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

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

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

Winter Leaving Us

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

NASA's Picture of Britain Today

Blog-a-Dog

Thought for the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Crystal Clear Atheism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thought for the Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time does something else too.

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

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

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

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

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

Thought for the Day

Advent begins this Sunday with all its anticipation and waiting.

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

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

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

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

“A word in your ear please?”

“Uh, no, maybe later….”

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

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

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

Promise and threat sometimes begin to look like each other.

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

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

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

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

Always the Celebrant, never the bride!

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

Lutheran Airlines

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

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

Time for the details

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

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

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

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

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

My wife, I think, will appreciate that.

Fear and Surprise!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Alter on R. Crumb

....Perhaps the most winning aspect of Crumb’s Genesis is its inventive playfulness. He is keenly aware that many bizarre things happen in these stories, first in the primeval history because of its legendary character and then in the patriarchal narrative because of the writers’ deep interest in what is odd, paradoxical, and surprising in human behavior and in divine intervention......

I don't own a copy of Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses, but his book The Art of Biblical Narrative was required reading for at least two courses which I took in seminary. Alter teaches Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and it is his translation of Genesis which R. Crumb has used, more or less completely, in his Illustrated Book of Genesis (which should be arriving in my mailbox on Monday in time for me to bring it up to the Edinburgh clergy conference the following week in Pitlochry).

Robert Alter has written a review of Crumb's latest contribution. It appeared in the New Republic last week and can be found HERE.

The sort of news you see when you get up really early and flip through a few of your favourite church-related websites:

Ruth Gledhill has "Pope challenges bankers to adopt Catholic Ethics" which I guess is fine and good if the location is Venice or Florence and the Catholic Ethics in play are those of the Medicis and the Borgias. Wouldn't be much of a stretch, really. They're halfway there.

And speaking of "Catholic" and "adopt", it seems that the nice man from Forward in Faith is saying that a Diocese in Papua New Guinea is the "obvious choice" to be the first to request inclusion in this new Anglican Use Rite which the Pope is proposing for disaffected Anglicans.

One thing I'll say for disaffected Anglicans - they do get around. There really is no spot on the globe which they won't invoke, provoke or "mess with" in order to get back at the person living around the corner from them who they used to have lunch with.

How can you not be enthused
by this?

I have just pre-ordered two copies of R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis. Raspberry Rabbit being a rather small furry creature in the world of online Anglican personages, I don't get sent advance copies for review like that nice Bishop chap down in Blighty who always has that earnest air about him. I have to wait. As do you.

I used to sell the Georgia Straight on the streetcorner in Victoria and Vancouver back in the very early seventies - back around the time Jim Morrison died - back in the days when the Georgia Straight was an honest-to-goodness underground newspaper. Back in the days when my fellow Junior High School students walked out of school to protest the testing of a nuclear device on the Aleutians and got together and occupied an abandoned bit of University Endowment Land until the Saanich Police arrived and we all had to scatter and then walk back to school looking innocent.

The good old days.

Robert Crumb's women were right out of the Louvre and, being far too young at the time to have seen many (any) women in a state of undress, Crumb's facsimile thereof had to suffice. I've since discovered that not all women have really thick ankles.

A recent article in the Telegraph about Crumb's illustrated version of Genesis consisted of all the predictable boilerplate you'd have expected and included, of course, that obligatory telephone call to anyone who fit the caricature of the media-unfriendly "christian" lobbyist for whom "lip pursing" is considered a charism and, in lieu of genuine holiness, outrage will do in a pinch.

Now that they've gone out of their way to find him, the headlines can "accurately relate" how cross we all are here in Jesus-land that our Holy Book has been illustrated with tits.

The cumulative reaction from most Christian circles (among others) is actually not anger or disquiet - quite the opposite, in fact. Many of us are aging fans of Fritz the Cat who needed work and so slapped on a clerical collar and learned Greek and we can hardly wait to get our hands on a copy.

So what would you want in its stead? The Church of England? Soft floppy people reading a Book which contains scads of PG 13 sex, violence and nakedness though you'd never know it from the way it's read from the lectern in a stained glass voice?

Nah, give me something that I have to pass around in brown paper wrappers. Give me something my 12 year old stepson has to discover while fishing around in my office for a forgotten package of Tic Tacs and then pretend that he hasn't been reading.

Bishop Nick has a bit about it HERE. Church Mouse la-bas. New York Times HERE. New Yorker talks about the research which went into the artwork HERE. Article in the Jewish Daily Forward HERE. A few notes on the translation which Crumb uses HERE