Pause for Thought
BBC 2
Sunday August 9th, 2009

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

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

We stood there in stunned silence.

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

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

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

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

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

And we are, let’s face it, curious.

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


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

Sleep Tight!

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thrill, as they say, is gone.

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

Pause for Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

updated below

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

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

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

The story is all HERE
and also HERE

Update

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

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

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

story HERE

Pause for Thought

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the end of day three.

No news is good news.

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

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

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

Maybe another time.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

What do you do when you can't afford to go on holidays this year to the Canary Island? You worry about shit. Any shit will do!

If you're not being ploughed six feet under by the Common Cup in your local Scottish Episcopal Church you're being chewed to death by imported rodents!

I saw the story first on the Sky News page under the headline

"Diseased Chipmunks Could Invade UK"

There followed a picture of a relatively inoffensive looking chipmunk chowing down on a toothsome bit of peanut. Whatever disease it has clearly hasn't affected its appetite. The first line of the article proper offers a little more information:

Britain is set for an invasion by thousands of diseased chipmunks coming from France, experts have warned.

One's interest is piqued, of course, by all of this. Invasions of the British Isles are attempted rather rarely. One expects large quantities of masted ships sailing into the English Channel or barges assembled in the low countries or at least small fleets of long boats which can make it up many of the major rivers to threaten villagers. It's really all a matter of agency - how will these thousands of deadly chipmunks get to our shores?

These same experts (actually different experts from the earlier mention but they may take some of the same courses at Uni) offer the following prediction:

Nature experts fear tourists will pick up the animals and put them in their bags or car boots and bring them across the Channel to Britain.

Imagine the visual, if you will, of somebody chasing a chipmunk around the St Michel Fountain trying to stuff it in a handbag. Would somebody alert the policeman on the corner? What would he say, while shrugging his shoulders:

"Ah oui, Monsieur, ils sont fou, les Anglais!"

Once here, the newly liberated chipmunks will apparently set about adding Lyme Disease and Rabies to the Bird Flu and the Swine Flu we already need to worry about.

The Sun took up the story as well. Their headline was even more dire than Sky News:

Killer Chipmunks Threaten Brit Invasion

And they have something called a "Fact File" which gives you a map which outlines the vector of threat pointing directly at a British suburb near you.

At least they have a picture of a suitably scary looking chipmunk pretending to be Godzilla and letting us know that

"when I gets this pain I wants to do damage".

"Please" it's saying "could you pick me up off the sidewalk and let me loose in the car boot or in your wife's Gucci handbag the way thousands of your silly British compatriots are going to do because that's what you silly British do all the time.

Once it was in your handbag might it slip your mind that it was in there?

"A mint? You'd like a mint? I have one here in my bag....somewhere....let's see, purse, specs, evil infected rodent....oh bother, I forgot about that, it's dead and fusty now...no....sorry....no mints this time!"

I do intend to announce this Sunday that the extension of Eucharistic hospitality to "all the baptised" specifically excludes chipmunks.

Our brother-in-Christ Kenny Macaulay made some disparaging comments about the Orange March which was planned in his town on the north bank of the Clyde. The story can be followed HERE. His views on the subject were picked up (without his say-so) in the local newspaper and have occasioned quite a lot of negative feedback from a group of people not known for their affirmative listening skills.

Lawrence of Penicuik

The exhibiting of the obligatory camel-shot is a bit like a prostate exam. It's embarrassing and a nuisance but once it's over with it's not too bad. I'm thinking that my best effort to not look like a tourist didn't quite work out.

I'm reminded of Frank Greenhouse - Major Frank Greenhouse - who was nearly a hundred when I met him at St Philip's Church in Victoria where I was a curate in the mid eighties. Frank had been something dodgy in Mesopotamia during the First World War and was able to dress in local garb and fit in quite well while riding a camel or a donkey discreetly past the Turkish lines counting machine gun nests.

Not so here, I'm afraid.

Oops!

Some of my plans for the introduction of new liturgical practices at St James' and St Mungo's following our Start-up Sunday at the end of the summer are going to have to be postponed in light of mishaps which have occurred in Churches elsewhere.

Back to the drawing board!

(comment: I find it amazing how quick an elderly nun can be when she needs to be!)
Thank you Kenny!

Stuff you knew already

...but which I didn't. I was only 11 years old and we were in a tiny cabin in Banff National Park listening on a radio with poor reception. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The fact that one of the astronauts had brought the Sacrament to the moon with him was never part of the official blurb. The faith of heroes and public individuals shouldn't be ostentatious - but it should, nonetheless, come as no surprise.

Forty years ago, in the first moments of July 20, 1969, after Aldrin had piloted the Eagle lunar module into the dust of the moon with only seconds of fuel to spare, he asked NASA for a radio blackout. He suggested that people around the world take the opportunity to "contemplate for a moment the events of the last few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way."

Then, during the radio silence, Aldrin opened a packet of bread and a vial of wine that had been blessed a few weeks earlier at his home church near Houston, Webster Presbyterian. Aldrin unfolded a paper on which he'd copied Jesus' words from John 15: "I am the vine, you are the branches ..."

"In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup," Aldrin wrote in a story published in 1970 in Guideposts magazine. "I ate the tiny Host and swallowed the wine. I gave thanks for the intelligence and spirit that had brought two young pilots to the Sea of Tranquility."

Read the whole thing HERE

The Pool of Siloam (Silwan, Siloah - there are competing translations).

One of the highlights of the time spent in Jerusalem (and there were surprisingly few of them compared to the Galilee which was brilliant) was walking the half-kilometre length of Hezekiah's tunnel which had been hewn in the limestone to access the Spring of Gihon in time of siege. It issues forth into this small pool and thence into a lower one - one of which was the pool in which Jesus commanded the 'man born blind' to go and bathe himself. The first pool immediately past the outlet of the tunnel (pictured above) is the peaceful one - atmospheric and inspiring. The only partially excavated pool (opposite this one with the length of sewer pipe running above it) has the greater claim to authenticity - having steps up to it from what is clearly a Herodian city street and steps down into the water.

Nachal David is a small stream that flows out of probably the dryest and most weather-blasted landscape I have ever seen between Qumran and Massada beside the Dead Sea.

Old Tombs and New Tombs

at the foot of the Mount of Olives. You might want to click on this to see the picture mo' better.