Thought for the Day

Children are trudging down the lane this week in new school trousers - with back-to-school faces on - at five minutes after eight. Churches are planning to restart Sunday School this weekend, get their choirs back on a practise schedule and publicise their Fall programmes.

You don’t always get a second chance at these things.

You start with a bang or you start with a whimper.

This year we are hoping to break some eggs, stir the pot and open the doors to the possibility of grace, wonder and progress. It’s going to be different this year.

A youngish deacon in the Scottish Episcopal Church is being ordained a priest this Saturday here in Edinburgh.

There he is – another generation waiting for the bell – starting out with great hopes and ambitions. This time it’ll be different

Now listen up: I don’t care if you push that same button for the tenth time. I don’t care. You’re doing what you need to do. In our case, at Church, when there are a hundred on a Sunday or fifty or even when it’s just two or three of us gathered in the Lord’s name - He promised to be in the midst of us even then.

And I don’t care if it’s the tenth time you’ve tried to get a conversation going with your husband or wife about a problem you’ve been avoiding – or whether you’ve already tried to reorient your life out of its negative spiral a dozen times without much success or that you’ve been to detox twice and lapsed twice. It doesn’t matter. The fact that you’re willing to do it again is evidence that the spark of life is still in you – and the possibility of success is no farther away

It’s part of the nature of life, when you look at it through a microscope. Even more so the nature of faith in people such as we are, listening to our radios this morning - we move – we get up again when we’re supposed to stay down.

It’s what we do. It’s who we are. We start again.

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Audio is available HERE for a limited time.
TFTD begins at 1:24.23 on the audio bar

If you've not heard the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Here's a Youtube flick for introduction and for those who want to hear a little more, a recent Music Feature on Radio 4. Enjoy!

A video has been circulating around again. It came out a year or so ago - long enough, in other words, to have spawned at least one parody.

A tourist couple set their camera up on a rock at Lake Minnewanka in Banff National Park to take a memorable holiday shot. Unfortunately, they had the scene stolen by a local Ground Squirrel who "popped up" just as the timer clicked over and took the shot.

The resulting photo has become one of those viral events. Everyone is making their own version of it. You can now make your own photo HERE

Were the natural range of the Columbian Ground Squirrel, at the end of the last Ice Age, to have extended to Scotland, for example, the recent General Synod might have looked like this

If you take the link (above) to the Crasher Squirrel Make Your Own Photo page you'll see where hundreds of people have turned their ordinary photographs into something remarkable and funny. The family depicted below has clearly decided that they've had enough of the "dull" and the "ordinary" so they decided that the addition of a random rodent would add something of interest.

Pause for Thought

Hunger: It was one of the first things we ever felt and one of the first things going on ‘within us’ that anybody else ever recognized.

A dis-ease inside.
An emptiness within us.
An ache

At some point our mothers must have said ‘I don’t know why he’s crying. He’s just after eating'.

Hungry people aren’t always the thin ones. You know that, don’t you?

Some of us are hungry even after we’ve eaten our fill. The hunger outstrips the meal in front of us.

Its not always a meal we’re hungry for, either.

We’re hungry for revenge or for company or in need of an avenue for our anger. We’re hungry to be told we’re the best or maybe we’d even give our right arm to be told that we were merely sufficient.

The hunger often outstrips the physical need. We try too hard, we’re told. We’ve become very hard work. There’s going to be trouble ahead. We’re starting to leave carnage in our wake because we’re suffering so from this insatiable hunger - from this thing gnawing within us. There’s a marriage to think about and children who depend on us. We’re up for a promotion at work and folks in the office are wondering whether we’re maybe a little too desperate and driven.

We might have known. Come to think of it, we did know - we’ve always known.

We wish we had a dime each time we’d slapped ourselves on the forehead and wondered why we’d said what we said – why we’d lost the rag - the way we did - in a public place.

We need to step back and review what we already know - ask what sort of hole it is we find in the centre of our being – while there’s time - what sort of emptiness – and what it is which drives us for good or ill.

And there is time. Our misfortunes don’t all happen to us by accident.

There are lessons to be learned and a more creative and ultimately a more ‘nourishing’ response to be discovered.


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The audio is HERE for a limited time.
Pause for Thought begins at 1:12.54 on the audio bar

This senior cleric appears not to be completely up to speed with the technical innovations available to the clergy nowadays

My daughter Hannah lives in Montreal. She thought that a having a dog would be a good idea.

This is the dog. His name is Major. Major is apparently still a puppy.

This is Major looking for any whales on the lake that he could eat.

What's wrong with a Jack Russell Terrier? This is not a dog this is a pony.

Pause for Thought

I’ve just come back from a two week trip to the Holy Land – a trip pretty evenly divided between time spent on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and time spent in the old city in Jerusalem with a few side trips here and there.

The Galilee was wonderful – thrilling – magical. I can shut my eyes and I am standing on the Mount of the Beatitudes looking down at the small stretch of shoreline on the north coast of the lake where so much of the Gospel story unfolds.

I’d been warned about Bethlehem and Jerusalem; warned by well-meaning colleagues and friends not to set myself up for disappointment – that there is an industry surrounding pilgrims like myself.

“Buy this olivewood rosary – buy these postcards – genuine Jordan water – genuine holy oil!”

I’d also been warned about the palpable hostility which was engrained in the place – the walls you drive by, the barbed wire, the universal presence of rifles slung over shoulders and handguns stuffed into belts.

This hostility extends to conflicts within all three major religions, as well and not merely between them. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem seems at times like a sort of board game with different teams occupying different parts of the same space.

I do not regret that somewhere along the line I developed the ability to ‘squint’ slightly and to conceive things as they once were or as they could be. It’s a skill learned in order to hold on to a deeper order of things even in the face of misadventure and disappointment.

It’s something necessary in order to believe in people even when they fail you – necessary even in order to believe in one’s self when the person staring back from the shaving mirror has proved to be less impressive than you once thought him to be.

As you walk through an old place which has been knocked down and rebuilt many times you reflect on the fact that human beings will generally get up again when they’ve been knocked down.

They’re got a vision in their heads which doesn’t correspond completely to the rubble which surrounds them.

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Audio available HERE for a limited time
Pause for Thought begins at 0:22.03 on the audio bar

Rumours

Industrial action on the part of Royal Mail employees here in the UK has prompted the folks down at The Tablet to allow free online access to the entirety of this week's edition.

I read purloined, free or week-old copies of the Tablet more than I read it when I've actually gotten up on my hind legs and subscribed. Once I've gotten my own subscription they end up staying in their little plastic pouches and my wife complains about the expense.

She's Scottish. She notices these things. It's true what they say.

Two stories in this week's free and therefore infinitely juicier-than-normal Tablet speak to the power of rumour to damage and destroy. I've lived and worked in communities where rumours circulate. The communities I live and work in right now are actually quite free of this sort of sub rosa manipulation of the many by the few - something for which I find myself very thankful.

In the Tablet this week, as their main story, is a rumour quite intentionally circulated in order to provoke outrage and violence: that two pages of the Qu'ran were allegedly destroyed at at Christian wedding in the Eastern Punjab in Pakistan.

What, as part of the liturgy? After the rings but just before the declaration?

The resulting violence has claimed the lives of 8 people (six of them burnt alive) and many more injured. Property and livelihoods were destroyed and church buildings were razed to the ground.
I remember the first time I ever fired an old Lee Enfield .303 when I was about 16, marvelling at the sort of shoulder-kicking power which could be unleased by applying a couple of pounds of pressure to the trigger. This is that sort of story. The rumour-monger knows that it takes just a word or two and he's unleashed an earthquake. It happened just as he intended.

The second story seems a bit more pedestrian. It concerns an apology printed on the front page of a newspaper in New Brunswick, Canada with reference to what they'd printed on an earlier front page: that Stephen Harper the Prime Minister of Canada had gone to a Roman Catholic funeral and had slipped a wafer from Mass into his coat pocket.

Some outrage ensued. Damage was done.

What was he doing going up for Communion in the first place since he's not a Roman Catholic? Did he just get up when everyone else did and was he then given something and then did he not know what to do with it? Did he figure he'd pocket it and then give it to his PA, Sabrina, to deal with like he passes so many of his problems on to her?

Well sir, the whole thing apparently was hooey (see the article at the bottom of page 31)

According to Canada's CTV News, members of the opposition Liberal Party told the story of the Communion host to the Newspaper's publisher, who then passed the unverified allegation on to his editor.

At least in this latter case the retraction got the same coverage as the original story and the originators of the rumour have been identified - as should always happen in families and in congregations where rumours start. One needs to slavishly follow them back to the source and make people accountable for what they've whispered in alleys.

Notwithstanding a number of official apologies from governmental officials in Pakistan one assumes that the originator of the rumours there which have now cost lives and livelihoods will never be properly identified.

From the Herald today:

OUR story of the woman described as "East Ham" as she was "one stop short of Barking" reminds a Stirling reader of when a friend said his trousers were "a bit Cowdenbeath".

When he asked for elucidation, he was told: "There's no ballroom in Cowdenbeath."

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Thank you Kenny

George Monbiot writes how difficult it is to fight against the establishment of a Superstore in a tiny community.

Last month Tesco submitted an application to...... build a store of 27,000 square feet on the edge of the town centre. This is twice the size of all our grocery stores put together, and bigger than our tiny settlement – 2,100 souls – can support. Tesco will prosper here only if other shops close and customers come from miles away.

More than 300 people – roughly one fifth of the adult population – have sent letters of objection. The case against the store and the strength of local feeling is so strong here that if we can't beat Tesco, no one can. But, being deficient in magic potion, we have precious little chance of stopping it.

Even if you've got an inherant prejudice against the NIMBYism of posh city folks who move to small communities and then object to development you've got to hand it to George: the cards are stacked in the favour of large corporations and their legal teams.

Read the entire article HERE.

The language is foreign
........but the sentiments are universal!

As I understand it, anyway: an Altar Guild president receives her copy of the letter from the chairman of the Select Vestry saying that Fr Wilson has accepted the Bishop's offer of appointment to St John's. She is overjoyed at the news, having endured nearly ten years under the previous Incumbent with whom she didn't see eye to eye.

Other members of the Select Vestry and heads of parish guilds gather to plan a welcome evening for the new incumbent. In the midst of these plans, Fr Wilson arrives.

Somewhat taken aback by the early arrival of their new Incumbent, everyone is nonetheless delighted that he has arrived with a complete set of vestments.

The welcome evening goes very well. There is much singing and dancing.

Several former members of the Parish who left when the previous Incumbent cancelled the monthly Evensong are in attendance although their enthusiasm is muted.

The new incumbent and the Altar Guild president spend a few moments at the statue of St Joseph the Carpenter and a bas-relief near the Lady Chapel representing the Visitation of Our Lady to her Cousin Elizabeth before wandering down to Council headquarters to see the Engineer about the old lead water service in the Parish Hall.

The future looks very rosy indeed.

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.

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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.