Robert Alter on R. Crumb

....Perhaps the most winning aspect of Crumb’s Genesis is its inventive playfulness. He is keenly aware that many bizarre things happen in these stories, first in the primeval history because of its legendary character and then in the patriarchal narrative because of the writers’ deep interest in what is odd, paradoxical, and surprising in human behavior and in divine intervention......

I don't own a copy of Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses, but his book The Art of Biblical Narrative was required reading for at least two courses which I took in seminary. Alter teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and it is his translation of Genesis which R. Crumb has used, more or less completely, in his Illustrated Book of Genesis (which should be arriving in my mailbox on Monday in time for me to bring it up to the Edinburgh clergy conference the following week in Pitlochry).

Robert Alter has written a review of Crumb's latest contribution. It appeared in the New Republic last week and can be found HERE.

The sort of news you see when you get up really early and flip through a few of your favourite church-related websites:

Ruth Gledhill has "Pope challenges bankers to adopt Catholic Ethics" which I guess is fine and good if the location is Venice or Florence and the Catholic Ethics in play are those of the Medicis and the Borgias. Wouldn't be much of a stretch, really. They're halfway there.

And speaking of "Catholic" and "adopt", it seems that the nice man from Forward in Faith is saying that a Diocese in Papua New Guinea is the "obvious choice" to be the first to request inclusion in this new Anglican Use Rite which the Pope is proposing for disaffected Anglicans.

One thing I'll say for disaffected Anglicans - they do get around. There really is no spot on the globe which they won't invoke, provoke or "mess with" in order to get back at the person living around the corner from them who they used to have lunch with.

How can you not be enthused
by this?

I have just pre-ordered two copies of R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis. Raspberry Rabbit being a rather small furry creature in the world of online Anglican personages, I don't get sent advance copies for review like that nice Bishop chap down in Blighty who always has that earnest air about him. I have to wait. As do you.

I used to sell the Georgia Straight on the streetcorner in Victoria and Vancouver back in the very early seventies - back around the time Jim Morrison died - back in the days when the Georgia Straight was an honest-to-goodness underground newspaper. Back in the days when my fellow Junior High School students walked out of school to protest the testing of a nuclear device on the Aleutians and got together and occupied an abandoned bit of University Endowment Land until the Saanich Police arrived and we all had to scatter and then walk back to school looking innocent.

The good old days.

Robert Crumb's women were right out of the Louvre and, being far too young at the time to have seen many (any) women in a state of undress, Crumb's facsimile thereof had to suffice. I've since discovered that not all women have really thick ankles.

A recent article in the Telegraph about Crumb's illustrated version of Genesis consisted of all the predictable boilerplate you'd have expected and included, of course, that obligatory telephone call to anyone who fit the caricature of the media-unfriendly "christian" lobbyist for whom "lip pursing" is considered a charism and, in lieu of genuine holiness, outrage will do in a pinch.

Now that they've gone out of their way to find him, the headlines can "accurately relate" how cross we all are here in Jesus-land that our Holy Book has been illustrated with tits.

The cumulative reaction from most Christian circles (among others) is actually not anger or disquiet - quite the opposite, in fact. Many of us are aging fans of Fritz the Cat who needed work and so slapped on a clerical collar and learned Greek and we can hardly wait to get our hands on a copy.

So what would you want in its stead? The Church of England? Soft floppy people reading a Book which contains scads of PG 13 sex, violence and nakedness though you'd never know it from the way it's read from the lectern in a stained glass voice?

Nah, give me something that I have to pass around in brown paper wrappers. Give me something my 12 year old stepson has to discover while fishing around in my office for a forgotten package of Tic Tacs and then pretend that he hasn't been reading.

Bishop Nick has a bit about it HERE. Church Mouse la-bas. New York Times HERE. New Yorker talks about the research which went into the artwork HERE. Article in the Jewish Daily Forward HERE. A few notes on the translation which Crumb uses HERE

Flying

Ever since I young, I have had very intense dreams in which I was able to fly.

Effortlessly, by putting out my arms and pushing off with my feet, I have been able to soar above rivers and roads and mountains.

This video, posted on Facebook by my sister Ruth, is the closest thing to the type of flying which I am able to do when I'm asleep. Somehow I can't help believing that I would actually be able to do it were push to come to shove.

When I die, God is gonna let me fly like this for real!

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Good Audio Alert!

BBC 4's Runaway Train brings together the original radio conversations with Wesley McDonald, alone in the engine of a runaway train in New Brunswick in 1987, with interviews of those involved in the incident.

A thrilling listen online until the 24th of October. You'll want a cup of tea.

Saturday Night Greek Word

Courtesy of Liddell and Scott

abakcheutos

A. unitiated in Bacchic orgies: generally, joyless

Text Messaging Versus Morse Code

Morse Code Vs. SMS

Christophor|MySpace Videos
In honour of my grandfather, James Earle Warren, was was the fastest Morse Telegraphers of his day in the Province of Saskatchewan.


Bit of background on the Morse Telegraph in Canada during WWII.

Back to the books!

As the regular readers of Raspberry Rabbit might have noticed (that's all four of you), I've not been around for quite a while.

I will have been ordained a priest 25 years this coming June and in that time I've never had a sabbatical or undertaken any serious continuing education.

I suspect that I was beginning to turn into a one trick pony.

That is now changing. Both for myself and for whatever series of congregations will need to endure me over the next twenty years I decided that it was time to hit the books again.

I've enrolled in a part-time MTh at New College, Edinburgh, which is part of the University of Edinburgh and I am finding it a bit of a challenge in the first few weeks. I've slogged through a bit of Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs Von Balthasar so far and a series of articles about Theology and Media. This week is devoted to coming up with essay topics.

More later!

Be Green with Envy, Brits and Americans!

The Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, may not have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he has appeared on the stage of the National Arts Centre in Ottawa with Yo Yo Ma. Our rather Aspergic Prime Minister can sing (sort of) and his ratings have apparently soared. The leader of the Opposition, Michael Ignatieff has tried to cash in on the event and it....doesn't work really




So my question to you is - what would Gordon Brown or Obama sing and with whom?

Handed over to Jesus, today.....

...are two of my friends facing very different kinds of necessity in Africa. One is, of course, our brother-in-Christ Kenny Macaulay, a delightful rogue who also happens to be the Rector of St Augustine's Church in Dumbarton (just west of the nice and civilized part of Scotland where Mrs Rabbit and I live). Kenny is off to the Gambia to try and negotiate with a local landlord who owns the property presently occupied by the Dumbarton/London Corner nursery school which the folks in Dumbarton underwrite pretty well in its entirety. Several thousand pounds have been spent upgrading a delapidated property in the poorest part of the town and the lease is up. The landlord sees the opportunity of reclaiming a much improved property and the education of some 90 small children hangs in the balance.

My daughter Hannah and I were with Kenny and his wife in the Gambia a couple of years back and had the opportunity to see the school up close. It's a great piece of mission work. It is based on the local committment of a Scottish town - in large part the committment of the Episcopal congregation but gets broad local support in the town as well. Kenny keeps Standing Order forms on his person at most times and pretty well everybody he meets ends up being hit for £5 a month. The story of how Kenny got involved in this mission is pretty well explained HERE on his blog. The outreach in question is also collaborative in that there is a local committee in Serrekunda which recommends children whose families are clearly unable to afford the school fees. Finally, through the help of an organization called Gambia Tourist Support, they are able to channel money (upwards of £1200 a month) into a country, where graft and chaos are not unknown, in such a way that the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and the individual donors need have no concerns. Money sent in for the school gets to the school and the school is able to pay its bills.

I phoned Kenny on his mobile today thinking that he was still in the UK only to hear a different ring tone before he answered. There were car horns tooting in the background and the sound of Kenny leaning out the window and yelling 'Bugger off' so it was clear that he was already driving through either Banjul or Serrekunda. In an understandably short phone conversation Kenny told me that while the negotiations are going to be an uphill climb with a fairly intransigent landlord, he plans to be there for a week and thinks that some agreement can be reached.

The second case is a different kettle of fish. Mark and Val are good friends of the Reverend and Mrs Rabbit - they've not been married that long and have a tiny baby boy named Josh. Mark is a ships engineer and regularly gets flown around the world to join ships and fix their massive engines. The paper work for his trips - visas and joining instructions - is done by the agency which sends him there. This time they neglected to get him a visa for the particular African country (to be named later but well known to Anglicans) the ship sailed into while the engine was being repaired. They're upriver now - loading or unloading - and the agency decided that the most convenient thing to do would be to simply leave him off the crew list and for him to stay 'below decks' which makes him technically a stowaway and at the mercy of whatever local official decides to inspect the ship.

Added to this is the fact that (sods law being well and truly at work this week) the ship keeps running into the sorts of difficulties which might invite local officials aboard - today it was the local mafioso storming the captain's cabin armed with a machete. The problem was dealt with by the "six foot six ape of a bosun" - a bad tempered Russian - who simply heaved the local thug over the side of the ship and left him to swim the short distance to the river bank and climb out. No doubt the Russian equivalent to "Bugger off" came up at some point in the altercation. Mark missed all the fun. He was below decks in what he calls his 'hidey hole'. Mark has a mobile phone and keeps updating his Facebook page. His wife, at home with a tiny baby, is somewhat unhappy with the situation.

So keep Kenny and Mark in your prayers today. Two lads far from home trying to do good work in difficult circumstances.

Thought for the Day

Fields of barley are now being cut - with combine harvesters out in the fields late into the evening. The wet summer created sodden fields but, with the tops of the Beech trees starting to change colour, we suddenly have reasonable weather.

Climbing the crest of the hill towards Perth, recently, I noticed all the white fields in the distance. Lots of people have taken a calculated risk and planted barley. They may find their crop fed into distilleries and breweries for top dollar or…. happy farm animals may end up chowing-down on top grade barley sold at bargain prices because there's too much of it around.

Good skills and livelihoods are at risk.

We're moving into Autumn now, with yellows and ochre tones in the ascendant. Plant life is mature – heavy headed, rich and filled with promise. Other generations regarded this time as the crowning glory of the year – not merely the harbinger of winter.

For Episcopal clergy in the Diocese of Edinburgh, November brings our annual Conference in Pitlochry - the forest there in stunning Autumn array. Many of us are in our 50's. We were trained by clergy who were around at the end of the 2nd World War who were themselves trained by the generation that saw the men going off to the 1st.

Quite a chain of experience.

We arrive with our little suitcases and mixed success in our congregations – some "gathering in" growing numbers on Sunday mornings – some in churches where growth has been a challenge. Our skills aren't always valued or understood in the way we might hope –the retelling of Sacred Stories and the proclaiming of hope based on events which took place long ago. Prayer beside hospital beds, school assemblies, timely conversations in village precincts.

What would our forebears have to say?

They'd probably take issue with how we do things.

But they would remind us, at the same time that, like the farmer, we are not completely in charge of how things work out.

We ply our trade in hope and faith and not in complete certainty.


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Audio available HERE for a limited time
TFTD begins at 1:22.05 on the audio bar

These kids are obviously having a lot more fun in their N.T. Greek class than I remember having back at McGill in the 80's.

Thought for the Day

One of my parishioners showed up for Mass yesterday in his brand new Morris Minor. Brand new, that is, to him. A funny little car - he’s obviously quite taken with it.

His two children seated in the back as they turned into Chapel Brae had what could best be described as a ‘quizzical’ expression on their faces – proud to be riding in Dad’s new car but worried their school chums might catch a glimpse of them.

This next few weeks marks the 40th anniversary of the break-up of the Beatles – Paul McCartney making plans for the future but John Lennon wanting out. George Harrison salvaging some of his own songs for his first solo album – one of them with a chorus line cribbed from the Buddha - “All things must pass – all things must pass away”

There are certain songs, smells and places – stemming from the experience of particular decades - when I’m surrounded by them, for an instant, I am 21 years old again. Young, slim and quick-tongued, although a bit stupid and shallow. I remember the first bit but not the second.

Nostalgia has its highest moment in an appreciation of what is good and what, in its age, was needed to hit the nail on the head – the utility of the thing, the integrity of the idea and its ability to carry people along with it.

Once Eddie had parked his Morris Minor in the lane perhaps with a large stone under its back tyre to keep it from rolling down the hill we gathered together, members of a village church, young and old, optimists and cynics, for the baptism of a baby girl wearing an old family christening dress.

The traffic rumbled down the A702 and the windows in the church rattled.

If you’d been with us, yesterday, you’d have heard ancient words and prayers lifting up a life which was young and newly formed. We recited traditional promises and invoked the Spirit of God over the water – believing, as we do - that on such old foundations God brings forth the new and the unexpected.


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audio available HERE for a limited time.
TFTD begins at 1:22.48 on the audio bar

Uh, no. I can't help you with your cross stitch!

Thees ees somebody else.
Raspberry Rabbits - Raspberry Rabbit!
Don't even sound same!

Then there's these folks who are clearly neither Scottish or Canadian. Our interests may not be identical. I don't know what they're saying and can take no responsibility if they fail to exercise the caution and charity so typical of my little blog.

Raspberry Rabbit is suddenly becoming a crowded place. Having been Raspberry Rabbit since 1993 on the Anglican-L email list surely I must have some sort of grandfather rights to the name.

Sand Animation

Many thanks to Malcolm+ over at Simple Massing Priest for this. I gather it comes from some sort of talent show in the Ukraine (Ukraine's Got Talent) or somesuch. Malcolm included the video as part of a prayer request for his wife who is off visiting her very ill Ukrainian grandmother.

Quotes that give one pause....

"Mr. Harper's visit was intended to display Canada's military might for a domestic audience grown skeptical about the slow implementation of long-standing Arctic promises, as well as to showcase Canada's resolve to international rivals such as Russia."

I found myself looking at this sentence from an article in the Globe and Mail two or three times, trying to figure out why my head was cocked to one side like the RCA Victor dog.

Platitudes, Bromides
and Thought-Terminating Clichés

A site called "Platitude of the Day" pokes daily fun whichever poor sod has done his ' bit' on Radio 4's Thought for the Day.

Scores would normally be expected to range from a 2/5 for 'slightly platitudinous' to 4/5 for 'highly platitudinous'. There are a few which garner a score of 5/5 for 'thoroughly platitudinous' or 1/5 for 'actually not bad' or 0/5 for 'Dammit I gotta start going to Mass again' (well no not really but 'hope springs eternal').

Criticism of the very existence of Thought for the Day on a public radio station is not unknown even though the slot is surprisingly well defended.

Mercifully the eagle eye of the site's author has not yet reached the howling wastes of Alba. It would take considerable effort to go through the whole episode of Good Morning Scotland on "Listen Again" and the Chief Imp at Platitude of the Day has better things to do with his time. Those north of the border have been spared.

The site is not devoted to improving the quality of Thought for the Day on Radio 4. There's a grudge in place from the outset that "religious' people" have a monopoly on this broadcasting slot and that the "There's quite possibily not much of a god, really" crowd aren't getting equal billing.

Nonetheless - there's a mission here ready to be taken on by somebody because platitudes are not unknown when it comes to mainstream religious contributions on the radio. Come to think of it they're not unknown in other places where clergy fiddle through a sheaf of papers and begin with a slight throat-clearing Ahem.

The Wikipedia definition for "Platitude" reads as follows:

A platitude is a trite, meaningless, biased, or prosaic statement that is presented as if it were significant and original. The word derives from plat, the French word for "flat." ........used as a pejorative term to describe seemingly profound statements that a certain person views as unoriginal or shallow.

for "Bromide" you have the following:

"A bromide is a figure of speech referring to a phrase or person who uses such phrases that has been used and repeated so many times as to become either insincere in its meaning, or seem like an attempt at trying to explain the obvious. It can also mean the unnecessary insertion of an (often irrelevant) cliché into a conversation, designed to make the speaker sound more authoritative."

It goes on to add:

The term derives from the former use of certain bromide salts (sodium bromide and potassium bromide) in medicine as mild tranquilizers and sedatives. ...... The literary usage of "Bromide" is meant to humorously imply a boring statement with similar sleep-inducing properties.

I read that and I want to get up and say 'Yes - I do that sometimes! In the pulpit and in school assemblies and into the microphone. Do I win the T-shirt?'

Well I do - really. And when I'm reading over an old sermon or listening to a service which has been recorded I get a pain and I begin to fidget because on far too many occasions what I'm listening to is more or less shite and unworthy of the time I've put into it or the time the assembled throng have dedicated to listening to it.

I don't think presenters do this because they've a hankering to write shite but because they understand, somehow, or have been convinced or are deluded that that the context requires something more 'toned down' than what they are otherwise inclined to say or write.

In this they probably err. While there is little appetite for pulpit moralizing and tremendous constraints upon any sort of religious polemic, nobody is going to shut the door on an able presenter who can spark a little kerygma in the form of story or personal reflection.

It can be done. Sometimes it's done very well. Not by firing one's arrows into the constantly narrowing public space which is begrudged us - like some corner of a foreign field. Which is forever England - but by taking stock of the privilege and opportunity these gigs represent.

There's nothing in the process of production which necessitates the creation of platitudes. I reckon it's much more about the dwindling confidence of religious presenters, their lack of playfulness and their unwillingness to tell stories instead of taking positions. The door to creative presentations of love, grace and opportunity is, I think, rather open.

We are not still not used to working with the permission of others.

With the Radio 4 gang you eventually get to the point of hearing a particular presenter being introduced and you turn up your radio because this particular one is different. They don't drone on. They're not boring and formulaic. This one usually has something to say.

You suspect, as well, that others are turning their radios up as well.

So, keeping in mind that POTD has a particular axe to grind and purely as a matter of interest, what would the Chief Wonk at Platitude of the Day believe a platitude to be or not be?

Here's one by the Rev'd Angela Tilbey (Vicar of St Benet's, Cambridge and avid TV fan) that earns itself the moniker 'Not Platitudinous' and here's another one of the same, written by Rhidian Brook (writer, celebrity and Christian) which is also judged to be 0/5 - 'Not Platitudinous'

On the other end of the scale you'll find those offerings judged by POTD to be extraordinarily platitudinous. Here's one by Joel Edwards - who recently stepped down as head of the Evangelical Alliance and is now the Executive Director of the Micah Challenge. Here's another extraordinarily platitudinous one by the Rev'd Dr Alan Billings who's billed as a mere Anglican priest.

I happened upon another definition which I'd never heard of before: that of the Thought Terminating Cliché

A thought terminating cliché s a commonly used phrase, sometimes passing as folk wisdom, used to quell cognitive dissonance. Though the phrase in and of itself may be valid in certain contexts, its application as a means of dismissing dissention or justifying fallacious logic is what makes it thought-terminating.

I hope I don't use those. I don't think so.

I think that in my early days I may have had some T-shirts with a few of those printed on them.

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Further reading on platitudes. An essay in their defense (in general terms - presumably not within a two minute slot on the radio!). From Australia. It can be found HERE (you'll need to click on the words 'Show Transcript')

...Schooled to avoid clichés, I simply could not find the appropriate words to acknowledge the awful tragedy in this woman's life. I stuttered and stumbled and finally said something stupid like, 'Gee that was bad, what happened to you...', then ground to a halt, as a look of pain and embarrassment crossed her face.

In retrospect, how much better would it have been for both of us if, at that moment, I'd simply reached for a soothing platitude? If I'd simply said, 'I'm so sorry for your loss', or, 'You have my deepest sympathy'?

Sometimes, you see, we actually need language to be well-worn and solemnly delivered. Sometimes a platitude need not sound insipid or insincere but is, instead, just what's required in a moment of deep emotion. To use a familiar phrase, a platitude can build a bridge over troubled waters....

....The great English journalist and philosopher G.K. Chesterton once wrote, 'Platitudes are there because they are true' - which almost sounds like a platitude itself! But he was definitely onto something because as the familiar words rolled off my tongue, at my grandmother's wake, I knew that what we were saying about her in our clichéd, unimaginative way was absolutely true. And with most of our energy going into coping with the sadness of grief, we simply didn't have enough left over to try and be sparklingly original in our use of language.

According to linguists, platitudes and clichés belong to the broad category of 'verbal cuddling strategies': language used to ease social interaction. Like euphemisms, they can be used to cover up unpleasant or awkward realities, or as tools for positively reframing our conception of negative situations.

Thought for the Day

Children are trudging down the lane this week in new school trousers - with back-to-school faces on - at five minutes after eight. Churches are planning to restart Sunday School this weekend, get their choirs back on a practise schedule and publicise their Fall programmes.

You don’t always get a second chance at these things.

You start with a bang or you start with a whimper.

This year we are hoping to break some eggs, stir the pot and open the doors to the possibility of grace, wonder and progress. It’s going to be different this year.

A youngish deacon in the Scottish Episcopal Church is being ordained a priest this Saturday here in Edinburgh.

There he is – another generation waiting for the bell – starting out with great hopes and ambitions. This time it’ll be different

Now listen up: I don’t care if you push that same button for the tenth time. I don’t care. You’re doing what you need to do. In our case, at Church, when there are a hundred on a Sunday or fifty or even when it’s just two or three of us gathered in the Lord’s name - He promised to be in the midst of us even then.

And I don’t care if it’s the tenth time you’ve tried to get a conversation going with your husband or wife about a problem you’ve been avoiding – or whether you’ve already tried to reorient your life out of its negative spiral a dozen times without much success or that you’ve been to detox twice and lapsed twice. It doesn’t matter. The fact that you’re willing to do it again is evidence that the spark of life is still in you – and the possibility of success is no farther away

It’s part of the nature of life, when you look at it through a microscope. Even more so the nature of faith in people such as we are, listening to our radios this morning - we move – we get up again when we’re supposed to stay down.

It’s what we do. It’s who we are. We start again.

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Audio is available HERE for a limited time.
TFTD begins at 1:24.23 on the audio bar

If you've not heard the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Here's a Youtube flick for introduction and for those who want to hear a little more, a recent Music Feature on Radio 4. Enjoy!

A video has been circulating around again. It came out a year or so ago - long enough, in other words, to have spawned at least one parody.

A tourist couple set their camera up on a rock at Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park to take a memorable holiday shot. Unfortunately, they had the scene stolen by a local Ground Squirrel who "popped up" just as the timer clicked over and took the shot.

The resulting photo has become one of those viral events. Everyone is making their own version of it. You can now make your own photo HERE

Were the natural range of the Columbian Ground Squirrel, at the end of the last Ice Age, to have extended to Scotland, for example, the recent General Synod might have looked like this

If you take the link (above) to the Crasher Squirrel Make Your Own Photo page you'll see where hundreds of people have turned their ordinary photographs into something remarkable and funny. The family depicted below has clearly decided that they've had enough of the "dull" and the "ordinary" so they decided that the addition of a random rodent would add something of interest.

Pause for Thought

Hunger: It was one of the first things we ever felt and one of the first things going on ‘within us’ that anybody else ever recognized.

A dis-ease inside.
An emptiness within us.
An ache

At some point our mothers must have said ‘I don’t know why he’s crying. He’s just after eating'.

Hungry people aren’t always the thin ones. You know that, don’t you?

Some of us are hungry even after we’ve eaten our fill. The hunger outstrips the meal in front of us.

Its not always a meal we’re hungry for, either.

We’re hungry for revenge or for company or in need of an avenue for our anger. We’re hungry to be told we’re the best or maybe we’d even give our right arm to be told that we were merely sufficient.

The hunger often outstrips the physical need. We try too hard, we’re told. We’ve become very hard work. There’s going to be trouble ahead. We’re starting to leave carnage in our wake because we’re suffering so from this insatiable hunger - from this thing gnawing within us. There’s a marriage to think about and children who depend on us. We’re up for a promotion at work and folks in the office are wondering whether we’re maybe a little too desperate and driven.

We might have known. Come to think of it, we did know - we’ve always known.

We wish we had a dime each time we’d slapped ourselves on the forehead and wondered why we’d said what we said – why we’d lost the rag - the way we did - in a public place.

We need to step back and review what we already know - ask what sort of hole it is we find in the centre of our being – while there’s time - what sort of emptiness – and what it is which drives us for good or ill.

And there is time. Our misfortunes don’t all happen to us by accident.

There are lessons to be learned and a more creative and ultimately a more ‘nourishing’ response to be discovered.


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The audio is HERE for a limited time.
Pause for Thought begins at 1:12.54 on the audio bar

This senior cleric appears not to be completely up to speed with the technical innovations available to the clergy nowadays

My daughter Hannah lives in Montreal. She thought that a having a dog would be a good idea.

This is the dog. His name is Major. Major is apparently still a puppy.

This is Major looking for any whales on the lake that he could eat.

What's wrong with a Jack Russell Terrier? This is not a dog this is a pony.

Pause for Thought

I’ve just come back from a two week trip to the Holy Land – a trip pretty evenly divided between time spent on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and time spent in the old city in Jerusalem with a few side trips here and there.

The Galilee was wonderful – thrilling – magical. I can shut my eyes and I am standing on the Mount of the Beatitudes looking down at the small stretch of shoreline on the north coast of the lake where so much of the Gospel story unfolds.

I’d been warned about Bethlehem and Jerusalem; warned by well-meaning colleagues and friends not to set myself up for disappointment – that there is an industry surrounding pilgrims like myself.

“Buy this olivewood rosary – buy these postcards – genuine Jordan water – genuine holy oil!”

I’d also been warned about the palpable hostility which was engrained in the place – the walls you drive by, the barbed wire, the universal presence of rifles slung over shoulders and handguns stuffed into belts.

This hostility extends to conflicts within all three major religions, as well and not merely between them. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem seems at times like a sort of board game with different teams occupying different parts of the same space.

I do not regret that somewhere along the line I developed the ability to ‘squint’ slightly and to conceive things as they once were or as they could be. It’s a skill learned in order to hold on to a deeper order of things even in the face of misadventure and disappointment.

It’s something necessary in order to believe in people even when they fail you – necessary even in order to believe in one’s self when the person staring back from the shaving mirror has proved to be less impressive than you once thought him to be.

As you walk through an old place which has been knocked down and rebuilt many times you reflect on the fact that human beings will generally get up again when they’ve been knocked down.

They’re got a vision in their heads which doesn’t correspond completely to the rubble which surrounds them.

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Audio available HERE for a limited time
Pause for Thought begins at 0:22.03 on the audio bar

Rumours

Industrial action on the part of Royal Mail employees here in the UK has prompted the folks down at The Tablet to allow free online access to the entirety of this week's edition.

I read purloined, free or week-old copies of the Tablet more than I read it when I've actually gotten up on my hind legs and subscribed. Once I've gotten my own subscription they end up staying in their little plastic pouches and my wife complains about the expense.

She's Scottish. She notices these things. It's true what they say.

Two stories in this week's free and therefore infinitely juicier-than-normal Tablet speak to the power of rumour to damage and destroy. I've lived and worked in communities where rumours circulate. The communities I live and work in right now are actually quite free of this sort of sub rosa manipulation of the many by the few - something for which I find myself very thankful.

In the Tablet this week, as their main story, is a rumour quite intentionally circulated in order to provoke outrage and violence: that two pages of the Qu'ran were allegedly destroyed at at Christian wedding in the Eastern Punjab in Pakistan.

What, as part of the liturgy? After the rings but just before the declaration?

The resulting violence has claimed the lives of 8 people (six of them burnt alive) and many more injured. Property and livelihoods were destroyed and church buildings were razed to the ground.
I remember the first time I ever fired an old Lee Enfield .303 when I was about 16, marvelling at the sort of shoulder-kicking power which could be unleased by applying a couple of pounds of pressure to the trigger. This is that sort of story. The rumour-monger knows that it takes just a word or two and he's unleashed an earthquake. It happened just as he intended.

The second story seems a bit more pedestrian. It concerns an apology printed on the front page of a newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada with reference to what they'd printed on an earlier front page: that Stephen Harper the Prime Minister of Canada had gone to a Roman Catholic funeral and had slipped a wafer from Mass into his coat pocket.

Some outrage ensued. Damage was done.

What was he doing going up for Communion in the first place since he's not a Roman Catholic? Did he just get up when everyone else did and was he then given something and then did he not know what to do with it? Did he figure he'd pocket it and then give it to his PA, Sabrina, to deal with like he passes so many of his problems on to her?

Well sir, the whole thing apparently was hooey (see the article at the bottom of page 31)

According to Canada's CTV News, members of the opposition Liberal Party told the story of the Communion host to the Newspaper's publisher, who then passed the unverified allegation on to his editor.

At least in this latter case the retraction got the same coverage as the original story and the originators of the rumour have been identified - as should always happen in families and in congregations where rumours start. One needs to slavishly follow them back to the source and make people accountable for what they've whispered in alleys.

Notwithstanding a number of official apologies from governmental officials in Pakistan one assumes that the originator of the rumours there which have now cost lives and livelihoods will never be properly identified.

From the Herald today:

OUR story of the woman described as "East Ham" as she was "one stop short of Barking" reminds a Stirling reader of when a friend said his trousers were "a bit Cowdenbeath".

When he asked for elucidation, he was told: "There's no ballroom in Cowdenbeath."

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Thank you Kenny

George Monbiot writes how difficult it is to fight against the establishment of a Superstore in a tiny community.

Last month Tesco submitted an application to...... build a store of 27,000 square feet on the edge of the town centre. This is twice the size of all our grocery stores put together, and bigger than our tiny settlement – 2,100 souls – can support. Tesco will prosper here only if other shops close and customers come from miles away.

More than 300 people – roughly one fifth of the adult population – have sent letters of objection. The case against the store and the strength of local feeling is so strong here that if we can't beat Tesco, no one can. But, being deficient in magic potion, we have precious little chance of stopping it.

Even if you've got an inherant prejudice against the NIMBYism of posh city folks who move to small communities and then object to development you've got to hand it to George: the cards are stacked in the favour of large corporations and their legal teams.

Read the entire article HERE.

The language is foreign
........but the sentiments are universal!

As I understand it, anyway: an Altar Guild president receives her copy of the letter from the chairman of the Select Vestry saying that Fr Wilson has accepted the Bishop's offer of appointment to St John's. She is overjoyed at the news, having endured nearly ten years under the previous Incumbent with whom she didn't see eye to eye.

Other members of the Select Vestry and heads of parish guilds gather to plan a welcome evening for the new incumbent. In the midst of these plans, Fr Wilson arrives.

Somewhat taken aback by the early arrival of their new Incumbent, everyone is nonetheless delighted that he has arrived with a complete set of vestments.

The welcome evening goes very well. There is much singing and dancing.

Several former members of the Parish who left when the previous Incumbent cancelled the monthly Evensong are in attendance although their enthusiasm is muted.

The new incumbent and the Altar Guild president spend a few moments at the statue of St Joseph the Carpenter and a bas-relief near the Lady Chapel representing the Visitation of Our Lady to her Cousin Elizabeth before wandering down to Council headquarters to see the Engineer about the old lead water service in the Parish Hall.

The future looks very rosy indeed.

Pause for Thought
BBC 2
Sunday August 9th, 2009

We’d been cutting wood for a few days down at our logging camp which was ten miles down the lake by canoe. It was Autumn. The nights were turning cold. The snow on the hilltops would creep a little lower each morning.

We didn’t have more than a week before we’d have to stop cutting for the year. Mid-morning the two of us downed tools to have a smoke – both of us with the impression that we were being watched. We turned around and there was a fellow standing behind us dressed in Moose hide from head to toe, with a Winchester rifle slung over his shoulder and a knife in his belt. His hair was in two braids and his eyes were bright blue.

We stood there in stunned silence.

“My name is Ice” the man said, and that was about all he said for three days.

Now understand that this was all in the Yukon Territory in northwest Canada. We’d canoed ten miles down the lake to get to our camp – there was at least some sort of settlement in the direction from which we’d come. This ‘Ice’ had wandered into camp from the other direction where there was nothing.

Now the Yukon in the mid seventies was filled with characters like this. Ice stayed with us for a couple of days. He was good with a chainsaw and his basic bush-craft was in order – consistent with a man wandering around the wilderness dressed in Moose hide. Still, it took us a good day before we’d turn our backs on him.

Our canoe was big enough for three and later we took Ice with us back to the village where some of our friends met him. Opinions were pretty evenly divided. Had Ice survived a plane crash when he was a child and was he then raised by wolves or was he a high school English teacher from Toronto who had taken too much dodgy LSD in the late sixties and gone to live with the bears?

The stories we concoct to make sense of characters like this. either build them up fantastically or reduce them to something wounded and pathetic.

And we are, let’s face it, curious.

We find ourselves yearning for something beyond mere explanation. Mystery. Possibility. Extending the horizons of those whose lives have become uncomfortably predictable.


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The audio is available HERE for a limited time.
Pause for Thought begins at 1:10.18 which is two thirds of the
way along the audio bar.

Sleep Tight!

Not a completely current story but one that I just saw for the first time today:

The BBC has been put in the position of defending its choice of 'scary books' for the long running Radio 4 show Book at Bedtime.

The Radio adaptation of Canadian Barbara Gowdy's novel Helpless was greeted with complaints from a number of listeners that the story had made them feel physically ill.

The Guardian's take on Gowdy's novel - called an 'unnerving psychological thriller' and reviewed, no doubt, by somebody who read it in her office surrounded by reassuring distractions and in full light - makes it seem a poor choice for the single listener tucked up in bed beside the radio with a cup of warm Horlicks under the feeble glimmer of a bedside lamp.

The novel has had a mixed reception in the US and in Gowdy's native Canada, where critics are either discomfited or admire this daring attempt to imbue the psyche of a child abductor with shades of grey. Known for inhabiting the minds of unorthodox protagonists - a herd of elephants and a female necrophiliac have previously starred - Gowdy has further tested limits in her exploration of the vulnerability of a child-stalking kidnapper.

I find at the beginning of my 50's that I am less tolerant of sad or disturbing material read or seen in order to give me a thrill.

The thrill, as they say, is gone.

I used to sleep better than I do now. I've also given up cheese before bed.

Pause for Thought

I have a neighbour who’s always building something out back. Like everybody else he’s also thrilled by any break in the Scottish weather. Which means of course that whenever the sun peeks out from behind a rain cloud and we all step outside to marvel at the sight of a blue sky in Scotland, the sound of an electric grinder begins or the smell of creosote starts to waft across the garden. He hammers and saws, he fits and bends, he nails and grinds. And never seems to get called in for tea – I don’t know when the man eats - there’s no break in the din – no respite.

He’s such a ‘doer’ this neighbour of mind. The man is an utter bastion of industry. Mostly on nice days, mind.

No, neighbours are no fun sometimes. People will occasionally come to blows over Leylandia hedges which have started to loom large and lopped-off branches of cherry trees where the trunk of the tree is tantalizingly close to the property line.

Other people are our greatest hope and the cause of our undoing. We are tempted to avoid them – close contact anyway. It’s always safer to be alone, to live alone – to this end people have forsworn marriage and avoided children. To this end folks will maintain a lifelong arms-length relationship with churches and organizations – always casting their vote but never serving on the executive.

At the graveside of one very ancient lady a number of years back, surrounded by her children and foster children, by students she had mentored – by people with whom she had been on speaking terms and folks with whom she had struggled, one of her equally ancient friends leaned over to me after the committal and said: “She was all used up you know”. All used up.

It’s what you do with fuel – and though you might worry about not having enough, it’s what fuel is for - and money, and effort, compromise, forgiveness, conversation.

Sorry that you feel your capacity is being stretched. Your irritation is noted – but community is precisely what these things are for. What on earth did you think you were saving them for?

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The audio can be found HERE for a limited time
Pause for Thought begins at 1:09.49 on the audio bar

updated below

The folks in Dumbarton are not out of the woods yet. The Sheriff is to rule tomorrow on the application by the Provincial Grand Black Chapter of Scotland for an Orange March on the 8th of August which would see 37 marching bands and 3000 Protestant marchers in what is a predominantly Roman Catholic town on the West side of Scotland.

The Council's Licensing committee has, I gather, rejected the application at a meeting yesterday. The Provincial Grand Black Chapter has taken it up a step and appealed to the Sheriff.

Our friend Kenny Macaulay, the Priest at St Augustine's, the local Piskie church, says in a tweet today that his congregation is not all that confident that the Sheriff will rule on the side of the angels.

The story is all HERE
and also HERE

Update

I have just heard from Fr Kenny Macaulay that the Sheriff has overturned the Council's decision to ban the Orange March in Dumbarton this Saturday and that it will be going ahead.

Fifes and drums and approximately 3000 marchers on a route which takes them past St Patrick's Church.

This in spite of a policing report which warns of trouble and a decision by Council to ban the march.

story HERE

Pause for Thought

I was speaking at a local Rotary club in Montreal a few years back – a club which had been in the same premises in Montreal West for sixty years. The photographs of the past club presidents were lined up on the wall – wartime and peacetime presidents, boom and bust presidents.

The appearance of a Rotary Club president changes remarkably little across the years – conservatively coiffed hair, a dark suit and a sober tie.

The President from, say, 1940 might magically bump into the President from 1995 on a street corner and exchange pleasantries and business cards, without the one ever needing to say to the other, in the course of conversation: “And oh, by the way, Frank, what the hell are you dressed as today?”

The fly in the ointment - the exception to this rule – is, of course, the five or so years in the late seventies when everybody lost the plot. Who designed those sport coats? Which Scottish Secretary in the Callaghan government permitted Tartan to be used worldwide as a weapon? Where did the inspiration for all those puffy hairstyles come from? What was the message being proclaimed? “I may be a pipe fitting wholesaler but that doesn’t stop me from being a Disco Demon!”

We’ll find the same sorts of gaps or queer half-decades in many of our own personal photo albums – the year or two when we had that wobble. We were teenagers, or, later in life, we weren’t doing very well in our jobs. Our marriage was a struggle and adjustments were in order. We realized that we were getting older and were trying to fight it. We wondered whether we had missed the boat and needed to expand our horizons.

With hindsight we appear vaguely ridiculous but the task was quite possibly a necessary one. Going through one of those patches is not a pretty sight. It’s not a spectator sport.

Some of what we threw away needed throwing. And perhaps we held on to the good core of who we were and still are today. And so we should marshal up a little tenderness.

We came through it. We turned the corner. We endured. We’re better now.

--
The audio can be heard HERE for a limited time
Pause for Thought begins at 0:22.10 on the audio bar

My twelve-year-old Step-Rabbit is off at the Scottish Episcopal Church's summer camp in Perthshire this week.

It's the end of day three.

No news is good news.

I've just made a quadruple recipe of spinach and parsnip soup.

Spinach and parsnip soup because that's what was 'at risk' in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. A quadruple recipe because, of course, I screwed up and used four times as much of one ingredient and the resulting single recipe was overpowering so I had to go out and purchase more spinach and.....whatever......you're probably not interested.

Caireen went out to collect the young lad from where he's had an overnight and instead of writing my sermon, as I should, I was browsing around strange vintage recipes and I came up with this one. Its for Ham Shortcake with Pea Sauce.

Maybe another time.

We went for a walk along the Glencorse reservoir near my home in Penicuik this afternoon. My wife's dog Patch is part sheepdog. Which gave him the inclination to round this lot up and organize them into a proper flock. He required some disusasion. We were worried that we'd be plucking him off their horns like a marshmallow.

Adolescence has always been a tough row to hoe. No addition of earrings will ever make this veal calf look like a pirate.

In an age where the police wear black golf shirts to match their black trackpants, the Brownies wear yellow sweat shirts instead of proper berets, smocks and Sam Brown belts and clergy have their official pictures taken in Rugby jerseys it was good to see a little traditional solemnity on the streets of Edinburgh today. This horse drawn hearse was on its way back from what looked like a massive funeral in Liberton.

"Boy, my time ran out fast today. I rebuke that clock in Jesus’ name!"


- Quote attributed to Marcos Witt, pastor in an American megachurch

And while we're on the subject of 'Comin' through the Rye' (or in this case, Barley): Something caught Clio's attention in a grain field today and she was off like a shot.

While we're on the subject of foreign chipmunks: What with Homecoming 2009 and the beginning of the festival season in Edinburgh the streets are filling up with people from "elsewhere" whose grandmothers "were Scotch". I have yet to see my first Korean tourist wearing a Jimmy Hat but the streets are beginning to take on the atmosphere of a carnival.