Being here before #pisky

Biagini

I went to Stirling University this morning for a lecture by Professor Eugenio Biagini of Cambridge University who was speaking about my grandfather, Canon Ernest Bateman. It is a very strange thing to find people making a study of your ancestors like this. I remember Ernest as elderly, cheerful, a constant reader, an every Monday golfer with his clerical friends, very deaf – and because of his deafness a perpetual clutch-slipper and generally terrifying driver. And he remarried at the age of 82. It turns out that the eleven boxes of his sermons which are in the Church of Ireland’s library in Dublin together with his press articles and letters have become a major source for those who want to research the story of the Southern Irish Protestants – particularly in the period after Partition when they could no longer be British and were being pushed very hard by a triumphalist Catholic church.

It was a time when that community tended to be in ‘keep your head down’ mode – for fear that they might invite mistreatment as a minority. It seems that Ernest Bateman did not know about those rules.

I’ve been aware of Professor Biagini’s work for a while. While my mother was still alive, I went to Dublin with her and we read the sermons together. It was an extraordinary experience – for her to hear this voice again and for me to begin to grasp its significance and the parallels to my own experiences at that time in Northern Ireland. Those parallels left me feeling that ‘I have been here before’ – and that applies at least as much to the issues which I deal with in Scotland.

Canon Dom Ind and I sat and listened this morning as the issues unfolded in elegant academic discourse. The most obvious parallel was to the ‘English Church’ tag used of the Piskies, The Irish parallel was West Brit and we heard about the journey in which Ernest tried to express an Irishness which was not nationalistic. And I think I began to understand myself a bit better – why I do what I do and say what I say.

One piece of information was new to me – that when Eamon DeValera’s [he subsequently became President] son was killed in a riding accident in the Phoenix Park, the Garda wanted to bring a priest when they went to break the news. Ernest was the most close at hand and they brought him – the foundation of a subsequent close relationship between them.

And so it goes on. Professor Biagini now wants to read the 50 hard back notebooks of Ernest’s son my Uncle Artie’s diaries. They are written in a microscopic script. My test drillings have revealed that its going to be tough to get much out of them but time will tell. Artie worked on the sports page of the Irish Independent, was a Church of Ireland Lay Reader and had a turbulent relationship with the church in general and bishops in particular.d

Meanwhile my own biographers can make what they can of this blog, the sermons and the 80000 emails ….

General Synod – Primus’ Charge #pisky

Our General Synod ended on Saturday – and then I went off to Belfast to preach at St George’s Parish Church

So I haven’t really had time to reflect on all that happened.

For a start, I wanted to share the Primus Charge in which I tried to set the scene for what followed.

Then there were many things which one would just straightforwardly welcome. Synod was addressed by some of the most capable and articulate young adults that one could possibly hope to meet. We are continuing to see extraordinarily rapid development in the work of the Scottish Episcopal Institute which is training the next generation of clergy and Lay Readers – and growth in our number of ordinands combined with a fall in the average age. We have many real challenges but we’ll find a way.

Meanwhile, I need to come back to the issues around the proposed alteration to our Marriage Canon and the First Reading. I think that many Synod members – for quite a few spoke to me about it – felt that in the way we had addressed this question something very significant had happened. I’ll come back to that shortly. It’s a question about what kind of church we now feel ourselves to be. And I need also to address the related question of where we are in our relationship with the Anglican Communion. So a little more thinking time …

Parish Church of St George, Belfast #pisky

St George's Belfast picture

On Sunday, I found myself back in the Parish Church of St George as part of their 200th Anniversary celebrations. I don’t do much of going back to where I came from – even though those who know me are used to the fairly constant internal dialogue which goes on in my mind. I joined the choir here as a teenager in 1967 – my father was Secretary of the Vestry for a long time – and the parish lived through the bombing campaign in central Belfast. The church was constantly and seriously damaged and they just kept on going.

It’s an interesting and unusual place mainly because it is one of the very few churches of catholic churchmanship in the Church of Ireland in Northern Ireland. In 1967, I was there for the music and the music kept some kind of faith flickering. But in God’s greater economy, it was obviously a preparation for my future appearances at All Saints, St Andrews.

I find it quite difficult to make the various connections in these circumstances.But this is my attempt in the sermon

The last media contact in the midst of Friday’s meeting of General Synod came from BBC Radio Ulster looking for an interview for their Sunday Sequence programme. So I ended up in their studio in Belfast on Sunday morning attempting to explain what our General Synod had decided. That in itself was interesting because Northern Ireland is the only part of the British Isles where same-sex marriage is not legal. I watched Roisin Mcauley’s eyes widen as I explained what we had decided.

Confirmation at Holy Trinity, Dunfermline #pisky

Confirmation at HT

Last Sunday – Trinity Sunday – was the Patronal Festival for our congregation at Holy Trinity, Dunfermline. But more important than just the 125th Anniversary was the Confirmation Service and a church full … Lots of people, a great diversity of age groups and many children.

I read a comment recently to the effect that the current members of our College of Bishops are ‘positive about Confirmation’ or something similar. I certainly see it like that. Confirmation as a ‘rite of passage’ has been fading – although I think that there is real value in focusing the minds and hearts of young people on Christian faith at critical moments in their growth. So we have some of that – but also more of adults to come at all sorts of times in their lives to make a fresh commitment of faith.

Commitment is not as obvious today as it was formerly. All sorts of organisations find that – political parties and voluntary organisations all find it hard to get people to ‘sign up’. I used to say that it was a challenge of congregational life to help people to move from being ‘welcome visitors’ to being ‘members of the family’. Confirmation – which we sometimes call the ‘Affirmation of Baptismal Vows’ – provides an opportunity for people who have found themselves on a journey of faith to make a specific commitment. I think that is helpful to them and encouraging for the congregation – and it is a real pleasure and privilege for me to be part of it.

Not in God’s name #pisky

Sacks

It was a great experience to go to the Lecture given by this year’s Templeton Prize Winner, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, in St Andrews University.

‘Not in God’s Name’ is of course a subject which matters to me – since I spent much of my life living with degrees of religiously-motivated violence. The lecture was full of the almost throwaway lines which are entirely memorable – ‘wars are won with weapons – peace is won with ideas’ I’m working my way through the book at present. He has an extraordinary ability to encapsulate in a very few words the biggest changes in human society. And he provides the most comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of anti-Semitism which you could imagine – that it is not so much about the Jews as a sign that a society is about to break apart.

I was glad to be there .. I should have put this up sooner!

Churchless Christians #pisky

I’m getting into Steve Aisthorpe’s book, ‘The Invisible Church – Learning from the experience of religionless Christians’

It is of course an alluring prospect – that many of those who may have quietly walked away from the churches or not walked into them in the first place may carry faith which they choose not to express in membership of a congregation; that decline is ‘apparent’.  So we might see our challenges as being as much about belonging as about believing.

There is careful research here – rather than wishful thinking.  But I’ll look forward to exploring the obvious questions such as: is membership of the visible community of faith essential to Christian belief and practice; and how should churches respond to churchless faith.

Confirmation at Glenalmond

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I always enjoy the Confirmation Service at Glenalmond. It’s partly the contact with a group of young people, of course. But it’s also the opportunity of trying to catch and hold the interest of the very diverse congregation – their parents and godparents, uncles and aunts, grandparents and friends. All of those people are there in support – so it’s an opportunity of trying to describe faith in an attractive way.

This kind of Confirmation Service is rare today. I think it was 26 – or was it 27 – young people. More often now, it’s small numbers and diverse ages. Some teenagers – but also adults of every agegroup. It’s people who have decided that this is their way of marking a fresh beginning in discipleship and sometimes a new start in a new community of faith. The stories which lie behind that are always both important and interesting. It seems to me that one of the most important things we can do is to give people the opportunity of marking that new start – or staging post in their journey of faith

So on Friday, we came together in the beautiful Chapel in Glenalmond College – and I hope it was a memorable moment for all of this.

And this is what I said

Visiting Samye Ling.  #pisky


Photos: At the entrance to Samye Ling; the Temple; with Rt Revd John Chalmers, former Moderator and Principal Clerk of the Church of Scotland.

I spent yesterday with the Religious Leaders Forum at Kagyu Samye Ling Monastery and Tibetan Centre.  This was part of the work of Interfaith Scotland – the kind of meeting which you approach feeling that there are lots of other things you might be doing but go away glad that you went.

Scotland is a big country – so it was 110 miles due south on the twisty roads of the Borders and 140 miles home on the M74 and the A9.  The monastery is extraordinary – a magnificent temple, a conference centre and lots more – all built to the very highest standards.  I suppose it’s the kind of thing you could do if you were able to concentrate all your resources in one place and weren’t trying to sustain a ‘branch network’.  Perhaps we should look for a site near the Ferrytoll or Stirling

The meeting was interesting too.  In this particular interfaith gathering we seem to have reached the point where difficult conversations seem to happen – and what we share is articulate and incisive.  So we talked of many things – particularly of radicalisation and of anti-semitism.

Then we welcomed a group of children from Lincluden Primary School.  They were great and asked us killer questions like ‘How do people worship and why do they worship?’ and ‘Do all religions have religious leaders and why do they have them?’.  A session with staff from the Scottish Government on ‘Getting it right for every child’ and a bit of business and we were done.

So an interesting and encouraging day – some very impressive leadership now in place in the faith communities and all sorts of interesting things are possible