Category: Blog Entry

Three contacts with the world of vocation.  One bringing real joy at the end of long struggle.  Two bringing struggle and pain.  I’ve lived inside my own sense of calling for so long that I hardly know how to think of myself as separate from it.  Yet one of the constants of a bishop’s life is contact with people for whom vocation is objective reality and driving force – and I thank God for that.  They amaze me and humble me.  Yet, knowing what I know and having seen what I have seen, it’s all I can do not to say, ‘If you could just squeeze this germ out of your system … just go and get on with your life and forget about this … just be content to be …. you would be so much happier.  But there is no point.  I didn’t listen either.

Strange that in my by now fairly exhaustive knowledge of central Scotland in general and Fife in particular …. I have never been to Cellardyke.  But how amazingly beautiful the villages of the East Neuk are.  One feels for the poultry farmers – while noting abstractly that the bird population of the wild bird risk area is 163 times the total membership of the Scottish Episcopal Church.

Work expands, etc., etc.

All meetings end at the same time regardless of their starting time.

The length of a sermon is often in inverse proportion to the strength of its content.

When you keep track of money carefully, there seems to be more of it.

When you keep track of money carefully, there seems to be less of it.

When you give money away, there seems to be more of it.
No matter what speed they begin, all hymns revert to 75% of their optimum pace

Pickfords cardboard boxes breed in the night.

One day I shall go to bed early.

Black Dyke Mills Band was, of course, amazing.  Virtuoso playing and exuberant with it.  They drew a huge and very different audience.  Two interesting things about it.  One is that brass banding is a competitive movement and they brought the silverware with them.  The other is that, like Welsh Male Voice Choirs, this is the pinnacle of a movement which has its roots in the old mining and mill communities of the north of England.  It remains, obviously, a vibrant movement – although everybody is now middle class ….  And then it’s Sunday again.  I spent this morning with our small congregation in Kinghorn – directly across the Firth of Forth from Leith.  They did the brave thing of letting go of their building last year.  They now continue to worship in a side chapel of the [Church of Scotland] Parish Church and find themselves very welcome there.  How sensible – one building less to maintain.

Survived my chamber music last night – but I need to practise my scales and exercises.  As my teacher used to say in her wonderful middle-European accent, ‘If it does not hurt, it is not doing you good.’  Which brings me painfully to my efforts to write a sermon for Passion Sunday with all its messages of life from death and suffering.  And my still-fresh memory of St John Passion at the beginning of the week.  Concert again tonight but rather less traumatic, I expect.  Black Dyke Mills Band – I always regret not having learned to play a brass instrument.  Tenor Horn, I think, if I had a choice.

So the walls of boxes are reducing steadily.  No internet connection yet so the blog is being updated by a mixture of Bluetooth on my mobile phone and sheer willpower.  Otherwise, it’s quite suddenly back to doing what I do.  Meetings in Edinburgh; meeting Vestries about appointments; exploring vocation and future possibilities with clergy; school assembly tomorrow morning; big carbon footprints all over central Scotland in the car; getting the row of coat hooks in the cloakroom straight.  Chamber music tomorrow night and I feel like a child going to my violin lesson without having practised my scales … and my hands are rough from humping furniture around.

We’re in that in-between phase.  No internet connection yet so still E Mailing by will-power, Bluetooth from the mobile and going back to the house we have left – where our network is still up and running.  Boxes reducing but not fast enough.  Nice man arrived today to set up all the TV’s that we never watch.  Poppy was confined in a room so she couldn’t get out – which is obviously why I met her coming back in through the front door about ten minutes after he arrived.  Rural Perthshire is like a safari park – eight deer in the field at the back today and buzzard intermittently overhead.  We’re obviously going to have to prepare her for release into the wild.

Just occasionally one is in the presence of something truly remarkable.  And St John Passion tonight in Perth Concert Hall was one of them.  If you ever get the chance to hear Mark Padmore singing the Evangelist, don’t miss it.  I am not easily moved to tears but this did it for me.  Peter’s denial … and the scourging …  He had the ability to put Bach somewhere in the back of his throat and create a sound which tore your heartstrings.  Where had I heard anything like it before?   I fell to thinking of traumatic funerals which I have conducted and the unrestrained outpouring of grief .. and this sound was like it but far, far more devastating because it was channelled and focused.  It opened up a window into bottomless pits of fear and anger and desolation – a glimpse of what it means to crucify the Son of God then and now.  I couldn’t cope with that every day or every week – but it reminds me of the level on which worship should engage us … just sometimes.

I’ve never quite worked out Mothering Sunday.  But that’s my problem.  Lots of people come to church … it’s obviously very important to them … there are parents and children and grandparents and flowers and the first sniff of spring.  Down in Dollar today, we had seven confirmations and there was a real sense of the importance family.  But somehow, in the middle of all that, one has to try and remember that the stable family unit of mum, dad and 2.4 children isn’t the norm it once was.  There are single people – single by choice and single not by choice.  There are people who have lost children before and after birth.   There are people struggling with childlessness and infertility.  There are people who have given children for adoption and wonder where they are.  There are parents and grandparents who do not see their children because of divorce and remarriage.  It’s impossible – but what redeems it is the remarkable ability of children just to be children and to leave the anguish and the complications to the adults.

Well, I suppose the most important thing is that Poppy is instantly and totally at ease in her new surroundings.  This is unlike our previous move where she howled without ceasing for three months and I had to keep explaining to people on the phone that we were not living in a safari park.  Otherwise our move went as smoothly as Damian and his team from Pickfords could achieve.  The exciting bit was in the need to get the conveyancing process completed before we moved into the house.   As the furniture vans set out for the new house, I was on the phone standing in the garden and we were still trying to get it sorted out.  Thank you to everyone who got the process to the finishing line just in time.  So now we just have to deal with a sort of Berlin Wall of boxes – I shall keep you posted on the reducing balance.  And the spirituality of all this?   Certainly it felt a bit like living in the ‘in between time’.  To travel lighter would have been helpful.  And a touch of Kipling’s ‘If you can keep your head …’ was around there somewhere.