The Feast of St Peter

and St Paul

July 1st, 2007
A patronal festival in Edinburgh

Peter and Paul – they go together, like ham and eggs or like Romulus and Remus or Morecambe and Wise.

You might call the two towers of your church Peter and Paul, or so name two bells in one of those towers.

My mother had a little song about two small birds sitting on a wall - one named Peter and one named Paul. There’s a certain ‘twoness’ there – a symmetry.

In an icon the two saints are each depicted holding an edge of a basilica and supporting it. All is well. All is as it should be.

See how our lintel is supported by two strong posts. See how they share the weight. Stability and peace.

It’s what two apostles should do. It’s what Luke is eager to demonstrate in the Acts of the Apostles as he describes the Jerusalem conference. Peter - he will minister among the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Paul - he will work among the Gentile believers.

Two individuals – each with his own trajectory for Mission meeting together and ‘agreeing’. Agreeing at a formal meeting. Agreeing in the presence of witnesses. Agreeing not to get in each other’s way – agreeing that their separate missions are in fact two sides of the coin – two peas in the same pod.

What would you think were you to find such a written agreement between two individuals promising to work in concert with each other without getting in each other's way? You might entertain the cheeky thought that significant disagreement had already taken place, no?

Are we always so suspicious? The box says ‘tasty’ but we look at the back to see what the ingredients are. We remind ourselves that the woman feeding this stuff to her happy children on the television is a paid actress. She conjures up that smile for money.

The actor and his new wife appear on the red carpet looking positively glowing But maybe the tabloids have it right: He hit her once. She has another love interest on the side. She has trouble maintaining her weight.

If Country Life is telling the story of an agreed stable apostolic ministry aiming in two directions then we can be assured that the News of the World is not far behind wanting very much to scratch the surface and find what lurks there beneath the symmetry – behind the rosy picture of unity and stability.

We do not have to go very far beyond today's second reading to find sharp and suspicious words in the Epistle to the Galatians. Paul first describes his agreement with Peter and the others in today's Epistle in a way not unlike Luke's version of events in the Acts of the Apostles.

“They gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised.”

Public agreement - the recognition of different missions - to Jew and Gentile. But if we carry on for a few verses beyond where this morning's lectionary reading ends we find evidence of a significant 'falling out' when Peter comes to visit the mission of Paul and Barnabas in Antioch.

Showdown in Antioch - screams the tabloid headline. I needed Peter and Peter bailed out. Maybe just a single word headline - hypocrite!

The trouble? Ah! The usual, I'm afraid. Who is in and who is out - What are the limits of God's reach? Does he maintain a small circle of friends or should we, in his name, open the door wide. - remove the door from the frame and the frame from the wall. Do we take the walls down.

And if creative and inclusive ministry is good for us when we're alone and far from home is it equally good for us when the Bishop visits? Is it as much a feather in our cap when the 'men from James' come to visit - representatives of a very conservative leader back in Jerusalem who might end up compromised if word of the goings-on in Antioch were to reach his opponents. Fear conflicts with grace - prudence undermines boldness.

Conflict. We've seen it all before. Maybe you're here because you landed in it in another church. Maybe the possibility of conflict in the Church has kept you off vestry. Maybe you hunger for the sort of Church where pastor, pope or primate speaks with the sort of eclat that doesn't allow for opposition or serious critical analysis. It makes life a lot easier. I think of how many fine young people I was at seminary with who, in search of something solid and unambiguous locked themselves away in every more inflexible patterns of ministry.

I had occasion, recently, to participate in my parents' Golden Wedding celebrations. Everyone was there - all the cousins - uncles and aunts. I have snapshots. The shutter opened and shut and revealed a family that is really quite well - at this particular moment in time - almost all of them.

What made that fact remarkable is that it has not always been that way. It's a 'scarred wellness' rather than an innocent and virginal intactness with my family. Like I said, I have the snapshots.

You move your finger from left to right and when you arrive at each face in the picture you can tell a story. Ten years ago this happened. Those two brothers weren't talking for a while. There was an addiction. Here was a betrayal. It very nearly ended that marriage right there and then. How did he ever get a job? He's kept the same one now for nearly five years - that's some kind of record.

They've not so much leapt from crag to crag as they have climbed out of the swamp onto a safe rock. And the fact that they are now comparatively well is not so much in opposition to what they once were as it is the harvest of what they once were.

Some of them, anyway, would say that it was all worth it. They could do with better knees and a few more teeth. But the struggle was part and parcel of the life they now lead.


If Peter and Paul are the authors of the grace which they preach then their struggle and disagreement is fundamental and a scandal to be concealed and glossed over. Splits in the Anglican Communion, divisions in the parish, the Reformation and its sequelae in like manner diminish the quality and effect of our ministry if we are the authors of the grace which we preach - which we are not - there is another. Peter and Paul are martyrs - witnesses - they stand in the presence of something greater than themselves and point to it.

What was Peter told in the Gospel I read a few moments back? That life and ministry would exact a terrible toll on him. He would be mastered. He would be taken and led - taken somewhere he did not want to go.

Clearly he understands all this for he is possessed, for a moment, by an instinctive childishness. In words which, again, are just beyond the reading from today's lections he points to John the Beloved Disciple, there beside Jesus, and asks about him. What about this one? he asks - your favourite disciple. Die in his bed, will he then? Old and full of years? Why just me? Why must I die in service and not him?

And Paul? What is Paul told by God when, at some subsequent point in his ministry, he cries out to be relieved of a 'thorn in his flesh' the exact nature of which we are never privy to - some weakness or vice, some infirmity of flesh or spirit. Three times he appeals to God to have this taken from him and is told 'My Grace is sufficient for you for my strength is made perfect in weakness'.

We know that truth is something struggled for and not simply possessed and then preserved. Not only because we believe that the truth is arrived at through a process of assertion, negation and the arrival at some new unity. Conflict is at the very heart of its discovery and acquisition - conflict with a world slow to recognize love, conflict with a self reluctant to submit to mastery and martyrdom. Peaceful worlds are so frequently small and lonely worlds.

The lintel is held up by, among others, these two strong posts. When we examine them closely, however, we notice that the wood is not without character in its substance. It has been rough hewn. Scraped and chipped. It bears the marks of its children, the marks of seasons, the weak parts healed over, bitter winters and scorching heat. Its rings and circles bear witness to times of both fatness and leanness - effective mostly because it has been tried and in the long run found to be sound and strong.

There are still a few heros in the world

Let's hear it for the intransigent individual who refuses to be co-opted by the marketplace. An American newsreader refuses to bow to her producer's taste in lead stories.

Cultural Studies



nothing to do with General Synod. A complete excursis.

A new primate for Canada!

The final tally on the 5th ballot.

Fred Hiltz 60 / 81
Victoria Matthews 56 /56

A strong showing among the laity in the second ballot was obviously quite convincing. This is not unknown in episcopal elections, for example. I can think of at least two elections where the clergy house has moved quite dramatically towards the laity. It's not the result I had expected but then what are expectations but a very common blockage to good and holy movements in human experience. God's blessing on Fred Hiltz!

Heres the story from the Anglican Journal

Balloting in the Primatial Election 2

Second Ballot
Voting: clergy/lay

George Bruce 1 / 4
Fred Hiltz 49 / 69
Bruce Howe 1 / 5
Victoria Matthews 64 / 60

The next ballot will have only two candidates: Fred Hiltz and Victoria Matthews. Candidates come off when they pull less than 10% of the votes. I wonder if we'll have a third ballot result showing a clergy favourite and a lay favourite. In the two episcopal elections I have participated in where such a situation occured the movement was on the part of the clergy house towards the lay house [note at the end of balloting - this is exactly what happened]. I'm out for supper with my girlfriend tonight. We will eat quickly. I think we'll skip pudding.

Balloting in the Primatial Election.

1st Ballot
Votes Clergy/Lay

George Bruce 14 / 9
Fred Hiltz 40 / 57
Bruce Howe 5 /18
Victoria Matthews 56 / 54

Some rather succinct background on the four candidates written by an American priest studying for his Th.D at Trinity College in Toronto. This appeared on Fr Jake's website a number of months ago. A name will drop off the ballot after the second round. They gather again at half twelve CDT (6:30 pm in the UK) for the announcement of the 2nd ballot results.

I'm told that those voting for George Bruce and Bruce Howe would be unlikely to vote for Fred Hiltz. There may be a very few for whom gender trumps theological stance but very few indeed.

General Synod in Winnipeg (continued)

Two items from last night's (Thursday evening's) session as reported by one blogger-delegate from the Diocese of New Westminster and the Anglican Essentials folks who have some sort of observer status at GS. The new Prolocutor of General Synod (who acts as vice-chair of GS and chair of the Council of General Synod) is a 'relatively' conservative clergyman from the Diocese of Algoma. The author of the 'live blog' which Anglican Essentials Canada is hosting from General Synod got breathless at this point and, noting that the individual in question was 'Essentials-friendly', promptly spelled the man's new position incorrectly at least once.

This prompted the following comment:

Praise the Lord that Stephen Andrews was elected Proluctor (sic) of our General Synod. This a major step in the right direction. Now we need to elect a Primate who will call the Church back to the Authority of Scripture and defeat all motions which would allow same sex blessings in our church or even allow for local option. We need to come under the Authority of Scripture and not align ourselves with our culture. The church must always stand over against the culture of our time to call people to repentance and to new life in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Okay, so it's not an easy word to remember. It's probably not even included in the spell-check so the poor blogger is really on his own.

One is hesitant to see this as a decision by General Synod to elect 'a conservative' to a senior position in the hierarchy of General Synod. Bloggers from Anglican Essentials Canada are looking constantly for the presence of 'their folks' in the wings, in the visitors' seats and potentially in key positions. Equally one might conceive that a blogger from the Diocese of New Westminster might be looking at the same possible evidence from an entirely different treetop.

Nonetheless, one does wonder what the 'conservative in hand' as vice-chair of General Synod and a potential middle-right Primate could possibly do with an eventual decision to proceed with the blessing of same sex-unions.

Synod also defeated an amendment to a motion to receive the report of the Windsor Response Group. The amendment called on Dioceses (such as New Westminster with its 8 parishes presently able to bless such unions) to abide by a moratorium on the blessing of same. This caused much discussion on what was implied by the 'reception' of a report - is it simply received or is it accepted? Speakers against the amendment noted that such a decision would prejudge the discussion and decisions to take place later at Synod and the amendment failed massively.

The Anglican Journal Daily Journal, - Issue 3, dated the 22nd of June is available HERE

A propos of nothing: Andrew Goddard was speaking to the Essentials folks about the Anglican covenant. The video of his presentation is here



The Primatial Election is to start at 11:00 CDT (5 pm UK time) !!

Do note the Friday updates to yesterday's post linking to various General Synod resources.

General Synod 2007, Winnipeg Manitoba
(updated Friday a.m.)

Live Coverage of some of the General Synod debates is apparently available HERE. Some of the plenary sessions will be broadcast courtesy of the good folks at Anglican Video.

Remember that Winnipeg's time zone (CDT) places it six hours behind the UK.

A series of articles which give some background to the issues (and not simply THE issue - sorry cyclops!) being dealt with at General Synod can be found HERE

Update Friday morning - The bloggers listed below were all out at the pub last night with the exception of one delegate from New Westminster who dutifully checked in. The Anglican Journal's Daily Journal covering General Synod 2007 is also available and appears to be the most comprehensive record of the events of the day. These are .pdf files.

Issue 1 - June 20th

Issue 2 - June 21st

Today (Friday) the balloting begins for the new Primate

Tomorrow - Canadian Anglicans vote Saturday on same-sex blessings - CanWest News Service

The sequence of these two events is either 'interesting' or infelicitous. There are an awful lot of people who have been flying the flag for Victoria Matthews, the bishop of Edmonton. She was forced to withdraw from the last primatial election because of a diagnosis of breast cancer. Having beaten the disease she is now back in the running. The bishop of Edmonton is not known for being of one mind with those agitating for a public rite of blessing for same sex couples. She is, in fact, on the conservative end of the spectrum on a number of issues. While the question of 'will be bless the unions of same sex couples?' and 'who will be our Primate?' are separate issues - they aren't completely. Victoria will be the one defending the actions of General Synod to the wider Church, to potential dissidents in Canada and the U.S. and to grumpy Primates of other Provinces.

The fourth video in the Synod on Demand series is now available. It is dated Thursday the 21st of June

The third video in the series, dated Wednesday the 20th of June, available via the Synod on Demand website. I'm not sure whether this site (an anglican.ca address) is going to include much blow-by-blow coverage of interesting debates.

I've listed some of the blogging delegates who appear online. There are other offerings from the two extreme ends of the spectrum but I can't bring myself to read them. If anyone knows any other delegates blogging from GS who haven't already met in caucus to discover what their opinions are meant to be on the proceedings, then please drop me a line and I'll link to those as well.

Bloggers at GS

one blog
two blog
red blog
blue blog

un blog
das blog

Do note that, as expected, these bloggers are busy being delegates and so there's not the real time blogging that one might want. After having unsuccessfully tried to blog from a conference recently in Derbyshire I realized that one either has a laptop equipped with the proper wireless technology or one must wait until the house computers become available at the end of the day - a time where one should probably be in the pub getting the skinny on what's really going on rather than poring over copious handwritten notes. I don't have a laptop with the appropriate bits. I'm not rich enough to afford one - I will have to think about getting a patron or running a lottery here on Raspberry Rabbit or maybe just begging the blogosphere for anybody's old (but not too old!) equipment once they upgrade. Would that the SEC took blogging seriously and equipped their clergy with proper equipment. I shall suggest this to Kelvin and get him to shake his finger at the Primus.

The Second of the Synod on Demand videos - dated Tuesday the 19th. Includes material from the Opening Eucharist and some background on the city of Winnipeg where the General Synod is being held.



The Rev'd Michael Fleming writes an article entitled Don't Tear Apart Our Church from yesterday's Ottawa Citizen

Anyone interested in following the events of the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada which is taking place in Winnipeg right now might be interested in checking in on Synod on Demand which has some summaries and video clips.

The first of the Youtube videos can be found below. It's dated Monday the 18th of June and it is basically an introduction to General Synod.

My friend has a very high energy dog. It's one of these border collie crosses which lives in a perpetual state of agitation. It won't sit still - it whines all the time. I'd have sunk the thing to the bottom of the Tweed in a burlap sack with a builder's brick a long time ago. The dog has a young woman who loves it though, and her little boy loves it even more and so I understood long ago that she was a package - and that this package included the world's least obedient dog.

The dog wanders the house at night. Up the stairs, down the stairs, in the bedrooms and back downstairs again. Hopping up on the couch to look out the window lest a cat be walking by. Back upstairs to get a better view from the upstairs window. All night - every night - up and down and round about. When my friend is at work the dog sleeps. It makes it easier to be up and active and vigilant during the night. To make her joy complete my friend decided that she would baby-sit her friend's dog as well for a few days. A large and very dense chocolate lab. Together these dogs would wrestle and tussle the whole night through - glad of each others' company - glad to do things in tandem.

I tried to help. I loaned my friend a pair of really effective ear plugs made of cotton and wax. A good night's sleep would ensue and so it did. She slept like a log. The dogs whined and tussled and she slept. The dogs ran around in circles and she slept. The dogs dug away at the wall of the living room until there was a hole in the plaster four feet high which exposed all the wiring and still she slept.

It is perhaps unfortunate that her dog never discovered the joy of chewing those electrical wires. To have uncovered so much and not to have tasted the joys of copper wiring - to have stopped just below the crest of the hill but to have proceeded no farther seems a strange and self defeating thing.

My friend will phone her insurers. She will no doubt be told that the damage is not covered due to the fact that it constitutes an Act of Dog.

Have just witnessed a wonderful exchange between Andy Duncan, the Chief Executive at Channel 4, sitting alongside Mark Browning, the Programme Director at Heart Radio and a group of BBC types sitting in the audience.

They'd both had a good half hour each to explain to us the changes in radio and television - the explosion of new stations tailored to the needs of subgroups, the new role of ' the consumer' as the one who sets the agenda and plots the course and the media as those who merely respond to changing needs and tastes. Marketing in such an environment becomes an appeal to a small group - a gathering together of like minded people into a tribe - and not a matter of convincing folks to tune into a 'one size fits all' programme schedule.

One of the media type working for the Church of England asks why - given that 70% of the general population expressed an 'interest' in 'spiritual issues' there was such a paucity of such programming on commercial radio and television? Could it be that only 20% of those involved in professional media production had a similar 'interest'. The answer was that such programs had been tried and had received low ratings - Priest Idol was one example given by the Director of Channel 4

Another C of E clergyman involved in commercial radio pipes in that he considers it his job to find the interesting angle on a religious theme - to ferret out the people who can speak in such a way as to animate a subject. If it's simply a matter of responding to 'what is the case' then we should simply be broadcasting pornography since it has a market which can be demonstrated. If a religious program is poorly rated it may be the program which is at fault and not the audience which is disinterested. Many rumbles of assent from the audience. BBC Manchester man jumps the queue and suggests loudly to the two hapless guests at the front that it's their job to find a stimulating way of responding to the market and that their disinterest in the subject is more notable than the market

At which point the two speakers make the major error of the morning and state that the BBC hasn't fared any better in their religious programming - something which the BBC religious programmers in the audience - numerous and all sitting in a row - take great exception to and begin to list off the BBC shows - Monastery, Son of God - along with others in the process of sale to BBC 1 and 2 which they believed had more than adequately linked the 'interest' in spiritual matters.

Blogging from the Churches' Media Council

"A Future and a Hope"

Having just gotten off a plane from Canada I was not looking forward, initially, to hopping back onto a train but it happened nonetheless. By day I'm here in Derbyshire representing a little organization in Edinburgh in support of Local Broadcasting - here as well because I do a little broadcasting on commercial radio in Edinburgh. But by night and herein I am merely looking for all the good scoops, gossips and interesting personalities - of which there are several.

Every second person I've met so far is from either London, Manchester or with the Evangelical Alliance - lots of these latter. I shared a taxi from Derby with Joel Edwards, the Chairman of the Churches' Media Council and another fellow from Tearfund. We're starting in a couple of minutes with our first plenary. Plenty of workshops upcoming on New Media and Old Media. I'll tell you what happens

Long Beach on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. I haven't been here for a while. Magical.




It just gets better.

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

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!