Category: Blog Entry

I’m still pondering the mysteries of leadership.  Every time my paper shows pictures of polar bears standing on ever-shrinking ice floes, I say to myself, ‘I know about that.  It’s like Canute trying to stop the tide going out.  But leadership ….. the strong, confident, decisive, affirming, encouraging role model is all very well.  Except that people [or at least people like me] actually bounce off that and are repelled by it.  And the Jesus model of teacher, leader, healer, sufferer …. is all about creating a new kind of space and openness within which people can find healing and grow.  As always, it’s a balance but where is the point of balance?

As bishops go, I’m probably just about OK with computers.  I have just got on top of RSS feeds and I sorted out my mother’s internet connection over the phone last week.  But I know my limitations – and wireless networks are over the edge for me.  So I spent a happy four hours in the office last night setting up some new computers with Tim who is, as he says, ‘geek and proud of it’.  So he made the WiFi sing songs to the router and pinged everything in sight while I shoved the back files in the filing cabinets into archive boxes.   And at the end of it all, the computers would all talk to the world outside but not to one another.  So it’s more pinging next Tuesday night.  Thanks, Tim

We once ended up by accident sitting in the front row at the ballet. What seems effortless and swan-like from a distance becomes a series of grunts and heaves at close quarters – rather like an Olympic weight-lifting competition. My re-entry into the world of chamber music playing with my violin last night was rather similar. I was never effortless but I was better than that. I remember my violin teacher – a very splendid Czech lady – saying ‘If it doesn’t hurt it is not doing you good’ Sounds pretty Protestant to me. Some pain ahead, I think. And not unlike dealing with one’s soul.

It’s dreadful. It’s wrong. Even viewed tactically, it’s always counter-productive. But without getting into the area of sympathising or excusing, can one understand or behave as if it is unexpected? I watched some film recently of soldiers coming home from Iraq – saw the big, tough soldier moved to tears of sheer relief at getting to the end of what was obviously a nightmare experience to see his family again. The strain of fighting a war – or is it peacemaking – which they can’t really hope to win, where they don’t know who is friend and who is enemy … more of the intangibles and irreconcilables. Politicians carry their share of responsibility for putting people in such a position. And more about dealing with intangibles and irreconcilables another day.

Hours in meetings 18
Miles driven 476
Flights 1
Lord Mayors Greeted 1
E Mails sent 88
MadRussianTaxiDrivers 1
Concerts 1
Out to Lunch 2
Trains 1
Services 2

My tandem-riding friend in Ireland stirs me by sending a recent ‘Irishman’s Diary’ column from the Irish Times. It’s a rant. It’s a triumphalist hymn to the economic and social triumph of Catholic Ireland when measured against today’s Scotland: ‘Catholic Ireland has demographically and economically overhauled its once-triumphant Presybterian neighbours. A vibrant enterprise culture flourishes in a once priest-ridden, backward and dirge-filled land. Whine-Eire has been vanquished by Ryan-Eire.’

Meanwhile Scotland, home of Adam Smith, birthplace of ‘economics, the raincoat, tarmacadam, single malts, penicillin, the suspension bridge, modern roads ….’
The ruin of Scotland … subsidies. And he ends ‘Depend on the state for your wealth and you will end up watching daytime television and drawing the dole while your diminishing band of overweight offspring shoot up in their classrooms.’ Rant indeed and triumphalist at that!

But how much truth?

Today was amazing. After living in the dark for the last few months, suddenly it’s almost spring. As I drove out to Glenalmond this morning the the light was bright, bright – and on to Dundee, across the Tay and back to Perth through the Sidlaw Hills beside Shakespeare’s Dunsinnane Hill. If it wasn’t for the bits I have to do in between all that, I would think I was on holiday.

And as a linked search, I wasted 20 minutes looking for the Honda Civic ad on the net – but found it. It won’t make me buy one. But if the church had a quarter of that creativity, discipline and panache … life would be very different.

I seem to have spent the whole day dishing out encouragement. Those who know me as capable of quite a bit of cynicism may find that difficult to imagine. But to meet a lack of confidence in the future is to be reminded of how fragile these things are. I actually find it quite alarming because, for all my cynicism, I don’t think I have ever seriously doubted the future for a moment. And it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it and how you are and how you feel … and you point people towards the promised land without being quite sure that it is there … but maybe that is what living in the tide of grace is all about. I’m learning.

As so often in my work a day of contrasts – beginning in London and ending up at the Introduction of a new Priest in Charge in the congregations of Elie and Pittenweem. These are beautiful little coastal villages in the East Neuk area of Fife.

Jim, their new Priest, was born in Fife and has spent most of his ministry in America. The congregations have had good times and bad times but are full of hope that this marks the start of a new and positive chapter in their life. As always I felt how like a wedding these services are. The life of this priest and that congregation come together at the intersection of vocation and mutual need. They make huge commitments to shared life and work in an open future. Friends and family, the diocese, are there to support them as they make the commitment. And then we all tiptoe away … leaving them to learn to live and work together.

A dinner at the Mansion House in London for bishops from the churches of the British Isles. Overtones [sic] of Gilbert and Sullivan in the uniformed guards, watermen and lightermen. Stirrings of memories of being taken to London as a child to see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace. Some signs around one that the dressing up box and the Oxfam shop have been raided for anything vaguely purple. But most of all at such moments one is aware of the strange sense of lurching from one mode of life to another – a slightly Cinderella-ish feeling that one suddenly finds oneself at the ball without being quite sure which is real life – going to the ball or life at home with the ugly sisters. Most interesting of all in these fragile times for the church is the sudden sense of Christendom recaptured and the joining up of various bits of establishment. Yet to say that is to suggest that this was about wallowing in the half-forgotten comforts of the past. For what was said by the Lord Mayor and the two Archbishops was all about one of the key challenges of our times – the building of an inclusive, tolerant and accepting society.