Palm Crosses

It took us a while to remember what we were doing.

The diagram we had saved from last year and printed out proved to be of little use.

On the other hand, the story about the bunny going twice around the tree and the other bunny going round the back, up and down into the rabbit hole was more to the point and provided much better results.

MCMLVIII - a very very long time ago

There - it's just gone midnight. Today (friday) is my 50th birthday. It's just starting to hit me. I'm 50 today. 50 is extremely old. Life is pretty well half over!

I do occasionally wake up in the morning and ask myself whether I'm really as old as all that. I shake my head for a moment and wonder is there's been a mistake. I know where the years have gone - I was there when they went, but it seemed like it was just yesterday that I was turning 30 (and feeling old then)

Other people born in 1958

Andie MacDowell
Holly Hunter
Jamie Lee Curtis
Kate Bush (yeah, okay - she's old!)
Madonna
Michelle Pfeiffer
Sharon Stone
Tim Burton
Viggo Mortensen

Looking at it this way, of course, 50 is not that old. These folks aren't old. These people are more or less just like me - plus botox and regular time in the gym, singing lessons, agents to get them gigs and - therapy.

I guess turning 50 is better than the alternative.

Now I'll head off. It's past my bedtime.

This morning's Thought for the Day on BBC Scotland. A couple of spoonerisms - 'Oath of Loyalty' became 'Loath of Oyalty' but hey, it's early in the morning. The hedgehogs were just going to bed.

The whole idea of young people taking an Oath of Loyalty is not even the flavour of the month - it's the flavour of the second half of this week.

From the morning's papers: Simon Jenkins writing in the Guardian and Daniel Hannan in the Torygraph on more or less the same subject. This will all have gone away by the end of the week and will be replaced by yet another silly quick fix cooked up by a Focus Group.

A Greek tailor bumps into

his client in the Agora

First man: Euripides?

Second man: Yes, Eumenides?

Tavener's Requiem available on BBC 3

The premiere of Sir John Tavener's Requiem is available on the Radio 3 site only for another day or two. The programme begins with selections from Rachmaninov's Vespers and finishes with Tavener's work.

Tavener is, apparently, seriously ill at the moment and was unable to attend on the evening the piece was recorded. The orchestra was set up in the form of a crucifix with the cello soloist at the very centre of the cross. The last ten minutes of the Requiem will stay with me for a long time.

Steve Tilley over at Mustard Seed Shavings has been stripping away lot of excess language as part of his Lenten observance and posting mostly in haiku form. This has led to such spine-chilling little nuggets as

Visit Christ Church
Sort out the Alpha course food
Not many takers

I guess a lot of haiku experts have passed by his website. Some have clearly made comments, provoking the following outburst:

"Look you bunch of pedants. Brummies make two syllables where one is written. Japanese make the punctuation count as a syllable. Haiku is more an intention than a form. It is just oh I can't be bothered the rest is a quote from a web-site explaining stuff like this:"

Crack on Steve! Square your shoulders. They're all Philistines! They will not be numbered among the Just.

NB. The outburst could have been written thus:

Frankly, can't be arsed.

Further explanation here

Lighten up, won't you?

Commonwealth Day 2008

Today is Commonwealth Day. The day you give thanks for, among other things, Canadians.

You'll know who we are. We're the ones lining up at the Garlicky Little Foreign People with Dodgy Passports queue at Immigration while the Finns and Lithuanians breeze through with EU passports.

A tradition designed to compensate for all those years of ignoring and overlooking us is the giving of quite splendid gifts to Commonwealth citizens on the second Monday in March. Best wishes to Canadians and other Commonwealth citizens can be left here in the comments box. Monetary gifts or gifts in bottles with consonant-heavy Scottish names printed on them can be sent via the post.

An article in the Telegraph bemoaning recent attempts to restrict Commonwealth immigration can be found here.

Teach your children to cherish their nearest Canadian vicar (and not to bang their hard church shoes on the pew during his children's talk) by going to the Young Commonwealth site.

Lying in bed covered in bandages with tubes hanging out of you? The Commonwealth Nursing Federation has some ideas for celebrating Commonwealth Day.

My 'Commonwealth moment' came about ten years ago standing under the Menin Gate in Ieper (Ypres) Belgium. A bugler from the Ypres Fire Department plays the Last Post every night at 8:00 pm. School children from around the world visit the site. Not infrequently one of them is asked to read the usual fragment of McCrae's poem - "they shall not grow old.....". This particular evening it was a little girl visiting from New Zealand with her family who took her job very seriously - solemn little Kiwi dipthongs echoing throughout the chamber. Her dad was visibly chuffed and clearly proud of her.

On the wall were the large number of names (among others from around the Empire) of members of my regiment - the Canadian Grenadier Guards - who were killed in battle and whose bodies were never recovered and identified.

Palm Crosses

It's coming up to that time of year again. This Saturday morning at 10:00 we're gathering in the Hall with the children and anyone else who feels 'young at heart' to make the Palm Crosses for Sunday. There are several ways of making them and everybody swears by their own method. Each year we gather and the first thing we have to do is remember how we did them last year. Some of the methods involve a single piece of palm. We don't do it that way - we use two.

We use two because, erm, of the two natures of Christ - the divine and the human.

We use two pieces of palm because *thinking.....* of the two Gospel Sacraments - Baptism and Holy Communion.

No? Okay, we use two because that's how we were taught us a few years back and we're Anglicans and when we find something that works we stick with it like tar to an old boot.

So, in anticipation of Saturday's get-together to make palm crosses, I post here the a pictorial guide on the web which illustrated the way we do it. I post it simply as an aide-memoire for myself so I don't look like an utter pillock on Saturday morning.

-- - - - - - -

Joe Walker (Diocese of Edmonton in Canada) has published his sermon notes for next Sunday. Worth a read!

Frequently wrong but never in doubt

Glad to see that there's somebody out there who's as grumpy and opinionated as I am. Well done, Fr Heron!

De Mille is De Man



via Scott Gunn via Bishop Alan

An article from the Daily Mail. I'm sure it's as true as anything else the Daily Mail publishes.

Following the never-ending theme here in the UK that you can't be too careful it appears that lamp-posts in parts of London are now to be padded.

Readings for the 5th Sunday in Lent

I'll be doing the Family Service in one of my churches this Sunday which is a slightly truncated affair. Wishing I had a little more sermon-time for readings such as these.

Mare Winningham 'Valley of the Dry Bones'



The old standard by The Delta Rhythm Boys



The Raising of Lazarus from
The Greatest Story Every Told

Little Dark Poet

Before it's too late.....

I am heading out over the next couple of days to visit a very ancient lady who spent her life as Penicuik's Registrar. Somebody meticulous - as you might imagine - a member of our little 8:00 service at St James.

Penicuik no longer has a town hall where births and deaths can be registered, certain debts settled and payments made. You drive through our town and you are struck by the fact that our Centre has collapsed. Businesses are boarded up. The appropriate role for us in life now is to be a good bedroom community for Edinburgh. Left behind on all sorts of levels are the locals. Banks close and Cheque Cashing outlets and betting shops open in their stead. Never say we don't provide for the local people!

The closing of the Town Hall and the withdrawal of local services was all going on at about the time I arrived here from Canada and I was only dimly aware of the controversy. I had a couple of the battle-weary in my congregation. Yes, it is a shame, I said. You'll have to go to Dalkeith to do these things. I didn't think too much about it at the time. The town hall was reborn under different coverings as a resource-to-the-community-but-not-a-town hall. Not the same thing. There was a committee struck to oversee it. They spent as much time fighting with each other as they did managing the resource.

Simon Jenkins' article in the Guardian last week was about the nationalization of social responsibility and the weakness of our social contracts at the local level. A few highlights:

The nearest any British community has to local government these days is the police force. Local leadership is a 999 call. Whether it is a rape epidemic, an unruly school, trouble with immigrants, a released paedophile or bingeing teenagers, the community appears before the world as a police officer. There may be walk-on parts for a firefighter, a priest and, bringing up the rear, a national MP. But the figure of reassurance and authority in any British town nowadays is in uniform (which is why Muslims turn to their mullahs).

he continues:

Go to any community abroad, whether in America or France or Germany or the Netherlands, and that figure will be a locally elected official, normally a mayor.

and then the clincher:

In France there is an elected official for every 120 people, which is why French micro-democracy is alive and kicking. In Germany the ratio is 1:250; in Britain it is 1:2,600. In France the smallest unit of discretionary local government (raising some money and running some services) is the commune, with an average population of 1,500. In Germany that size is 5,000 people. In Britain the average district population is 120,000, and even that body can pass the blame for any service deficiency to central government.

Misery Literature

And while we're on the subject of larger-than-life caricatures: What about those nuns! The Magdalene Laundries closed down in Ireland in 1996 for any number of good reasons. Everybody ought to be glad to see the back of the whole enterprise. The 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters is pretty grim viewing by anybody's estimate.

Not everybody on the bandwagon, though, appears to be quite who they say they are. A subsequent 2005 book by Kathy O'Beirne entitled "Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries" (or "Don't Ever Tell", as it was marketed in the UK) has recently been decried as a work of fiction.

O'Beirne told of being tortured by her labourer father, experimented upon in a psychiatric hospital, and raped by no fewer than four priests and a policeman. Then there was her spell in a Magdalene laundry, one of Ireland's notorious Church-run homes for "fallen women", where, aged 14, she gave birth to a daughter.

Problem is that the story doesn't add up - the daughter doesn't exist - the sisters of the Magdalen Laundries were apparently very good at one thing at least - keeping records - and no records of Kathy O'Beirne can be found. Nobody at the laundries in those years can remember her.

Fiction is good. Misery fiction clearly occupies a place in the psyche of those who purchased one of the 400,000 copies of "Kathy's Story" which flew off the shelves. Their troubled lives seemed more manageable perhaps when compared to the life being described.

Or maybe it is just pornography under another guise.

The problem lies with the fact that real people are being implicated in these events.

...what makes the O'Beirne saga so troubling.....is that it fuels Ireland's obsession with clerical sex abuse, and the abuse-claim industry. O'Beirne herself accused Fr Fergal O'Connor, founder of the homeless hostel Sherrard House, of raping her in the 1970s. The investigation took a year, during which the 77-year-old University College Dublin professor was prevented from visiting his own workplace. Yet Fr O'Connor was virtually crippled by arthritis when the alleged crimes took place, unable even to shake hands because of the pain, according to a friend. The priest was exonerated two days before his death.

Charity workers and members of religious orders working in the 19th and early 20th century probably would have the right to demand that stories about their misdeeds be subject to a modicum of scrutiny. They are people, after all, and not merely monsters.

Lizards that just don't quit ............

I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield last night. I wanted to see it last Monday but the whole day-off fizzled following a death in the congregation and a series of phone calls and other obligations. My fiancee doesn't like films like this. My future stepson would have loved it but wouldn't have slept afterwards so it was strictly a solo affair. Once I'm married to his mother I'll take him to films like this when he's being a little sod. I'll put him to bed afterwards, shut off the light and close the door. Periodically I'll walk by the door and make this sound.



Any of you who were watching B-movies in the fifties and sixties will have to explain to me how on earth the original Godzilla movies inspired anything more than a chuckle. One is taught to treat past generations with a measure of patience. You did endure the War after all - the Blitz, Mock Apple Pie, Glenn Miller - and, yes, you may now be incontinent, dribbling and forever accusing the orderlies of stealing your teeth. But how lame is the idea of people screaming and covering their eyes at what is clearly an out-of-work circus midget stumping around a baptistry in a rubber suit kicking over a three foot model of a bridge. And the Atomic Breath? Yet another even smaller midget with a paintbrush colouring in the squares of film.

Which is a long way of saying hats off to anybody who can resurrect the Godzilla/Gojira tradition and have the film end up being really quite scary.

The film begins with the theft of an idea from the Blair Witch Project about a bit of video data being found by accident. In this case the data is contained in a castoff video camera found in "what was" Central Park in New York City. Special effects abound throughout the movie - money was spent in copious amounts but the point of view is that of a rather stupid boy named Hudd who's been given a cam-corder and told to record the evening's festivities - a surprise party for his best friend's brother who's leaving the next day to take up a junior management job in Japan.

The entire movie is filmed in Not-Too-Steady-Cam, then, with quite thrilling results. The first twenty minutes are difficult to endure. Pouty young women, vacuuous youths trading gossip and scandal. We knew we'd come to see a scary movie. Oh for God's sake send the Creature in! Don't force us to endure the late-teen, early-twenty crowd with their up-talk and their petty scandals. Stock characters do abound - a stupid boy who manages to be charmingly naive, a protagonist caught between two choices, a grumpy sister, the female Object of Desire, the mysterious stranger-girl. You're trying to figure out all the connections and you're not quite bored yet when the first earthquake hits and reports of explosions come in over the television. The giant lizard starts wreaking havoc in the city.

The original Godzilla movies didn't arise, like the monster, from a submarine trench. They reflect the anxiety felt by most in the early years of the Nuclear age. It was, as I remember, the testing of the Hydrogen Bomb which was alleged to have released the creature into the world. In the long run, though, the movies were a lot more fun than they were therapeutic. Cloverfield has woven within its plot all sorts of markers of post-911 anxiety as well. One scene of people cowering inside a convenience store as the monster passes is very nearly an exact replica of the famous bit of footage from September 11th in New York. There is, however, no real therapeutic task to the film and it ends up being a good ride.

All of the stock preamble at this point both begins to make sense and to (mercifully) disappear when the monster begins its rampage. This is a good film which eats its own schlock and demonstrates what another age might have been so scared about in its day. Go see the film if it's still around. Don't wait for the video!

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The Sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

~R.S. Thomas (1972)

Via Elizaphanian via Madpriest. Thanks.

God's Country

A long and eloquently written piece in this month's edition of The Atlantic on Christianity and Islam in Nigeria called God's Country by Eliza Griswold.

Calling all Scottish Episcopal Bloggers

At least those within reasonably quick driving distance of a small town just to the south of Edinburgh. Our local folkies - a group called Herken which is drawn from St James Episcopal Church and the Penicuik Folk Club - have put together an evening of hymns and folk music with a special emphasis on "...a strain of Christian music that borrows, without saying so, from traditional songs and tunes." It's this Sunday evening at 6:30 pm.

The website for Herken give you a link to the current project which is called Of Earth and Altar. Take a peek at their other stuff as well. Follow the link at the bottom of that page to call up a .pdf file with the evening's offerings of songs and readings. Bring yourself. Bring a carload!