Fame and Fortune in Small Communities

Soon to be step-son was sitting in the back of the car the other day as I was driving him and his mother back to their house in West Linton. Children are always a good source of village gossip in West Linton. They share amongst themselves the things that their parents might not talk about in the Precinct so it's always 'all ears open' when the boy begins to speak. As I remember S was moaning that his life was dull and ordinary (as was, by extension, the lives of the adults connected to him).

As an example of what life could have looked like if he were luckier he gave us the example of one of the little girls in Primary 5.

"Her family's famous" he said
"They are?" I asked. "I didn't know that"
"Yes, of course they are. Her grandfather does the voice of the Gaelic* Pig on the television"

*Scottish Gaelic - not the other one

Rev'd Ruth - my colleague in Portobello reports:

“At a wedding ceremony that I was performing, I raised my hand to give the final blessing. The bride misunderstood my gesture and surprised me with a high-five. Not wanting to exclude the groom, I offered him a high-five, too. I was finally able to get my blessing in, amid the laughter of the guests.”

Gambia I

There's the Gambia for tourists and then there's Africa. The beach in front of our hotel regularly found itself traversed by a herd of local cattle. My daughter Hannah hasn't travelled much. We haven't actually spent an awful lot of time together over the last few years and since she was coming out to Scotland for Christmas the opportunity was there to take her somewhere hot and 'different'. Thomas Cook had some package deals for the Gambia so we booked some tickets. The country was wonderful - the hotel proved just a wee bit sealed off from the country. Relief came in the form of my colleague Kenny Macaulay from St Augustine's Church in Dumbarton in Glasgow Diocese who was coming down a couple of days later with his wife Linda. Kenny's been to the Gambia off and on now for a number of years - had his own wheels and knew his way around. So we got to see the country in the last four days of our trip.


We made a trip to Senegal. Bumped into a few fellow travelers from Scotland in the form of the Ospreys who were spending the winters in the mangrove swamps there. There's a Thought for the Day on BBC Scotland about this. The ferry ride across the mouth of the River Gambia was long and the return trip especially arduous and very hot. Shade was at a premium and Hannah managed to find herself a cool corner on the deck.

More pictures and stories later as I edit them and post them online

Good Clean Fun for Kids. The Zombie Walk

Something from the Edmonton journal in October - Canadians know how to have fun with their kids - October, yeah, which just before I kinda went offline sometime in November what with missing passports and all. I am now legal. No - not languishing in an immigration holding cell at the pleasure of the Home Secretary. Not dead - kinda Undead and looking forward to a busy Christmas and then off to the Gambia with my daughter for a week's holiday before returning and sending my passport off in the mail again for a Certificate of Approval to Marry. It's endless!

Back after a long journey, Raspberry Rabbit's new Canadian passport goes straight back into the mail for another adventure.........

The saga of the missing passport and the application for Further Leave to Remain in the UK continues.

It took a month - to the day - for the newly issued passport to travel by recorded delivery from the Canadian High Commission in London to my doorstep in Scotland. We've had a mail strike you see. Things have been stored in warehouses. The envelope arrived today (the 9th). I couldn't believe it. I'd already replaced the driver's license which was also in the envelope and ordered a new birth certificate from British Columbia. I was ready to apply for another passport. I looked at it several times, thumbed its pages, admired the fat and aging person depicted on the front page and wondered how I'd ever been young. Problem was - the passport was supposed to have been in Durham (thence to Croydon) last week in the company of an application to stay in this country a while longer.

I'd sent the application in on time but without the passport. I had found (surprisingly) a photocopy of the front page and the Residence Permit. I included that. I'd gotten a fax from London saying that the passport had indeed been issued. I included that. On Wednesday I did get a note from the immigration folks saying that they'd received the application and would I please not phone them to enquire about its progress. "We'll call you if anything is missing". The note had a reference number on it. I decided to risk a phone call anyway. The nice man named Dave at the enquiry line today said I could send it off to Croydon quoting the reference number and that it would be appended to my application. Which is what I did - special delivery - entrusting this document once again to the Royal Mail. Trusting that Dave hasn't led me astray. Every hopeful or maybe just desperate.

My parents are under strict instructions to stay well in the absence of my travel documents. I've a holiday booked with the daughter after Christmas which will require a passport. I'd even like to be admitted back into the UK at the end of the holiday. All is not yet completely sorted but it's looking better than it did a few weeks ago and your prayers and best wishes have been appreciated. One day I'll understand why things had to be this way.

It's that time again. The Annual Clergy Conference for stipendiary clergy in the Diocese of Edinburgh. This is not a holiday! No way, Jose! I suspect my parishioners may be nurturing visions of clergy sitting in groups telling jokes, drinking in the pub, griping about their lack of preferment, being nasty to the Dean and conspiring against the Bishop. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a priest I would not lie to you. Fact is - we simply get a good group rate at the Atholl Palace in Pitlochry. It just works out that way. It's just a place where we get together and work hard. We'd rather be at the Holiday Inn.

Things you can actually buy!

Andrew Brown makes reference to a geek gift he's looking forward to getting for Christmas. It's a t-shirt which actually measures the strength of the Wi-Fi signal where ever you happen to be walking at the time. I think the three AAA batteries sewn into the shirt might dangle uncomfortably and keep the garment from hanging properly. But if you're wearing one of these you're not exactly a slave to fashion, are you?

I don't know if anyone else has been adversely affected by the strikes at the Royal Mail but my new Canadian passport is hanging around formlessly in the void being played with by Schroedinger's Cat - probably languishing in a mail bag somewhere in the Edinburgh sorting office. It was sent on the 10th of October. My permission to remain in the UK runs out shortly and I need to bear said passport along with my person to the Immigration Office in Glasgow and apply for Further Leave to Remain. Something I can't do without my passport. Removal Orders and Deportation are really not my thing.

Needless to say I'm a tad anxious and desirous of your prayers for the successful arrival of this little blue booklet. All may pray - of whatever theological persuasion - making a joyful noise from the same songsheet!

Raspberry's Passport needs to be found.

V. Lord in your mercy,

R. Hear our prayer

The Rector's Warden from one of my congregations has just sent me this photograph saying that it reminded him of me. I don't see it. But then again as one of the world's truly execrable poets has said:

Oh wad some power the giftie gie us

To see oursel's as others see us!

I'm guessing the photographer was getting the message that the Winnie the Pooh costume he'd chosen for this particular shoot was less convincing wet and up close than it had been at a distance on the shore.

At my first couple of weddings here in the UK I was rather surprised by strange combinations of feathers sticking out of the heads of the female guests in attendance. They weren't hats, exactly. I've since found out that these things are called 'Fascinators'. They're all the rage in the UK, Oz and Middle Earth for weddings and posh sporting events.

Do we have them in Canada? I don't remember seeing them. Perhaps in Toronto. Nowhere we'd admit living, anyway.

They're little creations of feathers and sometimes a second element attached to a comb or morphed into the sort of 'mini hat' which Queen Victoria might have yearned for. Who knows - maybe there's a recipe:

Take one songbird, chop coarsely, apply sparingly to head

For those of you who are in the Territorial Army there's this little number in Army/Olive which can double up as sniper's headgear.

This is all occasioned, of course, by Rev'd Ruth's reflections on a recent wedding at St Mark's Portobello where she said that she wanted a Fascinator and wondering what sort of design would be appropriate. Oi! Ruthie! Set the challenge and we shall meet it.

The basic question is - do you want it to go with your cassock and surplice (in which case a black and white number could be found) or with your hair (God has richly blessed you with a rare hue of rich colour not always found upon the heads of clergy) in which case something purple might be more appropriate.

Clergy Conference will soon be upon us. I shall arrive with a selection and you can try them on and model them for us in the pub. Pictures shall be taken and offered to Scottish Episcopal Bloggers at a modest price.

Human Tetris

Tetris is one of the only computer games I've ever liked. I liked 'Pong' too but it's best played on a Commodore 64. The Japanese have come up with a version that can be played without a computer. Admittedly this is an odd thing for the Japanese to be doing but the results are pretty inspiring.



Thanks to Gareth Saunders for this clip

Time is running out!

Fr Knisely over at Entangled States is constantly coming up with interesting stuff. . The latest installment - quotes the following paragraph:

"'The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space. That's the conclusion of a group of Spanish astrophysicists who have calculated that observers inside such a Universe would see it expanding and accelerating away from them just before the flip. "

Going back to the original article doesn't help. I've as much chance of reading this as I have of flying to the moon. I suspect, though, that this could be serious. The astronomer in my congregation has noticed that the universe is expanding away from us. I hear he's not alone. That's why we get the 'red shift' in certain stars, right? So we must be 'just before the flip', non?

Is it even worth purchasing the 2008 Parsons Pocket Book? Should I get more furniture instead to fill the extra space?

Nick - you gotta help me!

The Times has the following report on the New Zealand reaction to the loss at rugby to the French:

Newspapers printed match reports in white type on a black background, reflecting the sombre mood. The foreign minister, Winston Peters, called the result a tragedy and suggested it could even drive distraught men to "beat up" their wives and children.

And we're talking about Kiwis here - they're supposed to be milder mannered than even the Canadians. Who'd a thunk it?

Without a false note

I was tremendously taken with the adaptation of Ian McEwan's novel 'Atonement' which I saw in Glasgow the other night. Even taking into consideration the denouement at the end of the film, the story remains a simple one. I read the novel a year or so ago and I am usually hesitant to see a film where I've enjoyed the book and cultivated a set of visual images to go with it. In this case the film adapts the novel well - I even found myself thinking I had seen certain parts of the film before.

The movie opens with words being typed on an old Corona and it is the power of uttered and written words which is at the centre of the film: Words spoken or written which can never be taken back.

We never simply record events. We inject ourselves into the story we are relating. The desire of a budding young writer - Briony Tallis - to have the world conform to her hopes and, ultimately, to her anger and jealousy forms the core of the plot. A community of men and women reel from the effect of a young girl's testimony and attempt, over time, to reestablish what has been broken by her words.

The film has been well crafted. I cannot think of a single regrettable image or badly crafted scene - not one false note. This was a very satisfying film.

Liberal Defence critic Denis Coderre was in Afghanistan yesterday talking to Canadian troops there. Would somebody please tell the honourable member that just because he's in the Opposition in Ottawa doesn't mean he has to grow a beard and look like the Taliban in Kandahar.

Yes you can be too careful!

A report commissioned by the Church of England advises us to leave our clerical collars at home because they make us a target for violent criminals. The whole question of the advisability of wearing clericals on the street has been discussed elsewhere. This is different - now we're into the realm of health and safety where we know that......

You can't be too careful

Let's deal with how the report begins. It begins with the pictures of murdered clergy.

It then goes on to state in one of the introductory paragraphs that a 2001 study found that "70% of clergy suffer from some sort of violence". That's a lot! Me, I've got the same package of plasters that I had back in Chibougamau in the late 80's. I'm not even sure that the adhesive works any more. Maybe I've been lucky. The author then states his own findings from 2006 that "48% of them (clergy) had suffered at least one violent incident in the preceding 12 months". Fine.

First you want to know what 'violence' in this context means. I'm just off the phone with somebody with whom I raised my voice. Was I being violent? I was being aggressive. What is violence anyway - being shouted at - given sideways glances? The definition given in the article ends up being pretty wide indeed

4.4 Often in a parish are one or two people who can use violence as described in footnote 2 above [which I can't find]. These can be people who have a grudge against the church, the vicar themselves [sic] or God. The vicar becomes the target of the abuse which can often take the form of anonymous letter writing to the bishop, attempts to discredit the vicar and accusations of improper behaviour. These are often long term problems that are seldom dealt with in a satisfactory manner according to those clergy who suffer from this sort of violence.

Ah. We're back in Britain again.

First - show pictures of four clergy murdered between 1996 and 2007. Truly horrifying stories, all of them.

Second - give statistics for a generalized form of violence which includes disgruntled Altar Guild presidents writing the Bishop under the name of Outraged of Penicuik and saying that the Rector is an utter shit who should never have been sent to the congregation in the first place. I'm sorry - that's not violence. That's the reality of ministry in some places (tho mercifully not Penicuik).

Thirdly - propose a series of over-the-top safeguards.

My favourite? From the appendix at the end:

All front doors should reach the European Standard ENV 1627

(This means that the door should withstand assault with crowbars for five minutes, withstand pressure on the lock of 600 kg and withstand pressure on the corners of 300 kg)

All I have to say is that on the day my Altar Guild starts to assault the front door for five minutes with crowbars I'm gonna start checking the Church Times in earnest for available positions.

------

On a more sober note. I had somebody decide to kill me once - back in the early nineties.

His marriage had broken apart, he was seriously manic depressive and we had found alternate accomodation for his wife and daughter when he had beaten them rather badly.

His plan was to lure me to the 17th floor apartment/hotel room he was living in and pitch me off the balcony. He was waaay manic when I arrived after his phone call. He was a round but still very well-built fellow and when I arrived he was sweating profusely and wearing nothing but a small pair of bikini briefs and kept telling me that it was too hot in the room and he wanted to talk to me on the balcony. "Not here" he snapped in a staccato voice, "on the balcony. On - the - balcony!"

I was clever enough not to advance into the room. I backed out slowly on a pretext and got the hell out of there.

I must admit that I had ignored any number of little warning bells in my head as I was driving over to his place. I shoulda known better. The next day he was threatening over the telephone to throw himself off the same balcony and I managed to do a two-telephone trick and have the Montreal cops sneak up and haul him down. On his way to the hospital he told the police about his plans to throw me off the day before.

I'm not sure that risk can ever be completely avoided or should be avoided, for that matter. The cultivation of good common sense pays great dividends, however. My one risky encounter with an unwell parishioner was cleary my own bloody fault.

My friend John Beach, that most excellent of Episcopal priests serving (with his lady wife Denise) as Rector of Emmanuel Church in Geneva, Switzerland (part of the American Convocation of Churches in Europe) has written a letter to his friends about a man named Hiram Bingham. John's letter is reprinted here with permission.

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Dear ones,

Denise and I were at a conference in Nice last weekend and were struck by the beauty and soothing climate. After the conference, we attended the Chagall museum and were moved by the paintings of this French Jewish painter. It was in this museum, that I came upon the story of Hiram Bingham (for his biography you can look at his Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Bingham_IV).

Be certain to read about Hiram Bingham the IV, for there is a long line of impressive Hiram Binghams.

Anxious to limit immigration to the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. Bingham disobeyed his directives and issued between 2-3,000 visas over the course of the next year. Many of these were hidden in the American Episcopal church in Nice before they could be given transport.

When his superiors discovered what he had been doing, he was immediately fired. His family, however, was very influential, so he was given another post in Buenos Aires (then considered a hardship post) during which time he was instrumental in locating Nazi war criminals after the war. The state department become so fed up with his insubordination that he was fired from this position and moved to Salem, Connecticut where he disappeared into obscurity (I am told that Salem, Connecticut is an excellent place to disappear into obscurity). He arrived in the U.S. at age 44, and was never able to get a job for the rest of his life.

He tried several attempts to start small businesses, all of which failed. He died in Salem in 1988.

No one in Salem (not even his own children) were aware of his heroism until they were contacted by the Holocaust museum 5 years ago who wanted to commemorate Bingham. His own children were astonished when, over the course of 2001-2002 several memorials and a postage stamp were issued in his name.

Among the many people given visa, was Marc Chagall who was able to spend the war years in the U.S. Upon his return to Nice, he painted a series of oils paintings depicting the Exodus. I spent an hour looking at one in particular the Chagall museum on Monday. It shows the sinister forces in dark grey tones representing the Egyptian army chasing the Jews towards the Red Sea. One of can make out one person in the grey mass who is a bit separated from the rest, who has a yellow foot (the only bit of color on that part of the canvas). There is an ancient Midrash which states that the son of Pharaoh continued to think of Moses has a brother, so that his heart would not allow him to join in the genocide. The yellow foot was meant to represent the son of Pharaoh. It was also meant to represent Hiram Bingham. Chagall wrote in a letter found in Bingham’s attic where his confused children sought for documents for the holocaust museum. In it he stated that even in the hearts of those who are the beneficiaries of cruelty and injustice, a shred of human decency emerges and we can see that the darkness is not completely dark.

He referred to Bingham as a “bureaucrat par excellence”.

I spent a good while meditating on that yellow foot.

Love
John