A wee outing ..

There was a nice saying in my parish – ‘Well, it’s a wee outing for you’

So I’m off to Sewanee, Tennessee, to receive an Honorary Degree at the University of the South. So we are flying to Newark and being picked up by the limo company in Nashville. We is Alison, our daughter Anna and myself. We hope to be there in time for a dinner party this evening. I’ll be preaching at the graduation ceremony tomorrow.

I’d tried to fix myself some tartan in honour of the occasion – all measured, fixed and ordered in Perth. But a disaster of failure to deliver and wrong sizing ensued.

I am at this point the ghost of Bishop Samuel Seabury who was consecrated in Aberdeen in 1784 by the Scottish Bishops as the first bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. I checked out the detail when I met Bishop Ian Douglas of Connecticut and Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori earlier in the week in London. It was a key moment in the life of the American and Scottish Churches and a seminal moment in the development of what became the Anglican Communion. An honour for our church.