Category: Blog Entry

I find it rather ironic that the final round – no, surely not the final round – of the Northern Ireland negotiations should be taking place just up the road from here in St Andrews.  One can only hope and pray that this time there will be agreement.  It’s hard to understand the enduring nature of this conflict – in its present phase, it began when I was 18.  One thinks of Churchill’s ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ speech in 1922.  Reflecting on the First World War, he said of Ireland that, ‘the integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions which has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’

If there is to be agreement this week, the movement which will have made it possible will have come about mainly through the pressure of events which have been inexorably leading towards a settlement.  The body language and other language of the politicians certainly gives one little cause for hope.  They carry to the table all the anger and hurt of the long years of violence.

I suppose it has to be that way.  It would be heartening to hear even a little of the insights of Christian faith – some ‘swords into ploughshares’ language or some hope of healing and reconciliation.  But this is real life and it will be enough for most of the people of Northern Ireland to see a pragmatic agreement which makes it possible for people of different traditions to share the same space with dignity and respect and which pushes the possibility of a return to violence even further away.  The healing will come later.

After four days in Ireland with the Celtic Bishops – and the last three days in Dunblane with our own Scottish Bishops – I have now emerged blinking into the sunlight.  Well, actually, into a torrential downpour.  Back in the parish, when – as they say – I felt that I was ‘losing the run of myself’ I would go out and do some visiting.  Just ordinary, everyday people.  Time spent with people would in some way bring me some healing and re-integration.  Church life can be immensely stimulating and even fun.  But it carries dizzying levels of incoherence – so much so that one goes home feeling that we have moored alongside problems for a while without doing very much to solve them

YMCA Reflection 7.10.06.doc

I was asked to do a short reflection at the start of the YMCA’s AGM in Perth today.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the YM – in Northern Ireland, they were taking steps to leave the sectarianism behind long before that became fashionable.  Certainly what I saw today was very impressive

Home at last – and glad to be back.  Just three days of bishops’ meeting to survive next week and then I might get the grass cut.  We did a flying visit to Donegal to sort out the aftermath of the great explosion – a visit enlivened by a young dog which nipped into the porch and removed one of Alison’s shoes while she was reviving her pot plants.  When she retrieved the [by now] mangled remains from the neighbour’s patio, she got the Peter Sellers ‘not my dog’ response.  Welcome to the new Ireland.

I’ve been reading Ben Elton’s ‘The First Casualty’ – about a man who declines to fight in the First World War because it is illogical.  Everybody else knows that it is illogical and hopeless but they can’t break loose from it.  Now when did I ever hear about anything like that before?

I’m looking forward to getting home.  Between holiday and this Celtic Bishops’ Conference I have been away most of the time since September 8th and I shall be away another two days next week.  In the good old days, one was just away.  Now I attempt to keep the basic administration going through the laptop and the VOIP phone – I’m getting better at it but it’s tiresome when it doesn’t all work just as easily as it does at home.  This hotel gets its broadband by satellite link – a fact lost on the staff members who attempted to sort it out for me.

Meanwhile, I have been forcing myself to think out from my own little patch and engage with the issues of the wider Anglican world.  It reminds me of the worst of Ireland – the times when one just knew that a crunch was coming and that there was almost nothing which would avert it.  But one passes through moments of crisis and life has a strange way of just moving on on the other side.

So what is this celtic identity which we share – 20 bishops going on a boat trip on the Shannon tomorrow?  I am having something of an idientity confusion because of representing Scotland at a conference in Ireland.  The Welsh seem to be the most celtic which is only what you would expect since they live in England’s back yard.  The Irish are not so sure and the Scots have a Welsh Primus.  So that seems clear enough then.

Meanwhile, I have the laptop hooked into the hotel’s satellite broadband and am carrying on virtual ministry as usual – E Mail and VOIP phone.

Back in Ireland – in Co Cavan – one of the most depressed parts of the old Ireland.  I’m now in an extraordinarily posh hotel, built in the middle of nowhere, which is being used for a meeting of the Celtic Bishops – the anglican bishops of Scotland, Ireland and Wales.  On one level that means ‘not the Church of England’.  But it also means that there is time to explore whether there are things which bind together the other nations of the British Isles – sense of humour; attitude to spirituality; or what?  Time will tell

Harvest Thanksgiving Dublin 1st October1.doc

Just to say what this is about ….. Katharine, the Rector, is a former Curate from the time I was in Portadown and we had a very long and happy working relationship.  This is a dying, inner-city Dublin parish which has been transformed by the economic migrants of the new Ireland.  It has an African Gospel Choir and Desmond Tutu preached here when he passed through Dublin recently.

Interesting to move overnight from springtime in South Africa to Autumn back home.  I’ve been writing a harvest sermon today – clergy joke about only needing one for your entire life in ministry.  And we used to ponder the fact that it is moments like Harvest and Mothering Sunday which tend to draw the crowds even though they seem rather theology-lite – while tougher moments like Good Friday can pass almost unnoticed by many.  Yet I am finding that Harvest actually has most of today’s issues there for the taking – wealth and poverty, the environment, justice ….  And most of all it seems to provide one of the moments at which one can see the difference between a secular society – which lives by values such as freedom, individual responsibility and self-sufficiency – and a society whose values are broader and deeper and where well-being and wealth are not the same things.  Interesting to hear Bill Clinton telling the Labour Conference that what mattered was that, when you gave up office, people were better off than when you began.  How inadequate a world vision is that?

We’re safely back at Blogstead and enjoying the peaceful and slow rhythms of life to which +Bruce refers.  It’s a sort of mixture between Big Brother and the Archers with an ecclesiastical flavour.  Poppy is still in Ireland and returns next week.

We had a meal with friends as we prepared to leave South Africa.  ‘Yes or No?’ asked James. It’s a question which nobody could answer – least of all a visitor.  There has been great progress – clearing of townships, building of schools, provision of water and sanitation, building and investment.  The miracle of South Africa remains – by that I mean the extraordinary way in which the leadership of Mandela, Tutu, de Klerk and others managed to overcome the race issue.  It is an example of the way in which spirituality and courage can transcend political limitations.  To my eye, South Africa’s problems are now to do with poverty and its links with race and colour.  The poverty is dreadful – somebody described the task of overcoming it as being like emptying the sea with buckets.  There is real concern about lawlessness and criminality.  There is a persistent belief that the government’s stance on HIV/Aids is a pragmatic recognition that it cannot meet the needs of the huge number of people who have no skills or education to bring to the new society and that Aids should be allowed to reduce the population.

But for all that there is a persistent optimism, generosity, flexibility and grace about the place.  The problems which lie ahead are daunting – but my answer to James’s question is a guarded ‘Yes’