Pause for Thought
The Richard Allinson Show
BBC Radio 2 
Sunday, June 17th, 2012

It’s a religious platitude that we bring nothing into this world and carry nothing with us out of it at the end.  As anyone knows, however, who has moved house we seem to do our level best to compensate for this state of affairs by accumulating an incredible weight of stuff during the middle bits between our arrival and our departure.

Where does it come from?

There are presents given to us by people who obviously don’t know us very well:  Books we have no interest in or executive toys which we are too busy to play with. 

Then there are the outdated things.  Our interests were different, once upon a time, and we collect things associated with a particular hobby and pursuit.  And then we moved on and lost interest but all the trinkets, the tools are still there in a box marked “Miscellaneous – Very”.  Outdated too are the  ill fitting clothes which we once looked good in before the outward development of the belly out front and the backside out back.   We’d be embarrassed to try and shoehorn our way into these old clothes. 

In both cases these things no longer match our shape or our interests.   They are no longer part of who we have become.

Moving house – like many forms of spiritual discipline – is a stripping back of the illusion of who we – or other people – thought we were.  We simply get rid of what is not us.  In packing up a box to take down to the charity shop we get closer to accepting and even rejoicing in the truth of who we have genuinely become.

Pause for Thought

The Anneke Rice Show

BBC Radio 2

Saturday June 16th, 2012

At our final assembly at one of the local primary schools I addressed the subject of “moving on”.  I don’t always have a lot in common with small children but this time and at this assembly I felt I had a foot to stand on.   You see, my family and I are moving, ourselves, in the next few weeks to central France where I’ll be taking a new church and we’ll be starting a new life. 

The school children, for their part, will be moving up a grade or, in the case of the Primary Sevens, will be heading off to High School in a neighbouring town.  The smaller children will all see themselves reorganized into new classes.  Friendships will be reorganized too.  Children will come back from their summer holidays and will start the year by breaking old alliances and making new ones.

As for the Primary Sevens – they will go from being the oldest, the tallest and the most admired of the students to being the smallest and the least experienced.  As I outlined some of the changes which would take place for them in the coming year a number of faces were truly solemn.  A few can hardly wait for the changes to happen.  Many, however, find themselves caught between the promise of an enticing future and the loss which they will incur by seeing the old way of life – known and comfortable – ending or at least at risk.

I might have told them that at 54 years of age it doesn’t get any easier to move.   The same questions hold sway: 

Will I have friends? 

Will the new people like me?

Will the new work prove to be difficult?

And the same resources will need to be called upon – an openness of spirit, a willingness to learn from mistakes and a degree of trust in the people around us.

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Audio available HERE.  PFT begins at 0:19.20 on the audio bar

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland

BBC Radio Scotland

May 18th, 2012

The Scottish government hopes that introducing a second and even a third language to children’s education will allow Scottish young people to “…flourish and succeed in (a) globalised (and) multi-lingual world…”

Scottish young people should find themselves at home in that world.

A week this Sunday, we will celebrate God’s gift of language to the early Church on the day of Pentecost and His equipping of the early apostles for their mission amongst different peoples and cultures.

I struggled with languages in High School back in Canada. My teachers may have thought I was thick. Others understood all too well that, perched on the edge of the Canadian west where pretty well nobody spoke French, I simply saw no reason to invest much energy in parsing the verbs être and avoir. And so I did the bare minimum - at the very last minute – and it seemed enough to scrape by.

My French – the language I can now work in, sing in, make friends in – I learned as a young adult – climbing off a Greyhound Bus in Quebec City with two suitcases and almost no ability to converse or ask meaningful questions. What followed was months of hand signals and garbled phrases. Eventually I could say intelligible things and people would respond with intelligible answers.

My wife and stepson have both studied French in Scotland in the way that I studied it in Canada. It’s their turn now - to move, with me, at the end of June, to the town of Clermont-Ferrand in central France where I am to be the parish priest in an Episcopal church there. While there are plans for their formal instruction to give them a base in conversation, their education will begin on the day they need to get themselves out of a jam in a train station or need to ask a question in a market.

By trial and error, with words which are misunderstood, partial and half-baked, we live and minister in communities which are not the places of our birth but which are places where will learn to belong.

Getting close to halfway through my pilgrimage from Leon to Santiago de Compostela. Blog posts aplenty in the works


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Thursday, April 5th, 2012

In the Christian calendar this week is called Holy Week. Today is Maundy Thursday. On the evening of this day, Jesus broke bread and poured out wine into a cup and said that this act of his, done at a dinner table, was the way he wanted God’s love for people to be remembered. Re-enact this, he said - “do this” - as a way of remembering - even embodying - what God’s love is and what human love can hope to be.

Love is broken and poured out for others.

Love needs to be demonstrated. We find that out the hard way. Those who’ve not been loved or not loved appropriately will tell you that.

Strong feelings don’t count for much. They’re a fluid thing. They move on. They’re not what love is. Love translates into care – it builds, protects and nurtures. I know you love me because of what you did – not because of what you said.

The Galilean Springtime at the beginning of Jesus' ministry - the excitement, the crowds, the novelty - have been replaced in Holy Week by something darker. The story is mysterious and symbol-filled. It can’t be embodied in a parable or a speech from a hillside.

Many Christian churches do not, so much, preach the message of Holy Week as they will “walk through it” – walking around the church or the streets bearing Palm branches or carrying a cross. Churches of different denominations in small towns will often do rather a lot together this week – leaving aside the things which separate them in order to gather as one community around a common story:

What Jesus did in those dark days leading to Easter,

The way he showed what God’s love was like.

When we are full of years, the words spoken to us by the people who loved us will begin to recede but we will always remember that we were cared for and valued at a cost.

That love made us who we are. It gave us the ability to or at least made it possible for us to love others like that.
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Audio link available HERE or a while. TFTD begins at 1:21:47 - about halfway along the audio bar.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Friday, March 30th, 2012

Gaffes are in the news today...

Critics have accused David Cameron and one of his Cabinet Ministers of unnecessarily alarming Britons by suggesting that they top up their tanks or store jerry-cans of petrol "just in case" the tanker drivers go on strike.

Here in Scotland our First Minister has been criticised for the decision to invite some recent Lottery winners - and future SNP donors - to a Tea Party at Bute House.

Gaffes - a french word referring, generally, to acts or words which do not demonstrate good judgement and which subsequently cause offence or bother.

I am rather prone to these. One of the wardens in my congregation refers to the "Canadian School of Charm" when I have come out with something, on the spur of the moment, which causes faces to fall and even me to slap my forehead and say "why the hell did I say that..."

My lady wife refers to it as "opening my gob and letting my belly rumble".

I do it rather a lot.

One of the few places I don't make many gaffes is here on Radio Scotland at 7:24 in the morning but, then again, I have a producer with whom I discuss scripts beforehand.

A producer who, I might add, resolutely refuses to accompany me to all my meetings, to vet my announcements in church or to apply a red pencil to my sermons. She won't look over my emails to vestry members before I press the send button. More's the pity.

And this is the conflict - for bank managers and clergy, for doctors and politicians, for people speaking on behalf of their clubs and organisations: they are asked questions and are given full marks when they speak freely and openly.

But they are asked to remember the power that words have and the meaning of the acts which they perform on behalf of the people they represent - whether in the form of parables or sermons or diagnoses, or solemn warnings about petrol queues.

And that people, who could be hurt by what they say or do, are taking them seriously .
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Audio link available HERE. TFTD begins at 1:21:55 - about halfway along the audio bar

Pause for Thought
The Richard Allinson Show
BBC Radio 2
Sunday, February 26th

As I prepare over the next few weeks for rather a lengthy hike through northern Spain – nearly five hundred miles to Santiago de Compostella – the question in my mind is not

“what do I need to take with me” but rather

“what can I leave behind”.

Anything I take with me has to be carried on my back. I find myself thinking strange thoughts about the weight of underwear – which seems a silly thing to be thinking about except that it will all add up. It’s all going to need to be carried.

We accumulate things – which we move around with us around the country or around the world. Our loft contains items in boxes which we never unpacked after our last move and which we don’t feel able to part with. We have become heavy-laden – not only with items but with accumulated responsibilities, with the weight of habit and with an ever-increasing appetite for stability and regularity.

I know any number of young people who feel very tied down to particular lifestyles and to a set series of steps ahead of them. It collides with what we oldsters imagined “ought” to have been the trademark of youth - mobility and lightness of step.

We do know that when the telephone rings with news of a sufficiently urgent nature we’ll drop everything at the drop of a hat. We’ll sort out our finances in an instant. We’ll streamline our lives. We’ll make the time. If it were urgent enough…..

Part of the message of this season of Lent, as it is understood in the Christian tradition, is that the news is urgent. Men and women need to live a leaner life because our overconsumption has been to the peril of others.

And, if we look at what we have collected about ourselves we may find that we have compromised our freedom to walk lightly on the trail.

This is a good time to offload that baggage – to do it urgently – to be less of a burden to the earth and all its peoples. At the same time we might just experience the world around us more fully, and win back our freedom to change.

Pause for Thought
The Anneke Rice Show
BBC Radio 2
February 25th, 2011

When I was seventeen years old I took a course in bush craft. I was living in the southern Yukon Territory which, notwithstanding the adjective southern, is still pretty north by Canadian or anybody's standards.

One of the concluding tasks was to spend three days (two nights) out in the woods in substantially subzero temperatures living in a shelter you had made for yourself and eating only what you could catch. Some of the details are less palatable now on British radio waves than they would have been in Canada in the seventies, so I'll spare you the details. At some point an instructor would hike in from the road to where you had pitched your camp. He’d inspect your shelter, your reflector fire, and see what you had caught to eat.

That would be your only conversation for those three days. Other than this you would be alone - in community with that part of the animal world you had elected not to eat. You'd listen to the high pitched yaps and wails of a pack of coyotes in the valley behind you or the solitary baritone of the lone wolf howling at the other end of the lake. As the darkness set in you'd witness the utterly silent swoop of an owl along the trail as it hunted for small mammals. During the day you'd make use of the habitual trails of the snowshoe hares which would provide some ease of passage through deep snow.

You may have been the only creature in the forest equipped with matches, snare wire and opposable thumbs but it was driven in to you, by your time alone, that you were a creature and that you were vulnerable.

During the coming season of Lent, Christians will hear the Gospel story about Jesus, following his baptism in the river Jordan, being driven out into the desert by the Holy Spirit - into a place where the purpose of his ministry would become clear.

Things can become clear in the wild. Men and women have always taken time by themselves on retreats in monasteries or on long walks in the forest to sort things out - to listen to a quieter voice within them which makes better sense of the world.
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An audio link is available HERE. PFT begins at 0:20:57 - at the beginning of the audio bar.

In the Wilderness - Robert Graves CHRIST of His gentleness
Thirsting and hungering,
Walked in the wilderness;
Soft words of grace He spoke
Unto lost desert-folk	5
That listened wondering.
He heard the bitterns call
From ruined palace-wall,
Answered them brotherly.
He held communion	10
With the she-pelican
Of lonely piety.
Basilisk, cockatrice,
Flocked to his homilies,
With mail of dread device,	15
With monstrous barbéd slings,
With eager dragon-eyes;
Great rats on leather wings
And poor blind broken things,
Foul in their miseries.	20
And ever with Him went,
Of all His wanderings
Comrade, with ragged coat,
Gaunt ribs—poor innocent—
Bleeding foot, burning throat,	25
The guileless old scapegoat;
For forty nights and days
Followed in Jesus’ ways,
Sure guard behind Him kept,
Tears like a lover wept.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012

One of the newspapers in Britain had headlines splashed across its website outlining the threat of a trade war between Canada and the European Union over the EU's threats to declare the controversial Canadian oil sands to be "highly polluting".

If it's any consolation, the exploitation of this resource in northern Alberta is the cause of no end of heated conversations even amongst Canadians at home. The benefit of extra oil may not be worth the damage to the surrounding environment.

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the Christian season of Lent. Folks may joke with each other about giving up chocolate or cutting down to ten cigarettes a day, but the whole issue of what we consume – as individuals and as nations - and what we restrain ourselves from consuming is deadly serious.

From a very early period in the history of the Church, ordinary people have undertaken a time-limited task of examining what they really need to live on. At times, the exercise becomes a spectacle of controlled starvation and self-hatred. There are, however, beneficial lessons to be learned from what Christians have been doing from the very beginning.

What we require – rather than being a fixed thing – is exceptionally fluid. It changes over time – usually in the direction of greater and ever-more-expanding budgets and waistlines. It can however, through reflection and restraint, be curbed. We have that power.

Our appetites increase, in part, because of laziness, fear and lack of restraint.

We find ourselves eating, drinking, burning and consuming ever more resources, and then making accommodations for that bigger and needier person, that hungrier society – needing to devote more and more energy to finding more money or more oil and also more time – time that could be used creatively elsewhere. We are addicted to an ever growing struggle.

Restraint is possible- for ourselves in our personal budgets and for our nations.

Pause for Thought
The Zoe Ball Show
BBC Radio 2
Saturday, February 18th

My father and I would talk a lot in the car when I was young.

Like his own father, my dad had a habit of confecting his thoughts in such a way that they seemed like pronouncements - "sayings", if you will - as if he were working on his own version of Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book.

I suppose my dad and grand-dad had had teachers who spoke in this manner or maybe ministers in church - who said a few brief words which summed up longer explanations. Let the young guy figure out what it means later.

One of his pronouncements I can still remember:

"Robert”, he said, “you will get to a certain age where you realise you don't amount to much. You will discover that thought to be very liberating."

At the time it didn't seem an awfully hopeful pronouncement. As a teenager I suppose I hoped to amount to rather a great deal.

In a few days, on Ash Wednesday, we will be holding three services of Holy Communion throughout the day in my two churches south of Edinburgh. At the beginning of each service there will be an opportunity for men and women to come up to the altar rail. I will dip my thumb in a mixture made up of ashes and a little olive oil and make a small cross-shaped smudge on each forehead and say just eleven words:

"Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return".

It seems a little negative, innit? Until, of course, you grasp that what the priest is saying is that this earthly life is made up of a few resources and a finite amount of time. A couple of billion breaths, twenty-five years of active parenting, forty years of work, fifty years of covenanted relationship with a spouse, six dogs, seventy five holidays. All of it valuable. Valuable insomuch as it is executed and experienced by somebody with a finite amount of time in which to do it.

So get up off your knees, then. The time you have and the people you have within your orbit are hugely valuable and very special.

Use that time well and fully.

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An audio link is available HERE for a limited time. PFT begins at 0:16:48 near the start of the audio bar.

An Episcopal Election

in Auld Reekie

A new Bishop for the Diocese of Edinburgh is in the making and will be elected and consecrated.

You can bank on it.

Get into your time machine and dial up a date two years hence and there will be a bishop in post down at Grosvenor Crescent on the telephone ironing out some knotty problem in measured tones.

That bishop may well be one of the three candidates announced a while back on the Diocesan web page.

It's a small list. Three names is the very minimum the Preparation Committee can present to an electoral synod. Some lists of only three names might not seem particularly small in that they contain candidates who appeal to broad constituencies and across party lines.

Such candidates could conceivably produce odd and interesting alliances of electors, interesting debates on the floor of synod and conspiratorial conversations over a pint at lunch at the Haymarket Pub.

Other lists don't seem quite as large.

With all the forward preparation, and with no allowances in the Canon for candidates nominated from the floor, it's always been a bit of a stretch to describe the Scottish process as anything other than "a process of appointment with some discussion in the final phase".

It's a problem which a quirky list holding a number of possibilities would palliate.

No group of electors likes to feel pushed around.

We have not been lucky with episcopal elections in Scotland, of late. There seems to be a bug in the system. It's not so much a problem of what happens when the list hits the floor of Synod. It's what happens in the lead up - behind closed doors - with a process which we are not supposed to know anything about.

The relevant Canon - Canon 4 which governs the election of Bishops - imposes a great deal of discretion (even secrecy) upon the Preparation Committee as to the way the list of candidates is arrived at.

Anyone may nominate. There's not even a provision to preclude somebody nominating more than one candidate. We have no idea how many candidates were nominated but there are no natural limits in place to keep the list from being long and very interesting.

It falls to the Preparation Committee to go through the list, solicit written responses to a questionnaire, interview and come up with a shortlist of between three and five "electable" candidates to place before the lay and clerical electors of the Diocese.

A candidate may be nominated and then decide not to go ahead and write the necessary (and voluminous) responses to a series of questions posed by the Committee. A nominated candidate may further discuss the move with his or her family and be told "not on your life, buddy"!

For their part, the Preparation Committee may not like the written responses of the candidate and decide not to interview. The interview may take place and, as a result, a particular candidacy may be placed to the side.

At some point the Scottish House of Bishops will exercise its canonical right to exclude names from the list. How many of the candidates, in our case, were deemed "suitable" by the Scottish House of Bishops is another one of the unknowns. Perhaps all the candidates passed muster. Or maybe the list was pruned back tightly by the Scottish House of Bishops and only a few names remained.

The process as outlined in our Canon 4 provides for confidentiality throughout the process.

That's a damned good idea - in itself. There is a risk to clergy allowing their names to stand for election to a diocese. The people of St Swithins, East Badger, might feel that their local clergyperson had let them down, somehow, by allowing his or her name stand in an episcopal election in far off Edinburgh with its cobblestones, it's University and its upscale shops.

Equally, those clergy who don't even make it through the first cut wouldn't want their colleagues, professional rivals or congregations to know that decades of apparently successful ministry hadn't even warranted an interview in what, in the Anglican world, might seem a rather small diocese.

These, then, are risks. And so anyone looking at the resulting shortlist and asking the question:

"Holy cow, what happened there!"

must rely on that self-same rumour mill which ordinarily generates such headlines as:

The Bishop of Aberdeen and Orkney Ate My Hamster!

and

Faith and Order Board Finds Holy Grail - Escapes with Elvis in UFO!

for the persistent rumour is that there were, in fact, very few nominations for the post.

If true, this is hard news to digest. Why would there be so few nominations?

Most of the congregations in our Diocese record some growth (albeit modest) each year and a couple of congregations are growing quickly. Clergy of very different theological stripes maintain close friendships with each other and this even across lines which would ordinarily divide other Dioceses and Provinces. A quick glance at The Edge, our Diocesan magazine and a scan of the last dozen or so Bishops Announcements will reveal a healthy level of activity undertaken by both young and old on our patch. Our program of lay education - Adventures in Faith - certainly has no flies on it. Edinburgh is a charming city and the outlying towns have their own unique attributes. There's a university with a School of Divinity. The air and the water are clean. The Rector of Balerno and the Rector of Penicuik, between them, control access to a dozen or so reservoirs in the Pentland Hills containing plenty of Brown Trout and any Bishop applying for access will get a special rate.

Lots of opportunity for hill walking.

And so the idea of there not being a healthy bolus of creative and interesting clergy interested in being cultivated as a potential future Bishop of Edinburgh has us all checking our collective underarm for untoward odours.

Is there something wrong with us that we're not aware of?

Or maybe it's the fault of ordinary members like your humble servant here. It was up to us, after all, to think, discern and research and then to telephone, cajole and nominate. Perhaps we are the problem then - lazy sods that we are - and, if this is the case, we have let each other down badly and I look forward to being told so from the Chair at the first of our two meetings of the Electoral Synod tomorrow.

Our Canon 4 - dealing with the election of Bishops - is a strange beast.

That veto exercised, for example, by the Scottish House of Bishops. The assumption is that the Bishops, through their contacts and by way of discreet conversation, will come to know things which the Preparation Committee will not: that Father X had a tendency to drop his trousers and scream out "Armageddon" at the end of Compline services when he was at college. The Diocese of Edinburgh needs to be protected from such proclivities which might still be lurking under the surface. Mother Y, for her part, still has people around who remember the famous Restraining Order which one of her churchwardens took out against her in the 80's. There was that story about her and the spraycan of yellow paint and it's not the place of the electors - clerical or lay - to know why or even that the names of these two individuals were quietly withdrawn from the list by the bishops.

Nobody wants to know the details.

(Ed. That's not completely true. My friend Earle wants to know the details and whether there are any black-and-white photos which might be available for download. )

Most of us are all happy enough to have somebody in Episcopal orders exercising this prevenient caution on our behalf.

Herein lies the problem: There's nothing in the Canon which specifically states that when the House of Bishops pulls someone's name from the list it is because they have identified a tangible threat to the Peace, Order and Good Government of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Such a degree of control over the reservoir of men and women who may be considered by an electoral synod for Episcopal ministry in the Diocese of Edinburgh - if it is based on subtle estimations by the present House of Bishops of who does, or does not, have "Scottish Bishop" written all over them

- if not frankly unacceptable is, at least, something which must be discussed. If it was discussed in days of yore it should be discussed again.

One trusts that the political life of the Church isn't just ordinary politics. One might go so far as to hope that it has, built into it, an openness to elements which are both gracious and even unexpected.

We, on the Synod floor, are willing to be surprised, notwithstanding some ambivalent feelings about our process for identifying and raising up bishops for the Scottish Episcopal Church. We remain hopeful that a suitable candidate will emerge.

Tomorrow we will listen to presentations from the candidates presented to us.

Next Saturday, in our respective Houses, we vote. Remember us.

Whisky is the Fountain of Youth

My old seminary chum Bruce, in Montreal, is turning 59 in the next day or two. Feeling his age he asked if I could recommend a good single malt to drown his sorrows in. Now, just because you move to Scotland you don't immediately turn into a Scottish version of Yoda able to say "Och Aye...." and make binding recommendations about whisky. However, my response to Bruce may prove useful to a wider community and so I here publish it for all and sundry:

Poor Bruce. I suppose the only thing worse than turning 59 is the alternative.

I find that a 12 year old Highland Park confers an increment of youthfulness with each glass taken. After glass one you realise how your many years have equipped you with the sort of sophisticated palette that a younger man could only dream about. After glass two you turn to your lady wife and are struck by her mature graces and your good fortune in having her. It will be no consolation to the good woman, however, that after glass six you've turned into a disgusting old Bacchus and are making time in the corner with a twenty-five year old exchange student from Guatemala. After glass eight you curl your lip and say "It's not fair". After glass ten you wet yourself and need to be changed. After glass twelve all the women present make clucking noises and say "Oh look, he's asleep".

12 year old Highland Park, Bruce. Damned fine whisky.

Anyone growing tired of the Authorized Version of Burns' Address to a Haggis and looking for the Good News Version of same is welcome to borrow mine (giving credit where credit is due).



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, January 16, 2012

Disaster plans.

Our hearts go out to all who have been lost. The story of the Costa Concordia is still to be written as emergency crews search for survivors in the overturned cruise ship off the West coast of Italy. Questions are emerging about the adequacy of the ship's preparedness for a disaster and the timeliness of the initial response to the grounding.

If you dig through the layers of many ancient cities you will encounter what are known as destruction layers - typified by the presence of blackened or broken masonry indicating that a city was periodically put to the torch or subjected to natural catastrophe and its inhabitants beset by tragic circumstances. It is a given that disasters will take place. They are a part of the history of human communities.

As you look at the rubble and the blackened bricks you wonder what the people were thinking and what they did to alleviate their own distress and that of others. Human stories from ancient disasters are hard to come by but we do have modern analogies.

In such tragic circumstances two sets of stories frequently emerge: In one set of stories those in responsibility abandon their post. In so doing they abandon those they are meant to be caring for. In another set of stories some germ of human worth dominates. Places in lifeboats are given to others - the weak and the infirm are thrown over the shoulders of the able-bodied and carried to safety. Plans are worked out on the backs of envelopes by torchlight and everybody shoulders the task they've been given and performs it admirably.

Do you have a disaster plan?

What will you take with you?

How will you preserve the life around you and, in so doing, your own humanity?

In our disaster plans we must give thought, not only to our passports, our wallets and our credit cards but also to our nobility, our responsibility, and our love of strangers.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
December 22nd, 2011

At our service of Nine Lessons and Carols the other night we had our university students back in the congregation and in the choir. Back for a while, they look forward to restoring the familiar - to having their laundry done, to having a meal with the people they know.

We know who sits where and who carves the turkey. We appreciate Christmas carols we can sing without looking at the words. Once we've had a glass of mulled wine - or two - we might even provoke a little amusement, in familiar surroundings, by chancing the bass line or the descant.

There are folk who aren't at the table - family members and friends we've not gotten on with since the "event" of 1979 or 1982. Or maybe we've just drifted. We are unsettled by this state of affairs.

But we might ask, defensively, "why should we always be the first one to pick up the phone?"

The traditions of Christmas meals and celebrations with limited groups of our dearest and closest have more to do with the residue of North West European village life than they do with the Christmas stories in Matthew and Luke, where you'll find a surprising amount about the outsider, the alien, the stranger - those who've been thrust to the margins - being invited by God into the heart of the story: The strangeness of the foreign wise men - even the angels in the dead of night visiting shepherds - who are in no way integral t the story - for no good reason other than to announce that God has given a gift to those who are far off welcoming them in.

If the gift is for us it is for the outsider as well and for the person we find it hard to speak with. The nagging feeling about the unwritten letter and the unaccomplished healing phone call has its origins right at the heart of the Christmas story. It is a timely reminder that, as the Scottish Liturgy puts it,

"...when we were still far off (God) met us in (his) Son and brought us home..."

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An audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:18.20 - halfway along the audio bar.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
December 1st, 2011

Many of our parents here in Penicuik and West Linton shuffled their schedules yesterday to accommodate children who were not in school because of the strikes. Some folks had to go in to work anyway, while others were on reduced duties. Many didn't go in at all. Still others braved the blustery weather to take their places on picket lines.

Well-informed and good-hearted people might disagree on some of the issues surrounding
this strike action. It seems clear, though, is that there's no reason to suppose that life simply is the way it is with nothing more to be said on the matter.

We've had a good solid dose these last few years of being told that things are the way they must be and that there's nothing else really to be said or done. It's the way the economy is, it's what the climate of finance nowadays dictates. From men in yellow jackets reminding us what the rules are or computers generating lists of what we owe the bank one would be forgiven for thinking that we were nothing but leaves blown about in the breeze.

Our society depends greatly on what is called, in French, a "rapport des forces" - a balance between strong individuals or groups which is held in tension but which nonetheless produces stability. That rapport can fall apart. Unhappy conflict can develop when one side attempting to exercise total victory over the other.

Most of the time, however, and what has developed over the generations - is a painfully won agreement about the nature and stability of our work, This is based, in part, on the belief that everything is negotiable. Life is more fluid than we think. One of the canticles - taken from the opening chapters of Luke's Gospel - describes the work of God as "putting down the mighty from their seat and exalting the humble".

Ordinary working people have a voice - and a role in deciding how they want to work and live.

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an audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:23.38 - halfway along the audio bar.

More than just noise

My friend Iain asked me, when this picture surfaced on Facebook, "Why are you smiling? Are you deaf?"

No - I'm beginning to find it quite tolerable.

The relationship between music and what a set of bagpipes does is sometimes a bit tenuous. Even though I can pick out most of the canonical tunes I'm not sure I think of bagpipes as musical instruments.

Today was graduation day for people like me at the University of Edinburgh. I've been poking away at an MTh by Research for a couple of years now and I received my degree. It wasn't particularly cold and there was a fair bit of wind and some light drizzle. There were white ties and academic processions. There was much happiness.

A perfect day for bagpipes, in other words - uniquely able to transmit the spirit of a place an an occasion and much appreciated by me - even up close.

So much more than mere noise.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Thursday, November 17th

A massive yellow stone – the Sun Drop Diamond – sold at auction in Geneva the other day for a princely sum in excess of 12 million dollars. No one knows whether the anonymous buyer intends to set the stone as a piece of jewellery or whether he’ll be slipping it into a safety deposit box as a hedge against fluctuating currencies.

It’s just a diamond, though, and diamonds are made of carbon. Perfectly ordinary carbon subjected to the natural processes of intense pressure and heat over time but able to generate much attention.

The value of things is what we attribute to them – how much attention we pay to them. Something which is valuable this year may not be valuable next year. Things which we threw away as worthless fifty years ago now command a high price on Ebay.

My wife, and my children are mostly made of carbon.

As is the new person at my church in Penicuik who I don't really know yet. She's a face I have now seen twice. I said to myself, after she escaped at the end of the service and didn't come to coffee, that I'm going to have to nab her next time before she leaves - to introduce myself – to welcome her to St James’. To say that we’re glad she’s here.

Within communities people emerge – with their talents and their stories – and take their place. Through us – or perhaps even in spite of us - they begin to discern God’s attention which speaks of their innate value - their worthiness.

Jesus is perpetually telling us in the Gospels to look out for the Pearl of Great Price buried in an ordinary field, or the insignificant mustard seed which becomes the greatest shrub of the garden or the sick, the lonely, the needy and the prisoner.

"When you care for them", says Jesus, "you care for me" and therefore – he says - you need to pay attention.

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A link to audio can be found HERE. TFTD begins at 1:23.44 - halfway along the audio bar.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

The face has changed. A thinner and paler Gilad Shalit was hustled out of a van yesterday morning after five years of captivity. The well-known picture of the younger and heartier boy is now clearly out of date.

One exchanged for a great many: A fair deal or not? Were questions of justice and security weighed against the safety of an individual?

These negotiations will be debated in the weeks to come.

What does the individual amount to anyway in the grand scheme of things?

Important decisions are often made about crowds. While we are individuals, we are also numbers of interest to statisticians. We are members of communities in political disputes over land and resources, requiring medical services or schools or housing or sewers. The big picture is always bigger than you are. Where are you, though, in that big picture?

As individuals we get lost in crowds.

We get lost unless there’s somebody to pay attention. It’s attention which ensures the needs of individuals – and memory. To our husbands and wives and our families, we are individual souls. They remember us when others forget us.

One of the earliest pieces of Christian iconography was that of the shepherd with a single sheep on his back. You can see it inscribed in the catacombs in Rome as you can see it in modern stained glass. It wasn’t a Christian invention but it rang a bell with the early church because of Jesus’ parable about the good shepherd who will leave the 99 sheep in order to search out the one who is lost.

It is the personal and relational aspects of friendship and our participation in communities which we yearn for – linked to the belief that at the heart of the universe is a voice directed to us – as individuals - to whom somebody says:

"I know you. I've known you for years. Though others may forget - I will not forget you.”

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Audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:24.00 - about halfway along the audio bar.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Tuesday, September 20, 2011

A teenager walks out of the deep forest straddling Germany and the Czech Republic where he claims to have been living rough with his father and with no other human contact for years. The father dies in a fall in the woods. The boy follows a compass heading north and shows up in the city of Berlin seeking help.

He is English speaking and claims to have little memory of his life before he entered the woods as a small child.

Mystery and intrigue: Is the story even true? Some lost souls, washing up on shore or found wandering in the heart of a great city - know very well who they are. The memory loss conveniently covers a darker past.

So even when the police express their opinion that this boy is telling the truth, there remain suspicions.

In the Christian tradition, solitude is an exercise. We are not abandoned to it. We enter into it freely. We leave human community and conversation for a time and a season. We retreat with our thoughts – like so many characters from the Old and New Testaments did - to a lonely place and, there, sort things out in the silence and in the presence of that part of God’s creation which does not speak our human language.

The idea that children could be raised apart from people belongs to a Romantic age. Mowgli or Tarzan represent the “noble savage” - at one with nature and “free”- a more authentic state than we enjoy. In that fantasy – even children raised by apes or wolves retain that which is best about humanity.

But we know that children raised in such circumstances suffer enormous deficits. The lack of interraction makes them unable to communicate. Thought, itself, is language - and language is spoken between people.

When our loneliness makes itself known to us we will usually follow the compass needle until it brings us back into the grasp and conversation of others.

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An audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:24.24 - halfway along the audio bar.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, August 29th, 2011

The Eastern Seaboard of the United States battened down the hatches in the face of Hurricane Irene. Shop fronts were boarded up. The New York Subway system closed down. Until last night no one knew exactly what would transpire. For some there was a carnival atmosphere. Others, especially those responsible for the preservation of life, limb and infrastructure, had faces set in grim determination. A lot was at stake.

Recent history has seen examples of both the best and worst in human nature which have come out of natural disasters.

Storms can bring out the worst in human apathy, violence and greed. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina still causes tremendous soul-searching amongst Americans.

Similar events can have radically different results - they can produce a sense of solidarity and community.

Storms, earthquakes and other disasters remind us that we are small and limited creatures - that the risks to us are real here in our smallness. It's what most humans have had to live through for most of their history. Only recently have we been able to look though windows (or television screens) at the outside world.

When you're caught up in something big you have a choice of paths. One way of looking at others is that they are competitors and enemies. They occupy space you need to occupy. They eat the food you might want to eat.

There's another path, though. No matter how much you think humans are merely greedy organisms it's a path that is taken often. Jesus said "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul". In a crisis we may find ourselves surprisingly able to exercise good citizenship and abundant charity. There is something greater and more important than keeping our buildings intact and our own selves safe.

You end up hoping two things for those caught up in storms: first of all that the sandbags hold and the buildings aren't washed away - but also that the human spirit rises to the challenges and shows itself once more to be a beautiful and graceful thing.

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An audio link is HERE for a limited time. TFTD begins at 1:23.30 - about halfway along the audio bar.

Pause for Thought
The Zoe Ball Show
BBC Radio 2
Saturday, August 20th, 2011

There's a scene in David Lean's movie Dr Zhivago that I have had to suffer all my life.

At one point in the film the hero struggles through a war-torn Siberian landscape until he reaches his childhood home - abandoned and encased in snow and ice. There he is reunited with his lover. They fire up the stove in one room and make it habitable. In the midst of all this chaos - the Russian Civil War and the depths of winter - they have a brief interlude of peace.

Zhivago finds the desk he wrote on as a child. He opens the drawer and discovers there, laid out in order, a sheaf of white paper, a pen and a bottle of ink.

He writes a poem.

My mother always talked about "Zhivago's Drawer". She would describe its order, its simplicity and its adequacy. She would then open the door to my bedroom which looked like any teenaged boy's bedroom and not at all like Zhivago's Drawer.

She would make reference to my school bag with its crumpled homework assignments and mouldering apple cores. Again, not Zhivago's Drawer.

And over the years I have muttered about "Zhivago's Bloody Drawer" countless times as I see what a mess my Income Tax return looks or the list of tasks which I have meant to get around to but haven't.

As a younger priest I would arrange to spend four or five days at the Trappist monastery north of Montreal, after Easter and after Christmas - not everybody's idea of a riotous good time - but I was attracted to the simplicity there. The balance and order of two lines of monks gliding in to worship in the wee hours of the morning, the Salve Regina sung at the end of the day with a single candle at the feet of a statue of Our Lady.

Please, God, before I die,
give me that small place of order and harmony
at the centre of my soul.

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*nb. "bloody" edited to "wretched" in the actual broadcast.

Pause for Thought
The Richard Allinson Show
BBC Radio 2
Sunday, August 14th, 2011

I don't have time for side streets. People I know swear by them.

Why are you going this way? It'll take forever. Take this side street, then left at the post box past the yellow dog and over the bridge.

Right.

I'm going to end up in the middle of a field dotted with cow pats - lost and late. Give me the direct route any day. Simple and straight. If it takes a few minutes longer I can budget for that.

Edinburgh is crammed with tourists right now. They wear impossible colours and silly hats and walk slowly down the High Street. Many of them are wearing shorts. Some of them have knobbly knees.

They speak an amazing collection of languages - I can only guess at a few of them. I have time, you see, to guess because I always seem to be stuck behind a long queue of tourists ambling down the high street. They are on holiday. I am not.

They spend an awful lot of time taking pictures of the small closes - the quaint little alleyways - which open out on to the High Street. I've walked past plenty of these in the last eight years. I don't know where they lead. I've never walked in to one because I've generally had other things to do - like walking straight down the street from A to B.

Everything I know about history tells me that it's not made up of straight lines. Nor are the lives of the older people I love. Nor the lives of the saints or the people in the Old and New Testaments. There are always these side streets which open up because of disasters or misfortunes or even opportunities.

Angels and burning bushes seem to figure prominently in the Bible stories.

And I look forward, frankly, to clearing my slate well enough that I can follow a few of these side streets. Not just on holidays but in the midst of busy life when I feel the nudge.

And the next time I see a tourist in a ridiculous hat walk in to one of Edinburgh's little alleyways. I just may follow him in to see where it leads.