What goes around ..

Went to Edinburgh to meet somebody today.  Arrived on time – just as he was arriving equally punctually at our office in Perth.  Fortunately we managed to meet at the half-way point on the return journey.  Good scones at Dobbies Nursery in Kinross.

And they were lifting potatoes in the dark on the way to Forfar tonight.  Amazing

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

Another Rant

I try to pick inanimate targets.  This time it’s the Exit sign in the Long Stay Car Park at Edinburgh Airport.  However I interpret it, I always get it wrong and end up in a cul de sac.  Plane was late last night so it was midnight when I was trying to get out.  The pay stations weren’t working so I went to the Office and, to my surprise, was friendly and sympathetic to the staff member there.  Perhaps it’s since Mark began working in a Call Centre?  Anyway, he looked at me and said, ‘All I can do for you is to let you out free.’   Next stop the Promised Land.

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

Getting it Together

Wonderful balance in my day today.  Led a Quiet Morning for members of our Spirituality Group this morning – all silence and prayer – very good for me and I fitted in a little snooze as well.  And this afternoon we had a meeting of our Diocesan Review Group.  It’s going very well.  Members of the group have been out meeting clergy and people in our congregations.  We have statistics, comment, feedback of all kinds and we’re beginning to shape a stragegy for the future.  The risk, of course, is that we organise and strategize so that there is no space for the Spirit to do its stuff.  Now if we could just get the two groups together ….

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

Religious insignia

Well I hope I get my pectoral cross through the airport security tonight – since the display of religious symbols is becoming such a huge political issue.  One has to be careful – India Knight in today’s Sunday Times suggests that Moslems are becoming the ‘new Jews’ and that the political sensitivity about dress and veils is part of a growing anti-Islamic feeling in society.  There is, of course, a legitimate and honourable argument about religious freedom – and religious groups which feel under pressure will naturally tend either to vanish out of sight in order not to draw attention to themselves or will do the opposite -asserting ever more strongly their identity and individuality.  Out of my reading and exploring of the nature of sectarianism in Ireland, I find myself unhappy when strong expressions of religious identity become the bearer or the marker of other strands of cultural and political identity.  I have no problem with strong and confident expressions of religious belonging – provided that they come with strong messages about including and respecting other strongly-held expressions of belonging.  But then of course you run into the difficulty which I used to run into in my parish.  I used to risk saying, ‘I don’t think I would be happy to send my child to the Free Presybterian Sunday School’ [Ian Paisley’s Church].  To which parishioner would reply, ‘Sure they are all the same anyway – isn’t that what you are always saying?’

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

Agreement

Well – it looks as if I shouldn’t have been so pessimistic about the Northern Ireland talks.  There wasn’t much of a ‘feel good’ factor about it all – but at least there is some agreement or an agreement to agree some time in the future.  And then one says, ‘If they could agree that today, why couldn’t they have agreed it five years ago or ten or twenty …?’

But then it isn’t as simple as that.  Nor are our difficulties within the Anglican Communion.  I can see all the same tendencies – difference tends to move further apart and the centre is eroded; dialogue becomes difficult because it is fraught with misunderstanding.  I suspect that, in the short terms, we shall hold together only if we make a decision to do so – regardless of the difficulties.

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

End Game

I find it rather ironic that the final round – no, surely not the final round – of the Northern Ireland negotiations should be taking place just up the road from here in St Andrews.  One can only hope and pray that this time there will be agreement.  It’s hard to understand the enduring nature of this conflict – in its present phase, it began when I was 18.  One thinks of Churchill’s ‘dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone’ speech in 1922.  Reflecting on the First World War, he said of Ireland that, ‘the integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions which has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world.’

If there is to be agreement this week, the movement which will have made it possible will have come about mainly through the pressure of events which have been inexorably leading towards a settlement.  The body language and other language of the politicians certainly gives one little cause for hope.  They carry to the table all the anger and hurt of the long years of violence.

I suppose it has to be that way.  It would be heartening to hear even a little of the insights of Christian faith – some ‘swords into ploughshares’ language or some hope of healing and reconciliation.  But this is real life and it will be enough for most of the people of Northern Ireland to see a pragmatic agreement which makes it possible for people of different traditions to share the same space with dignity and respect and which pushes the possibility of a return to violence even further away.  The healing will come later.

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

Glad to be home

After four days in Ireland with the Celtic Bishops – and the last three days in Dunblane with our own Scottish Bishops – I have now emerged blinking into the sunlight.  Well, actually, into a torrential downpour.  Back in the parish, when – as they say – I felt that I was ‘losing the run of myself’ I would go out and do some visiting.  Just ordinary, everyday people.  Time spent with people would in some way bring me some healing and re-integration.  Church life can be immensely stimulating and even fun.  But it carries dizzying levels of incoherence – so much so that one goes home feeling that we have moored alongside problems for a while without doing very much to solve them

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

With the YMCA

YMCA Reflection 7.10.06.doc

I was asked to do a short reflection at the start of the YMCA’s AGM in Perth today.  I’ve always had a soft spot for the YM – in Northern Ireland, they were taking steps to leave the sectarianism behind long before that became fashionable.  Certainly what I saw today was very impressive

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry

Back Home

Home at last – and glad to be back.  Just three days of bishops’ meeting to survive next week and then I might get the grass cut.  We did a flying visit to Donegal to sort out the aftermath of the great explosion – a visit enlivened by a young dog which nipped into the porch and removed one of Alison’s shoes while she was reviving her pot plants.  When she retrieved the [by now] mangled remains from the neighbour’s patio, she got the Peter Sellers ‘not my dog’ response.  Welcome to the new Ireland.

I’ve been reading Ben Elton’s ‘The First Casualty’ – about a man who declines to fight in the First World War because it is illogical.  Everybody else knows that it is illogical and hopeless but they can’t break loose from it.  Now when did I ever hear about anything like that before?

Published
Categorised as Blog Entry