Category: Blog Entry

So if you think that Edinburgh is the A720 and Hermiston Gait and all that, you’ve missed it. The alternative Edinburgh is set out on the excellent cyclists’ map provided by Spokes – the Lothian Cycle Campaign. Their website quotes President John F Kennedy as saying ‘Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride’. Which takes us back to the simple pleasures of President George W Bush’s ‘waving or drowning’ moment at Gleneagles during the G8 Summit when he wiped out a local policeman.

Anyway – to go back to Spokes. Have you tried the Water of Leith Cycle route?

It runs from Balerno to Leith. And the fascinating thing is that it runs through the centre of Edinburgh – just below Charlotte Square – and you would never know. And then there is National Cycle Route No 76 which comes in along the canal – and suddenly you are in Haymarket.

And the remarkable thing is that, when we were there on Thursday afternoon, those cycle routes were alive with people.

I’ve spent the last two days at meetings in Edinburgh – it makes me thankful that I do less of that than many other people. I found myself in the middle of the Forth Bridge trying – and failing – to connect my Blackberry to Stagecoach’s free wifi. Don’t know why – but I have a bad track record at that stuff.

Two things. Surely it’s time we pushed much harder for an improvement in the miserable broadband speeds which seem common in rural Scotland. If there is one thing which would help us to make a serious attempt at video conferencing, it would surely be an improvement in broadband speeds. Every meeting saved is a huge cost and time saving.  Then I found myself reading about new video-conferencing technologies – like Flash Meeting. We talk about these things in our Information and Communications Board. We need to try some of it in a more determined way.

Like Kelvin, in the end I was glad I was there. I didn’t particularly look forward to it – too much angst and too many false starts for that.

So what did I learn? Hard to say really. I think the witnesses whom I listened to reminded me of the – in the best sense – ordinariness of faithful gay relationships. I remember thinking the same sitting in a restaurant in a gay district of San Francisco. Ordinary, everyday people getting on with their lives.

You can’t do everything in just one event. But there are at least two other aspects to this. One is the need to understand and find a way of responding to the anger, passion, hurt, sense of exclusion – yesterday was necessarily too cautious for that. The other is Malcolm Round’s point – agreeably made, I thought – that the fact that we have all been agreeable does not mean that we agree.

But for now – thanks particularly to the witnesses and to the organisers.

And I’ll go on trying to deal with some of the specifics through the comments on my Conspiracy blog of a while back.  I have learnt something else from that.  Face to face engagement is the only way of dealing with the feelings – Kelvin’s tears tell us that.  I’ve been shy of blogging about it because of who is listening in.  But the blog does give you the chance to reflect for a day or two on a reply – so there’s a chance of measured dialogue with a bit of space.  And the fact that we know one another means that it can’t be passion-free either.

Always enjoy a good headline.  There’s a famous example – maybe skewered by Myles of the Irish Times – lazy headlines beginning ‘Bid’.  Give thanks for that patriotic Irishwoman – ‘Bid to resolve decommissioning impasse – Bid to end world hunger, etc.’  Then there was the famous [and distasteful] ‘Gotcha!’ from the Sun as the Belgrano went down and took 1000 Argentinian conscripts with it.  And the cheery ‘What a burqua’ from the Mirror as the BBC’s John Simpson got a bit overheated about his personal role in the liberation of Kabul.

The Portadown Times joined that illustrious band this week – marking the sad closure of the former Metal Box factory – the place where Flora Margerine containers were made – and the consequent loss of jobs.

‘Blow as 95 jobs are lost’

I spent this evening in Stirling with the Dunblane Area Council who had joined together for an Ascension Day Eucharist.  Our Area Councils have sometimes seemed to be casting about and looking for a role – this evening they had a joint choir with all the trimmings.  Seems to me to be just what they should be about.  The sermon was rather closer to the script than is sometimes the case – tho’ the printer on which it was printed was running out of ink.

You would think that, after all these years, I would have worked out how to pace things.  But I haven’t.  I think some of it is that I still haven’t come to terms with the way in which a whole day can go – a meeting in Edinburgh or the conference I went to in Stirling on Monday just wipes out time.

We’re almost at the end with the Diocesan Policy.  Our commitment was delivery by the end of April so we’re writing and rewriting.  I’m keen to get on and begin to put it in place – in terms of what we do and how the diocese is organised, it means some very significant change.  The renovation of the Diocesan Office is finished and the new furniture has arrived.  Tim the Geek spent last night putting in a server – which will be great when I have worked out what that means.  And somewhere along the line, I promised to do Prayer for the Day for the BBC which means six scripts for next Monday… and an article for Inspires for Friday .. and sermons on both Thursday and Friday evenings ..

Could spring have sprung at last? I came out of St Serf’s, Comrie this morning into clear blue sky and warm air. The cold wind seems to have gone. The staff are beginning to bring the Blogstead croquet lawn back into commission. +Bruce and Elaine, like migrating swallows, are due back on Thursday.  And finally … Alexander McCall Smith is on the front page of the Sunday Times Property Section and is apparently holding Poppy.

I’ve been watching the response which has been stirred by the placing of the body of Padre Pio on display.  The protestant in me finds it all a bit difficult.  But it gets better if you step sideways and ponder the power of that kind of spirituality – the stigmata which are or are not and people’s appetite for the holy.  I suppose some of the power is in its directness and touchability – not bound up in inaccessible ideas and words.  I used to love poking around in the recesses of North Italian village churches.  They all had relics with ill-translated and ill-typed explanations of how the statue of the Virgin broke out in an aqueous sweat in 1453 – and here is the very identical handkerchief.

Ireland is probably second only to Italy for this kind of piety – if you are unaware of the Moving Statues of Ballinspittle, you should take a look.

 

My ‘Conspiracy’ comments on Bishop Devine’s lecture ignited a lengthy sequence of comments – including a dialogue with Phil about the church’s treatment of gay people. You may be interested in exploring that because he moved me out of the comfort zone. I thought it had reached a natural end but maybe not …

 

In the final comment of the sequence, Kimberly neatly [and I think correctly] summarises the issue as

‘Phil’s concern that church sometimes denies the full humanity of gay people, and David’s concern that no one argument (either a particular view of scripture, or a particular way of expressing issues of justice and inclusion) trump all others without an attempt at mutual understanding.’

 

When I worked in Northern Ireland, I found myself sharing a church with some people whose views I found difficult, at times not recognizable in gospel terms and – at the extreme end – abhorrent. Some of them, I know, regarded my views as dangerously liberal. I wouldn’t use the word ‘discrimination’ but at times I paid a price for positions I adopted and argued for. I wasn’t seen as altogether ‘safe’.

 

I think that part of what lies behind our difficulties is the nature of the church – at times untidy to the point of incoherence. It is neither debating society nor democracy. Some of it is people who can hold and articulate strongly-held and opposing views – evenly matched intellectual, spiritual and emotional fire-power. But more of it is all of us some of the time and some of us all of the time stumbling about trying – as the first disciples did – to work out what it was all about. There will be incoherence and incompleteness – that is what the Spirit of Truth is for – rather too much standing for the wrong things and missing the chances of becoming what we are meant to be.

 

That doesn’t excuse failure to understand, care, include .. It just means that people haven’t got there yet. It explains why I see my task as trying to help a divided church hold together as it learns to find the way forward in this issue.