Category: Blog Entry

People looking at the church from outside see crises to right and left … One of the things which really strikes me as a bishop is the passion – driving urge – for ministry with which I am constantly confronted. As a parish priest, it was largely happening somewhere else. Now I meet it day in and day out in those seeking ordination or lay ministry roles and in the very high quality of applicants for posts which are advertised. It amazes me and impresses me – that there could be so many people who feel this calling, who are prepared to make enormous sacrifices to pursue it – and who believe that this path will be for them not so much a way of comfort as of fulfilment at the deepest level. As always there are questions one could ask about it – but I still wonder at it and what it represents.

I’ve been following the story of the electoral success of Hamas. And the familiar refrain which has greeted it: ‘We won’t have any dealings with them until they give up violence.’ On one level, that is reasonable – why negotiate with people who are going to shoot you if they don’t like the outcome? But the reality is that Northern Ireland’s peace process has now been [and largely remains] frozen because of just this issue – the need for the IRA weapons to be destroyed and war declared over not just in a way which satisfies official observers but which also engenders new trust in the other community. For ultimately in these situations, the issue is not just guns and bombs but the demonisation of ‘the other’. Paul Oestreicher writes of this in the context of the Holocaust in today’s Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1696847,00.html

Still struggling with my Sudoku habit – probably down to about two a day now and hoping that it might fall further so that I could get my reading up a bit. The attraction, I suppose, is probably that there is an answer, that all it requires to get there is the application of some simple logic and that it can be finished and set aside. When I compare that to daily life and work where there often isn’t an answer, where logic is sometimes not helpful and where there is never a tidy end point ….. no wonder Sudoku attractive. Just like that traditional link between clergy and model railways and the Mussolini-like desire to make trains run on time. Although according to Urban Legends at www.snopes.com Mussolini did not achieve this.

Tomorrow brings my first involvement with a funeral for nearly a year – such is the difference between life as a bishop and ministry in a congregation. I miss it – not, obviously, in the enjoyment sense. But for a pastor, a funeral brings together the opportunity of knowing people at the deepest level, the natural sadness of the moment, thanksgiving and the challenge of standing in the face of death and declaring resurrection hope. Sometimes the pain is just too great – but sometimes the thanksgiving for long life well lived releases all sorts of wonderful things. And, as you get older, you think more about your own death and what you really believe.

Sitting in Edinburgh traffic today – leaving my carbon footprint behind me – and saw a poster outside a church. It read ‘Prayer is asking God what He wants.’

Worth thinking about. It’s a good antidote to ‘Prayer means getting God on my side’ But ‘What about my free will?’ I thought as the lights changed. I don’t quite warm to the idea that there is just one right answer and that prayer enables me to find out what it is. Maybe there is more than one right answer. And then I thought about all those choices which are the ‘lesser of two evils’ and neither of them ‘right’ – like Mandela’s suppport for armed struggle or Bonhoeffer’s support for the plot to murder Hitler.

Fortunately I didn’t hit the bus on my right.

The papers are full of exhortation to cast off the post-Christmas blues and emerge both slim and solvent. The fact that Gap and others are reported as adjusting their sizing so that today’s bigger people can have the ‘feel good’ pleasure of fitting into smaller sizes suggests that nothing much changes in the end.

I’m pondering it myself, of course. I am at times a role model – but no need to be a roly-poly model even tho’ it helps to look a bit patriarchal sometimes. It’s too dark most of the time for the bike. I hate the gym – mind-numbingly boring when I did it a few years ago. Maybe it will have to be the pool again.

Whatever I do in the end – and obviously I need some more time to think about it – I shall ponder how I can set about having a renewed and more beautiful soul to match the slimmer me.

I’m delighted to be here with you……. We are linked in all sorts of ways. We held our clergy conference this week. Our guest speaker was Rev Peter Neilson of the Church without Walls Project of the Church of Scotland. We value one another and we learn from one another. And these things matter. As you are gently soothed off to sleep by my soft Irish accent, you may think about the scandal of the disunity of the churches in Ireland – scandal because the churches should have been able to offer to a divided society the witness of people who could, whatever their differences, acknowledge their essential unity in Christ.

What does scripture say to us this morning?

We’re in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity – tomorrow I’ll be climbing into what may be the BIG pulpit of a Church of Scotland Parish Church which is linked with one of our congregations in Fife as part of a Local Ecumenical Project.

I always enjoy these contacts – people are incredibly warm, welcoming and hospitable and it is very stimulating to step into a different culture. The problem, as always, is to turn the ‘one off’ into an ongoing commitment to shared ministry.

But back in Northern Ireland …..

I really enjoy the times I go places and meet people – and ‘shadow’ clergy doing their job.

So today was spent with one of the Padre’s at RAF Leuchars which sits on the edge of the North Sea just north of St Andrews. Over 2000 people work there so it’s a huge and busy place.

So what did I find ….

Spent an interesting evening as part of the Theological Reflection series which we run for our students in training and recently ordained. We were ‘talking about communication’ which is, I suppose, at least slightly better than talking at length about the use of silence.

We talked, of course, about the skills and arts of communication. But I was struck by how much of what we talked about was to do with the communication of the intangibles: integrity, faith, love, empathy, passion, peace, the presence of God ……

And, of course, one ponders the conundrum that spiritual authority might actually diminish as institutional status increases. In which case bishops might be better to stay at home and let others get on with the communicating.