No thanks – I think I’ll stick with the one we have. I drove through the dawn this morning towards Dundee watching the sun rise into a clear sky over the Tay Bridge. Yes, it’s cold but it’s clear and bright. The local farmer who delivered some logs late last night said, ‘We’ve finished with the potato harvest .. and we’ve been working on the Christmas trees…. and now it’s logs for two weeks … and then we’ll be sowing and planting again’ I remember farmers in Northern Ireland unable to put machinery onto the land until April.
Category: Blog Entry
Thou knowest …
BBC Radio Scotland Thought for the Day on the serveillance society
De Mortuis
Sometimes it’s just better than people deserve. PW Botha – former President of South Africa, finger-wagging defender of apartheid in its final years, he who refused to release Mandela from prison – is dead. Nelson Mandela comments, ‘We will remember him for the steps he took to pave the way towards the eventual peacefully negotiated settlement in our country’ – and the ANC sends a message of sympathy to the Botha family. What a country. Poverty – yes. HIV/Aids – yes. But amazing grace as well.
How did that happen?
Sitting in the Departure Lounge at Edinburgh Airport in the very early morning – reading a file of turgid correspondence – the kind of stuff one can only read while semi-comatose in the early dawn. Walked towards the plane holding correspondence in plastic folder with open side downwards. Entire contents fall to ground and disappear down the wafer-thin slot between the plane and the walkway.
I could see them twenty feet down on the concrete. I said to the Flight Attendant, ‘Any chance … perhaps … without causing major security alert and closing entire airport’ ‘Of course,’ she said. Summoned First Officer who went and picked them up. His thoughts are not recorded. Thank-you to BMI Baby.
The ‘M’ word
We’re having a session with clergy tomorrow looking at the SEC’s plan to have a Year of Stewardship. Two things most clergy dread, in my experience. Not the Sunday Sermon – nor difficult pastoral situations, however distressing they may be. At least we feel that’s what we were ordained to do. No – it’s the Annual Meeting or a Stewardship Campaign because in each case you’re in the stocks and fair game for anything anybody wants to throw at you! Stewardship Programmes come in many shapes and forms – at heart, it’s about encouraging people to see financial commitment as an expression of their faith commitment and thanksgiving for what they have received. Our finances are not disastrously bad – but they are not all that good either. I hear people talking about fundraising and how much it costs to run the church – not so much about giving and what it might take to enable the church to engage seriously in mission. There is a difference!
Dedication Festival at Forfar
Fired Up
Can’t resist one more visit to the issue of clergy employment/office holding. It is probably inevitable that the privileges attached to clergy freehold and the stipend arrangement under which one is supported while ministering – rather than paid for work done – will be eroded. That’s not all bad. Clergy do not all enjoy the same security at present – for example those who are ‘Priest in Charge’ rather than Rector. But it is often not recognised how vulnerable clergy are – ministering often in small, relatively isolated communities, they function without many of the boundaries and everyday employment protections which other members of the workforce enjoy. A minority, of course, abuse the security which they have – and bishops struggle in vain to extract square pegs from round holes. But we should not forget that it may just be the restless, energetic, troublesome, prophetic square peg which God sends to stir, challenge, proclaim – as that nice prayer so nearly says, ‘Comforter of the afflicted and afflicter of the comfortable’
Fired Clergy
Important day today. Rev Sylvester Stuart of the New Testament Church of God won the right to take his case for unfair dismissal to an Employment Tribunal. I suppose it is another stage in a sort of lost innocence of the church – rather as today people were being nostalgic about the gentlemanly [sic] ways of the Stock Exchange in the days before the Big Bang – 20 years ago today. So out here in Blogstead Episcopi, we mourn the loss of the days when Mr Quiverful sought a living which would enable him and Mrs Q to bring up their little pledges of affection. But, whatever the nostalgia, I think anything which brings clarity to a muddled area of life [and episcopal management task] is to be welcomed. Although clergy may find that it is something of a two edged sword as people apply [as they are already doing] the same standards of accountability to clergy as they experience in their own workplace.
Green Wheels
Sorry – missed Green Wheels Day yesterday. Another trip to Edinburgh Airport and another flight. The websites report that ‘if all commuters left their cars at home one day a week, that would save enough fuel to drive to the moon and back 35000 times’. Why would one want to do that – drive to the moon and back 35000 times, that is? But, in my defence, the faithful Passat, with sauna effects from the leaking heater cured [?] by a £2.99 container of radiator sealant, continues to be greenest of the green. We drive downhill a lot and use the brakes sparingly. I even washed it on Wednesday. Over 130000 miles and more than 50 mpg – long may it continue. Still, I regret the fact that the big spaces of Scotland make it very difficult to use the bicycle for more than pleasure and exercise.
Forgive us for neglecting you…
Ireland is suffering an epidemic of road accidents which are claiming the lives of young people – in the most recent, four young men died in a head on collision in Co Monaghan. One of the papers claimed to have taken a photo of the speedometer of one of the cars frozen at 140 mph. At the funeral of two of the victims yesterday, Fr Martin O’Reilly, Youth Director for the Diocese of Clogher, made an extraordinarily passionate statement about how Irish society has neglected its young while it has got on with the Celtic Tiger economy. ‘We have thrown everything at you except our time. Forgive us for neglecting you …’
Extraordinary .. There can’t be a single cause for such a thing – any more than there is a single cause for the epidemic of suicides of young people in Northern Ireland. But maybe when you put together an undreamt-of prosperity and the secularisation which accompanies it, the collapse of the Catholic Church as a significant upholder of moral values and the unprecedented strains on family life which go with rapid social change … maybe it’s not surprising that the strain shows somewhere.
It makes you ponder where a society is to find its stability – for prosperity is no substitute for relationships