Senora Rabbit and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire last week. The trailer I'd seen for the film made it seem a combination of really good music and a fairly cheesy and curious plot. As Caireen and I were going over the various offerings on the Edinburgh Cinema listings this was our third choice, after Far North and Defiance.

It having been "one of those days", however, we decided that these other films were too "dark" and that Slumdog Millionaire would be the more upbeat choice.

It's a good film - directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later) which follows the unexpected success of a Bombay slum boy in the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

I thought it was really two films mixed into one. The first story places its question in the mouth of a Mumbai policeman questioning a young man accused of cheating at a televised game show: Given that doctors and lawyers get only half of these questions how has a street orphan with little formal education managed to arrive at the very last question without answering anything incorrectly?

We're then shown the reason - via a series of flashbacks - bits and pieces of a life lived on the edge and at tremendous personal cost which have given him all the incidental nuggets of information necessary to answer a series of twenty questions. It was his destiny.

The second story is the old boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl story. It's what seemed a little cheesy in the trailer but it wasn't woven badly into the story.

All in all a much better movie than I thought it would be and, as it turned out, a come from behind winner at the Golden Globes.

Highland Cattle at Nine-Mile Burn

I pass them several times a week on my way back and forth from West Linton. Today, on my way back from the midweek Mass at St Mungo's Church I decided that I'd take a picture.

They stand out there in the rain, in the snow and frost, day in and day out. They don't even seem overjoyed when the weather finally breaks and the sun comes out.

Aye, right! This is Scotland. It won't last. It never does.

As long as they get their breakfast they just keep plodding along.

The Marrying Season

We've had a great year for marriages at St James!

We're not one of those churches where people travel far and wide to be married here. We don't advertise. We don't appear in catalogues! We don't compete with the Elvis Chapel.

The couples we've married here this last 12 or 13 months have all had some connection to the congregation - they were either children in our Sunday School who had grown up and moved elsewhere in the UK and then returned to be married or they were local people who set a date many months ahead and then started attending quite regularly in the months leading up to the wedding service. A few of these local couples have moved on but a number have stuck around. In either case, by the time they arrived at the Chancel steps to make their vows they were people we had come to know quite well.

Weddings in Montreal were sometimes a headache. I remember a lot of demanding strangers. There were even a couple of horror stories where people ended up not being exactly who they presented themselves to be (either to the priest or once - an interesting story I may not relate - to each other).

I once had a fancy Montreal 'wedding coordinator' to deal with. Her existence had never come up in my conversations with the bride and groom. We were introduced on the evening of the rehearsal at the Church. She flounced over to me and told me (quite politely, actually) to sit down and she'd get around to me in a moment.

I remember wanting to murder her.

Needless to say, she ended up sitting down and I got around to her in a moment.

This last weekend we married a couple here at St James' where the groom was the fourth generation of men in his family to be married in our church.

I rather like doing marriages here. They're a lot of fun and a very rewarding form of ministry. We've had nine or ten in a little over a year which, for us, is a lot. I've only got two scheduled (so far) for the remainder of the year - one on the Saturday before Pentecost (with the children being baptised the next day) and another on Hallowe'en.

Knowing the bride at the Hallowe'en wedding quite well, I have no doubt the occasion will be milked for its particular cachet.

Mrs Rabbit and I took a wee holiday to Bruges last weekend. We hopped on an overnight ferry as foot passengers from Hull to Zeebrugge and then took a short bus trip into Bruges itself. It meant driving into England first, of course, which is always an adventure.

I'd been told solemnly that there was nothing on the other side of the border but howling darkness and incomprehensible north-country accents. Indeed one eventually arrives at a small stone with the words "England" on it which appears to have been set up by an intrepid pioneer to indicate to the wary traveller something along the lines of "this far and no further". The hills were bleaker - the sheep more bedraggled and unhappy.

But, surprisingly, civilisation did continue and we soon arrived in the city of Newcastle where the locals have set up an enormous and sinister looking angel cast in iron - called the Angel of the North - which serves as daily visual exhortation to good behaviour by reminding the Geordies of the two options traditionally offered to them by benevolent judges in past years: Death or Transportation.

The ferry trip was calm but not so calm that you weren't rocked to sleep by the North Sea swells. We arrived in Zeebrugge on a glorious morning with an orange/yellow sun low on the horizon shining through the cranes.

It was cold in Bruges - colder than Scotland had been when we left. The canals were all frozen and the ducks were wandering around looking alternately confused and irritated as they searched for open bits to swim in. At the height of its fortunes, Bruges was a port city. The estuary which gave it access to the sea silted up at the beginning of the 16th century however, and Antwerp took up the slack.

The Groeninge Museum itself almost makes the trip worth taking. This time around there were repairs going on and about half of the collection was inaccessible. Oh, and chocolate.....did I mention chocolate? Or pastries? Okay, chocolate, pastries and the Groeninge Museum.

Belgians are an odd lot. The Dutch speakers and the French speakers don't get on particularly well. Most of the famous Belgians are either fictitious or have become legendary over time: Tintin and Inspector Poirot - Jacques Brel and Sister Sourire (the singing nun).

A telling indictment of low national self esteem: One of the tourist pamphlets solemnly informs the visitor that bakelite is a Belgian invention!

Mrs Rabbit and I spent a good part of the afternoon at the Chocolate Museum where a handsome and capable chocolatier with a suitably Belgian moustache tried out his charms on the missus!

True to type

I was being teased by the members of one of my two Vestries when I first started doing little mini-sermons a year or so ago in a now-defunct daily God-slot on one of the local commercial radio stations.

Reference was made to the episode of the Vicar of Dibley where the rector was asked to do Pause for Thought on Radio Two. Nonsense, I replied, I'm nothing like the Vicar of Dibley. But, I added, the resemblance between the Vestry at St Mungo's and the Dibley Parish Council was quite striking.

They really don't help themselves either. This evening one of the wardens was giving his excuses for showing up fifteen minutes late for Vestry. Seems that he backed over a sheep coming out of his driveway this evening and had to spend twenty minutes jacking up his car with the help of a neighbour so that he could drag the poor beast from where it was pinned underneath.

I phoned him this evening to enquire after the sheep's health. Apparently it's a bit lame and not a little irritated but still alive and expected to remain that way.

The Battle of the Buses

There are 800 buses trundling around the UK today bearing the slogan 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and get on with your life". The organizers of this campaign suggest that this is merely a 'positive' counter-campaign to some group or other who had 'Jesus died for your sins' slogans plastered on the sides of London buses in 2008. These apparently also bore a link to a website that described the Lake of Fire in which non-Christians would inevitably be plunged by obliging angels on the last day.....or something of that sort.

Not to say that 'free thinkers' (as opposed to the rest of us who are in chains) wouldn't have come up with such an idea on their own.

Anyway - this appears to be a battle between fundamentalists of different parties and shouldn't concern right-thinking Anglican people one whit. It's not all about Richard Dawkins' need for publicity - but that portion of the campaign which is about Richard Dawkins' need for publicity could probably be identified without binoculars.




Given that Charles Darwin was once seriously considering a vocation to ordained ministry and that most mainline church clergy have little problem with the evolution of higher life forms from lower life forms, I suggest that the deadly conflict between the two is overstated.

The Port of Zeebrugge, early morning. More to come.

Sharon's Christmas Prayer

She was five,
sure of the facts,
and recited them
with slow solemnity
convinced every word
was revelation.

She said
they were so poor
they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
to eat
and they went a long way from home
without getting lost. The lady rode
a donkey, the man walked, and the baby
was inside the lady.
They had to stay in a stable
with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)
but the Three Rich Men found them
because a star lited the roof.
Shepherds came and you could
pet the sheep but not feed them.
Then the baby was borned.
And do you know who he was?
Her quarter eyes inflated
to silver dollars.
The baby was God.

And she jumped in the air
whirled around, dove into the sofa
and buried her head under the cushion
which is the only proper response
to the Good News of the Incarnation.

– John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected

Via Tale Spin (via Felix Hominum)

Thanks Dan

No animals were injured in the process of making this video. A number of mice were possibly a little pissed off.

source

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

It’s those Christmas cards. They leave us with a series of still images in our heads. Our Lady and St Joseph on either side of a manger, the shepherds looking up into the sky, Wise men standing quietly at the door with gifts in their hands.

Hearing the story read, however, offers a very different perspective. Great changes are promised. Angels appear in the darkest bit of the night to shepherds and announce that the old order is being overturned. The universe is on the cusp of tremendous and wonderful change.

We know what the ‘old order’ is – it’s what we wake up to on Boxing Day - bills to pay - work piling up on our desk. The same damned thing. And the newspapers - filled once again with headlines about the bloody conflict on the border of Israel and the Gaza strip. The world, it seems, didn’t change overnight. When is this novel departure announced by the angel going to take place?

People are constantly migrating in the Christmas story – hither and yon. It’s movement and not stasis – to Bethelem – towards the star – away from the sheep - into the town. No matter how much the new thing is God’s thing and is something that God is going to enact himself the human actors have to move in order to witness it and participate in it.

Peacemaking is rarely a case of sitting still and seeing what will happen. We know what will happen on its own. Peace in a poisonous office environment requires people moving together into each other’s proximity. Peace within a family requires time spent at each other’s tables – front doors being opened to people we’ve not been getting on with. All the glimmers of hope in the Middle East in past years have involved travel as well – old enemies greeting each other at the bottom of steps leading down from an aircraft.

We’ll file away those Christmas cards in the coming week. The invitation to make peace and to be active citizens of a new kingdom will remain.

Edinburgh's Hogmanay

The four day celebrations began this evening with the torchlight procession leaving from the City Chambers, down the Mound, along Princes Street and up Calton Hill. There were lots and lots of us with torches. The evening ends with the burning of a viking longboat and a large Lion Rampant up on top of the hill.

Did you miss it?

Were you eating turkey at the time or engrossed in conversation with your family?

The Boxing Day walk

...didn't take place on Boxing Day since there were family gatherings, tables to set, etc etc. So the boxing day walk took place today. Very bright and frosty.

Merry Christmas

The Children's Christmas Eve Service
at West Linton.

Lots of babies and little children this evening at our Christmas play at St Mungo's West Linton. A good crowd. Not exactly a quiet crowd though. It was nice to see all sorts of visiting grandparents and returning children and grandchildren.

Every year we say we're going to get a little hands free microphone and a sound system of some sort. The children are starting to read a lot more audibly these days - they're growing up and are no so wee any more. Some of these children were very small when I first arrived here.

David King our Rector's Warden was the donkey (again!). He's agitating for a speaking part next year. Notwithstanding the pious legend of the animals speaking on Christmas Eve I think I'm going to steer him away from this. I'll promise him a smaller Mary next year.

The Calm Before the Storm

The Church was decorated yesterday morning and everything is pretty well in place for Midnight Mass tonight.

The Nativity Scene characters are all in place but the bambino is not in the manger. He's hiding on the window sill near an electric cable from where he'll be collected during the opening hymn and placed in the crib.

One of my colleagues and I will take the two services in different places (Penicuik and West Linton) tonight at 11:30 pm and will switch churches on Christmas morning for what are usually rather cozy and informal services in both churches.

The list of parishoners who will want Holy Communion brought to them over Christmas is about a third done. I managed to get to a couple of nursing homes yesterday. We've eight or nine parishoners on this year's 'shut in' list who suffer from some degree of immobility or dementia who will need to be visited this Christmas.

The Santa Claus Bailout Hearings

Fr Joe Walker over at Felix Hominum has some reflections on "The Two Types of Christmas Sermons"

Baby it's cold outside!

Betty Garrett and Red Skelton
For all my family and friends in Canada who are enjoying a real winter.

Nine Lessons and Carols right out of the book. With a few added touches à la Penicuik. Lots of old friends. Quite a few small children sitting in a big lump with toys at the back and singing along when they knew the carol. Good participation from other denominations. A "happening", if you will.

You don't mess with Canadian Knitting Bloggers!

I made reference a week or so ago to one of the Canadian Blog Award winners for Best Activities Blog - a knitting blogger who, in 2007, had actually scooped the Best Blog award in any category. Well it seems that another knitting blogger has been making the news: this time for having faced down an aggressive Ottawa police officer involved in what appeared to her to be a rather 'over-the-top' takedown of a young woman on Bank Street in Ottawa.

Every vigilant she started snapping some photographs of the cluster of five large police officers who had just rendered the young woman unconscious:

I snapped another picture. The cops noticed this time. One of them strode directly over to me.

“You can’t take pictures of this,” he said. His tone was aggressive.

I slid my camera back into its case.

“Okay,” I replied.

“Erase it,” he ordered me.

“What?”

“I said ‘Erase it’!” he said, “I work undercover and I don’t want my picture anywhere.”

I really didn’t want to erase my picture. Not unless I had to. Besides, if he’s so concerned about keeping his undercover identity secret, he shouldn’t walk around in a police uniform.

“Do I have to?” I asked.

“I told you, I don’t want my picture anywhere.”

“Is it the law?” I asked.

“I asked you nicely,” he said, but he didn’t say it very nicely. It sounded threatening to me.

“Is it the law?” I repeated.

“I asked you nicely,” he said menacingly as he stared down at me, “Are you refusing?”

I looked at him. Maybe if we were in a dark alley with no witnesses, I would have deleted it. But here? In broad daylight, surrounded by witnesses, with a tiny, bleeding, unconscious, handcuffed woman lying on the street? He was probably in enough trouble already.

“Yes,” I said, “I’m refusing.”

“Real nice,” he said in disgust, “Thanks a lot.”

And he turned around and started to walk back to the knot of officers and the unconscious handcuffed woman.

The story hasn't been picked up that widely - it was in the Ottawa Citizen - but it's worth noting courage and reasonable non-compliance when it is demonstrated. Read the entire blog post. BD has some followup.

Oh, and Officer Post?

Merry Christmas from Scotland/ Joyeux Noël d'Ecosse!!

Christmas Service - Cornbank St James School

Yesterday morning Stewart said to me "Could you drive me to school?".

Couldn't the boy see I was busy - trying to find the coffee somewhere in the back of the cupboard where my wife had hidden it - it's never where I think it's supposed to be!

Last time I had checked outside it hadn't seemed a particularly dreich day so I said something firm, yet loving, along the lines of: "No - you stupid, lazy boy, walk to school like you always do".

Now equipped with a hot cup of coffee I walked into the living room and caught a glimpse of the sort of day that my step-son had just trudged off into muttering something under his breath. My goodness, but wasn't it an awful day. I spent the rest of the morning feeling like a miserable offender.

Anyway - water under the bridge. The boy proved to be solid drip-dry citizen and waved off my abject apologies when he got home that afternoon.

We did have a problem though. There were 300 small children from one of the Primary Schools where I am chaplain who were due to trudge from Cornbank St James Primary to the Church for their Christmas service the next morning (today - Friday). And the weather was not cooperating. The head teacher and I had played email tag about whether the service would take place at the Church or at the School - it would depend on the weather. This was a departure for us. I've always gone there for assemblies and class visits and a visit to the Church hadn't taken place in anybody's memory for a very long time. We had a lot invested in this.

A lot of preparation had gone into this morning's service. We have one active teacher at Cornbank and one retired teacher in our congregation and the active teacher had spent quite a bit of time planning the service. We'd laid out a zillion chairs late last night and predicted how many little backsides we could accomodate in the pews. We'd enlisted the organist and appointed a "fire marshall" for the event. There'd been a crisis with the heating during the week and a heating engineer had to be wept with, whined at and otherwise cajoled to get the boiler working again properly before the service. It would have been awful if the children could not have safely walked in groups the third of a mile to the Church and the service hadn't been able to go ahead as planned.

While the weather was terrible during the day, I did walk out last night and see some stars. This morning the horizon was a nice pink colour. We were fine. The service was great - good readers, carols sung in full voice and the P5 recorder group acquitted themselves admirably in their rendition of We Three Kings. Within an hour following the service and the children's trudge back up to the school (with the police blocking the road so that they could get back safely) the weather closed in and it's presently blowing a hooley out there.

I never take responsibility for the weather even though the heathen joke with me about it all the time. "The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous", I always say.

Yeah, yeah, I know all that. Nonetheless......

Thank you Jesus.

I suspect that Fr Richard Major has never understated a single thing in his life. His as-yet-unfinished book The Epic of God

being an account of the Eucharistic Mysteries of the Christian Church,
described historico-empirico-polemically and at enormous length,
by the Rev'd Dr Richard Major

has been placed online (quite conveniently divided into chapters which open as .pdf files) by one of his former congregations. I gather that the link I included a few weeks back was dead and I thank whoever it was at The Ascension and St Agnes who got in touch for sending me an updated link.

Irascible is probably the word that comes to mind. Character is another. There's plenty therein which one should probably object to but, frankly, I can't be arsed. I spend too much time marvelling how much of it there is that I agree with and simply loving the language used.

So, if you don't mind, I'll just hang around outside and will tell the first policeman who arrives at the China Shoppe that "....the bull went in that way!"

The chapter on Incense is one of my personal favourites.

I'm just hoping that he finishes writing the damned thing one of these days.

From another chapter: Not Facing the Altar:

.......I have no doubt that she [the Church] will find her way out eventually, back out of her cul de sac, and reorient herself. She'll recover the classic shape of worship, lined up eastward towards a high altar, and she'll recover all (or most) of what goes with an eastward gaze. These notes describe pretty much what the Mass will be like in 2100 - and I hope in 2020. But they do not describe what Masses are generally like in 2001.......

......If anyone under forty enters a church nowadays - and, unsurprisingly, fewer and fewer of us do - he is surprised by a museum-perfect recreation of the spirit of 1968, exact down to such details as slang, sub-Jefferson Airplane music, infantile slogans sewn onto day-glo hangings, strident informality, nylon costumes, strained glee. Good God! we say: hippiedom! it's a 'happening'! it's a 'pray in'! - all good for a laugh, unless we see through to the eternal sense, and regret with a pang what we have missed.............

........The Church's modernist mania will not last. We can be so certain it will not last that the issue becomes how to manage the inevitable reaction. For it would be tragic if ecclesial counter-revolution, when it comes, not only recovers liturgical order, but hurries us into theological and moral fundamentalism.........

[emphasis mine]

Holy Chaos, or:
What Episcopalians can learn from Baptists

Emily Scott's ARTICLE in the Daily Episcopalian.

I was attending a preaching course at Union Seminary maybe ten years ago and snuck off to Riverside Church on the Sunday morning.

It's one of those places that stays with you.

The winners of the Canadian Blog Awards in the category of Best Religion/Philosophy Blog have been announced, and they are as follows:
First Prize - Dennis Gruending: Pulpit and Politics
Second Prize - Holy Experience
Tied for Third Prize - Bene Diction Blogs On and
Whatever He Says
Fourth Prize - Felix Hominum


Special congratulations to Fr Joe Walker (Felix Hominum) for making the list (the only blogger on the list I was familiar with - not that we're overly familiar or anything),

"Amazing Together"

Amazing Grace sung coast to coast by sundry groupings of Canadian Anglicans. This is a little documentary about the project itself. Thanks to Simple Massing Priest for reminding me about it.

And this was our particular contribution at the Sorrento Centre this summer when I was there on a course with my family. Brings back memories - like what the sun and blue sky looked like.

The Bishop's "At Home"

Every year, Bishop Brian and Lissa have an 'at home' for clergy and lay employees/volunteers of the Diocese of Edinburgh. We don't have many occasions to meet each other socially during the year. Here in the SEC we stick to tending our own garden plots rather a lot. We certainly never get to meet each others' spouses and so the annual "at home" at the Bishop's house is an opportunity not to be missed.

There are rather a lot of us and so the 'at home' takes place over a number of evenings. One always tries to figure out what the criterion is for why one has been invited on a particular day. My chums in the Diocese always get invited to a different soiree than me. My designated group is a bit older - fairly sedate. Nice folks to be sure but my evening at the Bishop's house is always the occasion least likely to produce people sporting lampshades on their head and blurting out inappropriate emotions. I'd sorta thought that maybe this was intentional and the that the Rector of Bathgate and Linlithgow, the Rector of North Berwick and your humble servant were being safely peppered throughout the week's gatherings at different times for the greater good of the Scottish people and the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

This year I was unable to make my appointed evening due to Advent Studies in Penicuik and West Linton on those nights. I had to try and wangle an invite for Caireen and myself on another night.

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "I suppose you could come on Monday the 15th" the bishop's secretary said
"Are you sure that's okay" I asked.
"Uh, yeah, why wouldn't it be?" she asked.
"Well, you know, I thought maybe the groups were arranged in a particular way and....."

Well it now appears that it's merely alphabetical and that my surname, beginning with a "W" is in merely coincidental proximity to a group of people who tend to be restrained, tranquil and reflective.

But tonight we're with a different group.

Party on!

There's one in every congregation!

My colleague and friend RevRuth has taken the plunge and will include a Caganer in her Nativity Set this Christmas. She doesn't mention whether any of her faithful yet know this and we await a paragraph in some future Bishop's Letter about Achieving Consensus in the Local Congregation.

The Caganer is of course a little pooping fellow who you place in the straw somewhere to the left of the Pious Donkey or the Praying Sheep in your Nativity Scene. It's a Catalan tradition unknown in Scotland until Christmas 2008 "....when it's inclusion in a local Nativity Scene provoked the first recurrence of ecclesiastical chair-throwing in Portobello since the Reformation."

The Wikipedia entry for Caganer includes the following rationale for the use of the little pooping fellow in Nativity Sets - much of which makes eminent theological sense but will not dissuade any children from suddenly blurting out "Mommy there's somebody doing Number Two behind the sheep!" during a moment of silent adoration on Christmas Eve:

---------

Possible reasons for placing a man who is in the act of excreting waste in a scene which is widely considered holy include:

• Tradition.
• Perceived humor.
• Finding the Caganer is a fun game, especially for children.
• The Caganer, by creating feces, is fertilizing the Earth. However, this is probably an a posteriori explanation, and few cite this reason for including the Caganer in the Nativity scene.
• The Caganer represents the equality of all people: regardless of status, race, or gender, everyone defecates.
• Increased naturalism of an otherwise archetypal (thus idealised) story, so that it is more believable, taken literally and seriously.
• The idea that God will manifest her/himself when s/he is ready, without regard for whether we human beings are ready or not.
• The caganer reinforces that the infant Jesus is God in human form, with all that being human implies.

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

Anyone wanting to purchase something for the Midlothian clergy who have everything can follow this link

Update: I have checked with Alison our Sunday School superintendent and her greatest objection to acquiring such a figure for our Nativity Scene is that I or some subsequent Rector will want to do a live nativity scene in the Precinct one day and will insist on having a live Caganer in order to make the whole thing authentic.

Flash - Penicuik youngsters reinvent Glam Rock

The bass guitar at the birth of our Lord may be an addition by a later author. Nonetheless this morning's (admittedly early) Pageant was a great success with a good crowd and a lot of fun. Everyone got together for breakfast in the church hall at 9 am before the final rehearsal.

While waiting for the results of the Best Canadian Philosophy/Religion Blog (a competition I got bumped out of on the first ballot) I notice that they're not going to be announced until the 16th of December. So I checked out what had been announced and noticed that in the Activities Blog category there was one which won with something like 90% of the vote - which seemed like rather a large percentage.

So I checked it out and it turned out to be a knitting blog - which doesn't interest me overmuch. But it was a very very good knitting blog. The sort of blog which makes you not only want to point the blog out to others but makes you wonder why the hell you bother blogging yourself.

"My blog is just no feckin' good" you say.

I'm hoping that the second stage in the process will be something along the lines of "I'm going to make my blog better".

Maybe it's just a Kubler-Ross sorta thing where there are stages. You reconcile yourself to upping the morphine dose and eventually you see the light and dead relatives and feel better about the whole thing. Shantih Shantih Shantih

Anyway - there's even a post where the author of this knitting blog (which is called Yarn Harlot) decides that she needs to explain to her overseas knitting friends why the Canadian political process has suddenly become chaotic and messy.

I guess it's what people might talk about while they're knitting.

Anyway - check it out. It's really quite good.