I am enjoying myself far too much to blog this week. Easter was marvelous! The best Holy Week ever with joint services between the various congregations in our little town. Three well attended Good Friday services in our own church. Holy Saturday service well attended. Mostly all the right notes during the Exsultet. Ended up in the church garden with choir and congregation singing at the top of their lungs disturbing the neighbours. Came back into the church to get a good look at the sanctuary with its left-over cloud of incense and the smell of the flowers - candle lit and mysterious with the empty cross in the corner. A feast for the eyes and the heart. We had good weather for the sunrise service (not to be taken for granted in Scotland) which began in the graveyard of the local Church of Scotland in the centre of town and ended up on the hill behind the Episcopal church. Crown Him with Many Crowns sung loud enough to wake the neighbours who'd been disturbed the night before. Breakfast followed - the rectory hens had been laying furiously all week and there were enough eggs for everybody. Church now smelled of bacon rather than incense. Easter congregations well up over last year and a really good feeling in both. All is very well. See you next week.

R. Rabbit

Easter Eggs

My chickens were hoping to take advantage of the recent good weather to catch a few rays and generally relax after a tough winter. Think again, I said, this is a purpose driven flock! They have now been informed of the upcoming Easter morning breakfast following our sunrise service at St James'. They have grudgingly agreed to consume as many insects and greens as possible over the next ten days so as to produce the requisite number of proper tasting eggs with deep yellow/orange yolks. I'll start collecting them on Thursday. By Holy Saturday the next week I'll have a hundred and twenty - more or less. Enough for breakfast

It's a strange combination of folks from various churches (or no church) who we get out to our sunrise service. A mixed bag of young and old from our congregation - the youth group from the local Church of Scotland. A grandmother and her two wee granddaughters. We meet in the old church yard at St Mungo's - down the hill among the graves and in the darkness. We say a psalm and a few prayers. Others join us in dribs and drabs. The movement is then upward - up towards high ground - we say a few prayers, a mandolin is produced and we sing some songs.

The Easter drama took place in the same pink light of dawn as another small group of people moved around and tried to understand the import of what they've been told in part - daring to hope against hope.

So speaking of eggs. We're no longer used to a nice fresh egg straight from the henhouse. We phone up the rector after he's given us a half-dozen of the best eggs available in Christendom and we say "those eggs tasted different. You sure they were okay? The white of the egg wasn't perfectly clear. Part of the white was raised up high and the other bit was runny."

So - first of all - with respect to the eggs you bought at Tesco last time you went shopping - there was at least two weeks and probably three which separated their production at the business end of the chicken to the time they were placed on the shelf by the pimply lad in the green apron. In that three weeks the following things happened:

During the first day all the CO2 left the white of the egg. A perfectly fresh egg when cracked into a bowl will have a slightly cloudy white. That's how you know you're eating it within 24 hours of being laid. The cloudy raw eggwhite is a good thing. An egg has structures - there are two little cords which anchor the yolk inside the egg - called chalazae and in a fresh egg these are visible. There are always two of them. No, they're not embryoes or imperfections - they are supposed to be there. They'll be gone within three days so you'll never see them in a Tesco egg - only in a nice fresh egg laid by one of the Rector's hens who spends her day running around after beetles. You might see a small disk on the surface of the yolk - sure, flap your hands and worry a little more! No, this is not a developing embryo either. This is the place on the yolk - called the germinal disk wherein a fertilized egg would eventually develop an embryo once placed under a broody hen or in an incubator. You can find a germinal disk on a a fertilized egg - you can find one on a sterile egg. They're part of the egg you will never see as the Tesco egg slowly loses all its form and turns to undifferentiated goo sitting in the lorry, sitting in the warehouse, sitting at the back of the store and eventually sitting on the shelf. A fresh egg also has two types of albumen or egg-white. When you break one of my eggs onto a plate you'll see the runny bit which spreads out and the thick bit which has some height and maintains its form. Height is one of the hallmarks of a good fresh egg - the height of the thick eggwhite and the height of the yolk. My eggs stand out. They're outstanding. They stand at attention in the frying pan and on your plate. Eventually they stand at attention on your toast. Enjoy!

If you're not coming to the sunrise service at St James' Church then for goodness sake find a farmer near you and buy yourselves some proper eggs for your Easter lunch!

A song by The Nine Inch Nails sung by Johnny Cash towards the end of his life.

A story for Lent

It's not new but it seemed more appropriate than much of the dross I've posted of late.

Momofuko Ando, the inventor of 'Ramen Noodles' has died at the age of 96. His funeral took place last week. It is not known whether he owed his long life to a regular diet of his own noodles but the number of young men walking around in their underwear in garret flats, subsisting on a regular diet of cigarettes, beer and Ramen Noodles, before going on to steer the ship of state, build bridges, die for causes and write poetry must be significant. His passing should not go unnoticed.

I went to Sainsbury's some time ago and decided to stock up on a few dozen packages. I asked if they had 'Ramen noodles' and was looked at yet again with that bored expression from the boy in the apron as if I'd asked for something from Mars. They're called Ramen Noodles worldwide but not in Britain where 'instant noodles' seems to be the local name for them.

What you get when you Google your grandmother.....

Before she was married my Nana was a member of the Ingenues - an all girl band which was one of the models for the band featured in 'Some Like it Hot'. There have been a few still photos here and there - little snapshots of Nana arm in arm with a man in a fedora and a pencil moustache who wasn't Gramps. In the photo above, the girls are playing to dairy cows in the University of Wisconsin's cattle barn in an experiment designed to see if cows would give more milk when exposed to calming music.

I tried my hand at stand-up comedy once. I recognize the expression on the cows' faces.

For a girl from small town Iowa with a forbidding father, Nana's years touring the world with the Ingenues would have felt like freedom.

In the video at the bottom of the page, my grandmother is the young woman playing the cello (and the banjo and the bassoon) in the front row on the right. Hat tip to my sister Anne for finding this on the net.

This is just nice. I thought you'd enjoy it.

What we see at first glance may not be the way things actually are. We generally see our own faces staring back at us.

Somebody should invent a season wherein we spend more time on what we don't know than on what we think we know.

They have?

Pop Goes Your Heart!

So it's a slow news day. Things are filtering in slowly and I can't bear to wade through all the 'highly available' opinion which is mostly stilted so I'm pouring myself a nice glass of sloe gin (it's now ready!) and watching this cartoon. It's the sort of cartoon I always looked forward to when I was a child.

No you haven't missed the video. It's right below

Badger, Badger, Badger

In a slightly less jerky format

Kate heads out...

I've never worked in the American Church (other than a summer internship in Ketchikan, Alaska when I was in seminary) but I am filled with a tremendous admiration for +KJS not having lost the plot in the midst of all this bother. I'd have checked myself in for a 'little rest' long ago. Her comments and her approach to this conflict have, so far, been open and gracious.

It's where the rubber hits the road, isn't it - being in the midst of people who dislike and mistrust you - making your case surrounded by a host of opponents? There are many quick roads to resolution - one of which is to simply state the case aggressively and let the 'opposition' hang - another, to withdraw at a moment of your own choosing. But Christians - more than mere nationals - are citizens of something greater and Americans should not be immune to sobering lessons in international citizenship - even good Progressives.

It's not enough to present a faultless position and to leave such a meeting with one's Talent intact.

Part of me hopes very much that stasis is not preserved in Tanzania. But cutting the lines which connect one to the rest of the world and retreating to the 'known' has always been one of the arrows in the quiver of our American chums in centuries past and it doesn't work in the long run. The world is not built that way any more. There are no islands. The theologian Langdon Gilkey, writing about his experiences while interned by the Japanese in China where he'd been a schoolteacher at the outbreak of the war, writes in a journal article:

Since life's moral structure is continually distorted, more than intelligence and good intentions are needed, though modern idealistic culture does not believe this. In order to counter the conflict, disorder and violence that result from our imperfect responses to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, new and deeper commitments are necessary, hope even amid hopelessness is needed, and above all again, courage. Courage is the basis not only of the conquest of anxiety and fear, but also the ground of any reflective repentance, self-criticism, and reconciling gestures to those who threaten us. Justice and self-control may be as necessary as reason for creative community; but trust, humility and the capacity for love - what has frequently been called faith - are also needed.

It's that fear thing again!

The latest round in the great British 'get scared until we feel alive' game is the announcement today in The Times that doctors will require police or military protection when they walk around deciding who gets to live and who will be left to die once the Great Epidemic takes place - all this due to some dead turkeys south of the border in England. That the virus which will kill us hasn't even evolved yet is apparently just a detail. It's been a slow week for global warming. The latest roundup of muslim terrorists is a week old and starting to go green around the edges like something left in the fridge for too long. The second article in the Times this morning went one step farther. Doctors, it appears, will need their own guns. Will it be this bad? Of course it will. The British public clearly has no control. The people who survived the Blitz and the IRA and Margaret Thatcher were another race of men who bear no resemblance to the weaker and less worthy crowd which presently inhabits our island and can be depended on to murder any doctor who makes hard decisions.

When I was ten or eleven there was an American serial horror show on television called Dark Shadows. My sister and I weren't allowed to watch it because our youngest sister Ruth would have wanted to watch it as well and she was far too young. The show was genuinely scary and therefore far too good to miss so we simply invented homework parties at the homes of a couple of feral children we knew whose parents wouldn't take any notice. Feral friends are, of course, the salvation of bored suburban youngsters but that's the subject of another post.

So when Barnabas Collins was about to bite the neck of one of his victims or when Quentin Collins had finally been turned into a zombie and appeared from behind the door we children were able to feel something queer and primitive rising up in us. Something akin to what our ancestors would have felt in the presence of a genuine opponent or a wild animal. Fear is a thrill and we are short on bona fide thrills these days. With more money to spend than we've had before and with life expectancy rising we would need a frisson or two. The only thing falling as quickly as the genuine crime rate is the percentage of people who vote. You see, we're not passionate about very much and therein, I think, is the problem.

A problem which the media (like a helpful call-girl with nimble fingers) has identified and will be pleased to help us with.


Also: We could all fall into the sea!

Always 'on message' and never surprising...

One thing about people who are in the midst of a scrap is that they are all so bloody boring. We can blame the organism itself, I suppose, invariably draining the peripheral members of blood in order to keep the heart, brains and lungs alive. What works with the human body in cold water tends to be the ordre du jour as well for individuals and groups embroiled in conflict. They set priorities and decide to concentrate on only three or four things to the detriment of all else.

Known many divorcing people? Ever wished you had a large cork that you could jam into their mouths accompanied by a cartoonesque 'Ploink' when they start rattling on about the outgoing spouse ? Have you noticed the searching look in their eyes as they try and ferret out from you the only datum they require: Are you on my side or on the other side? Anything else you say - well sir, that's lost on them - an anecdote, story or reflection - an expression of joy or loss, anything winsome - it's all binned and the conversation is judged worthless unless they've acquired at least one useful increment in the case which they are building. Such individuals - the file-keepers, the wrongs-recorders, the letter-daters - they cut themselves off from any semblance of community in the long run - other than mutually-reinforcing groups of people who may have suffered the same fate.

As characters they become rather flat - always on message and never surprising.

Of particular concern is the way in which the world reduces itself, for such embattled folk, into only two shades. Like a mall security guard who is looking only for shoplifters, like an ocelot lying on a tree branch scanning the forest floor for something walking by which is edible - these folk aren't interested in the 'details'. There is simply dark and light. The job of the embattled warrior is not to 'describe' anything in its complexity it is to 'declare' in which corner it might be most usefully placed. The varied world we live in is rendered mere opportunity.

Nicholas Berdyaev describes such a narrowing of vision in a journal article he wrote in 1937

For the fanatic there does not exist a manifold world. This is a man, obsessed by one thing. He has a merciless and malevolent attitude towards all and everything except for this one thing.

If the opponents are best described as animals, dead stones or pagans then so be it. We have a job to do, which is to reduce the complex molecule into something simple and digestible. Unless the truth of a situation can be reduced to 'our truth' which is a 'useful truth' then we're not interested. Gone is the colour of life and the possibility for change - gone the possibility of the hidden being made real and or the subtle discovered in its previously unseen beauty. Gone now even the necessary repentence for anything other than a lack of vigour in pursuing the well trodden path towards a corporately determined enemy.

A Canadian attempts to keep his A-1 Credit Rating

From the Globe and Mail. Let there be no mistake about it - we're responsible folks in Canada and we'll always go that extra mile. There should be more of us in high places.

Of course there are plenty of choices to be made

All bets may be off as to what the results of next weeks Primates' meeting in Tanzania will be but it''s quite clear to Tom Wright that the manual on the table in front of them is the Windsor Report. It's just a matter of putting it into action. The documents are good documents. A lot of work has gone into them. It would be a shame if we'd wasted our time anywhere along the way. The Windsor report 'part deux' will consist of a series of action points. The Bishop of Durham, according to Ruth Gledhill , believes that:

The Primates have little choice but to follow Windsor at the meeting next week.

I've always been wary of anybody telling anybody else that they 'have no choice' but to follow this or that course of action. Such words, when uttered at a Synod or during labour negotiations are never descriptive. Nobody ever stops arguing because the geezer at the microphone has just accurately described the situation. There'd be no discussion if his point were self-evident.

So the Bishop of Durham's words are not designed to say how a body of people (split along several axes with a few of them being relative unknowns and subject to heaven-knows-what sort of pressure from lobbyists arriving with satchels, satellite phones and 'briefing packets for our African friends' or from pressure groups within their own constituencies) is going to act once they're together at a meeting. I'd have put my money on either chaos, nothing much at all, or perhaps something novel - a bit of fun and games with African Primates hiding chairs during the first hour of the meeting - but I would hope for something unexpected. I think that pushing the red button on the Windsor Report and watching things unfold as they 'must' would have been the last thing we'd see. I'd have given it slender odds, frankly.

When number three bishop in the C of E and a damned fine New Testament Scholar opines that the Primates and his own friend Rowan 'have no choice' but to take a certain course of action I cannot believe that he's being descriptive. He knows better than that and so does everybody else. These are 'prescriptive' statements. There are no less than five references in a relatively short article about how much hard work has gone into the Windsor Report - how complete it is and how beautiful are the staples and covers thereof. Tom Wright doesn't know what's going to happen in Tanzania either.

The course ahead is one of discovering possible common ground and preventing the worst possible outcomes. It's a time for making sure that, while substantial agreement is not possible right now, the field is not muddied too badly by the sheep and that avenues for future work are not closed absolutely. Unlikely allies will be encouraged to make agreements - some people will need to save face - compromises will have to be made - some will have to leave the meeting dissatisfied. All things, no doubt, that drive principled people (who have made a career of showing how one thing leads clearly to another if looked at correctly) to distraction. Any number of Rowan's spiritual forebears have had to square circles - clearly it will have to be done again. I don't think a reminder to the Primates or their handlers that they have no choice in the matter is either politic or particularly godly at this juncture - in fact it rather runs against the grain of what needs to happen at such a meeting viz. precisely that exercise of 'choice' which hauls people back from their respective precipices.

Not Standing Quite So Firmly

The battle has not been won, apparently. Somebody named Greg Griffiths at a website called Stand Firm (more temperate than Virtue Online, less temperate than Anglican Mainstream) is predicting that the so called 'global-south' and the American dissenters are going to lose badly at Tanzania. He doesn't use those terms - in fact he tells his opponents (and he names all sorts of his detractors by their Christian names in a rather amusing segment which I'll let you read for yourself at the URL above) that they've all tripped over their dinks (those that got 'em, anyway) - that they've gone too far, that their day is done, their dog is lame and their 'wagon is done fixed'. In the midst of threats and vitriol, however, these are his salient predictions:

1. There will be no crowning of a new American Primate at the meeting in Tanzania. This is certainly not what we heard earlier about how there was going be a chair somewhere and Robert Duncan was going to be sat upon it with a dwarf sitting at his feet, a bucket of mandarin oranges beside him and a girl fanning him with an ostrich feather. This was the only part of the meeting that I was looking forward to hearing about. The whole prospect of having people dash to the available chairs and someone thrust onto a throne was like a little bit of British history come back to life.

2. Rowan Williams will only 'ultimately' side with the global south. I'm assuming this means that he will not side with the global south in Tanzania. He will choose his words carefully at the upcoming meeting and then go home and have a cup of tea and think about who he's getting advice from.

3. Rowan Williams will never preside over the ejection of a Province from the Anglican Communion. There is no mechanism for this and this would not be his preferred course of action.

4. Defections from the defectors will occur after Tanzania fails to produce Elvis. Defectors are warned that Anglicanism will be renewed - again 'ultimately' (try telling Inland Revenue that you will 'ultimately' pay them) and that if these 'twice turned' ever want to come back they will be returning as from 'a rear echelon' - the relationship 'will not be the same'. These I take it are threats - an angry response to something which may or may not be happening among people known to Mr Griffiths. There are obviously some passionately held feelings here. We won't dwell on it.

5. Peter Akinola from Nigeria may not come to Lambeth 2008. I'm not sure how this squares with the ABC 'ultimately' siding with the global south. This may need to occur over a distance.

6. The American Presiding Bishop will have support. These supporters are grudgingly called 'the usual suspects' but the spectre of +KJS being left alone standing under the unanimous glare of the Primates is perhaps going to be too good to be true.

The article doesn't come across as one great concession to a rocky road ahead but the points it contains seem to indicate nothing else.

When politics goes sour.

Simon Jenkins is probably kidding. Maybe he's not.

"At times I can understand countries whose officer class, sitting in their barracks over brandy and cigars, finally lose their cool and send tanks into the streets to "defend the nation" against corrupt ministers and weak assemblies".

We could all fall into the sea!

So here I am planning to go out to British Columbia in May for my parents' 50th wedding anniversary and I find that B.C. is due to have its long-expected Uber-quake. I'll have to check the 'trip cancellation insurance' I bought to make sure that I get my money back if my family gets swallowed by the sea between now and then. Jeez, there's always something isn't there? Mind you - the Globe and Mail had it down as story number two. The gist of the report is that we're now able to predict earthquakes better - we know which areas might be worst affected by a tsunami when (not if) the quake eventually hits and, oh btw, here are the things you need to keep in your emergency kit. It's good to see a story which ends with something practical. It's great to see a newspaper which then moves on to the other stories.

I don't live there among the phlegmatic Canadians any more though. I live here with the Brits. Which brings me to my quick glance at the Times this morning where it is evident that

Fear Season Has Begun in the UK

We'll just pile them up, shall we? Global Warming, Bird Flu and Rabies from the Continent. What can we do? Sweet bugger all, apparently. Can we prevent it? Not really. Will it hurt? Oh yes, it will be terrible. Sit down and let me tell you how terrible it will be.

It will be horrifying. You've heard of mad dogs? Fits of aggression and foaming mouths - staggering about looking for something to bite. Imagine your little Billy affected like that. I know his Nursery teacher says he's a gentle soul but not then. Not after he's been brushed against by a dog owned by a man who lives next door to a Lithuanian who comes from a village where the postmaster says that somebody destroyed a mad dog just last year. Once bitten Billy will change - his breathing will grow hoarse and irregular. He'll foam at the mouth - he won't be himself. You'll see it in his eyes as he advances on you. You'll scream 'No Billy, go back! Don't try and bite Mummy, she loves you! Billy! Billy! Aaargh!. The streets of our villages usually filled with chubby teenager girls pushing prams and boys with shaved heads misbehaving outside Tescos will be filled with the screams of middle class mothers whose posh prams are now bereft of children since they've succumbed to the illness or have been shot by the Rabies Control Warden because the latest guidance
from the Scottish Executive is that 'you can't be too careful'.

If you ever find yourself doubting that 'fear is the only reality', no doubt Channel 4 will soon oblige us with a 'documentary' which intersperses dramatic testimony from Kazakh villagers about the attack of a rabid dog upon a woman washing her clothes by the river with a darkened images from a handheld camera running shakily along the corridor of an upscale British dwelling accompanied by the sounds of frenzied bubbly breathing (possibily Billy's) as somebody at the far end screams in terror and and slams the door shut.

Those of us who come from countries where Rabies is endemic can tell you that life continues very well in its presence. We have massive reservoirs of the disease in communities of Racoons, Skunks and Foxes. Our dogs are all vaccinated. Every once in a while a person needs to be vaccinated 'after' they've been bitten by a wild animal. We get by quite well, thank you.

Bird flu? Well it ranks high on the list of things to fear. I should declare my interests here because I raise hens and watched many months ago as people tiptoed up the lane quickly passed my henhouse in case a coughing chicken with a thermometer up its vent and a note from its GP should suddenly descend upon them. On the evidence on one dead Swan in Fife last year a local pram-pusher declared that my wee dog couldn't play with her dog because my dog had been in contact with chickens and, after all, 'You can't be too careful'. Yes actually you can be too careful. You might end up looking a utter pillock. Not looking like a pillock is usually one of the basic building blocks of life - one of its primal drives. Pillock Control Officers would have an easy sweep in most UK suburbs.

Problem is in this country that fear is about the only thrill people get any more. They are so frightened of living, of taking risks and of moving forward. These stories and the way these stories are presented seem akin to a calming opiate. Progress is unnecessary - such risks would be stupid - we may all be dead soon. And as for the media who dress the stories up? They're like clowns who appear periodically to 'set the mood'. They know their medium. They would rather thrust needles into their faces than neglect the worst case scenario. They're just providing a service to the feeble-minded. They get paid for doing that.

Lighten up folks - there's one death per birth. That's the way it works. Mozart never made his 30th birthday. While you're fretting and flapping like - well, like a sick swan from Fife - there's tons of good stuff you're not doing.