Traffic Jam on the Appian Way

I thought I was back on the Moor Road between Penicuik and West Linton again.

The bus taking me to the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian on the old Appian Way had been crawling along for five minutes. When we got to the corner we found out why.

Looking over Lago Albano this morning at about six-thirty a.m. towards Castel Gandolfo perched on the edge of this volcanic lake. The city of Rome is beyond the ridge obscured by the mist. The bird song was awesome.

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
February 1st, 2011

I am not Colin Firth.

Hopes that my congregation might start calling me Father Darcy have all been dashed. I remain to them unremarkable and not very glamourous. People in my congregation have, though, been crowing about the recent film "The King's Speech". While there is enthusiasm about the script and the story - much of it has to do with the leading man.

Every generation has its heart-throbs. Often they've been stars of the big screen. The facts about the lives these people lead - either as rogues or as timid and ordinary folks - are unimportant to many of us. There is, I gather, a Mrs Firth who wakes up next to Mr Firth every morning and who knows the real story.

For his admirers this matters little.

Actors get rather a poor rating in the New Testament. The word "hypocrite" which Jesus uses to describe his religious opponents comes from the world of the theatre and means, essentially, an actor - somebody inauthentic who doesn't believe the words he's saying and using.

The fact remains that there are, today, real men and women around the world who stand in the breach, who do battle against injustice, who champion good ideas, who do what they say they'll do and who make sacrifices for others. We tend to be cynical about real life heroes. There's a market out there for books and articles claiming to tell "the real story" behind our heroes and to knock the stuffing out of any person or institution which presumes to stand too tall.

At least some of it is jealousy. We're uncomfortable with our own lack of heroism.

In "The Kings Speech" it takes a failed actor to make a stammering King able to speak to a nation.

In a world filled with troubled families, failing political will, divided communities and crushing indifference, might not the stories of real life heroes do something to straighten our backs and increase our resolve?

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An audio link is available HERE for a limited time. TFTD begins at 1:23.20 - about halfway along the audio bar.

Address to a Haggis:
The Good News Version

How like a smiley-face you are!
Pre-eminent among all forms of prepared meat
(though chiefly made of guts),
you are worthy of a decent thanksgiving -
one of considerable length, too.

Almost too large for the plate, you resemble
a large backside, or a hill seen from a distance.
The small metal clip holding you together may prove useful
and should be salvaged at the end of the meal.
The cooking process has forced amber liquid through your skin
Yum!

Wiping the residue of previous work from his knife
he makes a swift cut down your middle -
opening you like a trench in the ground.
Everyone is happy with the wafting odour.
This is clearly a well-cooked Haggis!

Table manners are soon forgotten. With spoon in hand
each elbows ahead of the others. To hell with them!
Now, bloated and in pain, they loll about the table.
The head of the household, ready to fart,
intones a well-known thanksgiving psalm from the hymnal
to mask the noise.

Purveyors of Continental cuisine
look down on local country food like ours
but their oily stews and fancy concoctions
would make a sow-pig
pucker up her face and puke!

Look at those poor buggers
forced to eat crap like that!
They’re as week as weeds
with spindly legs and little fists
ill-suited to wading through a battle field

The rural Scot who eats haggis regularly
has a heavy footfall and a strong hand.
He is good with a knife
and well capable of dismembering and beheading
his opponents.

Oh you residual pagan gods and forest spirits
who control the fates of ordinary people.
True Scots want no watery soup
in little wooden dishes.
If you want us to be truly grateful
cook us up a haggis!

Address to a Haggis:
The Authorized Version

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang's my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hudies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o' need,
While thro' your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut ye up wi' ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reeking, rich!

Then horn for horn, they stretch an' strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
'Bethankit!' hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout,
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi perfect scunner,
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Tho' bluidy flood or field to dash,
O how unfit.

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread,
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
He'll make it whistle;
An' legs, an' arms, an' heads will sned
Like taps o' thrissle.

Ye pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o' fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware,
That jaups in luggies;
But if ye wish her gratfu' prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!

Sunday Night Divertissement:

The Album Cover Game (modified)

1. You come up with a name for your band by either using your blog title or going to Wikipedia and hitting "random article" and using the title of whatever article comes up first as the name of your band. I just tried it and it came up with "Black-tailed Dasyure" which has a sultry, jazzy feeling about it but is really a marsupial of some sort.

2. The title of your album is the last four or five words of whatever comes up when you go to quotationspage.com and hit "random quotes".

3. For the artwork go to Flickr and find "explore the last seven days". Your album artwork is the 3rd picture which comes up. That and nothing else. Expand the photo to its maximum size and you should be able to download it.

4. Have fun with a photo editor. I just used Paint.NET which is free and easy to use.

My dad's blog is called Elderly Eclectic Gentleman. I'm going to hazard a guess that my dad's got quite a lot on this next couple of weeks so here goes, Dad.



Thanks to That Hideous Man for the suggestion

Great Chieftain o' the puddin race....

As we move into Burns Night Supper territory, the Globe and Mail has a little introduction to the ins and outs of Haggis in its contemporary Scottish manifestations - fairly posh haggis, mind - lady haggis - haggis for the smart set. Not galumping manly great mountains of the steaming stuff like they usually have over here!

Mrs Rabbit and I are off to a Burns Night Supper a week tomorrow. I will never be asked to do the address to the Haggis since my accent's not right. It wouldn't do. The one or two times an "aye" has escaped my lips instead of a "yes" everybody's looked at me as if I were a total poser. Apparently I'm not allowed to fit in.

Nor this year will I be imbibing to my customary degree since I have a service and an AGM after church the next morning. I will be remaining sober enough to drive home. My behaviour at the supper will be exemplary and unBurnslike.

Until this year there'd been a ban on authentic haggis being sold or imported into the United States since 1971. That's done with now and Americans can enjoy genuine honest-to-goodness offal shovelled off the slaughterhouse floor instead of the tidier product they've been making do with (unless they knew a Canadian who could smuggle the good stuff over the border).

Enjoy!

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
January 12th, 2011

There’s a story in the Book of Acts, where Saul of Tarsus was on his way to Damascus with warrants in his saddlebag against the members of the small Christian community there - a group of people he had targeted before and come to know well in Jerusalem. Along the way he got knocked off his donkey. He had a vision. He saw the light, as they say. The great persecutor of the church ended up becoming Saint Paul – the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Queer how things work out, isn’t it: When people snap – when they change sides? Consider the case of PC Mark Kennedy, the undercover police officer said to have “gone native” while infiltrating one of the more radical Climate Change groups over a number of years.

Personal contact brings with it no end of risks. J. Edgar Hoover never liked to send agents in undercover for any length of time in case they ended up becoming tainted. For “tainted”, read “involved”, “compromised” or even “convinced” – no longer useful, anyway, as a weapon against their opponents.

But as embarrassing as this must be for the police who appear to have lost a case against members of the group because their man wobbled in post, and as distressing as it may be for the Climate Change group to find that one of their number was informing against them all these years, it is nonetheless heartening to know that, in relationships between people over a protracted period of time, we can still be transformed and changed through contact.

I would have a hard time living in a world where people remained so resolute they could not be moved and changed by the power of relationship.

Such apparent weakness may be the key to any number of dreadful situations around the world where people and communities stare across no man’s land at people they’ve been trained or even raised to despise.

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an audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:23.27 - halfway along the audio bar

The Baptism of our Lord

This is a small collection of video-clips of a single episode in the Jesus story shown in different ways on big or little screens which I had assembled for some parish project which never happened (or at least hasn't happened yet).

Nonetheless - it's timely - at least today.

Ghosts of Christmas Past
The "Chibougabus"

In the 1987 I accepted the post as the Incumbent of Christ Church Chibougamau in the Diocese of Moosonee. It was my first parish.

My new bishop, Caleb Lawrence, gave me a couple of pieces of advice: First of all, he said, you'll need a decent vehicle. You've got a total of 266 kilometres a Sunday to drive in all sorts of weather in order to lead services in two communities (Chibougamau and Waswanipi River in northern Quebec). Secondly, you need to learn to play an instrument because, in addition, you'll be responsible for a number of small outlying native settlements in the region - collections of plywood shacks dotted about here and there - and there'll be no other music there.

So I quickly learned a dozen chords on the mandolin (Caleb's other suggestion had been the accordon!) since one of my chums in the congregation in Victoria, where I was curate, was willing, not only to teach me the mandolin, but to let me help him lead music at the beginning of the service at St Philip's during the few months that remained before I left for the north. I built up a tidy repertoire of simple hymns and choruses.

The Chibougabus was a 1984 Toyota Landcruiser with a long wheelbase. It had interior heaters back and front, four-wheel-drive (obviously) and could fire itself through a deep snow-drift on a lonely road like a tank.

The problem was starting it in intense cold - minus fifty (celsius) in Chibougamau on one morning in 1988 - because diesel, even the winterized diesel available in Canada, tends to thicken up in the cold. It was necessary to plug the Chibougabus into the mains overnight at three points: The vehicle had a standark block heater to warm the engine block. It had an oil-pan heater to keep the engine oil from turning into tar and it had a battery heater which warmed the two batteries. All being well and the electric load not being high enough to blow the fuse on the outdoor electric socket, you could start your vehicle in the morning without too much noise and banging about.

One of the tricks to start a cranky vehicle in the cold is to open the hood, shoot a little ether from a spray can into the air filter, run around to the drivers side and turn the key. This helped on many a morning.

Safety equipment - tons of the stuff: I carried a pair of snow shoes, a length of rope, a shovel, an axe and two arctic sleeping bags with extra blankets. I also carried about a dozen bricks and a box of 8 hour emergency candles.

One of the tricks of pilots who were ferrying bombers over Greenland during the Second World War was to carry bricks and candles with them in case they had to ditch in some frozen waste along the way. You can build a little oven made of bricks with a few air spaces between them and light a candle inside it. The candle warms the bricks. If you manage to isolate yourself in some tiny part of the plane (or in some part of the Chibougabus with your artic sleeping bag around you and blankets blocking off the rest of the vehicle), you can keep your section liveably warm almost indefinitely.

I was set.

Our regional Dean at the time, the Rector of Val d'Or was, shall we say, a character. He was from south Florida and was a bit crusty. At some point during my last winter in Chibougamau, Sam came over for a visit. He knocked on the door. I let him in and put the coffee on. We sat at the table.

Sam says to me in his raspy voice,

"Rob, I've just looked in the back of your truck and what do I see there? I see ropes. I see a can of ether. I see an axe.

It is no mystery to me that you never get a date."

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Friday, December 17th

I went to a Nativity Play this week at our local Primary School in Penicuik. The annual school or church Nativity wouldn’t be possible without tea towels and cut up curtains and square paste-on beards made of construction paper.

And don’t forget the angels. When extra children show up in church who haven’t been given a part, they can always be draped in a disused choir gown and have a crown of tinsel placed on their heads. Voila – an instant angel- sent up to the front holding on to an older cousin’s hand apprehensively.

Much of the story involves human beings listening to angels - ordinary human beings caught up in trying circumstances or just minding their own business out in the pastureland but then tumbled into some sort of shape and woven into a story by a voice which comes from up in the sky or wells up from within in a dream.

It’s wrapped up with idea of inspiration, revelation and vocation: three words which have their roots in a religious tradition but which now are used in a wider sense- inspiring political speeches, revelations in a gossip column, the vocation we might have for a particular job or livelihood.

But it is the original, ghostly, version of these words which draw us to the story and give it its power. These Nativities are not only intended to enrich the small participants but the grownup watchers as well - we who have seen too much, or compromised too much of our potential or forgotten to look beyond our duties and our obligations.

What the children are telling us, through this story, is that we can change our ways. And, in the midst of our ordinary human lives and communities, such dreams and revelations, such promises of novelty and rebirth, still have currency in the human heart.
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An audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:25.13 - about halfway along the audio bar.

Will this wind...?

Here we go.

We haven't had as specific a date for the Rapture and the end of the world for a rather a long time. This time we have both. According to Harold Camping and Family Radio, it's May 21st, 2011 for the Rapture (where the blessed are removed bodily into heaven) and the beginning of the Day of Judgement (presumably for the rest of us).

It's October 21st for the end of the world. I think. That's it. All cheques cashed before then.

The campaign has generated a certain number of billboards and a bit of mirth in the U.S. Though I suppose the riposte would be that they laughed at Noah as well.

My wife's biggest concern is that our boy's bedroom is tidy on the day. His room is generally in such a state that you'd be uncertain as to whether he'd been raptured or whether he was just lost in some untidy corner playing with his Gameboy.

If you'd like to do the math yourself it's all HERE and it's about as convoluted as you might expect.

Another take on John the Baptist

In the early 1960's, schoolteacher Peig Cunningham brought a tape recorder into a Dublin classroom and asked the wee kiddies to tell her stories from the Bible in their own words. These recordings were rediscovered much later and some clever clogs has added some animation along with some dramatic topping and tailing - none of which detracts from the effect of the individual child telling her story.

There are, as well, a few bits and pieces from this morning's Gospel reading done better than I could have possibly preached them.

The BBC mini-series The Nativity will be shown on the following dates in the UK.

Monday the 20th
Tuesday the 21st
Wednesday the 22nd
Thursday the 23rd

all at 7 pm and on BBC 1. Each episode is half an hour.

Reviews and comments can be found HERE, HERE and HERE. An earlier post on the miniseries from this blog can be found HERE which contains an audio link to an interview with the writer, Tony Jordan.

It will be starring, among others, Montreal actress Tatiana Maslany (whose home town, I am now brusquely reminded, is Regina, Saskatchewan) in the role of the BVM along with a host of well-known TV personalities from the UK.

Peter Graystone, from the Church Army, who saw the complete series at a press preview in October, describes it as

"...funny (very), believable (totally),
sexy (yes!)".

Which give rise to the following unhelpful excursis:

I believe Peter Graystone may well have hit on something.

I'm thinking that some T-shirts with the Church Army crest and the words "Sexy (Yes!)" written underneath it would do the world of good for an organisation like the Church Army, which has much to its credit but which has a woefully inadequate level of marketing and visibility.

But I digress.....

Penicuik Abroad

It could have been the history of our town and the legacy of paper-making. It could have been the town's Scottish Episcopal Church, with its Kempe windows, its capable choir, its forward-looking congregation and a Rector with compelling brown eyes.

It could have been the tight knot of well-run charity shops in the Precinct and the plans for renewing the Town Centre.

It could have been Jean's Place and the fact that they serve the best egg-on-a-roll to be found anywhere between Loanhead and Eddleston.

But no - Penicuik made the Melbourne edition of the Herald Sun because it was bloody cold here last week.

One of our organists here at St James has been in Australia on holiday, visiting his children. He opened the local newspaper to see the picture of a man picking his way through the ice and snow on the Peebles road back in Penicuik.

Mike now has to pack up, kiss the kookaburras goodbye and return.

He may need to shovel his walk when he gets back.

Perhaps not as
fanciful as first thought...

St. Nicholas' remains were removed from his burial place at Myra and reinterred at Bari, in Italy in 1087 AD. There are conflicting stories of how this came to be.

In one story, the mortal remains of the Saint were rescued by heroic "sailors" fearing the tomb at Myra would be desecrated by Alp Arslan and the Seljuk Turks following their victory over the Byzantine forces in the Battle of Manzikert.

In another, it was "pirates" from Bari who took advantage of the confused political situation, beat the monks and stole from them what amounted to highly portable goods designed for later resale in the west. In either case - rescue or theft - the bones came back to Bari and a basilica was built over them.

In the 1950's the crypt where they were interred required considerable repairs. The bones were removed for a short period of time during the work and Luigi Martino, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bari, was asked to catalogue the remains and to take a series of detailed photographs and measurements of the skull.

One of his successors at the University in more recent years handed the photographs and measurements to an anthropologist at Manchester University who, using the latest forensic technology, reconstructed the face in the same way that she would have done for the police searching out the identity of a person following the discovery of physical remains.

Such close scientific work is presumably necessary because, as we all know, the eye of faith is a fanciful thing.

And yet the results (above) bear a remarkable resemblence to one of the 11th Century depictions of St Nicholas.

One which they'd had on the wall all along.

Winter Part Deux

We've had a nice couple of days but today the snow kicked in again.

I'm in town today, at my desk at New College, trying to revise and it's by no means certain that I'll find a bus going back to Penicuik which is worse than this. Mrs Rabbit took a bus back from work in the very early afternoon and the driver was saying this would be the last.

I might be banging on the bishop's door tonight asking him where he keeps the whisky.

David Hume was looking a little put out at being barefoot and clad only in a toga. His friend Adam Smith down the way looked no happier and was hoping that the "Invisible Hand" might somehow sweep a little snow off his brow.

Happy St Nicholas of Myra Day!

This picture, hanging in the Russian State Museum in St Petersburg, represents but one of the many interventions St Nicholas of Myra made in the lives of people at a point of dire necessity.

He was, shall we say, more of an activist than a contemplative.

Good St Nicholas of Myra link HERE.

Pause for Thought

BBC Radio 2
Saturday, December 4th, 2010

When a trench was dug through the ancient hill fort at Megiddo in Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century it revealed 26 individual layers of settlement separated by what were called “destruction layers”. New cities were built on old ruins. From the top you can look out over the Jezreel Valley and imagine the armies massing out there. You can imagine the fear which must have gripped the defenders - at least 26 times.

I could go through a family photo album with somebody of my father’s generation and he would point to pictures which represented moments in his family history when it appeared that the end was nigh. Hopes and plans had been dashed. Efforts had come to naught. He might have felt, at various moments, as if he lived in the shadow of impending doom. When you’re in the midst of it, it feels like the end of the world. You can’t visualize what life afterwards will look like.

If you walk down through the steep tunnel into the heart of the hill fort at Tel Megiddo you see a remarkable thing. You walk by a spring of water, captured and enclosed thousands of years ago by the hill fort – a free flowing spring - the original reason why Neolithic people first chose this little hill to live on.

More often than not you’ll see a small frog perched there by the edge of the water. In such dry and inhospitable surroundings baked by the sun and blown by the wind it’s the last thing you’d expect. But they’ve been there all along.

There’ll be a healthy dose of “end of the world language” in the Scripture readings in Church throughout the Advent season. It helps, though, to flip ahead a few pages and remind yourself that there are both books and history which follow. The germ of something good survives and resurfaces later. Life, with its testament to God’s abiding presence through history, hope and promise survives and endures.

Solomon and Ahab, have come and gone. So have Pharoah Thutmose III and the Canaanite Confederacy, the Ottoman Turks and General Allenby.

The frogs have seen them all off
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An audio link is available for a limited time HERE. PFT begins at 0:21.41 - a little ways along the audio bar.

The Bishop will arrive!

Our Bishop is paying us a visit at St Mungo's and St James on Sunday morning. Two baptisms of children "of riper years" and a confirmation (our Stewart) will take place on Sunday at St Mungo's, West Linton at 10:00 a.m. There's an opportunity to meet Brian and Lissa over a bacon butty at 9:15. At St James', Penicuik there will be four confirmations (three teenagers and an adult) and one Reaffirmation of Faith by an adult. I'm anticipating that our 11:00 service will begin ten to fifteen minutes late. A stand-up buffet will follow in the Church Hall.

The preparation has been done, the service has been rehearsed with the young people. They know what they're to do and say.

I hear rumblings of food being prepared in copious quantities.

Problem is the snow.

The bishop's trip to a neighbouring congregation was cancelled last week due to the inclement weather.

This is not to be the case here.

We have two landrovers on call - one to transport the Bishop and his wife Lissa from Edinburgh and another to transport an organist and her husband from Peniicuik to West Linton.

Our numbers may be a little depleted - I hope not too depleted. 18 people trudged up the hill through the snow in boots and hats for choir practise last night looking like Newfoundland fishermen. It can be done. It will be done! We are a doughty lot here outside the Edinburgh Bypass.

Where others succumb we will thrive! We will get our bishop here by hook or by crook.

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Mixed in with undiplomatic comments - by diplomats - may be some top-level secrets amongst the 250,000 diplomatic cables shared by the online source Wikileaks.

The volume of the material means that it will take weeks for commentators, journalists - and even some experts - to know what of the material is just embarrassing or whether dangerous and destabilizing information is now in the public domain.

We’re told that 2.5 million people – employees of the U.S. government – already had access to the secure source where these documents originate. That circle of people, who could be trusted to keep shtum however, didn’t include you and me. It didn’t include the major newspapers.

In every company, or extended family, or voluntary organization there is the truth which is known but is never spoken about. You would be considered naïve or even destructive were you to pipe up at the dinner table or board table and say what was already in the back of everybody’s mind. Someone, though, might be glad that the truth had finally been articulated even if it caused a major ruckus.

Jesus spoke rather a lot of truth about the powerful – like Herod, the High Priest and Pontius Pilate. He also spoke about the weakness of his own followers. His comments made of Jesus the sort of person who spoke the truth outside the inner circle and one who could not reasonably be expected to keep silence about what a lot of people already knew.

We've all got secrets. And they’re not necessarily shameful ones that ought to be known. Some of them are quite useful secrets. We know things – people tell us things – which we keep to ourselves - because the damage done would be worse if the thing were told.

But the balance between discretion and openness is something which must be periodically tested.

To see what happens when the thing is known as, shortly, it may well be in this case.
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An audio link is available for a limited time HERE. TFTD begins at 1:21.44 - about halfway along the audio bar.