Category: Blog Entry

Spring has finally arrived.  This morning I drove 20 miles across this amazingly beautiful countryside for Confirmation Service at Glenalmond College.  Confirmation as it was – a rite of passage for teenagers – is fading away.  We now call it ‘Affirmation of Baptismal Vows – commonly called Confirmation.  But in a school like Glenalmond it is still a ‘big moment’ – a gathering of parents, godparents and families.  It’s personal choice for the young people involved – but there is a strong feeling of ‘another milestone on the way to adult life.’  I enjoy the challenge of such a diverse grouping – there is quite a strong feeling in the air of ‘I know this is important but I am not quite sure why’  I was interested when one of the staff said to me that he found pupils increasingly asking questions and concerned about the ‘randomness’ of life – one might have expected that they, of all young people, might feel secure, confident, etc.

I used to think that I didn’t really have roots.  Lived in too many places – I couldn’t have the same sense of place and belonging as my parishioners.  But then being in Armagh Cathedral last night for the installation of my friend Patrick as Dean put me back in dialogue with my roots.  It’s great to be with people who know me and my family two generations back – and to meet old friends with whom I have served in all sorts of places.  But, of course, there is another side to it which I pondered as I blundered onto the Stena early this morning.    It’s the freedom of being able to re-invent myself as I choose – if that doesn’t sound too spiritually treacherous.  In Scotland, I don’t have ‘form’ and, as yet, I don’t have history.  Great freedom in that.   Poppy, by the way, has had enough travelling for a while and is in voluble mode.  She didn’t get to fill in the customer survey on the Stena HSS but she did wonder why the number of customer satisfaction surveys one is given is in inverse proportion to the pleasure of the experience.

Took half a day today to get involved in some contextual Bible Study.  For those of us who are trained to start with the text and its context, it seems strange to start with our context and work inwards.  But, as always with this kind of thing, it is about the people you meet – and the fact that everybody has experience and insight to bring – and so everybody starts equal.  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the JCB is continuing to move Perthshire around in what is steadily becoming our back garden.  Maybe we need a tree so that Poppy can get on eye level with the buzzards.  I also, for reasons which are too complicated to explain, bought a second hand car today.  Normally I avoid this because I lack the killer instinct in financial haggling and tend to think of the salesman’s children running barefoot.  But today, wonder of wonders, after the price had already been reduced by £1000, I did an Oliver Twist and asked for more.  And got another £400.  Is it the purple shirt, I wondered.  Unlikely.

We’re starting on a process of review and reorganisation tomorrow – first meeting of a new group with a consultant – I’m looking forward to encouraging people to be involved in a process of change.  Greatest sin?  To start out and lose momentum along the way.  Must keep reciting the prayer of Francis Drake: ‘not the beginning but the continuing until it be thoroughly finished that yieldeth the true glory’.  On the other hand, I’ve been at this long enough to know that there is no single answer to all problems.  I would like to think that we would at least reach the point where there is a good shared understanding of the issues and people feel that it is possible to make decisions and see change happen.

It’s that Andy Pandy moment again.  Still strange to go to Belfast Airport and take the flight home to Edinburgh.  But it’s time – and I’ll be back in Ireland on Thursday for the Installation of a friend as Dean of Armagh.  People ask, ‘How are you getting on?’.  Since the blog is much read in Ireland, many of them know the sanitized version which is on view here and I am in danger of believing it myself as a sort of alternative reality.  It is hard to explain how different something which is actually so similar can be.  Meantime Poppy is getting restless – after Stranraer, Belfast, Donegal and Belfast again.  She enjoyed meeting the sheep in Donegal but misses the deer and the buzzards of rural Perthshire.  She must be suffering the feline version of jet lag as I found her shouting at me at 5 am this morning.  All I can say on that front is that it takes a lot to wake me once asleep ….

I suppose the difference is that, in Ireland, my own story is interwoven with other bits of story.  So a visit to some friends beyond Sligo today became a sort of pilgrimage.  First to Mullaghmore which was the nearest seaside to my childhood in Enniskillen and where Alison’s parents used to rent a house.  Memories of Trooper Malone who used to smoke fish using the oak chips from Rodney Lomax’s boat yard and who did a wonderful imitation of the Lyon’s tea advert: ‘Teabags they said?  Never, I said …’  And behind the Pier Hotel now gentrified with seaweed baths is the remains of the old shed in which the Major presided over the lobsters in their sea water baths – ‘Leppin’ around all over the joint’.   And over it all is the shadow of Classiebawn, home of Lord Mountbatten, who was murdered here in 1979 on one of the worst days of the Troubles – three died here and 18 soldiers in Warrenpoint.  And on to Drumcliffe where Yeats is buried, ‘Cast a cold eye on life, on death.  Horseman pass by.’  Just down the road is Lissadell, home of the Gore Booths, of whom Constance became Countess Markievicz, one of the leaders of the 1916 Rising – who had a swimming pool named after her in Dublin.  Fame indeed.  Just round the corner, an Armada Trail, commemorating the loss of ships of the Spanish Armada in 1588.  Close to Sligo, we visited Rosses Point, major golfing centre but remembered by me because I sat down in the sand dunes and found that I had alighted on the carcass of a long dead dog.  A buttock-clenching moment which lives with me yet.  Around and through it all runs the simply astonishing prosperity and growth of the new Ireland – the first time since the Great Famine that the young have not had to emigrate to find work and home.  Indeed, even here in Dunfanaghy, there is some consternation that the latest development of holiday homes is being built by a group of Lithuanian building workers.

More and more I find myself re-reading old favourites. Is this a sign of age? Decided it was time for Susan Howatch again so I am re-visiting Scandalous Risks. It’s an extraordinary exploration of spirituality and psychic experience – just to remind me of how exciting my life in the rarified atmosphere of the church really is, although I don’t notice. I’m also a dipper-in. Picked up one of those tiny extracts as we were moving house – Joshua Slocum’s book about his circumnavigation in Spray around 1896. This is the bit where he rounds the Horn. It is amazing to think of him doing it alone and without GPS, decent weather forcasts, synthetic ropes, stainless steel rigging, bottled gas … And, just to complete the sailing theme, I am always dipping in at random to the Arthur Ransome Swallows and Amazons series – just to revisit calm, untroubled childhood. The first one begins with the classic scene of Roger pretending to be a yacht tacking back and forth up the field to Holly Howe while his mother waits at the top ever more impatiently. It reminds me of childhood sailing on the lakes in Fermanagh.

So here we are back in Donegal.  It is part of the Irish Republic while being geographically north of Belfast.  The car registrations outside and the accents inside our favourite restaurant are all Northern Irish.  By the way, it’s The Mill, Dunfanaghy. Derek and Susan who own it are Gleneagles trained and it is outstanding.  Dunfanaghy has a bit of the character of Portadown Sur Mer – so we can check out the progress of the parish under its new management without having to go there.  Our daily dose of the Irish Times tunes us in to the realities of Irish life.  Horrific road death statistics for one.  A big slice of the front page today reports concern by the Catholic and Church of Ireland Primates about a concelebrated Mass involving three Roman Catholic and one Church of Ireland priests last Sunday.  Archbishop Brady said that there was, ‘a real danger of causing widespread confusion, raising false hopes and creating situations that are open to misunderstandings and manipulation.’  The dilemma is that there are rules.  To break them doesn’t actually change anything.  I remember visiting the Columbanus Community of Reconciliation in Belfast – an ecumenical religious community.  They did not practise inter-communion – deciding not to take to themselves freedoms which were not available to others outside their community.  And yet – one wonders whether, after decades of failure to make significant ecumenical progress in areas such as this, there will be any change unless people break the rules.  Could it be a WWJD issue?

Kelvin Holdsworth’s blog charmingly describes my involvement in the Maundy Thursday washing of feet as ‘you wash, I’ll dry’.  What he didn’t mention was the kissing of the feet.  I declare myself a wimp in that department.

as one of our Prayers of Thanksgiving puts it.  And, as clergy have done from time immemorial, we survive Holy Week, roll the stone away, declare the Resurrection – and go for a week’s holiday.  So it’s Belfast tomorrow and Donegal on Tuesday.  Nothing much changes in Ireland.  Ian Paisley continues to maintain opposition to political progress.  I can allow him his point of view – but not the intemperate, door-slamming language in which he expresses it.  And in Dublin, they have been marking the 90th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising – with a strange mixture of pride and embarrassment.