Category: Blog Entry

I saw this poster on the other side of the world and just knew it might come in handy somewhere.  I’ve been watching Cardinal O’Brien gaining huge media attention before and over the weekend on the subject of embryo research.  Anglican and SEC bishops – do we need to take our Holloways?

Maybe – this is a very important issue and it is clear that many MP’s – not just Catholics- are troubled by it.

I’ll offer three reflections ..

One is that many of us – myself certainly – fall into the ‘pastor -manager’ style of bishoping.  The gain is that we pay attention to the life of the church and act as leaders of mission.  The loss is that we tend not to engage prophetically with the world beyond the church as we should.

Two is that, in terms of authority, Anglican bishops are very much more collegial animals than their Catholic counterparts.  That is both strength and inhibition.

Three is that I can’t imagine myself attempting so directly to affect the actions of legislators.  Prophetic challenge to society – yes.  Direct appeal to MP’s – no and not in some of the language which has been used this weekend.

A quick trawl through the comments about the Cardinal on the BBC website reveals, as one would expect, many people who think he should stick to church-stuff and not get involved in politics.  But thinking people expect and welcome a well-argued, balanced, passionate and compassionate contribution from the churches.  We need to work harder at this.

It was great in St Ninian’s this morning. Lots of light and colour and noise and music and incense and two baptisms and three confirmations and the licensing of a lay minister. We didn’t launch a ship. Nor did I see a herd of goats passing through. But I may have missed them. It was Piskie Church doing what we do well and pretending to be quite a bit bigger than we really are.

One thing I used to dislike about funerals in my former life was the death-denying material which used to creep in – ‘just slipped into the next room .. steamer being hailed on the horizon’ Sub-Christian, I think. I used to print them on the back of the Service Sheet and hope nobody paid too much attention.

No Easter faith without resurrection. No resurrection without Good Friday death. Maybe even a touch of that around in naming the decline and growth of the church.

So why would you want to remove the pews from the Cathedral?  Well – you begin to see the point when you gather around the Cross in the very middle of the Cathedral on Good Friday.  We explored the symbols – hands, water for Pilate to wash his hands, crown of thorns, thirty pieces of silver.  It’s the kind of worship that you wouldn’t have to be a churchgoer to get something out of – and surely that’s the point for a mission-facing church.

For something completely different, if you want to see what I said to the Diocesan Synod last week, it’s here

Many subjects clamour for my attention today. I missed National Sanitation Day yesterday but I’ll give you a Bogstead update shortly. I found myself idly reading the judgement on the Paul McCartney/Heather Mills divorce last night – got about 25% of the way through the 58 pages. Dreadful stuff – no wonder she didn’t want it published. Poppy’s fan club are reporting themselves a bit starved of information so I shall prepare an in-depth interview with photographs.

But the worst of today is the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War. I was in South Africa when it started – watching Sky in hotel rooms, listening to the arrogance of ‘shock and awe’. It would be facile to say that I always knew it was wrong. I remain a fan of Robert Fisk who says in today’s Independent that ‘the only thing we ever learn is that we never learn.’ I think I can claim to have seen enough in 30 years of Irish violence to know that it is much easier to start wars than to stop them. What really does disappoint me today is to hear Gordon Brown bringing out what is essentially the ‘regime change’ justification for the war in response to a question from Nick Clegg. Yes Saddam was utterly appalling. There was a telling line in last night’s dramatic reconstruction of the debate: ‘Saddam fed people into meat grinders. If he liked you, he fed you in head first.’ But regime change was not and should not have been the justification for war – and it should not be used now retrospectively.  If Saddam, why not Mugabe?

I am sure you have been pondering the Vatican’s  new ‘take’ on the Seven Deadly Sins.  It’s a fascinating list which includes ‘genetic modification, carrying out experiments on humans, polluting the environment, causing social injustice, causing poverty, becoming obscenely wealthy and taking drugs’

Clearly one could debate these endlessly.  The original list included envy, gluttony, greed, lust, wrath, pride and sloth.  But what is interesting, it seems to me, is how individualistic the old list was.  And now, in an individualistic age, they recast the Seven Deadlies in communal and global mode.

We’re still gathering ourselves up after being away – still slapping on the moisturiser to deal with the after-effects of the sun.  Yes!  Poppy has returned from apartment-dwelling with Anna in Belfast.  She doesn’t do Easyjet – prefers travelling as a paws passenger on the Stena HSS to Stranraer.

Meanwhile I’m still pondering the preaching and sermon-surfing issues raised by the Independent on Saturday – was there ever a skill or a discipline so widely misunderstood?  I’m a believer that good communication tends to happen when there are time boundaries – broadcasting makes you that way.   So I write about 400-500 words – certainly no more.  Every word written out – and then I don’t read them.  Strange.

Meanwhile I just happened to find this handy sermon-timer doing duty at traffic lights in Bangkok.  It counts steadily down in green until your time is up.  Then it counts in red.  Every church should have one?