patch looks like it's thriving.

A friend of mine made me this cool graphic. The original idea was to ferry over a few audio bits-and-pieces that get done for a local Edinburgh radio station - 45 second 'drivetime bumff'. I thought I might tell a few stories later on. That's its tail, by the way, hanging between its legs.

Psalm 150 - FAMU Gospel Choir

More ideas for youth group meetings