The church is an amazing organisation. Sometimes it seems that churches don’t notice what is happening on their own doorstep .. and then out of a summer afternoon comes Bishop Stephen Than Myint Oo to share a meal with us. He is Bishop of Hpa-an in the Anglican Church of the Province of Myanmar – here because of the commitment of members of our congregation in Kirkaldy who have visited the camps of the refugee Karen people in Thailand. The story unfolds of the struggle of the Karen people over fifty years to achieve independence. Now ever more tightly squeezed by the Burmese government and the Chinese, they live between their homeland in Burma and the camps in Thailand. Bishop Stephen says that it means much to them to be members of the Anglican Communion … the feeling that other people in other places know about their plight and care about their suffering

So I asked the question this morning of Lebanon – same as I did as we watched the submerging of New Orleans.  ‘What do you think is happening to all the pet cats?’  For pets are part of what makes people feel at home.  And to be evacuated without ….   Robert Fisk in this morning’s Independent crisply calls the evacuation of British and other nationals ‘Munich not Dunkirk’.

All my life, I have listened to people saying that they must ‘root out the terrorists from our midst’.  It is always nonsense at best and political laziness at worst.  In one sense, terrorists should be ignored – for they have chosen to step outside the norms of political dialogue and humane behaviour.  The fact that they choose to use violence should not give them any more weight than anybody else.  But their existence should also be taken seriously because they do not come from Mars.  They arise because there is an unresolved cause which they are able to exploit and there is a civilian population which may not agree with their methods but sympathises with their aims.  The civilian population, of course, needs to be protected and the processes of civilised society need to be safeguarded.  But this surrogate punishment of the civilian population of Lebanon, the destruction of its fragile democracy is appalling.  And the apparent lack of political leadership in bringing the suffering to an end is dreadful.  Munich not Dunkirk.  I agree.

I’m hoping to scuttle back to the cool of Perthshire this evening when the temperature begins to fall.  For all my reservations about conferences, this one [CTBI Stewardship Network] has been very good.  And I’ve plugged into a network of really useful contacts across Scotland, the north of England and the Church in Wales.

It still comes down to the basics – giving as an expression of thanksgiving and spiritual commitment.  But the quality and sophistication of the web-based materials which has been developed in the Grace of Giving Programme in Liverpool and in Chichester are very impressive.  And people are very open about sharing and allowing others to use what they have developed.  So I’m much more hopeful about our ‘Year of Stewardship’ in the SEC.  Just don’t ask when it begins, when it ends or how long it lasts.

I’ve been getting a bit better at the cycling these last few weeks. So today I took the opportunity of unfurling the Brompton from the back of the car and heading off from Carlisle along the Hadrian’s Wall Cycle Way – towards Brampton. The heat was ferocious – the Roman soldiers would have felt quite at home – and the tar was melting. Alas – while I had brought the episcopal padded cycling shorts with me, I forgot to put them on under my everyday shorts.  But I did about ten miles each way with a restorative pint at the mid point. Encouraging to see how many other people were cycling too – nice country lanes with plenty of shade.

These last few days, I have been reading with horror about Israel/Lebanon. I read the front page of the Independent this morning with disappointment if not surprise – it gives a verbatim record of a casual conversation between George Bush and Tony Blair at the G8 Summit. Ought we not to expect better of our leaders than half formed and half-informed conversation laced with vulgarity?

In just war terms, the only possible response to Israel’s actions is surely to say that they are ‘disproportionate’.  Israel must have by far the strongest military resources in the region – but its mindset is perpetually that of insecurity and vulnerability.  It is a mystery why those – whether Israeli’s or Ulster Protestants – who should feel secure act as if they were a vulnerable and oppressed group.

Always regret signing up to go to Conferences. Never more so than today when I have to leave this rural idyll at Blogstead Episcopi to go to a Conference in Carlisle. The subject is Stewardship – which is softly, softly, church-speak for money. I’m going because it is the best way of getting up to speed on today’s resources and getting the network contacts that I need. What this is really about is encouraging people to see financial commitment as just one expression of their spiritual commitment. I’m a veteran of many programmes like this in parish life. Mostly they were very encouraging. But they also provided an opportunity for anybody who wanted to complain about anything – the church heating/the Rector losing his hair/hymns sung too fast/hymns sung too slow/failure of the parish to defend the constitutional position of Northern Ireland, etc – to have a go. As if one hadn’t heard it all zillions of times before. Here things are different. What needs to be nudged here, I think, is the ‘fund-raising’ mindset – for there is a world of difference between fundraising and giving. Time to stop – because I can already hear people preparing to get their retaliation in early ‘Of course, this new bishop is only interested in money’ Actually he is interested in sitting under a panama hat in his back garden on a sunny day and not going to Carlisle

Spent this morning at a ceremony in Forfar at which the Freedom of Angus was conferred on the Black Watch.  I’m always struck by how alike church and army are – same sense of timelessness, same pecking order, same arcane rituals …  What interested me today was what I assume was the subtext – marking the [painful] change in the status of the Scottish Regiments under which they are all now part of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.  In the period before I moved here, I tried to inform myself about a number of local issues – so I connected myself to the Scottish Regiments website.  And in there I found fairly unpleasant expressions of their bereavement and loss of identity – very familiar to me from my experience of Northern Ireland.  So today was a piece of well-managed ritual which helped people to move on and accept that the new future doesn’t wipe out what they valued about the past.  I wandered amongst the veterans afterwards and we talked about their service in Northern Ireland in the early years of the troubles – dreadful times but, I suspect, not nearly as dreadful as Iraq today.

Now that Frozenweb’s geeks have revived my blogging corpse, I am faced with the daily space again. As you may have noticed, I have no problem talking about nothing in particular on a daily basis – indeed, talking about myself in the presence of others is probably what most of us like doing and what the blog medium provides.
So a quick update on the major issues while I play myself back in. Popppesja is googling ‘house martin’ to find out when their migratory patterns will take them far, far, away from here. While she takes a deep interest in the local bird life, she has been reduced to hiding from them under the patio table because they swoop on her constantly …

We had an Institution last night in Cupar, Fife, when Anne arrived as the new Rector. Great hope, optimism and joy all round, after a long vacancy. If you haven’t been to Cupar, it is a beautiful small town in the middle of Fife. The drive home last night – heading west towards the red sky and the setting sun [10.15 pm] was extraordinary.

For the rest, while Adrienne is kind enough to say that she finds my blog funny – I hope it is the right bits that she finds funny – life out here at Blogstead Episcopi has a slight feel of trench warfare about it at present. But, after all, are bishops not there to resolve the unresolvable, reconcile the irreconcilable and plumb the unfathomable?

So now I have restarted, I’ll add something a bit more serious later on.

Frozenweb which hosts this blog seems to have been affected by global warming these last few days.  But no matter.  Click on the link ‘Biskupi Blog’ on the right of the screen and you will find the Scottish Episcopal Church’s outreach into Eastern Europe.  Having peaked at 3% of the churchgoing population in Scotland, we’ve decided that our brand of liberal catholic churchmanship will go down a storm in Poland.  Faith and Order Boards are being set up throughout Poland and we are looking for the Polish translation for Local Collaborative Ministry.  We expect shortly to establish the first fan club for Poppesja as her furry fame extends to the east.

Interested today that Sunday trading is not to be extended further.  The man from Ikea seemed disappointed.  I have sympathy with the issue of staff having freedom of conscience about working on Sunday – but, for the rest, I suspect that this is an issue where people have simply voted with their credit cards.  The only reasons for opposing it seem to be residual sabbatarianism and some nostalgia about lost patterns of family life.  Locking up Ikea on Sunday morning is unlikely to drive people towards churches for spiritual therapy because they can’t have retail therapy.  The churches need to find other ways and other times of involving people.

Which allows me to sashay neatly towards ‘Decluttering – a Spirituality of Less’ by Andrew Barton which he kindly sent me.  Andrew inserts the occasional comment here – including the nicely-aimed one about Ikea selling flat-pack mitres.  This is Grove Booklet S97 and an interesting examination of modern society, consumerism and decluttering as ‘a process of contemporary life that can be employed in order that our relationship with God be more apparent to those around’  I found his description of the consumer society interesting – he was too early for the sterling consumerist performance of the WAG’s at the World Cup.  I can recommend it.

Meanwhile I find myself storing up memorable phrases which pass my way in Perthshire as they did in Portadown.  The accents of course are very different – in rural Perthshire they tend to be a bit patrician and parade ground.  Two gems which I particularly enjoyed were, ‘It was around the time he rebuilt the Tiger Moth’ and ‘It’s a snake-barked hickory.  I grew it from a nut’  I am, of course, in trouble myself.  Like most musical people, I tend to pick up accents.  So I am having to watch myself – my ‘a’s are beginning to lengthen as in Glenaaaamond.  I hope that my stay in Donegal in August will retune me.