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So it’s the end of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. And I did do it an injustice – we had a meeting this week between representatives of our diocese and representatives of Perth Presbytery. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s a big step forward. So the obsequies for Scottish Churches House weren’t the only ‘church unity’ event in my diary this week.

But the vision of the future which I was pondering as I sat in Dunblane Cathedral slipped away as I headed up the A9. So here’s an attempt to recapture it.

Scottish Churches House was a piece of ecumenical infrastructure as is ACTS [Action for Churches Together in Scotland] I think that the times are calling us to be more missional and rather less institutional. So we are less sure than we were about what to do with our ecumenical infrastructure but paradoxically we are rather better at working together in pairs and groups of churches. I know that that also implies a narrowing of the agenda from the majestic scale of the ecumenical agenda at its finest – but …

Or to put it another way. The trouble with the mindset of decline is that it leads to a ‘circling of the wagons.’ We turn inwards and become more like ourselves. If the mindset of growth and mission-shapedness takes hold, I believe that we begin naturally to move towards one another. We learn, for example, that what matters to the person who comes for the first time into one of our churches is that they pick up a sense that this is an authentic community of faith doing what faith communities do. The denominational identity becomes secondary. The search for that authenticity – or holiness – becomes a shared journey and I think it draws our churches together.

I don’t think I have ever known a time when the potential for inter-church sharing was as great as it is at this moment – and I believe that the will to move forward is strong. I’m talking about sharing of training for both clergy and laity. There’s the world of Christian Education. And all the possiblities involved in sharing of buildings and ministries. It’s impossible to get involved in that kind of working together without growing together and being changed by the experience.

There is clearly an appetite in our society for hearing a measured, compassionate, thoughtful view from churches and faith communities on many of the challenging issues of our times. Society is changing rapidly but still needs roots. Just at the moment, there’s Assisted Dying, Alcohol and Addiction Issues, Sectarianism, Education, Same Sex Marriage, Welfare Reform, the NHS – all areas where we have been or will be asked for our views as churches. And I don’t think that what we produce really does justice to the breadth of what together we represent. The Occupy Protests seemed to seek to address some of the most immediate issues in our society but we haven’t quite worked out how to respond properly and the protests themselves seem to have lost the initiative.

There’s plenty more.

Yesterday I attended the Service which marked the end of Scottish Churches House at Dunblane. Endings are always difficult – marked by sadness and regret – tinged with anger and blame – inviting us to search for new visions and new future. During the Service, we were asked to reflect together on our experiences of Scottish Churches House. I recalled my first visit there which was probably around 1981 when I was Youth Officer for the Church of Ireland and came for a meeting of the planning group for a British Council of Churches Youth Festival. I remember very clearly a visit from Bishop Alastair Haggart and my conversation with him. He opened my eyes to the concept of ‘adversarial churches’ – the idea that churches acquire some of their character and ethos in reaction/response to other churches which surround them. I also met one aspect of the life of Scottish Churches House which I think was not mentioned yesterday – the presence of the Sisters of the Holy Paraclete from Whitby. They provided an unobtrusive but distinct quality to the community life of the House.

So I sat in Dunblane Cathedral feeling sadness for many who were there – visionary people of a generation before mine who were entitled to ask what had happened to their ecumenical hopes. There is no single answer to that. Some of it is in changes to the way life is lived today. It has become difficult to persuade people to commit to residential experiences. They expect ever higher standards of accommodation – as do Health and Safety requirements. It’s important to remember also the extent to which the middle years of the twentieth century were times of ecumenical optimism. The history of Scottish Churches House mentions the celebration of the Jubilee of the Edinburgh World Missionary Congress in 1910. I suspect that even more influential was the Second Vatican Council and the way in which it opened up the Catholic Church to ecumenical contact and development. That change alone was transformative in the entire ecumenical area.

And now? Well, to be positive, we have come a long way. It is normative to expect good and warm ecumenical relationships at every level. My experience of everyday ministry in congregations here is that inter-church sharing in ministry is growing all the time. But all is not well. Declining churches tend to turn inwards rather than turn outwards towards one another and together towards the society which we serve and to which we carry our mission. We are not at all sure what kind of ecumenical structures will serve our needs – we are tending to enter into bilateral arrangements because that seems easier and more pragmatic. It requires less energy in the vision department.

But I think that there are some brave ecumenical dreams which are fit for our times. I was absolutely clear about that when I left the Cathedral – slightly less clear by the time I got home. I’ll do my best to recapture them and share them with you in a day or two.

Same service. First day of Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Many clergy and laity from Church of Ireland, Presybterian and Methodist churches present. I am sitting in a place of honour beside Bishop John, Bishop of Dromore. As you would expect, the normal rules for ‘eucharistic hospitality’ apply and those of us who are ‘non-Catholics’ [as it were] are not invited to share in the bread and wine of the sacrament.

How do you deal with that situation – that the moment at which unity is most needed is the moment at which it cannot be offered? How do you prevent words like ‘unwelcome’ and ‘excluded’ from floating around in people’s minds. The answer is that you do as Dom Mark-Ephrem did. At the Fraction – the breaking of the bread – he refers to the bread broken, the body of Christ broken on the Cross, the broken and divided body of his church. And he prays for the day when it shall not be so.

And somehow, somehow, instead of this being an ‘us and them’, it becomes a moment at which we all together become part of a shared brokenness. I learnt a lot.

Apart from the Service to mark the closure of Scottish Churches House, I have no other engagement in my diary relating to the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Think about that.

I’ll try to do my own bit of prophetic ecumenism tomorrow.

We were gathered in the church at Holy Cross Monastery where I have just been on retreat with the Benedictine Monks in Rostrevor. Monastic Profession of Brother Joshua. First day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Anniversary of the dedication of the church – for this community sees the ecumenical journey as being at the heart of its vocation.

There was a moment

In Casting the Net, we shape much of what we do around the Nine Marks of Mission – of which the first is ‘Worship which renews and Inspires’. You may remember that I wrote a while ago about what Dom Mark-Ephrem does with the incense. Not so much of what is in the old manuals of catholic practice – more gentle leaning into the candle flame …

As Joshua lay prostrate before the altar, his body was gently and tenderly censed. It was another expression of the words which he had just uttered: ‘and to continue until death’. And then I saw that this was one of those special moments of liturgy which faces both ways and is beyond words. It was baptismal – the affirming of newness of life and the recognising of death. And I thought not just about the dying and rising of baptism but also about the tentative English/Spanish conversation which I had just had with Joshua’s mother about how for a parent this was a very happy moment tinged with sadness.

The comments about the Iron Lady have been about whether the emphasis on her dementia was justifiable, dignified …. On reflection, I think that it was not. It didn’t tell us anything much about dementia and it served mainly as a rather crude vehicle for the flash-backs to her glory days.

Like most clergy, I have spent more time than I would care to measure with people in this state. The thing that I found most profoundly saddening was the fact that it doesn’t seem to be a constant/steady state. Time of blankness are intermingled with times when the person is clearly aware that all is not well but can’t quite work it out.

Meanwhile the debate about assisted dying moves on. I think that the thing that surprises me most about this debate is the fact that the insights and learning from the hospice movement seem to have almost entirely passed out of sight. Yet one of the significant changes in hospital care during my time as a hospital chaplain was the extent to which those insights began to become mainstream – there was a maturing which meant that doctors began to recognise that heroic medical intervention was not always the best. During all of that time, I remember only one person who was clearly asking for help to be allowed to die. Palliative care became a recognised specialism. Yet sadly I remember that when members of my own family needed that care, I found that I had to ask very directly for what I thought was reasonable and appropriate.

Well I hope you all had a lovely Christmas. As you can see in this picture from the hearth at Blogstead, all was well with Poppy and the turkey was to her satisfaction. She’s been out on the patio. The paving stones are wet so she requires a man with a hair dryer walking in front of her.

For us by far the most significant event was the arrival of Eve Grace on Tuesday – first grandchild for us. And since she lives near Glasgow, there is almost immediate access for grandparenting and all that this new set of relationships seems to involve.

Meanwhile I have been a non-combatant in the liturgical festivities – after a second short spell in hospital in less than three months. Nothing serious or significant, I hasten to add. More ‘light running repairs’ – a programme of continuing renovations and renewals rather like our cathedrals. We went up to church at Coupar Angus on Christmas Morning – Kenny the Rector was behaving rather like the ‘Rev’ when faced with a full church … trying to work out how and why this had happened. Anyway it was great and I learnt a lot about ..

And I did have an eye to Father Ted and the ‘Kicking Bishop Brennan up the arse’ episode. One of the all time greats, I think

I was sitting in the spa – jacuzzi to you and me – at the Leisure Centre. End of a week more difficult than many. And – Scotland being as it is at this time of the year – freezing cold as well. So the jacuzzi is the place to be.

So I had a ponder about things. About 100 paces away was St John’s Kirk where John Knox preached the fiery sermons which launched the Scottish Reformation. Maybe he would have enjoyed slipping up the road for a soak and a warm up. But maybe not. And I thought about the pandas again and our tendency to anthropomorphize. Strangely, as I reflected on some of my letters and e mails this week, we like to treat pandas and polar bears as if human but do the opposite to one another – treating bears and Burmese cats as more than animal and one another as less than human. And then there was a growing awareness of space and privacy issues since I had been joined in what is a rather small jacuzzi by a lady somewhat larger than myself. I was just beginning to wonder whether my sense of my space being infringed would be less acute if it was more than one other person … when the jacuzzi stopped as it does every five minutes. She uttered a single word – what in the Watergate tapes would have been called an expletive undeleted. Amazing. John Knox would have been startled.

I’ve been sitting pondering the ‘Christmas Message from the Primus’ challenge – 150 words to say something fresh about Christmas. As happens, one begins to think laterally under the pressure of the challenge. Was there space for Giant Pandas in the manger scene at Bethlehem – after all there were Wise Men from the East so why not Pandas as well? They certainly seemed to be everywhere in Edinburgh this weekend on their arrival in Edinburgh Zoo. The Zoo hopes for a 70% increase in visitor numbers – maybe that’s the answer to our mission challenges as well. 70% increase in churchgoing – we wouldn’t know how to cope. Bring on the pandas, I say.

But of course the church isn’t like that – we don’t have a single ‘Bring on the Pandas’ answer. Indeed the church is usually at its worst when it thinks it has found one. We are about faithfulness, truth and consistency … learning to love that which is not obviously lovable … struggling to find meaning and hope in suffering .

So I’m carrying on ‘doing what I do’. Here is a Thought for the Day from last Friday on the spiritual possibilities in retirement. And I spent yesterday with our faithful congregations in Elie and Pittenweem – if you haven’t been to the East Neuk of Fife you should go. Those who write sermons will understand what happened. I wrote out every word of yesterday’s sermon. But it was only when I preached it for the second time that I began to find out what it was about. Such is the nature of Advent.