Category: Blog Entry

Well I did get one whiff of the old Donegal today.  I was cycling middle child’s teenage mountain bike [not one of your aluminium-frame jobs – more like a five barred gate on wheels] back to Blogstead Na Mara from Dunfanaghy Village.  Suddenly I got this overwhelming whiff of turf smoke.  If you have never smelt it, it is extraordinary.  It can be blowing a gale – and it often is – and the smell is so pungent you will get it anyway.

But then it was gone.  And I wove my way through exhaust smoke of the serried ranks of BMW’s, Merc’s and Four by Fours [same guy as was picking the flowers in Perth, I am sure] queuing up to buy the new houses.  Two sets on offer here – 5 ‘energy saving houses’ just down the road.  That means two solar panels on the roof and no view.  Meanwhile the three houses across the valley from Blogstead are almost complete.  The price is 675,000 euro – for a holiday cottage – where it rains a lot – I know it has a view of Blogstead but ….  For those who find currency exchange challenging, that means that you could put five children through Glenalmond College for the same price.  Or buy 70 red VW Golfs just like the bishop’s wife drives.  [The Pope’s grey one is more expensive] Now which would you choose?  I think what I find most astonishing – but I didn’t point it out to the flash car drivers – is that it is  unlikely to the point of inconceivable that they could hope to get their money back should they decide to sell.  That’s what they call a bubble.  Meanwhile, the earthen floors, straw mattresses and oil lamps of Blogstead Na Mara will do us for now.

One emerges from the tomb – as it were – pondering the mish mash of life on the other side.  Poppy was reasonably content with the Poets’ Lounge on the P&O Express to Larne. 

I’m still thinking about the man who parked his Range Rover [now there’s real prejudice!] at 4.45 pm yesterday on the road between Perth and the M90 and helped himself to a bunch of municipal daffodils from the verge.  And a happy Easter to you, sir.  The sooner we have those talking lamp-posts in Perth the better.  I could have used my mitre as a megaphone and had a go myself. 

Like everyone else, I have been pondering why it was wrong to allow service personnel to sell their stories to the press.  Well, just to start with, it is distasteful to profit from circumstances in which other people are dying.  The weasel words of the 2nd Sea Lord in his interview on the World at One today were just disgraceful – media pressure, money …  He made Max Clifford, who was interviewed after him, sound like a paragon of restraint and integrity.  Whatever other navigational issues were involved here, there is certainly a weakness in the moral compass department.  Who knows where it will end?  Clergy who have been croziered by the bishop coming out and selling their stories … what next?  Which brings us smoothly back to Denis Healey’s  famous remark about being attacked by Sir Geoffrey Howe as ‘like being savaged by a dead sheep.’  And that in turn seems to have some link back into pastoral ministry.

I note a slight reduction in SEC blogging activity this week.  We’ve all been busy this week and you reach the end of Holy Week with a familiar tiredness – more emotional and spiritual than physical, I think.  Tho’ there’s a bit of that as well

Today was encouraging – a great throng in the Cathedral this morning – lots of excitement and trumpets and incense – and this evening at a Choral Evensong in Dunfermline in a church which showed the signs of huge effort going into expressing the Holy Week story in flowers and collage and ..   As always, one tries to find the words

We laid to rest today Alan the old priest. He was warm and gentle. He was playing the organ in church just a few weeks ago. He sang hymns right to the end. The creeping onset of Alzheimers seemed simply to reinforce the gentleness – accelerated the exuberance with which he shared the Peace – and did nothing to diminish the hymn singing.

We laid him to rest in the graveyard at Callendar – in the shadow of Ben Ledi to the sound of birdsong – as Alison the Rector said ‘in a new grave in which no one had yet been laid.’ It was a beautiful, calm, sunlit day. On the breeze, one could hear the whisper of ‘Well done good and faithful servant’. And maybe even beyond that the sound of stones poised to be rolled away.

I used these words which haunt me

“What though he standeth at no earthly altar
Clothed in white vestments on that golden floor
Where love is perfect and no step can falter
He serveth as God’s priest for evermore”

Said to be from the writings of
John Sinker, first provost of Blackburn Cathedral (1931)

One of those days when there is nothing to be said.  One goes into church, listens to the story comes out and goes home.

Meanwhile, since it is also Friday and therefore cat-blogging day, here is a picture of Poppy who is very much better thank-you.

Today was one of those days which included pretty well everything.

We started at the New Futures Centre – it’s a workshop in Perth run by Churches Action for the Homeless in Perth. We’re supporting CATH in our Lent Appeal. The workshop is where David Kydd and his staff help their ‘service users’ to get used to the rhythms and the dignity of work. They are going to make a pagoda for the Blogstead garden – I think it will probably form the centre-piece of the Japanese sunken garden.

And we had a look at Sandy’s beautiful garden – an oasis of peace in the middle of an industrial estate

The afternoon ended in the slightly posher but no more beautiful surroundings of the Gleneagles Hotel in the Big Tent for a follow-up meeting to the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign – addressed by Kofi Annan, Gordon Brown and Hilary Benn

And in the middle our Chrism Mass – where our clergy and I affirmed our Ordination Vows – and pondered this extraordinary way of life where a commitment to justice, to the poor and to people can take one in the same day from Sandy’s beautiful garden to Gleneagles.

Bit of variety today. I ended up at the Open Day for the new Visitors’ Centre at Perth Prison. This has play facilities for children and space for family members – many of whom will have travelled long distances – to wait either for their visiting time or for their transport home. I have had a bit of contact with the world of prisons over the years – mostly as a member of the Board of Visitors at Crumlin Road Prison in Belfast. That was interesting – is that the right word? – because the prisoners were mainly paramilitaries who did not regard themselves as criminals and had their own command structure, etc., within the prison. I found the conditions in Perth Prison pretty bad when I visited last year – the present rebuilding programme should improve things considerably. But what I really can’t cope with is the number of people whom we lock up in this society. It just can’t be right.

Thought you might like to see this lost Perthshire lamb which we met on Saturday

I thought I would get a bit of shepherding practice in but the lamb seemed fairly unimpressed.

There are two interesting inversions in church life.  The first is that it’s the ‘second level’ events which seem to gather most support – and vice versa.  So if you want to meet the crowds, turn up at Harvest or on Mothering Sunday.  The second is that the further up the ecclesiastical greasy pole you appear to be, the less you seem to have to do at the important moments.  So my colleagues in the diocese are all preaching erudite sermons on the Atonement at present as we move through Holy Week.  I’m clearing the backlog of letters and writing a paper about reform of Canon 64 and other pathways to the Kingdom.  But Cinderella will go to the ball later in the week.  Our Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday when the clergy and I renew our Ordination Vows  is always extraordinarily moving – an annual reminder that the fires of vocation do burn bright no matter how much cold water is chucked over them.   I’m doing a Three Hours in St Andrews –  fulfilling my annual  requirement that I should be moved to tears by the  crucifixion story.   And then there’s the Easter Sermon.  Of which more another day.

I found myself today face to face with the appeal literature for the building of the new Parish Centre back in Northern Ireland. The design was worked out in the last two years of my time there. I still think it will be an impressive building which will lift parish life onto a whole new level. But it took a bit of persuading for some people to make the move from seeing the building as a social and recreational space located at the edge of the site to seeing it as a mission-shaped building linked to the church. So my thoughts are with Terence, my successor, and the parishioners as they set about raising £1,355,900. But then I do have one or two challenges of my own around here.

On a more mundane level, I note that Seagoe Parish Church is still using the same font as in my time – Comic Sans 11 pt – really time to move on to something more protestant like Geneva.