Category: Blog Entry

Ever wondered what it would be like to meet a car going the wrong way on the motorway?  A driver was jailed this week for doing this on the M4.  And it happened to me .. travelling on the M1 west of Belfast in the faithful Passat .. with my sister, mother of three young children.. Sunday afternoon. We were, as is my wont, ambling down the right hand lane passing out a line of lorries. There’s a car in the distance and it’s coming closer .. at 150 mph closer. I dived for a gap between the lorries and was fortunate to find it – then expired on the hard shoulder. And suddenly the other side of the motorway was all police cars and sirens. And my sister said, ‘I heard somebody screaming and realised it was me’

So what was all that about? First, the driver had a head on collision about a mile up the road. He was killed and, fortunately, those he hit were not seriously injured. I went on to Portadown and conducted Evening Prayer. I am a chap, after all.

The police told me that the driver had entered the motorway and had a minor accident. He was being interviewed on the hard shoulder by the police when he suddenly got back into his car, turned around and drove off the wrong way up the motorway. And they watched him go.

A year or two later, I visited the parents of a young women killed with her friend further down the motorway by a drunk driver travelling the wrong way.

It was a while before I felt confident again .. Never so close to death, I think. But thankful.

Busy weekends recently and much variety. Saturday started with Kerry and Malcolm’s wedding in St Andrews. This was a somewhat Northern Ireland event with lots of old friends – and it was great to see them. We all did a bit of, ‘yurlukkinawfulwell’ and that sort of thing.

And on to St Mary’s, Dunblane for the licensing of Nerys as Lay Reader. This also was a pretty remarkable occasion where I stood in the middle and many interesting things happened all around me. It is a remarkable congregation – about to be looking for a new Rector following Janice’s retirement. They seem to have passed the ‘critical mass’ point in having children and young people around – and in involving people in ministry. And Nerys is both symbol and encourager of much of that. My favourite image of the weekend was Nerys saying ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ and using a gesture as if driving the congregation out of the church to do the work of mission.

This morning it was confirmations in Aberfoyle – we had that wonderful mix of family, grandparents, godparents and others who gather on these occasions. A good time was had by all – and Nick the walker was saying how much he had enjoyed every one of the 98 miles he had walked.

I normally do links to sermons and things but I realised during the weekend that I was getting somewhat behind. I pondered the all-purpose episcopal sermon, yet again. And wondered also if the sermons for the three events might be interchangeable – would they notice?

Which called to mind the elderly vicar in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Handful of Dust’ who had written his sermons while a padre in a garrison church in India. He continued to preach them unchanged in his retirement in a Sussex village: ‘Here we are far from our loved ones … ‘

Which further reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s Wobegon Boy in which the black Lutheran lady pastor used to squeeze members of her congregation during the Peace ‘as if testing them for ripeness.’

I was conducting quite a serious interview yesterday and found myself reading one of my own bits of paper upside down.

It was headed Diocese of St Andrews, Dundeld and Dunbland.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have been ‘having a spake’ about the financial system and its inequities. +Rowan says that ‘the biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality.’

Quite so. I first began to ponder these slippery realities while sitting in the sun in a cafe in Greece somewhere around 1970. ‘How could it be’ I asked myself, ‘that the sole visible economic activity in Greece consists of people hanging around cafes either serving or being served fizzy lemonade?’ Yet apart from the baneful presence of the Colonels and their dictatorship, everything seemed to be getting along just fine.

Meanwhile, nobody whose financial well-being is hitched to the SEC could possibly be described as a plutocrat [note the Greek roots by the way – nearly as good at Boris]. But I am quite a supporter of more wealth as a driver of human progress… opening the doors of educational and other opportunity .. the enhanced status of women .. the lowering of the birth rate .. the easing of sectarianism.

But my mind bends at the idea both that money must always be connected to material reality – and equally that it doesn’t need to be. Both seem to have elements of truth and I understand neither. Perhaps that’s why we’re in the mess we are.

I find it easier on the level of values. Aspiration seems to me to be mainly a ‘good thing.’ But its second cousin, envy, is surely not. The desire to create wealth is largely a good thing .. but it is better if the wealth creation is done with a clear eye to the true environmental and human cost of it. Better still if it is used to care for the poor.

Meanwhile I carried out my own researches into the state of the commodity market among the second-hand cars of a Honda dealer in Kirkcaldy yesterday – not, I can reassure you, with an eye to replacement of the faithful Passat which at 166000 miles has plenty of life left. But why would I buy that leather seated, low slung, wonderful-noise-making crumpet-catching supercar which I can’t afford, when I could have this 54 reg, 35000 mile Toyota Corolla at £5999 which I can’t afford. I could have spent time exploring with second-hand car salesman Ken why his job and mine are alike – but I contented myself with, ‘I’m sure you’d give me at least £500 off that for a straight sale.’

Fizzy indeed.

At the end of an interesting weekend, that’s the phrase that sticks in the mind. A new picture of ministry, perhaps?

Nothing at all, of course, to do with the special Diocesan Synod on Saturday at which we affirmed the proposed Diocesan Strategy as Diocesan Policy. The vote was overwhelmingly in favour. But I’m not stupid and I know that all sorts of people are anxious about aspects of it. It was the interviews that helped. People may not much like pretty diagrams and management-speak – particularly not in the church. But they know authentic faith story when they hear it. And large numbers of people have been involved in the shaping of it. It’s a great moment – a gesture of faith in God and in ourselves.

Not much either to do with our visit to Kinloch Rannoch on Sunday. It was one of those bright and clear mornings – but with enough autumn to give mist around the trees on the lower slopes. We slowed down and just marvelled at the view as we came over the hill to see Schiehallion and the glen below leading to Loch Rannoch and Rannoch Moor beyond.

Our congregation there functions quite happily without a resident priest. They run the church, have an ecumenical partnership with the Church of Scotland and are involved with the community in running the internet cafe and the petrol station. In fact, they could comfortably run a modestly-sized cathedral.

And then we had the AGM. We talked of the worship, the finances, the building, changes in rural society, their children’s group [Yes!] and Godly Play. En passant, they mentioned that they had encouraged someone to help pay for the cost of re-roofing the mausoleum which abuts the church. And the history says this:

The early documents of this building were lost in a London taxi by Col. Parker, probably around 1950. We therefore have no exact details. The church however has attached to it a mausoleum belonging to the Macdonald family. Three of the General’s children are buried there. The fourth is commemorated in the church itself but he died storming the palace of the Begum at Lucknow. His brothers, the Lt General who lived at Dalhoshnie, and the Major who died of heatstroke during gun drill at Meerut and sister Jemima who died in Southampton are in the mausoleum.

I am an ‘old boy’ of the same school as Henry Francis Lyte.  It also spawned Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett but that’s for another day.  I blame Henry – probably no good at rugger either – for the all-pervading ‘change and decay’ linkage.  Apparently he provided a tune as well so he can’t be blamed for that inestimably dreary one which we always use.

Anyway, tomorrow sees us reaching our special Diocesan Synod at which [I hope] our Proposed Diocesan Policy will receive the authorisation of Synod.  They say you should never change more than one thing at a time.  Pity about that – because this is pretty comprehensive.  But it needs to be and people have been very brave in the way in which they have shared in shaping it.

Makes me think about the ways in which the church successfully avoids change:

• tells you to do it ‘one bit at a time’ so you get utterly bogged down and tired out
• makes you so busy you haven’t got time to read the ‘Busy Priest’s Handbook’
• sends you to Achill or to Craggy Island so that you can think beautiful thoughts about change all on your own
• draws you into its soggy embrace by making you a Dean or a Bishop or something equally enervating

No doubt there are others ..

 

Well we gathered in our Cathedral in Edinburgh today for Tom’s funeral – family and friends, members of the parish in Oakworth, Mission to Seafarers and various members of the blogging community. I don’t think it has altogether sunk in yet.

This was the eulogy. The funeral of a priest is a strange thing – there are so many layers to what we become. Tom had done as we all do – stood in church at a funeral and struggled to find words to express meaning in apparent meaninglessness – said the words of faith and tested his own faith against them. Philip had found words from Tom’s own addresses at funerals – so I was able to place Tom’s very compassionate and pastoral faith at the heart of it.

And then … we went into the pub at Haymarket and raised a glass to Tom. Strange things, funerals.

Lots of interesting things this weekend – the secret gardens of the Royal Mile have become a major tourist attraction.  Blogstead surely can’t be far behind.

But it’s also been one of those weekends where a number of things gathered together around the same theme.  Our St Ninian’s Cathedral in Perth held an Open Day on Saturday with a special welcome for the Provost and other public representatives on Saturday morning.   And I said a few things about the confidence which I hope we are discovering as a church – working with others to serve the whole community.  Strangely the same theme appeared when I went to St John’s, Forfar on Sunday morning where our congregation was hosting the Service for the Kirkin’ of the Council.  It’s not often that these services are held in SEC churches – a recognition that our people there used the opportunity of Forfar Gala Week to make their church visible in the community.  In the sermon, I began by saying to the Provost that their presence ‘honours us and changes us’ – meaning that here again we are discovering a new confidence about being a church for the whole community.

And finally, as if all those excitements weren’t enough, we went off to Bishop Bob’s Cathedral in Aberdeen for the Ordination of Samantha.  It was a great evening.  The ordination sermon was something like this.  And those of us who like to get self-indulgently misty-eyed at these things had a great time.

How can it be that a huge travel company can just go bust without warning leaving 65000 people stranded? Does it happen like this in other places like this? And then one ponders the difficulties of the Channel Tunnel. What if one’s car is third in the queue when they had to close it and there are now 5000 others behind it – how does one ever get away from there?

Meanwhile, I’m spending too much time in transit between here and Edinburgh – a product of my sojurn with the Mission and Ministry Board. I was travelling back to Perth happily at the end of the second day when I realised that I should actually have been going to Dunblane. Ah well.

And I slipped in another Thought for the Day this week. A perfectly reasonable tour of the Millennium Development Goals.  But then I realised that I should really have done the CERN thingy which was about to be switched on and bring the world to a premature end. That would have allowed me to continue to obsess about Sarah Palin and the Creationists ..

We were just getting to know Tom and suddenly he’s gone ..

Tom became Chaplain for the Scottish Ports with Mission to Seafarers in June this year.  He and Anne moved to Linlithgow with Catherine and Matthew.  Tom was doing work which he loved and they were living in a place which they love.  He died suddenly yesterday evening.

One always struggles with ‘in the midst of life we are in death’  The midst of life for Tom was a very intense place.  He was a great priest – passionate in his faith, catholic in his vision, erudite in his theology.  We bloggers knew and appreciated him as Big Bulky Anglican – take a look and marvel at the range of his interests in music, reading, theology and all of life.

For his friends in ministry, the loss is very great.  Tom had the capacity to reshape our whole attitude to chaplaincy – not just among seafarers but in many other areas as well.  But our loss is as nothing to that of his family.  Tom was an adored husband and father.  Our sympathy and our prayers are with them.

May he rest in peace and rise in glory.