Category: Blog Entry

A great pleasure to be in church today with children marking the end of their Holiday Club – and with a group of enthusiastic leaders. I know that many of our congregations are in places where there are very few children and young families – but I experience the small numbers of children around our churches as a real loss. Children bring life and spontaneity in a way which it is hard to replace. My parish had a sort of tidal wave of small children during the last ten years – Ian Paisley is reputed to have said that ‘The battle for Protestant Ulster would be won in the beds of Protestant Ulster’. Maybe in Portadown but not, I think, elsewhere. Anyway, this week also sees the first of two weeks of programme for teenagers at Glenaaaalmond – well-established and very successful. I look forward to visiting next Sunday.

Another summer – another drugs scandal in the Tour de France – this time Floyd Landis, the eventual winner, is under suspicion of taking drugs.  How else to explain his moribund performance in Stage 16 followed by an astonishing solo dash uphill in Stage 17.  It’s sad stuff and it marks another etape in the slow decline of the Tour as a major sporting event.  We were on our way to Dollar last Sunday and met a local cycle club all dressed like bumble bees in lycra – I immediately got one of those urges just to get into the middle of the peloton and fly far, far away – exchange my alb for the Benesto padded cycling shorts.  I tried to explain to Alison that it must be a bit like flying in the middle of a big flock of birds but it was too late.

Just back from over-nighting with friends from ‘Norn Irn’ who were cruising on the Clyde – this is big boat stuff not the ‘bum in the waves’ sailing which I did in my youth.  Picked up at Largs, we headed for Arran.  I slept through last night’s thunder storms but woke up when the wake from the morning Calmac ferry reached us.  We visited Holy Island today – got soaked on the way but it’s a place of great serenity when you arrive.  It felt a bit like Corrymeela for Bhuddists.  We dropped in on the Mandala Garden – which somebody described as ‘It felt as if I was weeding my soul.’  I shall never reach those spiritual heights and lawn-mowing doesn’t seem to be part of it.  I was interested too in the idea that one might achieve ‘mastery of contentment’ – when I kind of hoped it might creep up on me one day while I wasn’t looking.  As always, it is amazing that such unspoilt beauty exists so close to Glasgow.  And if you want some further spiritual exercises … part of the fascination of that kind of sailing is the extent to which it is governed by wind and tide and not by what you want to do next.  We are so used to being captain of our own ship

Another sign of changing times.  Tiger Woods exercises iron [sic] control over 72 holes and then dissolves into tears as he experiences grief for his lost father – and commiserates with the runner-up on the death of his mother.  Particularly strange when he is surrounded by the de-humanising entourage which accompanies the super-star wherever he goes.  I suppose it tells us two things.  It’s no longer taken as read that ‘big boys don’t cry’ – and there is a holistic understanding which recognises that everything affects everything else.  So it’s too simple just to say, ‘Get out there and do the job’

The church is an amazing organisation. Sometimes it seems that churches don’t notice what is happening on their own doorstep .. and then out of a summer afternoon comes Bishop Stephen Than Myint Oo to share a meal with us. He is Bishop of Hpa-an in the Anglican Church of the Province of Myanmar – here because of the commitment of members of our congregation in Kirkaldy who have visited the camps of the refugee Karen people in Thailand. The story unfolds of the struggle of the Karen people over fifty years to achieve independence. Now ever more tightly squeezed by the Burmese government and the Chinese, they live between their homeland in Burma and the camps in Thailand. Bishop Stephen says that it means much to them to be members of the Anglican Communion … the feeling that other people in other places know about their plight and care about their suffering

So I asked the question this morning of Lebanon – same as I did as we watched the submerging of New Orleans.  ‘What do you think is happening to all the pet cats?’  For pets are part of what makes people feel at home.  And to be evacuated without ….   Robert Fisk in this morning’s Independent crisply calls the evacuation of British and other nationals ‘Munich not Dunkirk’.

All my life, I have listened to people saying that they must ‘root out the terrorists from our midst’.  It is always nonsense at best and political laziness at worst.  In one sense, terrorists should be ignored – for they have chosen to step outside the norms of political dialogue and humane behaviour.  The fact that they choose to use violence should not give them any more weight than anybody else.  But their existence should also be taken seriously because they do not come from Mars.  They arise because there is an unresolved cause which they are able to exploit and there is a civilian population which may not agree with their methods but sympathises with their aims.  The civilian population, of course, needs to be protected and the processes of civilised society need to be safeguarded.  But this surrogate punishment of the civilian population of Lebanon, the destruction of its fragile democracy is appalling.  And the apparent lack of political leadership in bringing the suffering to an end is dreadful.  Munich not Dunkirk.  I agree.

I’m hoping to scuttle back to the cool of Perthshire this evening when the temperature begins to fall.  For all my reservations about conferences, this one [CTBI Stewardship Network] has been very good.  And I’ve plugged into a network of really useful contacts across Scotland, the north of England and the Church in Wales.

It still comes down to the basics – giving as an expression of thanksgiving and spiritual commitment.  But the quality and sophistication of the web-based materials which has been developed in the Grace of Giving Programme in Liverpool and in Chichester are very impressive.  And people are very open about sharing and allowing others to use what they have developed.  So I’m much more hopeful about our ‘Year of Stewardship’ in the SEC.  Just don’t ask when it begins, when it ends or how long it lasts.

I’ve been getting a bit better at the cycling these last few weeks. So today I took the opportunity of unfurling the Brompton from the back of the car and heading off from Carlisle along the Hadrian’s Wall Cycle Way – towards Brampton. The heat was ferocious – the Roman soldiers would have felt quite at home – and the tar was melting. Alas – while I had brought the episcopal padded cycling shorts with me, I forgot to put them on under my everyday shorts.  But I did about ten miles each way with a restorative pint at the mid point. Encouraging to see how many other people were cycling too – nice country lanes with plenty of shade.

These last few days, I have been reading with horror about Israel/Lebanon. I read the front page of the Independent this morning with disappointment if not surprise – it gives a verbatim record of a casual conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair at the G8 Summit. Ought we not to expect better of our leaders than half formed and half-informed conversation laced with vulgarity?

In just war terms, the only possible response to Israel’s actions is surely to say that they are ‘disproportionate’.  Israel must have by far the strongest military resources in the region – but its mindset is perpetually that of insecurity and vulnerability.  It is a mystery why those – whether Israeli’s or Ulster Protestants – who should feel secure act as if they were a vulnerable and oppressed group.

Always regret signing up to go to Conferences. Never more so than today when I have to leave this rural idyll at Blogstead Episcopi to go to a Conference in Carlisle. The subject is Stewardship – which is softly, softly, church-speak for money. I’m going because it is the best way of getting up to speed on today’s resources and getting the network contacts that I need. What this is really about is encouraging people to see financial commitment as just one expression of their spiritual commitment. I’m a veteran of many programmes like this in parish life. Mostly they were very encouraging. But they also provided an opportunity for anybody who wanted to complain about anything – the church heating/the Rector losing his hair/hymns sung too fast/hymns sung too slow/failure of the parish to defend the constitutional position of Northern Ireland, etc – to have a go. As if one hadn’t heard it all zillions of times before. Here things are different. What needs to be nudged here, I think, is the ‘fund-raising’ mindset – for there is a world of difference between fundraising and giving. Time to stop – because I can already hear people preparing to get their retaliation in early ‘Of course, this new bishop is only interested in money’ Actually he is interested in sitting under a panama hat in his back garden on a sunny day and not going to Carlisle