Category: Blog Entry

Interesting and encouraging day yesterday.  One of our Area Councils decided to have a shared Sunday morning service – always difficult to close the doors in the local church – in the beautiful worship space at Bryce Kirk in Kirkaldy.  It turned out to be, as I experienced it, one of those moments where people experience something very different.  It was bright, warm and encouraging.  And on to Dunblane for the Ordination of Giles to the Priesthood.  Another of those moments where I find myself a bystander at the commitment of a candidate and his family .. and wonder and admire.  Things do move steadily.  The things that move are usually nothing to do with anything which I do.  But that’s ministry and leadership.

Meanwhile the faithful Passat has a slight problem on the demisting front which leaves me travelling the diocese in a slight haze.  It needed water so I called in to a filling station in Dublane  – the very one where I got stuck in the snow drift while being interviewed by Sally Magnusson.  What goes around comes around …

In Fermanagh where I grew up, a real soft day was a day in which it was sort of raining – it was not altogether clear whether the rain was going up or day.  It just sort of hangs about a bit.

So I have had a day in which I have tried to keep my feminine side on top – soft power all round.  All E Mails carefully screened for any sign of incipient episcopal authoritarian tendencies.  Much use of, ‘I know you will already have thought of ….’ and ‘I wonder how you feel about …. ‘  What one learns, of course, is that much of the way in which we communicate today is not at all conducive to the use of soft power.  E Mail, text and, to a lesser extent, the telephone are all dangerously one-dimensional.  One constantly has to read back, open out the cryptic, soften the conclusion …. and learn to be touchy-feely in a virtual world.

Just driven to Edinburgh Airport while listening to a programme about Hard Power and Soft Power on Radio 4. There is much to debate in working out whether a society actually needs both – even if the soft variety feels more subtle than the hard. But why link the difference to the politics of gender? And then go on to suggest that if Condy and Mrs Thatcher are examples of hard power, it is because they had learned to act like men in a man’s world. By the time I reached the contra flow at Kinross, I was getting really irritated that some women seem to feel that it is all right to speak of men in general in terms which one would not now dare to apply to black people, members of the gay community, Jews …….  And just while I am having a rant, when did the default position for the toilet seat get fixed as DOWN?

Great time in Donegal – relentless socialising left little time for the beach, etc. 

‘Slight smell of gas here’ said the nice man who was servicing the boiler.  Donegal convention places the gas cylinders in with the central heating boiler.  It was when the sweet potato and lemon grass soup flew across the kitchen later that evening that we realised that something just might be wrong.  A mighty explosion blew the door and roof off the boiler house.  Alison, of course, dived for the cat.  I went out the back to find flames coming through the roof of the boiler house. 

So I rang the Fire Brigade – speak to Dublin and then to Castlebar who send the apparatus from Falcarragh – it then gets lost.  Fortunately our neighbour Bob dived in and removed the gas cylinders before they caught fire and – once the gas had burnt off – the fire went out very rapidly.  And we hope no damage to the house itself.  We were fortunate.

Drumbeg Sermon.doc

Sermon at Drumbeg Parish Church, Belfast

It’s a wonderful thing.  One phone call and you’re back in it.  I’m mitigating/offsetting my Easyjet flight tomorrow by taking bus to Glasgow and then bus from Belfast Airport to [London]derry – stroke city, so-called.  But could I get the whole way to Dunfanaghy by bus?  So I rang McGinley’s Coaches of Gortahork near the Bloody Foreland and they told me to talk to Gallaghers.  They suggested I might take the bus back into Belfast and join them at 1730 outside Jury’s Inn.  Or I could get a taxi from the Airport to the second roundabout before the Toomebridge bypass and they would stop for me.  Wee buns – as they say in Belfast.

Time for a short blogiday, I think

As the holliers approach, I’m pondering the idea that one might use this time more profitably.  Found myself idly watching the sad tale of a lady who had combined her holiday abroad with liposuction, breast enlargement and something unspeakable to do with her eyebrows.  Of course, it ended in tears – particularly no doubt the eyebrows bit.  Indeed she spent the entire interview trying not to say that ‘It had all gone pear-shaped.’   Must check what is available to me in Falcarragh, Creeslough and Port na Blagh – I expect the bruising will have faded a bit by the time I got back to Perth.  I wonder if they do Air Miles.  A bit of stretching to give me that bit of extra height – a Donald Trump hair weave perhaps – a tuck behind the ears to take away the lines of character and give me that baby face, starey look.  Perhaps better to bathe in fresh Atlantic sea water and apply the Guinness internally.

TFTD 14.8.06.doc

I’m now heading rapidly into that cul de sac called ‘about to go on holiday’ – otherwise known as forelog.  Characteristic of this period is the attempt to cram ever more into a diminishing resource of time – and a joyful and increasing tendency to chuck stuff overboard since I am never going to get it done anyway.  It reminds me of that immutable law of pastoral ministry – they either die or they get better – and either way ….

It was all here before me and it will be here after me …. so let’s loosen up a little!  Where did I put that bucket and spade so that I can do mitre-shaped sandcastles on the beach at Marble Hill?

I remember standing outside Lurgan Hospital.  It was Christmas Eve and I had been visiting a parishioner who was in the last stages of terminal illness.  The retired priest who worked with us was with me and he said something like, ‘Can’t just be spectators in the face of suffering like that.  You have to pray the prayer of faith.’  So I watch John Sentamu with admiration as he takes a week of prayer and fasting in the Minister and invites others to join him.  We’re helpless.  Others who allow themselves the luxury of seeing complex historically-rooted problems in simplistic ways can shape the agenda.  Terrorists, who have cut loose from any sense of the personal or societal cost of their actions, make their plans.  We’re helpless.  Unless we take a stand on behalf of the redemptive power which is above … beyond