Dmitri Orlov on the Georgian crisis. He was once a student of Abkhaz language and culture (I wonder if he's available for dinner parties - it certainly beats an after supper game of Twister) and by his his own admission his take on the present situation is influenced by an earlier keen interest in one party to the present troubles. His parallels with Kosovo make things seem a simple matter of alliances - who's bloc one supports.

Things are probably even simpler than that.

Yards of stuff here I didn't know, though, about the ethnic makeup of the region.

Thanks to Sam Norton for the ref.

This is more or less what was preached at a Requiem Mass for Frances McLean. A couple of folks have asked for the text. I couldn't help adding a few bits and pieces which better reflected the whole day and not just the sermon at the Requiem Mass. Think of it as a retrospective sermon.

---------

A funeral sermon for Frances McLean
November 7th, 2008
The Church of Saint James the Less
Penicuik, Midlothian

The words which the Bishop recited as he led Frances McLean’s coffin out of the church were those of devout Simeon who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. As Luke tells the story, Simeon has now arrived at the end of his life and the child Jesus is brought to him. What he says is this:

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,

according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and for glory to your people Israel.

Simeon was promised one thing only and has now received it. Words like his speak of ‘sufficiency’ and, in my way of thinking; sufficiency has a lot going for it. You might not leap for joy to see the word ‘sufficient’ scrawled across the top of an exam paper or on a written appraisal of our work but I think sufficiency is badly under-rated.

We balk nowadays at eulogies – with their long lists of achievements – being read at funerals in the church. They’ve gone out of style, haven’t they - eulogies? You get the feeling that when such lists of achievements are being read out that we are swimming upstream and are battling what everybody in the church already knows, which is this: that rich or poor, famous or unknown, languid or troubled – we all go this same way!

The same sentences from the Burial Office – which Tony read on the night before the funeral as Frances’ coffin was carried into the chancel - are going to be read at our funerals one day. Our coffins, made of solid cherry wood with real brass handles, or made of veneer or canvas-covered chip-board are going to be covered with the same funeral pall in the church and will give the same visual effect as any other coffin. Frances was buried at Rosebank Cemetery on Pilrig Street near the 200 soldiers on their way to the front lines in the First World War who died in the Gretna Train Disaster, in the same graveyard as her grandfather and great grandfather and in the company of saints and rascals from two centuries of Scottish history. Gravediggers – Council employees in yellow coats – could be seen hiding behind trees puffing on their cigarettes until we’d gone. It was just one more burial to them.

We’re all together in our deaths. It is a great leveller.

Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the woman and our feelings for her, and even though there are remarkable stories that can be told about her, what the bishop said in his prayer at the Commendation referred simply to her participation in the Grace which God has granted to us in Christ:

Into your hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend your servant, Frances. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming…..

I believe that when Frances asked her nurse on Wednesday whether she would survive this illness and was told, as directly as any nurse could possibly tell her, that she would not survive it - she must have put her head back on the pillow and said to herself

that she’d had enough.

There was sadness. I sensed it on the Tuesday afternoon when we spoke. There was solemnity. The bishop told me that Frances said ‘goodbye’ to him on Wednesday after lunch with a great sense of occasion and finality.  You see,

She’d had enough. 

What does that mean? Not that she had no strength to fight it (we can’t know what she was thinking about that) – but that had you asked Frances if she’d had occasion to love and be loved, to apply herself to the world around her, to fill her generation and to meet Christ in the midst of the world’s people she’d have said ‘yes’. It was sufficient. 

She’d had enough.

I hope this for you – first of all, sufficiency.

Do remember that funeral sermons, such as they are, are intended for the living and not for the dead. The question today is not only ‘who was Frances’, but ‘who are we’? Men and women, boys and girls who may well not be in a position yet to say that

we have ‘enough’

- that we live today in sufficiency – that we would be satisfied were our life to reach its end on the 7^th of November 2008. This poses for us a challenge. It could provoke in us something of an ‘ache’ and were we to walk away from the hospital bed, the church or the graveside resolved that we would follow the lead of that nagging feeling rather than fleeing from it, then the loss of our friend and the experience of gathering around her coffin or more accurately, the experience of gathering with her around the Lord’s Table could be a tremendous blessing and a new beginning.

Now - you know and I know that ‘sufficiency’ is not a word that adequately exhausts the subject of Frances McLean. It doesn’t end there of course – but it’s something that has to be said.

The image we all have in our minds when thinking of Frances is certainly not a checklist with one ticked and sufficient box but something more akin to a cornucopia – a horn of plenty – filled with fruit – a cup - running over. It has much to do with a sense of humour, with a very loud and boisterous laugh and with a series of active associations around the world of a woman in her eighties. It has to do with the stories we heard of Frances on her last trip to South Africa with Angela being surrounded by the children she helped bring into the world, by the nurses and students she encouraged – people who remembered her and looked at her as one who nurtured life and enjoyed the fullness of her relationships.

And so, this I hope for you as well – abundance – not in what you gather to yourselves but what you scatter abroad into the lives and beings of others. In the remarkable lives or ordinary saints like Frances McLean we get a sense of what can be done with our particular portion of life.

This is the route of the pipeline which is Europe's alternative route to the Russian pipeline running from Baku to Novorosslysk. It doesn't leave a whole hell of a lot to the imagination, does it?

Mixing military enterprise with the oil business is not unknown, of course. It always seems a little more craven when somebody else does it though. Amateurs! Where were the spin doctors?

Disclaimer

Please note this sign does not appear outside the house of a clergyman just returned from holiday. I don't feel remotely the way this man feels.

Don't even suggest that I do.

The rectory at Penicuik is open for business.

Snowdome

At over 11,000 feet, this glacier-capped massif drains in three direction. It is a (possibly 'the') hydrological apex of North America. Its glaciers drain into the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, the Arctic Ocean via the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers and into Hudson Bay via the North Saskatchewan and Nelson Rivers.

If you've got a big screen you might click on the picture. I'm pleased with how it turned out.

The Stanley Cup has apparently been used in a 'private christening', according to the Canadian Press. The service took place in Sweden where Tomas Holmstrom was having 'his day' with the Cup having been a member of the Detroit Redwings which took the Cup out of the country (Canada) and the city (Montreal) which would ordinarily merit it.

Okay, so Detroit is a cold place and the Redwings a venerable team. We've now got a whole lot of teams in places where ice doesn't occur normally. They get the best teams American oil money can afford. Long past are the days when desirable foreigners had to defect in order to play hockey and all the American teams had Canadian players.

There is a long tradition of Canadian Naval Chaplains using an upended ship's bell for baptisms so I suppose it's not too much of a stretch. No mention in the article of a minister being involved in the service or whether the baptism was properly peformed using Trinitarian formulae.

We eagerly await to hear about the child of a Formula One winner being sprayed with champagne. Thanks to Joe over at Felix Hominum for the link.

More news from Rev Ruth about other innovations in ecclesiastical hardware.

Back in the saddle

Scotland is suitably grey and rainy. Will look idly out the window for an hour or so this morning and get back into it. Coming back from holidays isn't always easy. But we did see bears, and mountains. We spent time with my family in British Columbia and a week in a great summer community in Sorrento. Good worship - new friends. The whole nine yards.

The picture above is of two nice little people standing in the Columbia Ice Fields with somebody who looks like the rector of Weyburn Saskatchewan.

I can report that a wonderful time is being had by all at the Sorrento Centre in the interior of British Columbia. All the good ghosts - all those memories of past summers - are still well and truly in place. Many new friends and insights. I am probably not the first to discover that placing one's self in the tutelage of brothers and sisters in the faith is a good idea. I must do more of this. Caireen and I are in different courses - a good idea - Stewart is spending hours climbing onto the wobbly little dock out on the lake with his friends until it begins to upend, falling off with great shrieks of delight and then climbing up onto it again.

A good time being had by all.

RR

I'm leaving on a jet plane.......

Off on holidays with my wife and stepson.

Three days with the folks on Saltspring Island, British Columbia and then off for a week to the Sorrento Centre in the interior of the Province. I first went to Sorrento with my parents in about 1967 or thereabouts and have made my way back there periodically.

It's a magical place filled with grace and good memories. I'm hoping that my new family will sense some of what I sensed there.

Will finish up with a couple of days bumping around the Rockies before getting on the plane in Calgary and returning to Scotland.

And, as it turns out, it's also good for you!

Abundant, grainy and not overly expensive. Think of it as Red River Cereal for the soul. We know already that incense is an appropriate symbol of the soul's ascent and a means of hallowing or 'pointing to' significant places or actions - something which enjoys both clear Biblical warrant and obvious analogues in other religious traditions.

But is it good for you? From the reaction of certain folks it might appear not:

... Consider this symptom of distaste: the Protestant Frankincense Cough, a psychosomatic or (as we used to say) hysterical phenomenon. People who disapprove of incense often respond like Pavlov's dogs to the dinner-bell. I, way up in the sanctuary of my last parish, could merely hold up an unlit thurible, for one dear soul, thirty yards away, to hack and retch as if gassed. Her Scotch blood, perhaps: she only had to see an incense machine to think of popery (rather than pot-pourri), and she couldn't think of popery without gagging on the thought of Inquisitions, idolatry of false bones, pyres at Smithfield, Armadas, papal concubines, Jesuit assassins -- and of Galileo, mocking Abbés in powdered periwigs, salacious nuns, the Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing schools -- .

Now Fr Major has, I suspect, never been accused of understating a case. Nonetheless there is much unhappiness on the part of some people when the new rector begins to slowly and carefully introduce the practise on selected Sunday mornings. Not all of it has to do with the physical effects of the stuff.

This just in: It is now being suggested that the components of frankincense act to reduce anxiety and depression - at least among mice.

Those short unhappy lives, marked by high heartrates and quick dashes between corners of the kitchen looking for crumbs and dodging the cat and the householder's broom. If such lives can be made tolerable with the addition of a little frankincense think of what it can do for you.



If you've not read the irascible Fr Richard Major's (as yet) uncompleted series of articles on the Mass entitled 'The Freeze-Frame Mass" it's worth a read. The link sends you to a table of contents. Look a little further and you'll see a link to download the .pdf file


I heard some vile little creature cheering him on at certain points and realized, to my shame, that it was me.

Jeez, I suppose this is vaguely familiar.......

thanks to Ugley Vicar via Tim Chesterton

Feelgood video for the day

In order to get some quiet time with a book on a Sunday afternoon it's occasionally necessary to set some boundaries. This is possibly taking it a little far.

The very latest thing

Unfold Google page whereever you happen to be. Images immediately appear in the rectangular spaces provided. Move the page to the right or left, up or down. Borders will adjust themselves accordingly.

This morning at Saint James the Less we're celebrating Sea Sunday at our Family Service. We do this once a year. We hold a Fellowship Lunch afterwards and make a donation to the Mission to Seafarers. A few years back one of our stalwarts discovered and old hymn from the Sankey hymnal which has become a favourite here in Penicuik. The lyrics are below and the dreadful MIDI tune-bar thingy is here

Light in the darkness, sailor, day is at hand!
See o’er the foaming billows fair haven’s land,
Drear was the voyage, sailor, now almost o’er,
Safe within the life boat, sailor, pull for the shore.

Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore!
Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar;
Safe in the life boat, sailor, cling to self no more!
Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the shore.

Trust in the life boat, sailor, all else will fail,
Stronger the surges dash and fiercer the gale,
Heed not the stormy winds, though loudly they roar;
Watch the “bright and morning Star,” and pull for the shore!

Bright gleams the morning, sailor, uplift the eye;
Clouds and darkness disappearing, glory is nigh!
Safe in the life boat, sailor, sing evermore;
“Glory, glory, hallelujah!” pull for the shore.

What Joe really said at Woodstock

Regarding the subtitler's art. This was circulating around last year:


Muchas Gracias to Padre Mickey down in Panama for the first link

Mrs Rabbit and I went to the Royal Garden Party at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh today. We'd been invited last year but had been out of the country at the time and couldn't go. We were told solemnly that these invitations are given out sparingly and that once refused one could consider one's self off the list for any future invites. Such is life.

So we were surprised to receive the cream coloured envelope postmarked Buckingham Palace again this year and we resolved to go.

The weather threatened ominously but held nonetheless. The drive in Edinburgh from Penicuik was terrible - it took an hour and a half to make what is normally a half hour journey.

My lady wife is a mental health nurse and got herself scratched on the face at work yesterday. When it came to the choice of hats this morning she came out with a wide brimmed black affair. Fine except that the scratch on her face had a bit of an upturn to it which, when viewed from the side and with your eyes squinted, looked just a bit like a twirled moustache.

"No", I said, "you have to lose the wide brimmed hat. You look like Zorro"

I think that sometimes I'm not as sensitive as I should be. She changed hats for a less wide brimmed affair with several feathers and looked just fine.

The Bishop of Edinburgh and his wife Lissa were there. Our Primus was apparently somewhere at the party dressed in a frock coat. I'd have loved to see that but managed to miss him in the very large crowd. At least two other clergy - Church of Scotland types I think - were wandering around in their frock coats carrying glasses of iced coffee.

One of the options for the dress of the day was 'national costume' and I'll admit that the idea of showing up as a Mountie, a lumberjack or a trapper did cross my mind. The Royal Company of Archers were drifting in and out of the crowd and they have a head-dress with an enormous feather standing straight up. They carry longbows as well.

Eventually the Queen and Prince Philip walked by on their way from the Royal Tea Tent. The Queen was dressed in a cheery yellow dress and hat and looked quite grand.

Happy Canada Day everybody! We used to call it Dominion Day back in elementary school where the map on the wall had large portions (of which we were the largest, as I remember) coloured pink to show the extent of Britain's rule around the world. I'm not sure we've replaced Dominion Day with anything quite as grand as membership in the British Empire. But it's our day.

In brown paper wrappers!

Eleven year old boys are passing around videos (or at least their URLs) to each other in class. Aha, say I: time for the 'little talk'.

It would appear, though, that the age of innocence will endure a while longer. This appears to be hit number one these days. Steamier videos may arrive in due course.

Happy St Jean Baptiste Day everybody.

Historically the Patron Saint of French speaking communities throughout North America but now officially only the Patron Saint of Quebec. The day has become a fairly tidy and secularized 'Fete Nationale' in Quebec.