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.

Always tempting to say that one situation is ‘just like’ another situation – and then to over-press the comparison to make it fit. But I couldn’t help allowing my mind to play with this one.

I recently wrote in Inspires about the way in which the Scottish Episcopal Church is caricatured as the ‘English Church’. The implication, it seems to me writing in my Irish accent, is that we are less Scottish and less ? than others. And when I nudge people to think more bravely about mission I find that our thinking about the Church of Scotland as the national church with the territorial parish system comes into play. We are the small fry .. looking after our people ….

And the parallel … In Ireland, the 1937 Constitution gave a ‘special position’ to the Roman Catholic Church and gave to churches such as the Church of Ireland the status of ‘recognised churches.’ The implication was, presumably, was that to be Protestant or Church of Ireland was somehow to be less Irish and maybe less Christian too .. And through the working of the Ne Temere decree, the minority church grew ever smaller.

A tempting parallel and maybe just maybe there is some truth in it.

We emerge blinking into the light of day after three days of Clergy Conference. It seemed to me to be a good experience – an excellent speaker, a very good turn-out of clergy and a very high level of engagement. And in the midst of all the serious stuff, we even succeeded in writing a hymn/canticle, a creed and a rap based on Ephesians 1 for our final eucharist.

And what makes the relationships interesting for me … It’s the fact that I find myself in a very close working relationship with people whom I know and like and yet hardly know at all … and vice versa. So just occasionally, like people in a marriage, we find that we suddenly don’t understand each other. Sometimes it shows itself when we use the same words but mean very different things by them – sometimes we feel passionately about something because of experience we have had. But it’s different experience and we haven’t had long enough to share it with one another.

None of that’s a problem – in fact it’s enormously stimulating. Probably a bit like it is to live and work using a second language – sometimes missing the nuances and not understanding the jokes. But definitely worth working at.

Strange thing to be confined in a monastery with a group of clergy. We’ve had 41 here – which is a wonderful turn-out for us. Our guest has been Rev Peter Neilson of the ‘Church without Walls’ Project of the Church of Scotland. We’ve been looking at the question of how the church adapts to changed circumstances and how it engages with the very secular society which Scotland now is. But apart from that … the most important thing for us has been to begin to understand that the Kirk is now a church among churches – no longer expecting to have exclusive territorial rights. We therefore are free to move from being a vulnerable minority community to be also a church among churches. That is a big mindset shift for us – but it is good news for our clergy who sometimes feel that they have to ask permission to move outside the circle of ‘our people’.

So it’s off to the Clergy Conference tomorrow. The numbers are very good and some clergy from our link diocese of Meath and Kildare in Ireland are coming to remind me of home. Partly because of how spread out we are across the big spaces of central Scotland, our clergy don’t meet all that often. So I am looking forward to seeing them all together and working through some things as a group.

As well as the ‘main business’, we have a number of bits of policy to talk about – things like how we deal with second marriages, how we work with ordination candidates and how we see our links and partnerships in Ireland and Brazil.