Penicuik Church Float

We've talked off an on for years about the local churches having a float in the annual "Penicuik on Parade". It's the usual affair with cotton candy, cadets marching in perfect step and pipe bands. We tried something last year but it was only so successful. This year, the bull was taken by the horns and one of the local ministers found a stiltwalker, a tractor and a trailer. There were a million last minute glitches but a small group of ministers and parishioners managed to hand out balloons and literature along the whole course of the parade. It looks like we'll be doing this again next year.


The Rev'd Ian Cathcart on why the churches in Penicuik might have a float with David and Goliath at "Penicuik on Parade". Please excuse the lack of a wind screen for the microphone. A note to self has been issued



All present and accounted for: Four local clergy, a Philistine on stilts and a wee boy in cardboard armour.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, May 16th, 2010

My parents are over from Canada. They head off this morning on a bus tour of the highlands and islands for five days. They are part of that great crowd of North American visitors who will try to connect with their roots this summer. You’ll see them on the high street. You might roll your eyes when they announce to the young lady behind the counter in the shop that their ‘grandmothers were Scotch’

Visitors are a strange lot, aren’t they?

You see them coming off the ferry in places like Iona as you’d see them walking along the cobbled streets of Jerusalem. At St James and St Mungo’s we get our share of visitors throughout the year. They file into Church at an Easter Vigil or a Christmas Carol service or pop up in the back pews on an ordinary Sunday morning. Pilgrims and visitors – looking for something old and worthy or something novel and even transcendent.

The raw material for this experience is our countryside – our history – our Sunday morning service. They want to be a part of us for a while. They’re the only ones in church who actually read the pew leaflet. In town you’ll see them standing on the street corner reading through the tourist guide. By the time they finish their visit they can tell us things about our city that we didn’t even know.

Grant them this, at least: Strangers, pilgrims and visitors are here on purpose. They don’t find themselves here because they’re in transit or because they were born here.

They’re sometimes a lot more alert than we are. Their eyes drink in more of the beauty and the magic than ours do. Have we grown so used to the landscape – physical or spiritual - that we find ourselves amazed to see people so nourished by it?

And so there’s a gift to be given here – not from us but to us – a prompt, if you like, to rediscover some of the beauty and the sense of what we have forgotten or overlooked.



The audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:22.06, about halfway along the audio bar.

nb. This month's "Rector's Letter" in our church magazine was, in fact, a revision of an ordination sermon I preached ten years ago. All the then-candidates are, as far as I know, still in ministry so the original sermon didn't do overmuch damage to their morale.

I try not to revise old material. In my youth I rolled my eyes at the fifty-somethingish clergy who fished through old stuff and updated it for their current needs and now, it seems, I have become what I once mocked.

Rector's Letter, May 2010

When they had finished eating, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon
son of John, do you love me more than these?”

“Yes, Lord,” he said, “You know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my lambs.”
Again Jesus said, “Simon, son of John, do you truly love me?”
He answered, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Take care of my sheep.”
The third time he said to him, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was hurt because Jesus asked him the third time “Do you love me?”
He said, “Lord, you know all things; you know that I love you.”
Jesus said, “Feed my sheep. I tell you the truth, when you were younger
you dressed yourself and went where you wanted; but when you are old
you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead
you where you do not want to go”
Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which Peter would glorify God.
Then he said to him, “Follow me!”
Peter turned and saw that the disciple whom Jesus loved was following them
(This is the one who had leaned back against Jesus at the supper and
had said “Lord, who is going to betray you?”)
When Peter saw him he asked, “Lord what about him?”
Jesus answered, “If I want him to remain alive until I return,
what is that to you? You must follow me.”

Peter turns around and sees John walking after them
a few paces behind
humming one of his new hymns

What about him? Peter asks. Does he have to feed the sheep as well? Does he have to follow too? Does he also have to die in service?

There is a child’s question here -a question about Justice. Am I the only one who has to do this? What about him, what about her?

There is an adult’s fear of loneliness as well. Will I have company?

And the answer – the grown up answer is – yes and no

Yes, you are the only one who has to do ‘this’ and no, you will not always have company while you’re doing it.

But maybe I need to backtrack: Most of my early essays were filled with the words ‘this’ or ‘these’ circled by the professor because it was no longer clear from the context what ‘this’ of ‘these’ referred to.

Jesus asks Peter – Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? These ‘what’? More than ‘this’ life, represented by the tokens of a fisherman’s livelihood scattered around on the beach – these nets, these spools of braided line, these floats?

Or – do you love me more than these other disciples love me? You, Peter, pre-eminent among my followers, do you love me more than these others do?

The question arising between a man and a woman, - a parent and a child could be playful or maybe it probes at some perceived weakness:

Do you love me (of course you do)
Do you love me (I want to hear you say it)
Do you love me (I suspect that you do not)
Do you love me (I wonder if you know what that means)

I’ll roll the dice and will hold that:

1. When Jesus asked Peter if he loved him more than these that he was referring to the other disciples gathered with them on the beach.

2. He asks the question three times because Peter has denied him three times and

3. That when he asked Peter whether or not he loved him he was wondering if Peter knew what that meant.

Because it is not clear that we always know what love means.

The general moves to the particular:

The general - whether it is love (in general), ministry (in general) or the life of human beings (in general) - is something that can be talked about but never experienced.

We will never meet humans in general. We will meet Stan and Doris and Tabitha and Rex.

Nor will we live in a neighbourhood which is typically working class or typically old money but, rather, live and minister in a particular place with its particular population and its particular history. God (in general) is the god of the philosophers - the idea of god, the possibility of God,

We know very little about God in general

The glory of the Incarnation is that God wrapped himself up in the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth and achieves His highest moment not in the solitary being of a point of light but tied up with the smells and sounds of the Middle East, the dust of the road, the quiet of the Garden, guests at a wedding, the crowded roads of Jerusalem at Passover.

The local church is asked to interpret the fact of the resurrection. The request will be similar in most cases. What does the fact of God’s love mean here? What does it mean for me - in this moment in my life and in the life of my family?

What does Christ say about this?
What does the Bible say about this?
Where is God in all of this?

In all this grief – in all this change?
In this weakness of mine?
With respect to this son of mine, this illness of mine, this loss that I have incurred?

Will you translate the generalities of the Bible, the generalities of the Mass, the generalities that my child is taught in Church school into something which can give me life?

Does this beautiful field of wheat, blond, expansive and everlasting, ever become a loaf of bread?

And then ministry of the congregation, like love, will become knowable and known:

We have the choice of extending our personalities and our energy and our time into the lives and fortunes of other human beings and we decide to do so rather than simply falling into line

We do so not because we are impelled by some Ghostly force (that would not be a gift on our behalf but rather an empty reflex) but because we choose to - we want to - we feel we must.

There is a price to be paid for wrapping ourselves in the life and the environment of another person. Acts of love take their toll on our person, on our time, on our innocence and on our sleep.

But we are not called to suffer for suffering’s sake but for Christ’s sake.

We should be up for a little adventure - the demolishing of a few horizons We’d like to see things go ‘boom’. We should cultivate a healthy and godly curiosity about what people are like on the inside, and entertain the fancy that maybe – just maybe – the parish or the ministry we are a part of might just turn a corner and bring the whole Church with it and that we might have had some small part to play in that transformation.

And why not?

God knows that we’ve waited long enough for something more than this: that we should simply preserve ourselves at all costs – our buildings and our congregation as it stands.

We’ve been there – we’ve done that. We are ready for something more. We might be ready to participate in what God is about in the world - at the risk of seeming foolish, or credulous and at the risk of falling flat on our faces.

John likens it, in the larger story about fishing. We have cast our nets the better portion of the night and have gained only questionable purchase on anything remotely resembling a school of fish.

So why not now – with us – with out particularities of history and personality?

That we would cast our nets for the five hundredth time this time at a different angle and at the behest of a voice which we hear within ourselves and that something would, in fact, pull back – that to our surprise our net would actually grab on to something and we would find ourselves hauling in a miraculous catch of fish?

After a brisk climb and a more leisurely descent down the other side we all arrived at Dryburgh Abbey safe and sound although with a few sore ankles and tricky knees. The Bishop of Edinburgh led his flock on a small pilgrimage along the first wee bit of St Cuthbert's Way - the section joining Melrose Abbey and Dryburgh Abbey.

The weather held - just. An especially good time was had by the four dogs.

Our small collection of parishioners from St James the Less and St Mungo's - all of whom made it to their destinations. It was the first time, in recent memory, that the Diocese has put on a jaunt like this. Folk seemed interested in doing it agaiin.

Abbey to Abbey

Tomorrow morning a group of us are going for a walk with our bishop.

We send the bishop our statistics each year, we reserve a special chair for him in our churches, we are polite to him at Synod.

We don't go walking in the hills with him nearly enough.

All that changes tomorrow. We'll be gathering at the Market Cross in Melrose, visiting Melrose Abbey and then heading out over the Eildon Hills "in the footsteps of St Cuthbert" to Dryburgh Abbey. All this has necessitated complex plans to leave cars in two places so that we don't have to walk back the same way we came.

Packed lunches are in order.

Tonight's Game

One of the betting sites is listing the odds of any of the following teams winning the Stanley Cup:

The Boston Bruins 18/1
The Chicago Blackhawks 4/1
The Detroit Redwings 11/2
The Montreal Canadiens 35/1
The Philadelphia Flyers 16/1
The Pittsburgh Penguins 4/1
The San Jose Sharks 5/1
The Vancouver Canucks 6/1
The Washington Capitals 7/2

My team is clearly at the back of the pack but they're still in there and if Halak's goaltending keeps up with the momentum and we win tonight's game against the favoured Capitals, a few of these figures might change. The Canadiens were down in the series 3-1 at one point but have inched their way up and have forced a 7th game. It ain't over until the fat lady sings.

So we wait and see. I'm staying up late and watching it online.

update: We did win. A defensive game which worked well against this set of opponents but may not against Pittsburgh. Still - a good fast game!

Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends

One of our West-Country types here at St James', Penicuik was telling me that the same record company which manages Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse is just after signing a group of Cornish fishermen to a major record deal.

The Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends were singing in a pub when a record executive on holiday stopped in for a pint. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Amazon site has a video which doesn't appear elsewhere in a format easily nicked for a blog page. It'll set your foot to tapping.

We have our requisite number of Cornishmen at both St James and St Mungo's. I grew up in Canada and the only West Country accents we ever heard issued from the lips of pirates in movies. Stereotypes are hard to cast off. The old stories about Cornish villagers luring ships onto the rocks with torches are nothing but dreadful slander.West Country folk are, in fact, lovely people.

I am still hesitant to let ours help with the parking for major events at church, just in case one of them should revert to type and, waving a flashlight, tell one of our visitors to back straight into the wall at high speed, with other Cornishmen swooping over the wall and making off with the spare petrol tin, the jump leads and the dog gate.

Like I said, lovely people, but that sorta stuff is not part of our Mission Statement......

You said if we paid them no mind,
they'll stop bothering us!

A website in Britain called Neighbours from Hell in Britain is offering to help "hardworking normal citizens" develop a strategy for dealing with terrible neighbours who wreak chaos for those living in close proximity to them.

Positively Managing Negative Neighbours. Are you suffering or suffered in the past with a nuisance neighbour, noisy neighbour, harrassment, bullying, boundary problems, anti-social behaviour or any form of unwanted neighbour attention or interference? Neighbours From Hell in Britain (NFHiB) can help you to resolve neighbour problems or any issues with neighbours within many different situations, there's no need to be or feel alone.

So is there anything they can do, then, with the good folks in Iceland who, since 2008 and the banking crisis, have made their little nation painfully well-known to the rest of us.

Having neglected their family debts and chequebooks in 2008 they've now clearly forgotten to perform regular volcano maintenance and they've got one heck of a spewing example of such neglect right in their back garden (which they named Eyjafjallajoekull - in order to irritate the Welsh who thought they could only come up with unpronounceable names using few vowels) which is spewing ash and delaying travel for the rest of us.

An ASBO. That's what's needed. It may be too late for mediation by a good hearted local charity.

One of the "must do's" when visiting the Sea of Galilee for the first time (other than seeing if the water will bear your weight) is to sample the famous Saint Peter's Fish at one of seaside restaurants on the Kibbutz Ein-Gev. The Rabbit family are due for a return visit to Israel to visit family in the summer of 2011 except the St Peter's Fish will be in short supply. A two-year ban on fishing the Sea of Galilee will begin this month.

These are a fast-growing fish which, being vegetarian, does not accumulate mercury in its flesh through eating smaller prey fish. It can be eaten in copious quantities with no risk to health unlike the big Lake Trout in northern Canada.

They are one of a large family (1300 subspecies) of the family Cichlidae found in various parts of the world. Africa and Central/South America host the greatest number of these fish and these populations are very distantly related to each other in that the continents were joined in the distant past. In like manner the cichlids of India and Madagascar, related to each other, are examples of the same sort of Gondwanan distribution. The popularity of ciclids as aquarium fish and the intentional or accidental introduction of these energetic and fast-growing fish into the watercourses of Florida or Australia have (unfairly) given such fish as the Tilapia a bad name as a destructive interloper. The particular branch of the Cichlid family represented by the Saint Peter's fish is, in fact, vegetarian. They tend to clear up weed-choked watercourses and improve the habitat for other fishes.

They are definitely a warm water creature and they suffer in the cool water of the Sea of Galilee in the winter time. One of the places they congregate in enormous schools is at the outlet of the fairly warm spring which gushes forth from the foot of the Mount of the Beatitudes, near Tabgha at the north-north-west corner of the lake.

So, if you knew where to drop your net - or if somebody told you - you'd be in business.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

When did you last make up your mind? How difficult was it for you to get married or to change careers?

When I was a teenager, I attended a church service where the preacher asked people to make a commitment of faith – to make up their minds - and to signal that decision by sticking a hand up in the air. I remember the preacher saying:

I see that hand…yes, and that hand too.

Life would be easier if we’d been part of a Golden Age when men and women didn’t need to agonize over decisions – when everything was so blindingly obvious that there really were no decisions to make. Even in a time of national crisis or a family emergency we imagine it would be easier. Adrenaline would take over. We’d be inclined to act rather than to deliberate.

Some of us look back at the collection of stories in our Bibles to find people who, we suppose, had it easy - who heard a voice speaking out of a burning bush or encountered the risen Christ standing on the beach welcoming them. “Bowled over”, we imagine they were, “gobsmacked” even. People like these didn’t need to weigh options like we do.

Except that’s exactly what they did in these stories – from Moses to Saint Peter. These people were presented with promises and challenges which they measured and pondered. You’d be safer to read some silences into the text. That silence is the sound of Saint Peter making up his mind. That silence is the sound of God waiting to see what Moses will decide.

God does not rob people of their right to choose – of their ability to say yes or no. The energy for faith – the energy for community building – the energy required to change your course in life. This is energy which is triggered by decision and every decision you make requires a certain amount of human agony - just enough blood, perhaps, to mark it out as “yours” and not merely the byproduct of events.



the audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:18.33 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar.

Happy Easter Everybody. An amazing collection of services in at least two Scottish Episcopal Congregations yesterday. News from others will filter down over the next few weeks. These images are NOT from St James' Penicuik but, rather, from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. We had two baptisms at St James at our Easter service, though, and there were visitors in copious quantities and it had something of the same feel.

It's not evolution, it's just the truth nonetheless

That liberalism and atheism (and male sexual exclusivity) are associated with high Intelligence Quotients. Article HERE. I say Intelligence Quotient instead of IQ in order to prove that those of us who are believers in God and not particularly radical in either our political beliefs or theological constructs (and who just might have "put it about" a little more in our single years than we'd like to admit to our children and grandchildren) still know what the abbreviation stands for.

It's not - as is frequently maintained - a question of evolution. Theism "helps people to be paranoid" and so keeps them looking over their shoulders where, coincidentally, they see the lion and the bear creeping up on them and are able to run away and continue to add to the gene pool. Conservatism helps maintain solid tribal affinities and, hence, community survival. And, as the article helpfully adds at the end, intelligent people don't have large families.

So it's not evolution, then.

It's just a fact.

Well it's good to know that I can relax. It appears that I am as stupid as I feel sometimes and so are many of you. I actually find it strangely liberating! My father told me once that life would improve once I took it to heart that we don't really ever amount to anything. I can relax now.

I do see a few seams in the study as it's being presented on the CNN site and wonder whether any peer review was ever done on this man's work. But that might be, duh, wishful thinking.

A cloudy day in Castel Gandolfo

The Universal Pope

There was a Montreal eccentric in the seventies and eighties who claimed that he was the Universal Pope. In fact, he had two personae based on the two costumes his aged mother had made for him.

The first was that of an admiral of some sort - a white uniform which might have passed for the get-up of a hotel bellhop were it not for the military peaked cap and the chest full of medals. He was a regular fixture at hockey games at the old Montreal Forum in this uniform - strolling around as "the admiral". Everybody knew him and largely ignored him.

The other uniform was rather better-made and considerably more splendid: A purple cassock with stripes and tassels, a colourful cape and a red skull cap. In this uniform he would wander around in front of the Anglican Cathedral (and other religious establishments as well) and tell the tourists out front that he was the Universal Pope. Once in a while they'd take his picture and have their pictures taken with him.

He would show up at Synod Eucharists and other events, milling around at the front of the cathedral. Al, the Cathedral's verger, would inevitably lose patience with him and show him off the property where he'd wander about on the sidewalk just outside of Al's grasp. A game of "cat and mouse" would then ensue, for an hour or so, between the Universal Pope and Al the verger. Al tended to be "mercurial" and could be hot tempered. It was best not to mess with him.

When the Synod of the Diocese of Montreal elected the Dean of the Cathedral, Andrew Hutchison, to be its new bishop after the retirement of Reginald Hollis, the enthronement was a very grand affair with television cameras in the choir loft, the mayor and other city officials in the front pews and ecclesiastical dignitaries of various sorts in procession. The usual flurry of activity took place with clergy, both greater and lesser, being assigned to their various place in the procession. When the first notes of the Processional Hymn began the procession began snaking in the back door of the cathedral.

No one knows exactly at which point the Universal Pope found his place in the procession but he was in the middle of it, for a short time, bestowing blessings upon those to his left and his right. He never made it farther than about ten paces inside the cathedral, though, because at this point Al the verger waded in and hauled him out bodily.

The most memorable moment of the day was actually not the ejection of the Universal Pope from the procession. It was the rather alarmed look on the faces of the two visiting officials from an "Eastern" church in their full robes and box-like headgear who were clearly trying to figure out what the prelate, ahead of them in procession, had done wrong so that they could avoid a similar fate.

Off on the world's shortest retreat on Lake Albano just outside of Rome. Leaving on Monday and will be back on Wednesday. It's not so much 'retreating' as it is 'nipping outside for a mo'.

A Sermon

Sunday February 7th 2010
Epiphany 5 Year C
Luke 5:1-11

I'm of the generation which learned its measurements in inches, feet and yards.

I know what an acre is. The Rectory here in Penicuik sits on about a third of an acre of land. If you added together the car park and the property the church is sitting on, you’d have about an acre without having to steal much of Nigel Johnston’s back garden to make up the difference.

I have seen a bushel basket. I know how big that is although, frankly, I’m a bit stymied when it comes to what a “peck” might be. I don't know how long a chain is, or a league. That's too ancient. On the other hand, I have no visual reckoning of what a hectare looks like – that's too modern - but I believe it to be some sort of metric acre.

Stewart and Hannah are probably more inclined to think in centimetres and metres.

I am descended from people who’d have known all the ancient measurements. They farmed sections and half-sections of land and could have told a new neighbour how many men they’d need to have around at harvest time to reap the fields and stook the grain on such a piece of Canadian prairie.

When I was a child in school we were told that there was a room somewhere on Parliament Hill in Ottawa where the government kept a lump of lead which weighed exactly a pound. They also had a steel bar measuring exactly a foot and vessels which could contain precisely one pint or one quart or one Imperial gallon.

We imagined an old commissionaire with a funny moustache guarding a small locked room. If you thought that Mr Lee down at the corner store had cheated you on a pound of green beans you could always fly to Ottawa and ask the commissionaire to get up and shuffle around for his keys and let you compare the bag of green beans with the standard pound kept in the room. Just the though of it kept everybody honest.

Our measurements have to be standard and regular and common property. I’m not going to buy cloth from you if your idea of a square yard isn’t the same as mine.

Time we measure in seconds and minutes and hours - days weeks months and years. If you've hit the age when you begin to become nostalgic you might ask yourself: “where was I five years ago? 2005, of course, wasn't it? Where was I in 2000? Or 1995?"

You go back in five-year increments through the eighties or seventies. A bit slimmer you were then, with more hair, married to that one and not this one. But when you change direction and go back up through the list you'll notice that it’s not a satisfactory way of measuring time at all. Measuring your life in regular increments is quite daft, really, and not terribly useful because the events of any life happen in lumps, not in regular steps.

You didn’t have a crisis or a change or a transformation every year or every five just because the clock or the calendar turned over. No, every year is not the same. There is no standard year or decade guarded by a commissionaire in a little room in Ottawa. No such thing exists. Some years, days months and moments are special times - they weigh more and contain more things. They are significant. Some times are lighter and click by with a dull regularity.

In the Greek language there is a word for time which passes in regular increments - the word is "Chronos" and it's a useful word for mapping out the regular time - time without content - time-always-the-same – standard days, weeks, months and years.

The other word is Kairos and it is better translated by the English word "season". A season has particular obligations attached to it and requires that the farmer, the student, the disciple or the traveller be aware not only of its proportions but its requirements. It contains the promise of abundance if taken seriously and approached at the right angle or the threat of tragedy if it is misunderstood or disobeyed.

An ancient tapestry outlines the seasons in terms of agricultural activity in medieval Britain: There’s the farmer in the first panel sowing seeds in the spring. There he is reaping in the fall. There he is slaughtering his hogs in November. We do different things at different times.

At the end of whatever sermon he was preaching to the crowds in the fifth chapter of Luke, Jesus, in the boat with his new disciples, tells Simon Peter to put out a little farther on the lake and to let down his nets.

“Lord”, says Simon, “we’ve done that regularly on the hour and half-hour all night. We've been letting them down. No one can say we haven’t kept to schedule. Each time we brought them up empty. Time and time again. But because you say so, I’ll do it again.”

You know the story. He did it again. And this time they enclosed such a shoal of fish that his partners in the fishing syndicate needed to bring their up boats close and take up the surplus.

It's a story we tend to universalize. Some of us, you see, have made perseverence into a religion and would take almost carnal delight in any story which showed the hero performing a difficult task "just one more time" and thereby reaping a reward. We would bear such a story aloft like a flag and would bore our children and grandchildren to tears with such a story. You might invoke me - or blame me. In fact, that's not what I'm saying at all. But this is not a story which merely praises perseverance.

Everyone has a list of things they've been hammering away at with little success to their enormous and never-ending frustration - things that they've been trying to do for a long time - things which don't happened just because they want them to happen. They've even written to their MP. No joy there either.

And in fact there's not an iota of proof that the one more time will be any more successful than the first ninety-nine. Maybe the frustrating thing you've been trying to achieve for twenty years is the wrong thing to do.

You've been banging your head against a brick wall. Now you've got a bruise on your forehead and bits of brick in your hair. Maybe the thing was ill-advised or wrong-headed. Maybe you should take your wife out to a movie, come home and have a stiff drink in front of the fire. And tomorrow - try doing something else.

There’s another related tendency which folks try out on this passage which is to say that the moment is different because Jesus is in the boat. This is both true and not true. Yes, Peter lets the nets down one more time because it’s Jesus telling him to do it. Don’t we sometimes, though, make Jesus an addendum to what we were doing anyway? We go back to the same old list but this time we imagine Jesus alongside us - Sancho Panza to our Don Quixote- and we carry on tilting at the same old windmills – the same things on our list - but this time saying that we’re doing it in Jesus' name. We invoke the power of Jesus to get ahead in life or make some other provision for our safety and security.

One wishes, again, that somebody had the chutspah to ask us why you think Jesus wants the same things we’ve always wanted. Curious coincidence, no, that Jesus might want exactly what suits us? How does that work?

No, the secret here is to ask what sort of season it is that these people in the boat with Jesus are occupying at this moment in Luke’s story. Forget what they are receiving – what exactly are they participating in?

At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has just disappointed an entire congregation in Nazareth – a congregation in which his family were seated looking decidedly uncomfortable as he preached an inflammatory sermon and then horrified as the congregation rose up in rebellion to drag Jesus from the body of the Kirk. He has moved to Capernaum as an exile from his family home and, frankly, Peter’s desire for a full boat and the desire of the other soon-to-be apostles to pay their debts and invest in new equipment is clearly not the point. By the end the day they will have left all these things – nets, boats and families – and will have become followers. Given that this is Luke's version of the same story which John places at the end of his Gospel, we can safely say that, as far as Luke is concerned, this is the last full boat of fish Peter will ever see.

The point is the Kingdom and its extension. Peter, James and John are being invited out of the boat and into the company of the apostles. It’s not one more fishing day with some added success because Jesus is present.

It’s the end of fishing and the end of regular time with its identical moments, its standard lengths and weights. It’s a new season – a new and irregular measurement of time and space. It’s the beginning of a new life.

A welcome bit of subtlety

One of the truly tedious things about living in Britain is the number of "shock ads" on television designed to dissuade the Brits from drinking and driving or neglecting to turn their electrical appliances off at night. They generally involve firemen holding distraught parents back from returning into a burning house to rescue their children, who will shortly die because somebody left the little red light on on the television set, or twisted bodies of adorable children on roads because somebody drank too much, etc etc.

As necessary as the messages may be it seems to be of a piece with the government's low view of the people who elected them that the citizens of this country need to be brutalized by terrible visual images before they'll decide to fly right. The ads are truly distasteful (I won't even give you an example here) and I turn the well-known ones off when they start.

The example above is different. Quite gripping without being revolting. Well done!

Thought for the Day

One definition of “compassion” has it described as being “more rigorous than empathy”. I don’t know if the word is ‘stronger’ or simply more likely to be turned into action. When Jesus sees the crowds – leaderless and without a shepherd – it is said in the text that he had compassion for them. The conversion of St Francis of Assisi took place not when he had a dream or a vision but when he saw a man stricken with leprosy standing on the side of the road. The sight marked the well-dressed young "Francesco". Something leapt into life within him and his life demonstrably changed thereafter.

My daughter began her first evening shift the other day at an overnight shelter for homeless women in Montreal. Up until this point she’d been paying her bills by working as a manager at a restaurant and she’d been well-paid and good at her job. She found, though, that the work was unrelated to her study at university which is all about people and intervening in the problems they face.

Her boyfriend, for his part, has just arrived in Haiti in a Canadian uniform where he’s in the midst of unpacking a field hospital and managing other supplies destined for the relief effort there. At different points on the globe they are dealing with the plight of others. They are now old enough and trained enough to make good on the feelings they have within them and to translate those into action on behalf of others.

Is empathy a warmer word? It describes what’s going on within us - what we feel. The impact – it’s right “there” and can take the form of distraction or tears or even physical pain .

Compassion usually refers to what we do alongside the object of our concern – what we do for them. We’d have to know whether we’re doing them any good and that’s harder to know. That’s where the risks come in.

We don’t always manage to do the good we intend, but unless we take the best stab at it we can, the feelings we have inside of us may remain merely feelings.



the audio is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:21.25 - a little more than halfway along the audio bar.

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.