Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends

One of our West-Country types here at St James', Penicuik was telling me that the same record company which manages Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse is just after signing a group of Cornish fishermen to a major record deal.

The Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends were singing in a pub when a record executive on holiday stopped in for a pint. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Amazon site has a video which doesn't appear elsewhere in a format easily nicked for a blog page. It'll set your foot to tapping.

We have our requisite number of Cornishmen at both St James and St Mungo's. I grew up in Canada and the only West Country accents we ever heard issued from the lips of pirates in movies. Stereotypes are hard to cast off. The old stories about Cornish villagers luring ships onto the rocks with torches are nothing but dreadful slander.West Country folk are, in fact, lovely people.

I am still hesitant to let ours help with the parking for major events at church, just in case one of them should revert to type and, waving a flashlight, tell one of our visitors to back straight into the wall at high speed, with other Cornishmen swooping over the wall and making off with the spare petrol tin, the jump leads and the dog gate.

Like I said, lovely people, but that sorta stuff is not part of our Mission Statement......

You said if we paid them no mind,
they'll stop bothering us!

A website in Britain called Neighbours from Hell in Britain is offering to help "hardworking normal citizens" develop a strategy for dealing with terrible neighbours who wreak chaos for those living in close proximity to them.

Positively Managing Negative Neighbours. Are you suffering or suffered in the past with a nuisance neighbour, noisy neighbour, harrassment, bullying, boundary problems, anti-social behaviour or any form of unwanted neighbour attention or interference? Neighbours From Hell in Britain (NFHiB) can help you to resolve neighbour problems or any issues with neighbours within many different situations, there's no need to be or feel alone.

So is there anything they can do, then, with the good folks in Iceland who, since 2008 and the banking crisis, have made their little nation painfully well-known to the rest of us.

Having neglected their family debts and chequebooks in 2008 they've now clearly forgotten to perform regular volcano maintenance and they've got one heck of a spewing example of such neglect right in their back garden (which they named Eyjafjallajoekull - in order to irritate the Welsh who thought they could only come up with unpronounceable names using few vowels) which is spewing ash and delaying travel for the rest of us.

An ASBO. That's what's needed. It may be too late for mediation by a good hearted local charity.

One of the "must do's" when visiting the Sea of Galilee for the first time (other than seeing if the water will bear your weight) is to sample the famous Saint Peter's Fish at one of seaside restaurants on the Kibbutz Ein-Gev. The Rabbit family are due for a return visit to Israel to visit family in the summer of 2011 except the St Peter's Fish will be in short supply. A two-year ban on fishing the Sea of Galilee will begin this month.

These are a fast-growing fish which, being vegetarian, does not accumulate mercury in its flesh through eating smaller prey fish. It can be eaten in copious quantities with no risk to health unlike the big Lake Trout in northern Canada.

They are one of a large family (1300 subspecies) of the family Cichlidae found in various parts of the world. Africa and Central/South America host the greatest number of these fish and these populations are very distantly related to each other in that the continents were joined in the distant past. In like manner the cichlids of India and Madagascar, related to each other, are examples of the same sort of Gondwanan distribution. The popularity of ciclids as aquarium fish and the intentional or accidental introduction of these energetic and fast-growing fish into the watercourses of Florida or Australia have (unfairly) given such fish as the Tilapia a bad name as a destructive interloper. The particular branch of the Cichlid family represented by the Saint Peter's fish is, in fact, vegetarian. They tend to clear up weed-choked watercourses and improve the habitat for other fishes.

They are definitely a warm water creature and they suffer in the cool water of the Sea of Galilee in the winter time. One of the places they congregate in enormous schools is at the outlet of the fairly warm spring which gushes forth from the foot of the Mount of the Beatitudes, near Tabgha at the north-north-west corner of the lake.

So, if you knew where to drop your net - or if somebody told you - you'd be in business.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

When did you last make up your mind? How difficult was it for you to get married or to change careers?

When I was a teenager, I attended a church service where the preacher asked people to make a commitment of faith – to make up their minds - and to signal that decision by sticking a hand up in the air. I remember the preacher saying:

I see that hand…yes, and that hand too.

Life would be easier if we’d been part of a Golden Age when men and women didn’t need to agonize over decisions – when everything was so blindingly obvious that there really were no decisions to make. Even in a time of national crisis or a family emergency we imagine it would be easier. Adrenaline would take over. We’d be inclined to act rather than to deliberate.

Some of us look back at the collection of stories in our Bibles to find people who, we suppose, had it easy - who heard a voice speaking out of a burning bush or encountered the risen Christ standing on the beach welcoming them. “Bowled over”, we imagine they were, “gobsmacked” even. People like these didn’t need to weigh options like we do.

Except that’s exactly what they did in these stories – from Moses to Saint Peter. These people were presented with promises and challenges which they measured and pondered. You’d be safer to read some silences into the text. That silence is the sound of Saint Peter making up his mind. That silence is the sound of God waiting to see what Moses will decide.

God does not rob people of their right to choose – of their ability to say yes or no. The energy for faith – the energy for community building – the energy required to change your course in life. This is energy which is triggered by decision and every decision you make requires a certain amount of human agony - just enough blood, perhaps, to mark it out as “yours” and not merely the byproduct of events.



the audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:18.33 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar.

Happy Easter Everybody. An amazing collection of services in at least two Scottish Episcopal Congregations yesterday. News from others will filter down over the next few weeks. These images are NOT from St James' Penicuik but, rather, from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. We had two baptisms at St James at our Easter service, though, and there were visitors in copious quantities and it had something of the same feel.

It's not evolution, it's just the truth nonetheless

That liberalism and atheism (and male sexual exclusivity) are associated with high Intelligence Quotients. Article HERE. I say Intelligence Quotient instead of IQ in order to prove that those of us who are believers in God and not particularly radical in either our political beliefs or theological constructs (and who just might have "put it about" a little more in our single years than we'd like to admit to our children and grandchildren) still know what the abbreviation stands for.

It's not - as is frequently maintained - a question of evolution. Theism "helps people to be paranoid" and so keeps them looking over their shoulders where, coincidentally, they see the lion and the bear creeping up on them and are able to run away and continue to add to the gene pool. Conservatism helps maintain solid tribal affinities and, hence, community survival. And, as the article helpfully adds at the end, intelligent people don't have large families.

So it's not evolution, then.

It's just a fact.

Well it's good to know that I can relax. It appears that I am as stupid as I feel sometimes and so are many of you. I actually find it strangely liberating! My father told me once that life would improve once I took it to heart that we don't really ever amount to anything. I can relax now.

I do see a few seams in the study as it's being presented on the CNN site and wonder whether any peer review was ever done on this man's work. But that might be, duh, wishful thinking.

A cloudy day in Castel Gandolfo

The Universal Pope

There was a Montreal eccentric in the seventies and eighties who claimed that he was the Universal Pope. In fact, he had two personae based on the two costumes his aged mother had made for him.

The first was that of an admiral of some sort - a white uniform which might have passed for the get-up of a hotel bellhop were it not for the military peaked cap and the chest full of medals. He was a regular fixture at hockey games at the old Montreal Forum in this uniform - strolling around as "the admiral". Everybody knew him and largely ignored him.

The other uniform was rather better-made and considerably more splendid: A purple cassock with stripes and tassels, a colourful cape and a red skull cap. In this uniform he would wander around in front of the Anglican Cathedral (and other religious establishments as well) and tell the tourists out front that he was the Universal Pope. Once in a while they'd take his picture and have their pictures taken with him.

He would show up at Synod Eucharists and other events, milling around at the front of the cathedral. Al, the Cathedral's verger, would inevitably lose patience with him and show him off the property where he'd wander about on the sidewalk just outside of Al's grasp. A game of "cat and mouse" would then ensue, for an hour or so, between the Universal Pope and Al the verger. Al tended to be "mercurial" and could be hot tempered. It was best not to mess with him.

When the Synod of the Diocese of Montreal elected the Dean of the Cathedral, Andrew Hutchison, to be its new bishop after the retirement of Reginald Hollis, the enthronement was a very grand affair with television cameras in the choir loft, the mayor and other city officials in the front pews and ecclesiastical dignitaries of various sorts in procession. The usual flurry of activity took place with clergy, both greater and lesser, being assigned to their various place in the procession. When the first notes of the Processional Hymn began the procession began snaking in the back door of the cathedral.

No one knows exactly at which point the Universal Pope found his place in the procession but he was in the middle of it, for a short time, bestowing blessings upon those to his left and his right. He never made it farther than about ten paces inside the cathedral, though, because at this point Al the verger waded in and hauled him out bodily.

The most memorable moment of the day was actually not the ejection of the Universal Pope from the procession. It was the rather alarmed look on the faces of the two visiting officials from an "Eastern" church in their full robes and box-like headgear who were clearly trying to figure out what the prelate, ahead of them in procession, had done wrong so that they could avoid a similar fate.

Off on the world's shortest retreat on Lake Albano just outside of Rome. Leaving on Monday and will be back on Wednesday. It's not so much 'retreating' as it is 'nipping outside for a mo'.

A Sermon

Sunday February 7th 2010
Epiphany 5 Year C
Luke 5:1-11

I'm of the generation which learned its measurements in inches, feet and yards.

I know what an acre is. The Rectory here in Penicuik sits on about a third of an acre of land. If you added together the car park and the property the church is sitting on, you’d have about an acre without having to steal much of Nigel Johnston’s back garden to make up the difference.

I have seen a bushel basket. I know how big that is although, frankly, I’m a bit stymied when it comes to what a “peck” might be. I don't know how long a chain is, or a league. That's too ancient. On the other hand, I have no visual reckoning of what a hectare looks like – that's too modern - but I believe it to be some sort of metric acre.

Stewart and Hannah are probably more inclined to think in centimetres and metres.

I am descended from people who’d have known all the ancient measurements. They farmed sections and half-sections of land and could have told a new neighbour how many men they’d need to have around at harvest time to reap the fields and stook the grain on such a piece of Canadian prairie.

When I was a child in school we were told that there was a room somewhere on Parliament Hill in Ottawa where the government kept a lump of lead which weighed exactly a pound. They also had a steel bar measuring exactly a foot and vessels which could contain precisely one pint or one quart or one Imperial gallon.

We imagined an old commissionaire with a funny moustache guarding a small locked room. If you thought that Mr Lee down at the corner store had cheated you on a pound of green beans you could always fly to Ottawa and ask the commissionaire to get up and shuffle around for his keys and let you compare the bag of green beans with the standard pound kept in the room. Just the though of it kept everybody honest.

Our measurements have to be standard and regular and common property. I’m not going to buy cloth from you if your idea of a square yard isn’t the same as mine.

Time we measure in seconds and minutes and hours - days weeks months and years. If you've hit the age when you begin to become nostalgic you might ask yourself: “where was I five years ago? 2005, of course, wasn't it? Where was I in 2000? Or 1995?"

You go back in five-year increments through the eighties or seventies. A bit slimmer you were then, with more hair, married to that one and not this one. But when you change direction and go back up through the list you'll notice that it’s not a satisfactory way of measuring time at all. Measuring your life in regular increments is quite daft, really, and not terribly useful because the events of any life happen in lumps, not in regular steps.

You didn’t have a crisis or a change or a transformation every year or every five just because the clock or the calendar turned over. No, every year is not the same. There is no standard year or decade guarded by a commissionaire in a little room in Ottawa. No such thing exists. Some years, days months and moments are special times - they weigh more and contain more things. They are significant. Some times are lighter and click by with a dull regularity.

In the Greek language there is a word for time which passes in regular increments - the word is "Chronos" and it's a useful word for mapping out the regular time - time without content - time-always-the-same – standard days, weeks, months and years.

The other word is Kairos and it is better translated by the English word "season". A season has particular obligations attached to it and requires that the farmer, the student, the disciple or the traveller be aware not only of its proportions but its requirements. It contains the promise of abundance if taken seriously and approached at the right angle or the threat of tragedy if it is misunderstood or disobeyed.

An ancient tapestry outlines the seasons in terms of agricultural activity in medieval Britain: There’s the farmer in the first panel sowing seeds in the spring. There he is reaping in the fall. There he is slaughtering his hogs in November. We do different things at different times.

At the end of whatever sermon he was preaching to the crowds in the fifth chapter of Luke, Jesus, in the boat with his new disciples, tells Simon Peter to put out a little farther on the lake and to let down his nets.

“Lord”, says Simon, “we’ve done that regularly on the hour and half-hour all night. We've been letting them down. No one can say we haven’t kept to schedule. Each time we brought them up empty. Time and time again. But because you say so, I’ll do it again.”

You know the story. He did it again. And this time they enclosed such a shoal of fish that his partners in the fishing syndicate needed to bring their up boats close and take up the surplus.

It's a story we tend to universalize. Some of us, you see, have made perseverence into a religion and would take almost carnal delight in any story which showed the hero performing a difficult task "just one more time" and thereby reaping a reward. We would bear such a story aloft like a flag and would bore our children and grandchildren to tears with such a story. You might invoke me - or blame me. In fact, that's not what I'm saying at all. But this is not a story which merely praises perseverance.

Everyone has a list of things they've been hammering away at with little success to their enormous and never-ending frustration - things that they've been trying to do for a long time - things which don't happened just because they want them to happen. They've even written to their MP. No joy there either.

And in fact there's not an iota of proof that the one more time will be any more successful than the first ninety-nine. Maybe the frustrating thing you've been trying to achieve for twenty years is the wrong thing to do.

You've been banging your head against a brick wall. Now you've got a bruise on your forehead and bits of brick in your hair. Maybe the thing was ill-advised or wrong-headed. Maybe you should take your wife out to a movie, come home and have a stiff drink in front of the fire. And tomorrow - try doing something else.

There’s another related tendency which folks try out on this passage which is to say that the moment is different because Jesus is in the boat. This is both true and not true. Yes, Peter lets the nets down one more time because it’s Jesus telling him to do it. Don’t we sometimes, though, make Jesus an addendum to what we were doing anyway? We go back to the same old list but this time we imagine Jesus alongside us - Sancho Panza to our Don Quixote- and we carry on tilting at the same old windmills – the same things on our list - but this time saying that we’re doing it in Jesus' name. We invoke the power of Jesus to get ahead in life or make some other provision for our safety and security.

One wishes, again, that somebody had the chutspah to ask us why you think Jesus wants the same things we’ve always wanted. Curious coincidence, no, that Jesus might want exactly what suits us? How does that work?

No, the secret here is to ask what sort of season it is that these people in the boat with Jesus are occupying at this moment in Luke’s story. Forget what they are receiving – what exactly are they participating in?

At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has just disappointed an entire congregation in Nazareth – a congregation in which his family were seated looking decidedly uncomfortable as he preached an inflammatory sermon and then horrified as the congregation rose up in rebellion to drag Jesus from the body of the Kirk. He has moved to Capernaum as an exile from his family home and, frankly, Peter’s desire for a full boat and the desire of the other soon-to-be apostles to pay their debts and invest in new equipment is clearly not the point. By the end the day they will have left all these things – nets, boats and families – and will have become followers. Given that this is Luke's version of the same story which John places at the end of his Gospel, we can safely say that, as far as Luke is concerned, this is the last full boat of fish Peter will ever see.

The point is the Kingdom and its extension. Peter, James and John are being invited out of the boat and into the company of the apostles. It’s not one more fishing day with some added success because Jesus is present.

It’s the end of fishing and the end of regular time with its identical moments, its standard lengths and weights. It’s a new season – a new and irregular measurement of time and space. It’s the beginning of a new life.

A welcome bit of subtlety

One of the truly tedious things about living in Britain is the number of "shock ads" on television designed to dissuade the Brits from drinking and driving or neglecting to turn their electrical appliances off at night. They generally involve firemen holding distraught parents back from returning into a burning house to rescue their children, who will shortly die because somebody left the little red light on on the television set, or twisted bodies of adorable children on roads because somebody drank too much, etc etc.

As necessary as the messages may be it seems to be of a piece with the government's low view of the people who elected them that the citizens of this country need to be brutalized by terrible visual images before they'll decide to fly right. The ads are truly distasteful (I won't even give you an example here) and I turn the well-known ones off when they start.

The example above is different. Quite gripping without being revolting. Well done!

Thought for the Day

One definition of “compassion” has it described as being “more rigorous than empathy”. I don’t know if the word is ‘stronger’ or simply more likely to be turned into action. When Jesus sees the crowds – leaderless and without a shepherd – it is said in the text that he had compassion for them. The conversion of St Francis of Assisi took place not when he had a dream or a vision but when he saw a man stricken with leprosy standing on the side of the road. The sight marked the well-dressed young "Francesco". Something leapt into life within him and his life demonstrably changed thereafter.

My daughter began her first evening shift the other day at an overnight shelter for homeless women in Montreal. Up until this point she’d been paying her bills by working as a manager at a restaurant and she’d been well-paid and good at her job. She found, though, that the work was unrelated to her study at university which is all about people and intervening in the problems they face.

Her boyfriend, for his part, has just arrived in Haiti in a Canadian uniform where he’s in the midst of unpacking a field hospital and managing other supplies destined for the relief effort there. At different points on the globe they are dealing with the plight of others. They are now old enough and trained enough to make good on the feelings they have within them and to translate those into action on behalf of others.

Is empathy a warmer word? It describes what’s going on within us - what we feel. The impact – it’s right “there” and can take the form of distraction or tears or even physical pain .

Compassion usually refers to what we do alongside the object of our concern – what we do for them. We’d have to know whether we’re doing them any good and that’s harder to know. That’s where the risks come in.

We don’t always manage to do the good we intend, but unless we take the best stab at it we can, the feelings we have inside of us may remain merely feelings.



the audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:21.25 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar.

Julian Byng, 1st Viscount Byng of Vimy
Governor General of Canada from 1921 to 1926

He was commander of the Canadian Corps at the time of Vimy Ridge in the First World War. A High School was named after him in what was, then, a fairly deprived neighbourhood in Montreal. A long list of notable graduates of of Baron Byng High School included writers such as A.M. Klein and Irving Layton, Supreme Court Judges, Nobel Prize winning chemists and even the actor William Shatner. With reference to Byng's own academic performance at Eton as a boy:

"...his time at the college was undistinguished, and he received poor reports; indicative of his attitude towards academics, he once traded his Latin grammar book and his brother Lionel's best trousers to a hawker for a pair of ferrets and a pineapple."

Winter Leaving Us

The car park at St James Penicuik is still a sheet of ice and the light is still winter light but the first hints of Spring are in the air.

NASA's Picture of Britain Today

Blog-a-Dog

Thought for the Day

There’s a time after Christmas when we all start thinking about “business as usual”. It may not be yet. Frankly, you might even resent being reminded about it.

So what was it brought you down with a bump this season?

Family relationships? Ensuring transport for family members in the midst of all of this snow and ice? A stray thought or two about what you’d actually spent over the last month and what the credit card bill’s going to look like? The attempted bombing aboard an aircraft coming in to land in Detroit or maybe some other news item which reminded you that the world hasn’t changed all that much just because it’s Christmas?

All this reality gets in the way of a holiday, doesn’t it? A bit of sacred space for some of us, a few days of rest and relaxation for others.

Nobody in the Christmas story appears to be on holiday, though, do they? Funny that. Mary and Joseph are working to a tax deadline. King Herod is keeping order in his kingdom and preserving his place in the pecking order. Shepherds watching their flocks on Judean hillsides – they were on-call as usual. And let’s not forget the Wise Men: As strange and enigmatic as their job might have been, even they appear to have been on duty.

It wasn’t a holiday for any of any of them. We’re the ones who’ve made it a holiday. The Son of God was born into a busy world and the key for us is to maintain the link between that Story – with its message of hope and God’s good will towards humanity - with the person we usually are and not the person we are when we’re on holiday.

We’re people who slave away and make decisions affecting others. We’re charged with the nurture of children. We buy and sell. We make products, tighten bolts and run offices. We try to get the best deal we can. It’s that world which all this Christmas stuff has something to do with and not simply the family sitting around the front room playing charades.

And so maybe it’s not over when we find ourselves back to work today or in a day or two. Maybe it’s just beginning.


The audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:23.15 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar

Crystal Clear Atheism

An interesting (tho' fairly long) article about an evening spent at a fundraising evening for the Atheist Alliance International.

The biggest security guard I’ve ever seen in my life–this guy could work for Blackwater, and he’s got the coiled listening device spilling out of his left ear to prove it–has parked his burly self squarely in front of me, making it clear that I’d best slink back against the wall while the Rock Star of Atheism makes her entrance and a hundred entranced admirers take a collective breath, not quite believing they’re in her presence.

The whole article, entitled Joe Bob Biggs Parties with the Atheists repays the time spend reading it. Quite entertaining. Good quotes throughout about the new, more militant face of atheism:

Christopher Hitchens was an amusement of a different sort–first because he didn’t show up for his speech and several people had to go looking for him (“Check the bar!”), then because his thrown-together 19-minute talk was peppered with hysterical invective, as he described the “moon-faced Baptist preachers” and “smug smarmy rabbis” and “ghouls from Islamic organizations” he’d been forced to debate during the past year. Hitchens says most of them try to argue from some morally superior position, as though religion itself benefits society. “And yet there is this property of the supernatural–it attacks us in our core, despoils our sexuality, it is a source of misery, guilt, shame and immorality. And so my suggestion to you, when you encounter these people, is to say this: your antagonist has to make a moral statement that could not be made by a non-believer. Actually one was posted on my website. ‘Love your enemies.’ I don’t think that’s a moral statement. It’s immoral to say you love them.”

What a good article in yesterday's Telegraph
by Christopher Howse!

Today, what we wear is ugly, though the meanest medieval labourer wore hand-made clothes. We can't name the stars, except the ones we see on TV. We can read, but can't be bothered to. We save time by driving, only to lose it by slumping on the sofa. We can't sing, can't dance, can't paint and can't drink politely in company. Yet we have the childish gall to patronise past centuries as inferiors.

It's the 100th Anniversary of the Montreal Canadiens today and they're playing Boston tonight and I wish I was back home watching the game.

Thought for the Day

Where has the time gone? With Christmas a little over three weeks away it’s what we’re wondering. Has it been a year? Look at those children – they’ve grown up! Where has the time gone?

Time doesn’t actually go anywhere, does it? When we were small, time simply passed slowly. It took forever. We’re grown up now and it’s picked up tempo.

Should I worry about time doing that “other thing” (which time is also said to do) which is to “run out”?

Whether it goes, whether it passes or whether it runs somewhere you could drive yourself nuts trying to catch it or slow it down.

There’s no shame in occupying our portion of it and being satisfied with that. Grander people than us have seen their time come and go.

I have this picture in my mind of a Christmas gathering when I was small and my great-grandfather was still alive, up at the head of the table fiddling with his hearing aid which was squawking and squealing.

I’d have been six or seven. It was a timeless moment. Grandfather sat at the head of a table of busy young people who, for a single evening, were gathered together and it must have seemed timeless to him too.

Temporary, of course: We’d have all been back to business as usual given a few days
but for that moment the family was complete and together.

Time does something else too.

Those saints who were given to having visions knew it. When our first child is born we experience a piece of it. When love is expressed between people, or when words are written, spoken or sung which are beautiful and resound deeply within the human soul we feel it:

Don’t we say, in those moments, that ‘time stands still’.

Time stands still in the presence of the most important things. That we are there and participating in that moment is more than enough – it chases away the fear we have of being insignificant – not because we’ve grown bigger in any way ourselves,

but because we become part of it, part of what is meaningful or maybe even eternal.

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Audio available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:21.34 on the audio bar

Thought for the Day

Advent begins this Sunday with all its anticipation and waiting.

We all want to know what’s coming our way.

To this end we keep our ear to the ground, we read the papers, we listen to office gossip. What’s on its way may be good. It may be bad. The future is filled with the possibility of promise or judgement. Or a bit of both.

It’s that official looking envelope which comes through the post that we’re half scared to open.

We’re all for promise. But what about judgment? The last time we were caught short and had our performance or motivations criticized it hurt like hell. We’d pop into a side room before we entered into one of those conversations willingly – to find out that someone had a bone to pick with us, or that they needed to tell us something which required that we sat down first or had a witness present – that we’d been hurtful or destructive or that we just didn’t get what the point of our job was or our marriage vows or our priorities.

“A word in your ear please?”

“Uh, no, maybe later….”

There is a place, though, where promises and judgement intersect. The promise of anything new threatens what’s old and obsolete and quite comfortable. We get used to certain ways of life even if they’re way below par and we stagnate - as my grandfather used to say: “It may be an ugly dog but it’s my dog”.

And if the bottom were to fall out and we were apprised of our faults, what then?

Well, sir, everybody would know where they stood and there would be pieces to be picked up and the possibility of breathing in air which has finally been cleared.

Promise and threat sometimes begin to look like each other.

So that’s not really the choice we have. It’s a choice between judgment-and-promise on one hand or staying exactly the same - with our secrets untold and our promise unfulfilled.

In the worst case scenario the future is filled with the same damned thing repeating itself endlessly.

And surely in a season of anticipation, anything would be better than that.

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Audio is HERE for a limited time. TFTD begins at 1.19.57 on the audio bar

Always the Celebrant, never the bride!

I know it was their day and everybody should pay attention to them and all that but what about me? Why does everybody forget the poor vicar? Spend all those years learning Greek and putting up with grumpy old ladies and filling in Annual Statistics forms and once the wedding's over the celebrant gets forgotten! It's not fair, I tell you, not fair!

Lutheran Airlines

Okay - so it's now dawning on me that my two essays must now be written. I must get over the unhelpful fantasy that a blank page is somehow 'nicer' and 'fresher' than one filled with characters.

There was this other person a while back who looked quite a lot like me 'cept that this guy had rather a lot of time on his hands.

Time for the details

We're lucky in Edinburgh to have a few Titians 'hanging about' in the free part of the National Gallery of Scotland. For those of you who are connaisseurs of 'healthy women' but have no Reubenses right at hand, Titian will do in a pinch.

One of my favourite paintings is the one shown above - The Three Ages of Man - which I was looking at on Friday when I had a spare half-hour. On the right hand side are the infants - largely unaware of their surroundings and producing much fluid and little language. At the left you'll find the youth - "struck" and fixed as he is by the object of his desire. Finally, at the back, is the old man - senile and decrepit - slogging through his obsession with what is past and dreading what is yet to come.

Art is not always prescriptive of reality, though. There's more to life than being caught in a series of bottomless pits of self-absorption. My father's last two posts are a testament to the degree to which the last age of man can be a time of attention. With a certain amount of Adam's Curse laid to one side, space is made for one's attention to fill in - notice is taken finally of small things.

If we do, in fact, follow our fathers then the future bodes well for me.

I shall begin paying attention to the small things I'd missed.

My wife, I think, will appreciate that.

Fear and Surprise!

Back in the Diocese of Montreal it was always easier to marry two divorced Presbyterians in an Anglican Church than it was to perform the service for Roman Catholics where one party or both had been divorced. As was the case of all remarriages of divorced people, an application had to go before the Bishop and the Matrimonial Commission. With Roman Catholic applicants, however, there were additional concerns about "not alienating" a couple from their own Church. At least that's how it was explained to us at the time.

As Rector of a parish, you were left to deal with most things in the parish as you saw fit (within reason) and it always seemed a little 'out-of-keeping' that as much muscle and as as clear an interdiction was applied to this particular process. After all, nobody was worried about alientating the Baptists or the Dutch Reformed from their particular ecclesial bodies - who also disapproved heartily of divorce and remarriage.

As a young priest with lurid powers of imagination, I always figured that the Cardinal had gotten the Bishops' arms up behind their back at some point - but the groundwork of the explanation made a certain amount of sense:

"We are in the midst of a number of ecumenical discussions with Roman Catholics through ARCIC. Look - we've produced a document called Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry - we'll send you a copy in the post. We're getting close - real close - Authority next, then the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the meantime we'll try real hard not to stir the pot with our Cousins down the road."

Some of it didn't resonate with our immediate context. The Island of Montreal, itself, was not a hotbed of Ecumenism, nor was the military chaplaincy in the Canadian Forces where separate tents were required for religious services in the field and Anglican chaplains were by definition Chaplains(P) and lumped together with Presbyterian separatists with bad haircuts who preferred to call themselves l'Eglise Reformee du Quebec while our erstwhile cousins - Chaplains (RC) - met in other conclaves at conferences.

But, then again, there was the Diocese of Joliette. When I was the Rector of St Margaret's Mascouche I was friendly with the local RC priest. The clergy of the Diocese of Joliette were mostly Clercs de St Viateur - they were very creative, integrated and open and the Bishop took pity, at least on this particular Anglican, and I found myself included in all sorts of local clergy conferences for the priests of that Diocese. While not 'quite' sharing altars, it was the case that the emergency contact in my absence was Fr Bernard and in his absence it was me.

So the whole 'cousin thing' depended largely on which square kilometre of territory you happened to live in.

So let's turn to the candidates for 'inclusion': Brother Stephen (himself a 'convert') has listed the various 'types' of disaffected Anglicans and explains which three of these five 'types' might take up Benny's offer. There are the Prayer Book Catholics such as those found at St Thomas' Toronto (always grateful for Canadian content in the Christian blogosphere) and of course the Walsingham crowd - the Modern Catholics - who, according to Brother Stephen, make up the majority in Forward in Faith. There are then, finally, the Missal Catholics, and the example given comes from here in Scotland and I'll embed the video at the bottom of the post just because it's the sort of thing which 'speaks for itself' in terms of the Gospel horizon Rome might reasonably expect from such a tradition when 400,000 of them descend on St Peter's Square looking to have scratched what has made them itch.

Or fewer, perhaps, than 400,000. Take away as many zeros as you like.

Folks like this are, granted, a little more numerous than, say, British Israelites, but they will have approximately the same long term influence on the Christiian gene pool. They are not a force to be reckoned with, although I suspect that the points they've added which make up the collection of planes and surfaces within the Anglican tradition has given them more influence than they'll ever enjoy once they've joined 'Aunty'.

It would be an act of friendship on our part, with respect to the progressive Roman Catholics we have worked in partnership with over the last thirty years, to bitch and bellyache about this tactless invitation to our "disaffected" to come home to Rome. We should bitch effectively with an eye to getting a face-saving retraction.

A second statement could be issued which 'clarifies' what had obviously required closer scrutiny by some fictive underling who could then be said to be languishing in chains in the basement of the Vatican where it is expected he will be severely dealt with.

Let's face it - the Roman Catholic Church needs an infusion of waddling anachronisms in birettas like it needs a plague of Cane Toads.

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