Gary's Rather Sad Blog

St Paul (Deptford High St) SE8

2011-06-12T00:06:00.000+01:00

Described by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England as "One of London's finest Baroque buildings", and by John Betjeman as "a pearl in the heart of Deptford", St Paul's was built by Thomas Archer 1712-30 as one of the fifty new "Commissioners' Churches". Tablets commemorate John Harrison, who was the founder of, and first surgeon at, the London Hospital, Dr Charles Burney brother of Fanny Burney, the novelist, and a delightful inscription recalling a midwife, Margaret Hawtrees: "She was an indulgent mother, and the best of wives. She brought into this world more than three thousand lives."
The church's acknowledged contribution to the community in a deprived area, as well as its architectural merit, earned it a donation of £50,000 from local authorities which, added to a further £50,000 privately raised, enabled substantial restoration work to be carried out 1975-6. A quarter of a century later, in 2000, the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded St Paul's the largest grant accorded to a parish church, £2,777,000. Together with another smaller grant from English Heritage, this funded a yet more ambitious restoration project which was completed in 2004. St Paul's has long had a good claim to be considered one of the finest parish churches in London. Few could now argue.

From the Encyclopedia of London, p 806.

The story of the Stones

2010-09-17T20:56:00.001+01:00

This is a Twitter discussion that I couldn't possibly answer in 140 characters...

In discussing the stones of Stonehenge or Avebury you have to remember there are two broad categories:

The Sarsens are the big ones. They are made from rock-hard sandstone. The sandstone formed in depressions in the chalk which forms the downs of the Salisbury Plain, and surrounding areas. You can see them as far as apart as Stonehenge and Avebury. They naturally lay across the downs like lumpy sheep, hence the nickname "gray wethers". And they lay there because they're harder than chalk so don't erode with the bedrock. They're naturally pretty square so just need a bit of working (ie hundreds of hours pummelling with sarsen mallets) to smooth them off.

The Bluestones are the little ones. They are igneous rocks such as spotted dolerite and they originate from Presceli in Wales. Whether they were dragged by teams of Neolithic navvies all the way to Wiltshire, or whether they were dumped on the Wiltshire hills by glacial action - well, that's the question that archaeologists are still trying to work out. The Presceli hills already look like a natural quarry even without human intervention.

Another new blog

2010-09-07T21:01:00.000+01:00

Yeah, I thought I'd done all I could in that format with Drayton. So I hope I know when to stop.

So I hope a big welcome to Seeing the Wood for the Trees. Probably going to be a bit more Beaker-esque, I suspect.

Funny thing, these days I only use this blog to advertise other ones. Not sure what it says about the "real" me... Maybe a touch of the Mike Yarwoods.

Places you wouldn't want to be on holiday when having a baby

2010-08-25T22:37:00.000+01:00

Hot on the news that the Camerons have given their new baby the name Endellion, after the place in Cornwall - places you wouldn't want to name your daughter after:

Essex
Dudley
Loose
Pity Me
Dingley
Booze
Glasgow
Westward Ho!
Garboldisham
Frisby-on-the-Wreake
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

TEN FAMOUS BELGIANS

2010-08-21T20:33:00.000+01:00

1 In 1846, this famous belgian invented a musical instrument that combined the fingering of the oboe with the single reed of the clarinet. The instrument has been popular with wind bands and rock-and-roll groups ever since. Who was he?

2 Born on 17 June 1945, this cyclist had the nickname "the Cannibal". He won the Tour de France 5 times, including 1969 when he won the tour, and was the King of the Mountains. Who is he?

3 Roger Jouret was born in Brussels. In 1977 he hit the charts worldwide with "Ca Plane Pour Moi". What was his stage name?

4 Born in 1898 in Lessines, this Belgian artist was one of the leaders of surrealism. Almost all of his paintings feature some sort of visual paradox, a restless blue sky with a hole in it, a human body with a the head of a fish, a hat suspended in mid-air.

5 Gerhard Kremer was born in 1512. He was the greatest cartographer at the height of the exploration of the world. His method of projecting maps so that lines of latitude and longitude are at right angles, is known by his Latin name - which was?

6 Born in Belgium of a Dutch mother and a British father, this actress starred in War and Peace, and Breakfast at Tiffanny's. She spent the lastyears of her life working for third-world children, and was special ambassador for Unicef. Who was she?

7 By what name was the cartoonist Georges Remi better known?

8 Born on 1 January 1945 in Brussels, this racing driver won 8 Grand Prix races, but is best known for winning the Le Mans 24 Hours three times running. Who is he?

9 Born in a gypsy caravan in 1910, this Belgian musician made his only tour in 1946, with Duke Ellington's band. He created a so-called "two-finger" method of playing the guitar, so as to deal with the limitations caused by his disfigured left hand. He played with Stephan Grappelli, in the Hot Club Quintet in a Parisian nightclub. Who is he?

10 Finally, the inevitable detective question….. Born in Liege in 1903, this Belgian writer was immensely popular throughout the world. Who was the creator of Inspector Maigret?

1 - Adolphe Sax

2 - Eddie Merckx

3 - Plastic Bertrand

4 - Rene Magritte

5 - Mercator

6 - Audrey Hepburn

7 - Herge

8 - Jacky Ickx

9 - Django Reinhardt

10 - Georges Simenon

On spontaneity

2010-08-01T17:18:00.000+01:00

In the event, it seemed to be quite a nice All Age Service this morning.

Though my fat thumbs on the laptop made my projection of the Gospel reading a little more unpredictable than normal.

I set the congregation a couple of challenges in spontaneity. The first was by trying to get involvement in the sermon. Ooh that was tricky, and I probably made that harder than I had to.
But the second thing I did was to invite people, while we sang a chorus, to come up and write their prayers on pieces of paper which I could then collect together into the intercessions.

Beautifully written short prayers, which I sorted into an order that took us from thanks to God for his blessings, through to prayers for the hungry and those needing healing. Beautiful.

We also gave thanks for a Hovis "Best of Both", which seemed to fit nicely into the Rich Fool and the Lammastide nature of today.

And if you want to see an alternative sermon on the Rich Fool and his Barns - Drayton's got some words of wisdom.

Limited Creativity

2010-07-30T22:16:00.000+01:00

Looking back on the last few month's blogging, I find something interesting. Which is that when I wasn't posting any Eileen blogs, I posted quite a lot here. But when I started posting Eileen again, I stopped here. And then when Drayton starting taking over, Eileen became harder.
So I am working out Gary's Rule of Blogging, which states that I can only maintain enough creativity for work, my ministry and one blog at a time. Any more and my head starts spinning.

So nothing original here, I'm afraid. My creativity has gone elsewhere. Again.

Independent Fundamentalist Baptists

2010-07-17T08:36:00.002+01:00

Now here's a thing.

I've started a new blog, in case you hadn't noticed. It's called "My Gospel, Right or Wrong" and it's the further adventures of Drayton Parslow. Drayton, in case you don't remember, don't care or never knew in the first place, was second only to Hnaef as deputy to Archdruid Eileen. For reasons entirely unconnected to her paranoia, Eileen was convinced that Drayton was constantly plotting against her, and as a result Drayton suffered from a lot of casual violence. With Eileen safely packed away in 19th century Wessex, I suddenly realised I had a hole in my life by not writing funny stuff about modern church life. Eileen's interest in making money was matched only by her contempt for the people to whom she ministered, so I thought it might be amusing to have a dedicated, totally committed church leader whose poor people skills and utter doctrinal certainty made him a disaster. Drayton was the obvious candidate, so he was moved to the Leicestershire village of Frisby-on-Soar* and made a pastor.
But even in the Beaker world, where chapels are swallowed by black holes and choirs are floated out of the manor by filling their robes with helium, I couldn't just make Drayton an archdeacon, or even a curate or a Methodist presbyter. We have to go through years of selection and panels and training to do that. So I needed a congregation that would value dedication over academic qualification, and might even scorn Theological courses and schools. So I went for a congregationalist type of church. And since most child-baptising Congregationalist churches are now URC, and insist on training their ministers, I made it a baptist church. So Frisby Independent Baptist Church was formed. And Drayton's first musings arrived on the Interweb on Monday 5 July.
Note the date. Because on 4 July, Clayboy posted on an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church that was opening in his neck of the woods. And you will notice that I commented - on the 6th, because I don't read every blog every day - on the coincidence.
Now, I'd never heard of Independent Fundamental(ist) Baptist churches. And the co-incidence that I'd just invented the FIB as opposed to the IFB was lost on me. But this was still only the second day of my new blog, the time when you go around adding blog rolls. And my tradition on "fantasy" blogs is to link to blogs that are "interesting" in the wider sense of the word, rather than only blogs I agree with. So I did some googling, and found Stuff Fundies Like, which appeared to be an amusing take on the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Churches of the US. Seemed interesting, and that fits the criteria, so I linked.
Presumably I sent some traffic there, as the owner noticed and very kindly linked back to me. Simon Robinson pointed this out to me, and that prompted me to look at the stats. To find that I had (as of now, nearly three days after the post) hundreds of visits, nearly all from that one site. Including one person who seems to be totally devoid of irony [skip the text if you like - just head down to the comment from Mr Curry].
Now, I can see a lot of pain from the visitors - people who've been hurt by a movement of which I knew, until Thursday evening, next to nothing. We in England may laugh at American fundamentalists, but we normally laugh at the snake-oil salesmen and televangelists and snake-handlers - we don't think of them as having groupings and alignments and real victims. We hear about their financial and sex scandals, but we don't categorise them.
Now, Drayton is a monster and a pastoral disaster. But he's not these things because he's an Independent Baptist. He's these things because he's an idiot and totally devoid in irony and self-awareness. That is all. But I guess if nothing else, the response I've had to Drayton is proof that idiocy and religious incompetence are widespread human phenomena. I personally regard fundamentalism as a fear-response to uncertainty, and so I can see why something so utterly illogical and unscientific - and unbiblical, in my opinion - still attracts even in these twenty-first century days - or maybe even more so. The world is hard and complicated, faith is always something that is founded on things we don't see, and don't even understand. How much easier to read your faith off a play-sheet, and read the entire Bible as if "God's Truth" were a single genre.

*Named in honour of the real villages of Frisby-by-Gaulby and Frisby-on-the-Wreake. Frisby's just such a great placename!

The decline and fall of Christian Blogging...

2010-07-06T23:30:00.000+01:00

Church Mouse regrets the decline in Christian Blogging. Kindly, but kind-of-incorrectly, he cites the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley as joining David Keen's blog in going into oblivion. But 'tis not true, of course. Not only has Eileen re-emerged in 19th century Wessex, it would appear that Drayton Parslow is getting busy as well.

Of course, in David Keen's case it's a great shame for many of us. But hopefully not for the good Revd David himself, who has brightened and illuminated my days on many occasions, and realised the Beaker Folk were meant to be funny while members of a certain theological college were still praying for Eileen's soul.

Twitter and Trinity

2010-07-03T10:03:00.003+01:00

I'm a self-supporting minister. I spend 40-odd hours at work each week, and some more driving there and back. I have a young family I must spend time with. I therefore spend very little time networking with other clergy, So it has occasionally been suggested that I may feel slightly isolated in my ministry and development.

And it's true that, so far, I have made precisely half of one CME training session in the last two years. And I missed the new bishop's visit to the deanery chapter meeting. Partly because it was held at lunchtime on a workday, and partly because I seem to be sufficiently invisible that nobody knows who I am, or at least the person who does the inviting doesn't know I exist. So maybe viewed from a local anglican clergyperson's outlook I'm a little isolated. Although I have regular meetings with my Incumbent and of course share in worship and the life of the parish and carry out whatever parochial duties are compatible with one evening a week.

But the odd thing is that I don't feel isolated at all. Part of this may be to do with my own nature, which is quite self-sufficient. But one other reason for this I've got to put down to Social Networking. Because in fact I've got literally dozens of clergy - and other Christians - and Unitarians, oddly, but whom I'm grateful for - and non-Christians with whom I keep in regular touch, who I can bounce things off and discuss with - in different ways and in appropriate ways.

Now it's important to bear in mind one thing - which is that if I'm interested in really serious personal matters that I need to sort out, I talk to my wife and/or friends, and in real life not on Facebook or IM. Regardless of whether the friend is also on some social media or another. Because as well as being a fairly self-contained person I'm aware of the dangers out there of snoopers and what have you and I don't want the deeper details of life leaking out anywhere.

But for the normal, whirl-of-life, who's burying someone, who's confirming people, who's struggling with a sermon, who's angry about the treatment of women or animals or asylum seekers , who's got a big service coming up or an archdeacon's visitation - I'm really glad to see all that going on. And I'm always happy to share a fairly flippant remark to (try to) help someone else's struggle for truth. When people tell me that Twitter's just a load of people informing us that they're sitting on the bus or whatever - well, yes, some of it's that. But then that's part of life as well.

So I'm grateful for Twitter and Blogger and Facebook, which although they overlap do very different things. I'll be honest, if all my friends were on Twitter I'd never use Facebook again, as I'm not interested in how they're doing in Bejewelled Blitz, or how many kittens they've saved in the "Blazing Kitten Farm" game or how their cow is doing in Cowville. Just want to know that they're well, or know if they're not, and what they've got coming up next.
Because it's the communication that seems to matter to me, not the silly games*. And in the end for most of us that's what matters. And I think that's because we're made in the Image of God.
No.

Not that Image of God.

More like this Image of God**. An image of God where God is there in Threeness.

That Threeness is really important.

Just God and Adam*** didn't really work. Adam on his own was incomplete - even with the glories of the eternal and incomparable God before him. Adam needed someone else. And God found the answer for him. Obviously, first he tried all the animals of the field. But it turned out Adam wasn't some primaeval cat-person prototype. It might have been a nice idea, that he could have lived in his hut or wherever Adam was living, surrounded by dogs and anteaters and badgers and all the other friendly folk o' the forest, but they weren't good enough. Adam needed his own kind. A human being.

"But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said,
"This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called 'woman',
for she was taken out of man."

Adam needs someone to love. He needs someone to talk to. He needs to share things - his thoughts and his dreams and the fact that after working in the fields clearing all those weeds that just sprung up, he's now suffering from a nasty case of nettle rash.

And Adam and Eve can't stop there. Next thing you know there's Cain, and Abel and after the first human relationship breakdown (after all, Adam and Eve can't really argue about his mother's influence over him and how she's never really let him grow up, can they) when Abel's dead and Cain's run away they know the grief of broken relationship and then Seth comes along, and Seth and Cain go off and find wives in circumstances that are never adequately explored. And the web of human relationships goes on and spreads out. And through love, and sex, and marriage - and through talking, and sharing, and dreaming - the web of humanity brings itself together again and again and again. If you drew out the chart of human relationship, it wouldn't be an ever-expanding tree like an evolutionary diagram. It would be a web - constantly re-connecting its independent threads, unable to hold unless each thread touches many other threads, which in their turn touch many others. Holding the human race - lover and loved, child and parent, friend and friend - together from the first day to the last.

We are empty without human contact. Even with a wonderful relationship with God we cry out for a companion, a help-meet, an ally, an associate, a loved one, a child. Because we're made in the Image of God. The God who doesn't come in a self-contained, perfectly packaged, hermetically sealed One. Who isn't self-sufficient as One on His Own. Who in his own nature comes as an open, loving, relational Three. Where Father loves Son and Son loves Father, and the love of Father and Son is Godself as Spirit - a love that's not even locked between Two, but shared out to Three and then out to the many beyond the Godhead.

We increasingly live in self-sufficient boxes. Our houses are, increasingly, detached. We live further from the shops than we used to, so we travel in sealed boxes to get there. The other people that we meet on the route are also in sealed boxes. So we assume they're not so human, and can be abused for their stupidity and lack of knowledge of the rules of the road. Sometimes the most real people we can meet are those projected to us through Big Brother, or the tabloid newspapers or - the Lord preserve us - celebrity magazines. 2-dimensional people - if you're lucky - that we relate with one-way.

But we cry out for the relationships we can share. We were told that we'd all increasingly become couch potatos, absorbing whatever content the all-powerful, all-knowing Companies provided to us. But the minute we had it, we grabbed the Net and starting pushing content the other way. People started sharing their lives on YouTube, through Blogs, through Facebook. OK, some of their lives aren't very interesting to us. Facebook pictures of people standing in pubs are less interesting than being in the pubs with friends ourselves. But they're a sign of the Image of God in us - sharing, reaching out, making relationships. Re-forming the web of humanity. We want to share in other people's lives - and then share again. To #followfriday a new contact that we know is really interesting and pass it on. To chip our own comments onto someone else's theological or social musings - to share our insights, or move the debate on, or just to affirm that when someone's communicating it's a good thing to communicate back.

I'm not decrying the dangers of the Web - the security ones, and just the crying, obvious danger of wasting God's valuable time. Or the sense of neediness that can drive people publishing their thoughts to the world.

But in the end, for me, the Web used like this is about being ourselves, breaking the barriers of distance and age and class and education, sharing good news and bad, and just being ourselves - open, sharing, relational creatures. Made in the Image of God.

Just to express my inner geek, I've created this rather lovely Venn diagram to explain my social media and in-the-flesh relationships. At least one of these overlaps is actually empty - there's nobody I've never met, who's a Facebook Friend and I follow on Twitter, who's not clergy. In fact I only have one Facebook Friend I've never met, and since he's fairly well identifiable as a real vicar (and I know where he lives) I'm happy to stick with just that one.

* Apart from "Who's Got the Biggest Brain", but I've even stopped playing that now.
**The St Albans Holborn website explains what's going on in "The Trinity in Glory" - I can only tell you that you really need to go there to grasp the scale of this marvellous picture
*** Just in case anyone thinks I'm a believer in a literal Adam and literal Eve in a literal Garden of Eve - I'm not. But as is so often the case, the power and truth in the story is far beyond a little tale about a bloke and a woman and a talking snake with legs.

Unlikelihoods

2010-06-19T23:14:00.001+01:00

I don't really know where, or if, this is going. I came up with a fun thought experiment. There's a couple more floating around in my head (which is, like my imaginary world, fairly hollow and so easy to fill with stuff) - so have a look at Unlikelihoods. Hope you like it. That may be the only post I ever make. But I doubt it...

The Newcomer's Wife

2010-06-12T12:19:00.001+01:00

This is a poem I have known for a while, which popped up on the side bar of the Lost in Wessex blog. One of those poems that in many ways remind us of other days, this - and yet also has resonances for all people that discover something they didn't want to know. I post the link so that this Thomas Hardy poetry blog gets a few of the visitors it deserves, hopefully. Go on, read it. You know you want to!

http://casterbridge.blogspot.com/2010/06/newcomers-wife.html

What I read on my Holiday

2010-06-05T17:42:00.000+01:00

Just back from a week in Holland. And I did a lot of reading. That was the good side. On the downside, I didn't do any of the proof-editing of "Moonrise over Crawley Crossing" that I was hoping to do. So publishing the rest will have to wait until another day.

But I spent the time doing some research on Victorian times and the church - and some Hardy.

Leaving poor old Gabriel Oak still struggling with burning ricks and dodgy female farmers in Far from the Madding Crowd, I read "Desperate Remedies". Hardy's earliest published novel, could best be described as promising. A wildly over-blown melodramatic pot-boiling murder mystery. And including something quite like a lesbian love scene - at least by respectable 19th century standards. I pinched one or two of the characters from the novel and put them in "Lost in Wessex". Whether the mysterious Aeneas Manston turns up in a year or two waits to be seen.

The other books - Jeremy Paxman's book on The Victorians, through their paintings, is a really good description of the Victorian world. Ralph Whitlock's Victorian Village is one of yer slice-of-life real people books, but interesting for its detective work and that it's rooted in one, real place where Whitlock's family come from. And Owen Chadwick's The Victorian Church (Part 1) is a brilliant read. Meaning only to pick through it, I ended up living with its anti-Popery riots, Catholic Hierarchies, Puseyites, Ranting Prims and the rest all the way. A fascinating study of Establishment, Non-conformite, ideas and government - some of which we're still working out today.

Archdruid no More

2010-06-02T05:59:00.006+01:00

Somewhere in a different reality, something stirs.
Eileen has made contact.... But what has she done with the Beakers?
Welcome to one of the few blogs written by a time-travelling Archdruid caught in a fictional 19th Century.

The new rules of posting comments on other blogs

2010-05-27T00:45:00.001+01:00

It was Banksyboy's plaintive lament for the Beaker Folk that reminded me to post these new rules.

It just got too complicated, having so many sock puppets to comment with. So now the rules are simple. My creations are only allowed to post comments on fictional (I hope) sites such as Beyond the Woodshed. I will post as myself on "real" sites such as David Keen, Sally, Mike, Simon Robinson and (since "he" also interacts in the "real world"), Church Mouse.

I hope that's clear. And so do Mrs Daphne Hnaef and Eileen.

Marie Stopes

2010-05-27T00:27:00.001+01:00

Marie Stopes (or the organisation that bears her name) is much in the news for the new advert, and with comments from such as Cranmer.
I'm generally unhappy with abortion. Not because I hate women, but because I love human life. I can see cases where it's the least-worst option and I believe banning it would be wrong. Nobody has an abortion for fun. But I definitely see the current time limit as too late, and I get concerned in those cases where it does seem to be an alternative form of late contraception - particularly where its use as contraception is forced on women by a pushy partner, and makes a mockery of the concept of a woman's right to choose in any case.
But this isn't about abortion. It's about Marie Stopes. And I really don't like her.

Let me explain.

Back at the beginning of the last century, a family of North Londoners were ducking-and-diving in the streets off the Holloway Road. The father of the clan seems to have been a complete rogue, who had moved in from the sticks, changed his surname (possibly to his real father's) and went on to produce nine or ten kids. Daniel Poulter (for that was his real name) legged it leaving my great-gran (for such she was) with another one in the oven, and was never seen again.

The roads where my family lived are a litany of names that no longer exist, because planners decided they wanted to do something else. Bavaria Road (pictured below) was renamed from its original Blenheim Road. Cromwell Road was renamed Ireton Road, and then wiped away to form Whittington Park. Rupert Road was truncated by the same park. I sometimes feel that people like my family were just pawns on the map of north London, to be moved around the place at the whims of more important people - councillors, planners, people of vision - wherever was most convenient for those well-connected and important people.

And that's where Marie Stopes comes in. She started her first clinic in 1921 - just as my great-grandad was legging it up the Holloway Road. She opened it in Marlborough Road. Right in the middle of my family's old manor - just across the Holloway Road from my great-nan's house. And do you know, I feel she did it to try and wipe us out. The Upper Classes of the era were still producing fairly large families in those days, but she didn't worry about them. They weren't her problem. We were. It's like she decided that enough was enough. If you think I'm a bit paranoid, you may be right. But then read this.

Now, don't get me wrong. Birth control is a sensible and practical solution to the fact that men and women want to share their love in physical ways, but don't necessarily want to produce ten children per family. Apart from anything else, the planet can't take it. And I don't have "natural law" issues with it. We are free creatures and we have freedom in and responsibility in this as well.

I just wish the person associated with it didn't seem to have a personal grudge against my family.

By the way, this is the War Memorial for the people of Cromwell Road (as was). Since the road was wiped out by the planners, it's set in the ground in the park. Ernest Frank Miller, up near the top, is my great-great-uncle. He was swept away with a great mass of the working class at the Somme. I don't suppose Marie Stopes would have worried that much. After all, poor old Ernie was one of the "slave class".

It's Thicker by Rail

2010-05-19T17:24:00.001+01:00

Frustrated beyond even my normal abilities to be frustrated by the combination of greed and stupidity that masquerades as a pricing strategy for our railways.

Watford is a mere 60-ish miles away. It's not a great journey by train, involving as it does a walk across Snorbens (which is the local pronunciation of "St Albans") but it's eminently do-able. It's handy because it would mean I could work on the train. I could relax. It's cool. I like trains.

But when I get back to the St Pancras line on my way home, after a little trip on the Noddy "Watford and St Albans Abbey" line, and I get on a train that left London after 4pm, the price of a return suddenly goes up to £90 from the relatively sensible £40. Not if I leave after 4pm - no, it's the time of a train that I connect with that decides this. This is a rule to stop people daring to travel out of London in the evening rush hour, I presume. But the price goes up by £50.

So I walk out of the station. Return home and get in my car. Wreck the planet and my patience driving down the M1. Bill my company at 40p per mile PLUS the £8 parking because - irony of ironies - the only place I can park near the office I'm visiting is Watford Junction Railway Station. And it's still cheaper, and I can leave when I need to not when the Railways would like me to.

I know it's not fashionable today to say this, but there oughta be a lore.

Church without a Church

2010-05-19T00:16:00.000+01:00

Just reading Matt Payne's blogpost on "The Business Model of New Churches" and agreeing with every word.

Call me an old extremist, but I don't understand why, at this time in the history of history, any church in its right mind that did not have a building, would build one. Or buy one. Rent one might be OK.

But this country, like most Western countries, is full of schools. Schools on the whole, in my experience, like churches renting their halls. The church gets a cheap meeting place, the school gets a bit of money, the community gets more out of its money - it "sweats the asset" as a particularly cheesy ex-manager of mine would have said - and all in all everyone's a winner. It's not just economic. By meeting in a school (or community centre, or pub, or social club) the church lowers the entry barrier of going to church, and makes the boundaries of church porous to the outside "community". I use the word "community" in inverted commas, because in my experience it is of limited existence.

In fact, as far as I can see there's an argument for churches that have church buildings, if they are suitable, to sell them if they can. They might be good community centres. Or they might have development potential. Obviously, I'm not talking your 12th century Norman masterpiece here. More your Non-conformist preaching "box", or 20th century community church. If they're only used one day a week, maybe somebody else could use that asset better?

The whole concept of a "church" building seems alien to me. I've quoted no Scripture in this posting, for the simple reason that the Bible knows nothing of church buildings. It knows about synagogues, but they were centres for education, social interaction and religion. A very Jewish, very non-Platonic-Dualism way of behaving. I think we'd be well off with the same thing.

Priorities

2010-05-17T19:28:00.000+01:00

So pleased. Visiting-ministering a church yesterday and somebody was busy with money-related matters but then said "we've got to do with it, but it's a shame. We should be concentrating on the important stuff, like mission and the children".
Quite.
But then how can we do that when every year the Parish Shares go up faster than a government structural deficit? By everyone tithing in the old sense of the word, maybe - but then when tithes were invented everyone didn't also have 20% income tax, 11% NI and so on. On the other hand, life was much simpler and nobody spent money on Sky TV, Plasma screens or BT Internet. So it's never easy, is it?
Sorry, no solutions. Just thought it was nice that somebody talked about important church stuff, and managed not to mention buildings.

Fresh expressions of Labour

2010-05-11T21:39:00.001+01:00

I haven't blogged much on the Election. Mostly because my random, not very well thought out batch of libertarian beliefs tends to be more suited to Twitter where you don't need to justify yourself in 140 characters.

But I'm a bit worried about what New Labour is now going to call itself, now it's no longer shiny and New. I suggest that they could take some hints from the world of new Bible translations, which would provide all the following possibilities. And the good news (if you'll excuse the pun) is that these Fresh Expressions of Labour could all exist at the same time. Gotta catch them all...

New International Labour - an old-fashioned attitude to politics but expressed in new language.

New English Labour - committed to Anglo-Saxon self-determination, as a corrective to the last 13 years of Celtic rule.

New Revised Standard Labour - relentlessly political correct, but worded slightly strangely.

Today's New International Labour - quite politically correct, but not so popular as the original.

Good News Labour - policies in simple 1960s English, but all the politicians are just two-dimensional caricatures.

Updated (thanks, Simon):

On Message - Contemporary, simple, can be condensed to fit a txt message. But not much like the real, traditional Labour.

On the Filleting of the Liturgy

2010-05-10T23:00:00.002+01:00

There's just something a bit wrong about this.

This is Rev 22: 12-21.

“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

“It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.

And this is what it looks like, according to the lectionary

“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. “It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.

The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.

So this is what has been removed:

Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to that person the plagues described in this book; if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person’s share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

So the message would appear to be this: Christians are children. We must not scare them. We must not let them tackle hard passages. We must save them from looking at a text in full, and in context, and tackling in frankly. We must have only good news, and no nastiness. The Prophets of Baal went home chastened, the Beast goes for therapy and is released on parole, and Jezebel was a loving wife who died in her bed. And they all lived happily ever after.

The Moon Also Rises

2010-04-30T21:24:00.000+01:00

It's possible some may be interested. But if you are, I'm happy to point you to the first part of a Beaker Folk e-novella. Moonrise over Crawley Crossing (Part 1). Hope you enjoy.

Border Country

2010-04-28T20:58:00.001+01:00

I have a lovely drive to work. If I ignore the temptations of the A14 I'm effectively driving through rolling countryside the whole way - the gently rolling, lovely countryside of Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.
There are a few nearby battlefields - Naseby, of course, where the nasty roundheads beat the useless Charles, while the gallant and equally nasty and useless Prince Rupert rode around at random, and then atrocities were committed on the innocent wives of the Welsh archers. And then the Bosworth Field is just the other side of Leicester.
But the countryside holds the memories of a much older series of conflicts. And the place names give it away. Because 1200 years ago, this was border country. Round Wellingborough, the placenames are mostly English - Irthlingborough, (Earls) Barton, Harrowden, Orlingbury. But even here there's the odd Norse name such as Wilby or Thorpe Malsor. And as you head into Leicestershire the Norse names gradually become increasingly prevalent - Beeby, Barkby Thorpe, and the lovely Scraptoft. But even here the Angles never quite gave up their place names - Keyham, Hungarton, Syston. Who knows how many minor scraps established that the Angles kept Nosely while the Danes named Goadby? It's a fascinating history of the area laid out in the language of the places - place names we never normally give a second thought to.

A propos nothing, really, but it's a thought that 1200 years ago the Saxons were probably saying to each other "All those Danes - where are they all coming from?"

Proportional Desperation

2010-04-24T22:44:00.002+01:00

Poor Mac has a problem.
He's been reading up on Tactical Voting.

He lives in a Conservative-Labour marginal. And he's always voted Lib Dem.
But now he's unsure.

If he votes Lib Dem it's going to be a wasted vote.

And he's strongly into "Anyone but Gordon." Whatever else happens, he doesn't want Gordon to win. So he thinks that maybe he should vote Tory.

But if all the Lib Dems in marginals do that across the country, and the Tories get a majority.... that's not going to be good.

So maybe he'd be better off voting Labour. As then if Labour don't get too many seats then there's going to be a coalition. And it might be that if Labour's not too strong then they get rid of Gordon. And a Lib Dem - Labour coalition with - say - Alan Johnson might not be too bad.

But if Labour get in here, they could end up with a coalition where Labour's quite a strong partner. And then Gordon could stay - at least for quite a while. And he doesn't want that.

Mac's got a headache now.

So he's going to vote Green. At least he knows that won't do anything.

Salesmanship

2010-04-23T08:05:00.000+01:00

I'm spending two days in a store, finding out how my new company "works".
Being it was a bit of a quiet day, I spent a while wandering around in my suit, trying to sell a product that frankly I would never buy myself to customers. I was very polite, very informative, and managed to give away one leaflet in an hour and a half.
To be fair to the customers, some were more embarrassed than I was. Some saw me coming and ran down a side-aisle. And one stopped and chatted to me because I'm the curate at her church. But I suspect if I'd understood the thing I was trying to sell better, or if I'd tried it myself and liked it, I would have been a lot keener on trying to sell it.

The rules of Retail IT

2010-04-21T19:32:00.000+01:00

In 23 years of employment I've only done one kind of job. Retail IT. That's computers, in and for Retail (and Wholesale) companies.
And there's a rule. Whenever you start a new job in Retail IT, you get to go to the stores to work for a couple of days to see what it's like.
Which is why I'm going to spend the next couple of days selling curtains, rugs and cushions.
I wouldn't want it any other way. But it's not really "incarnational". Because in 2 days I'll know what it's all about and will go back to my life of living on the shop floor. But the 5 days I spent in the China Department at John Lewis were some of the most fun I've ever worked.
But I still wouldn't want to do it for a living.

Walsingham

2010-04-20T13:41:00.000+01:00

On a few days away (from home and kids) before the new job starts, we went to stay in Hunstanton, and I went down to Walsingham for a few hours.
Being someone who likes my peace 'n' quiet, I found it disconcerting that the cleaner seemed to have made it her personal mission to follow me around the shrine wherever I went, armed with a hoover. So I went up to the Orthodox chapel - up the stairs, past a rather anomalous statue of what I guess must be Charles I. Normally I get up there and enjoy the quiet, because it's off the tourists' beaten track, and I love the icons. I've only attended Orthodox worship once (in a church in Dorset populated entirely by disaffected Anglicans - but that's another story) but, like the Archdruid, I do like icons. I like the Orthodox concept that they are effectively focuses - or gateways, I guess - means of grace to come close to God. So, in my terms, I guess I'd see them as sacramental. Still, my peace was shattered fairly quickly by the chainsaw that someone seemed to be wielding in the grounds.
The ceremony of "sprinkling" is an oddly named concept, and slightly odd to a prod sensibility, but it is very symbolic, with strong echoes of baptism of course. You go down the steps to where the spring is, then receive the spring water to drink, on your forehead, and in your hands. Then you climb back up again. It's given me some ideas for what a baptistry should be like, if I ever get to build one. But it's always the most moving part of a visit, for me.
Then back to the coast, and another brilliant view of the Wash. By this morning, the weather had cleared enough that you could see the wind turbines out to sea - and last night had a view of the lights of Skeggy. A lovely part of the world.

Priest-Bound and Exclusive?

2010-04-19T11:20:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I went for a guest appearance at a church who have been in interregnum for 12 months or so. Despite this they are making stalwart efforts to keep their pattern of services going - which means Mass at 8 and 10am every Sunday and Weds lunchtimes.
I admire their spirit, of course. But it leaves me wondering about the extent to which we have made churches priest-bound. Of course Holy Communion is the normative act of Christian worship. But that doesn't mean that other forms are not valid. Communion is an excluding form of worship; defining who is "in" and who is "out" in a way that other services don't. And it leaves the church dependent upon the presence of a priest. I should say that while I can accept reserving sacrament for home visits I don't agree with communion by extension as I don't find it has integrity. It's a strange ceremony that seems to be saying "you should have been somewhere else, but this will do".

For once in my life I don't blame the Victorians for this situation. Well OK, yes I do, indirectly through a link to the Oxford Movement. But I mostly blame the Liturgical Renewal. It seems to me that what happened was that the churches put the present experience and expectation of their existing members, above that of any future members. I don't see Mass, Eucharist or whatever you want to call it as a very good form of service for people who don't know much about church. And 25 years when I attended a service of Communion for the first time it scared the wits out of me. Just a very odd thing.

It reminds me of a debate on banksyboy's and Sam Norton's blogs a few weeks ago regarding music and worship. If the service is meeting the expectations of regular and commited worshippers - what effect is it having on those who are not committed, or finding their way, or looking at what church-going is about? I wonder if sometimes communion has an effect similar to this:

So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and some who do not understand or some unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? 1 Cor 14:23

So on the whole what I think would be a good idea for the church is less frequent communion. It will mean the church is more friendly to those who are searching, to those who are uncommited - makes communion more special. And means it can get on better, with fewer priests.

Installation of Donald Allister, Bishop of Peterborough

2010-04-17T19:45:00.003+01:00

Just back from our new bishop's installation. The first Bishop's Installation I've attended and since it was the sad loss of Ian Cundy that caused our new need for a new bishop, I don't ever want to go to another for the same reason.

Traditional Anglican occasion of course. +Donald's appointment has caused waves in various places (eg the Guardian). And we were short of one planned participant. +George of Bungoma didn't make it due to being marooned at Nairobi Airport due to Icelandic geological conditions.

+Donald's sermon was clear, not too long, and covered Jesus's restoration of Peter, and the command to feed Jesus' sheep. He stressed that the sheep are Jesus's, not his or ours (as clergy) and I wondered about the bishop's emphasis when they stressed they weren't "Peter's". But the rest of the sermon was extremely inclusive - stressing men and women , clergy and laity, catholic, liberal, evangelical and charismatic. And respect in inter-faith relationships (very important in the City of Peterborough in particular). But also stressing that Jesus is uniquely the Son of God. And he was upbeat on church attendance and the future.

So all in all a careful sermon, well-balanced, a pastoral sermon (promising to be down "our" end of the diocese at least once a week - it's a funny-shaped place). Not a personal sermon in any way, but then probably not surprising.

And a good afternoon all round. I look forward to what lays ahead, and we will all of course pray for our new diocesan Bishop.

Plugging in the Bishop

2010-04-17T08:20:00.000+01:00

It's all very exciting, we're off to the installation of the new Bishop.
I've never been to a bishop's installation before. In fact I don't even know if he's gas, electric or book-burning.

The last day at work / Self-supporting Ministry

2010-04-16T16:03:00.000+01:00

The odd person (odd in the sense of a few, not the other kind of odd, although one or two were) thought I was giving up this secular job which I am leaving in an hour and ten minutes* to be a full-time clergyperson. No. I'm off to do another secular job.

And in the same line of work, as well. Admittedly with my experience my alternatives are IT or (if there are any stipends left) the church. But it's not just another job in IT, but I'm still going to be in Retail. That's all I've ever done, and it's what I do, and I love it. I don't think I could work anywhere else. I've always said that the day I go into full-time ministry is the day that I wake up and think "I don't want to do retail anymore". No sign of it happening yet.

It has been tempting at times over the last four or five year to think that I could drift into a working backwater - stop worrying about developing my career and just do as much as I need to, to get paid and then concentrate on the "more important" stuff of being a priest. But if I did that, I might as well be a full-time minister. So I'm not gonna do that. I still want to progress my career, still want to learn new stuff, still make people's lives better (and sometimes worse) with new and improved and more innovative systems. Still want to be the best I can in my day job - and in my self-supporting post - and also in that shady nightmare half-world where Eileen lurks and broods and my "alternative" creative side can creep out.

It's a four-way stretch, doing what I do. I have a wife and kids, a job and a ministry in the parish. The ministry in the parish always comes last - sorry to spoil dreamy-eyed views but, it has to. If I didn't put my energies into my time with my wife and kids, and do my job as best I could - what kind of priest would I be? One who gives the message that it's OK to duck your responsibilities for the Kingdom of God. Too many people (priests and others) can put too much time into their Church as a way of running from their other responsibilities. I try, as best I can, not to be one of them. And if you think, "he spends a lot of time blogging for someone with no spare time" - yes, true. But it's something I can do with the family around and while I'm talking to them or they're watching the Simpsons or whatever. I'm old-fashioned. I think plenty of time with the children is more important that "quality" time with them. (And I type and think pretty fast, as well).

By the way - I said a four-way stretch and only listed three. I never noticed the other one for a while in my ministry and then one day I did and it made me jump. See if you can work it out. And it's not "God". I've assumed that he works in everything I do anyway - even when I do it badly. He's not part of the stretch because "in him we live and move and have our being" - at work, at home, and even in the church.

So when I spend my time at church, it's precious. And when I'm refusing to attend somebody's latest dearest project, it's not because I'm nasty and don't care - it's because I am restricted in the time I can offer (and I'm fierce in restricting it). And the thing I've really found is this - I hate meetings. Meetings sap time and energy and the chance for ministry. Meetings are the cancer that eats away at church. I was at a meeting where they were asking - practically bullying - for volunteers to go to county-level ecumenical meetings, and I just wanted to say "Stop! Nobody needs to attend this! Nobody needs these meetings! The walls will not fall down if nobody goes! If nobody wants to go, then scrap them! Go and see your wives and husbands, or read a book, or work at the Daylight Centre or walk round a lake - but stop multiplying unnecessary meetings just because you think you ought to have them!" Stipendiary people probably hate them as well, but their time, although it's eaten into, doesn't seem to be eaten into in the same way. Maybe they have more flexible lives the rest of the time, but possibly it's because many of them don't seem to be any good at time management. If my diary is clogged up with meetings, the taxi meter in my head that shows my time availability for other stuff is running.

But I love doing baptism visits. Because I have something in common with the people I visit for baptism visits - working in a typical job for our part of the world (retail and distribution) I am where many of our baptism visiting people are. I took reduced hours because we were in a recession. I was made redundant (the day before my Selection Conference, as it happens). We have common ground.

Other people say of me "well he has a ministry at his work." Nobody's ever spelt out to me exactly how they understand that ministry as operating. I'm not the chaplain - I'm a project manager. Unlike the guy at Sainsbury's (see below), for whom I have the utmost respect, I would get thrown out if I wore a dog collar to work. I have to measure projects against timescales, and against money constraints, just like any other project manager. I bring Christ into the workplace just like any other Christian - which normally means badly.

And there's a gap here - the bit I'm still trying to work out - which is what they're is that's special about being a Priest at work in the secular, non-public sector, non-caring-sector world. And sometimes I think the answer is that there's nothing special about it - I really am just another Christian in a secular job. But there's a dilemma in that

But when I come to the Mass I bring that whole world that I know - the world of IT and Retail, of shops and Distribution Centres and lorries - and offer all that up. When the Credit Crunch hit, and the jobs were going, I was bringing all that to the Mass.

But I am aware that, in some respects, people like Mike and myself may well be a large part of the future of Christian ministry in this country. If I were looking at it from a worldly perspective, I'd be thinking - "SSMs - they're cheap, some of them are blokes, they earn a decent wage they can tithe from and once they're retired we'll have a nice supply of ministers with more time on their hands and we won't need to pay their pensions either." I can see a cathedral-style ministry model creeping in where the full-time vicars are managing fairly large teams of young retired pastoral assistants doing the pastoral stuff, while most of the non-retired priests are working at secular jobs.

If you're interested in the concept of Self-Supporting Ministry, there's a book called "Tentmaking - Perspectives on Self-Supporting Ministry". Well worth a read, and I wish I'd read it before Ordination - in fact, before selection. There's this Church Times article - but although it asks the question "how are Christians in special ministry being supported" - I don't think it answers it very well. And I notice that the SSM in the article is a judge, not a web-designer or a shelf stacker..

And next time you meet a young-ish SSM please don't smile at them and say "it's a shame - maybe they'll let you have your own parish one day". Maybe, just maybe, we don't want one.

*It's alright, they know I've got nothing to do today.

A City Mourns

2010-04-16T10:42:00.001+01:00

The exciting news breaks that Messrs Hicks and Gillette are putting Liverpool up for sale. I offer this simultaneous translation.

"Owning Liverpool Football Club over these past three years has been a rewarding and exciting experience for us and our families."

We still don't understand why your so-called footballers don't wear helmets and shoulder pads. But we're definitely hoping that selling the club will be a rewarding and exciting experience for us and our families

"Having grown the club this far..."

Having saddled the club with debt, and taken a team that had just been European Champions when we took over to the point where it will be lucky to make the Europa League, where it has only one decent striker (who's always injured), and having spent £20 million pounds on a midfielder specially so the striker has someone to talk to in the treatment room...

"...we have now decided together to look to sell the club to owners committed to take the club through its next level of growth and development."

...we have realised it was a misjudged acquisition and a bad time to take on so much debt, and we'd like to get out. Sorry about the stadium project, and all that. If you're really lucky we might sell to someone who has an interest in Liverpool or football. But at least we're talking, so that's the upside.

Tweet the Election

2010-04-16T09:20:00.002+01:00

Being out at a church meeting I missed the Leaders' debate last night. Doesn't particularly bother me as I made up my mind a while ago who I'm voting for. Basically any party that will stop telling other people what to do and what not to do gets my vote. And that's in politics and religion.

I was intrigued (or should that be intwuiged?) by the twittering going on when I got back. A lot of which seemed to be knee-jerk pro-Labour and even more so anti-Tory. I'd not realised I was following so many left-wing people. And then realised that is probably because so many of them are vicars.

But for incisive remarks, whether you agree with them or not, you can't beat @clayboy (who you can also find here on the web). Watching QT after the debate, he picked up very rapidly on something Shami Chakrabarti said. I normally have a lot of time for Liberty, and for anyone who tries to stop Government running rough-shod over people. But she said that we can't allow people to vote for local police "chiefs" (I use the word loosely) because we might not get the right kind of police chiefs. I though the whole point of democracy was that we get who we vote for, regardless of whether Liberty thinks they're the right kind of people or not. But maybe I'm missing something here.

This goes up to 11!

2010-04-15T15:47:00.000+01:00

Received an email to let me know that a friend's company's new website is live.

Nice to see that they go up to 11!

The People the Internet was Made For

2010-04-14T00:06:00.001+01:00

I read this blog. It is nothing like I have ever written. And yet it speaks deeply to the Archdruid Eileen in my soul. Don't know why (apart from the plug for the Beaker Folk).
Apart from the latest Starkadder episode this is the blog that has spoken most deeply to me in a while.

Beyond the Woodshed

2010-04-13T23:32:00.001+01:00

In the absence of Archdruid Eileen, someone's got to plug Beyond the Woodshed.
And this is the funniest blog post I've read in weeks. But it may be that only Judith and I share this sense of humour. I hope not. For if 'twere true, there would be sadly little humour in this world.

St Mark's Blog

2010-04-13T22:12:00.001+01:00

We're trying a new venture.
Inspired by the Filey Church blog, which gave me the idea of a blog run by the people of the parish, this is the St Mark's Wellingborough blog. I hope and pray we can make it work and show some of the church. And if you think it's a bit sparse yet - well, it's only just started.

Holdenby

2010-04-13T16:57:00.001+01:00

Nipped out to Holdenby church at lunchtime. One of these days I'll get organised and see if I can borrow the key.

But still. Interesting piece of social history. All Saints stands fairly isolated, far closer to Holdenby House than the modern village. And that's because of the Wellingborough connection, in that it was Wellingborough boy-made-good Sir Christopher Hatton who built the original Holdenby Hall. He demolished the old manor house and the old village (you can see the mounds and fish ponds round about) and moved all the peasants over the other side of the hall, to the new village. Thus turning the church into a kind of family chapel.

Unfortunately poor old Chris broke the family finances building the place in order to impress the Virgin Queen. The House went to the Crown, and Charles I was held a prisoner here during the Civil War. One of the ghastly Roundheads then knocked the place down to sell the stone - so the current House is mostly modern.

There's also a bit of a family connection in that the rector of Holdenby in the 19th century was Frederick Cecil Alderson, also Canon of Peterborough Cathedral (and with a monument in the treasury there). No real relation, of course. And I hope it's not because an Alderson was rector that the church is now redundant.

St George's Day

2010-04-13T08:49:00.000+01:00

I've been having a discussion with @goodinparts on the subject of St George's Day services.

Now despite having spent approximately half my life in church-going, mostly to the C of E and Methodist churches, I have only ever once been to a service that was a "St George's Day" service. It came in that very short period in which I was a member of the cubs, and they made us all go to St Peter's Church Dunstable for a parade service. Unusually, it was a sermon that I remember something of.

The vicar preached a very well-meaning sermon, but what I remember is his reference to death. He talked about a young girl who was dying, and how she was happy in her dying because she was going to be with Jesus.

I didn't know much about Jesus. I didn't know that much, frankly, about what I now regard as Christianity. I did know that I had been dragged into the church - which I freely confess I assumed was haunted, anyway - to hear a bloke in a dress tell me about dying.

11 years I think it was, before I went to church of my own free will again.

But what do you preach on St George's Day? And why? How can you extol the virtues of St George without saying that, actually, there clearly was no dragon and dragons are only in legends? There's no theological value in St George that I can see, and obviously he's not in the Bible. And although there's a dragon in the Bible he's definitely mythologized - and just as well, as we couldn't face the reality of what it stands for.
So far I'm relieved that I've never had to lead a St George's Day parade service - and wondering what I will do if I ever have to. And wondering why we can't have a proper saint we can talk about like grown-ups: St Edmund the Confessor, for example - as our patron saint.

Wedding Fees and the Open Market

2010-04-12T16:30:00.001+01:00

I'm quite new to this vicar business. Indeed, although I have now led 30 or 40 communion services, baptised a couple of dozen or so babies and conducted two funerals (a while ago) I've never taken a wedding service myself.

Now our church is lovely, but modern and brick-built. And other churches are chocolate-box-lovely and all mellow stone etc. And my question is this (and I hope somebody reading this may have an idea):

Why does the Church of England set rates for weddings centrally? Why can't we price a wedding to compete with the Registry Office (because we know people go to the Registry to save money), and St Martin's in the Fields' charge the going rate for a prime central London location with all the trimmings? If we can charge a sensible rate for a wedding, then we can allow more people to marry in church - and with that goes all the pastoral support we can offer and more meaning to those being married.

Just wondered...

On counting out time

2010-04-12T08:23:00.002+01:00

Doing my best to help out here. But.

The desk is (already) nearly cleared. Team handed over. Nothing in my diary. So I'll do what testing I can to help but it's all very quiet.

If there's one thing I like as much as taking on responsibility, it's giving responsibility up.

The lark is on the wing

2010-04-09T13:21:00.001+01:00

A lovely day. Up on the heath the cars aren't currently being burnt, although locals on scramble motor bikes are tearing up the place.

It's never really been a very nice heath, in my three years working here. But if you persevere across the heath to the Firs, it's much nicer. Albeit still plagued by the moto-cross brigade.

"Where every prospect pleases..." - the hymn writer may have been thinking of Greenland's ice mountains etc, but he should have gone to Northampton instead.

Cafe In Finedon

2010-04-07T22:59:00.003+01:00

More on Mackworth's Diner, the Cafe in Finedon, because we've been there now.

Took the kids there Saturday for 2 veggie breakfasts (still Lenten regulations), a small breakfast and something for George.

Good, well-cooked, traditional English cafe grub. Every ounce eaten and enjoyed. If you're after taking the young lady out for a sophisticated evening of music, champagne and truffles don't bother. If you want a really good breakfast and you're somewhere near Finedon, go for it.

Closing Husborne Crawley

2010-04-07T22:44:00.003+01:00

Funny thing, I feel very refreshed and released by this.

No pressure to think of something funny, even though I know it's only self-imposed pressure. No blog stats to look at, no responses to deal with.

Eileen and Hnaef will, I hope, be back sometime June-ish. But not in Husborne Crawley. I've wrecked the place's Google searches for years to come and it needs a break. And I feel like I've done pebbles and tea lights. But I've a lot of research to do. Something I can enjoy. And a new job to start. Which might need some time of its own.

So maybe I can blog here for a bit and just get the odd response from the occasional mate.

Easter Day

2010-04-05T08:37:00.003+01:00

Now recovering from a rather busy Easter period for an otherwise-employed SSM.

Thursday morning - Cathedral for Chrism Mass. An excellent sermon from +John Flack.

Friday morning - Good Friday workshop. I just played guitar and bimbled about in a dog collar, but there was excellent preparation by the people running the different activities and I was stopped in Tesco on Saturday by one of the mothers who wanted to tell me how good it all was. Which was great.

Friday afternoon - practising for Stainer's Crucifixion.
Friday evening - act of worship of Stainer - whole-deanery choir, and I don't care what Mike says, it was very powerful and great to meet with a bunch of other singers from across the area.

Saturday 9pm - combined Easter vigil, baptism and confirmation - getting on for ten of our people, of all ages, colours and levels of (dis)ability. A great occasion, and very powerful with the lighting of the New Fire out in the churchyard, next to the police station, as the Saturday night people went past and the traffic roared down the Midland Road. Got bed half past midnight....

....which was a shock when I got up at 5 am and went out to lead the dawn Easter Eucharist at our church. And despite the tiredness, couldn't stop grinning. Jesus is Risen!

And then the 11am service as a visitor at a new church. Again, great to be there. And good to preach a very unstructured, non-3-point sermon. And met lots of new people, dedicatedly getting on with being their church and trying to construct a vision in a small, old-fashioned (to me eyes) village.

And then I caught an egg thrown over the pub (ever tried that? It's not easy. You mostly get covered with egg....) and then won the quiz.

So - three days off. That'll do for now.

And He has Risen! Or did I mention that already?

Sophie's Cooking

2010-04-02T23:32:00.003+01:00

Just noticed a trailer for a cookery programme featuring Sophie Dahl.
As far as I can tell, she's a posh girl pouting at a camera in a suggestive kind of way.
But in a cunning twist, she's a lot blonder than Nigella.

(I don't use "blonder" in any kind of demeaning way. Simply to denote hair colour, original or otherwise.)

Mackworths Cafe in Finedon

2010-04-01T19:07:00.002+01:00

Just a little link to my friend Liz's cafe, Mackworths, in Finedon. Named after the first name of one of the Dolben family, of worldwide renown in Finedon and even as far afield as Little Harrowden and Irthlingborough.

But it's a very nice cafe and I'm hoping if this drives traffic her way I might get a free bacon roll...

Read it in the Daily Mail

2010-03-31T14:30:00.004+01:00

I'm not going to h/t all the thousands of people who linked to this. It is brilliant. BUT. It's worth pointing out that, although the only party-political sentiment here attributed to the Mail is anti-Labour pro-Cameron (which would be true of the Mail, of course) - the authoritarianism the song points the finger at is probably more true of New Labour's record than of anything the Cameroons have come up with.

This has been a party political broadcast on behalf of the "stop telling us what to do and rescind the Cider Tax party".

Dry-running a bike ride

2010-03-18T08:40:00.002Z

Tried out the new route to work as if I were going by train & bike yesterday. So I had an interesting selection of 3 & 5 mile rides plus the train journeys.

I think I needed to try it to check it. Unfortunately the trains don't run often enough to make it worth trying - I' d either be in far too early, or getting home too late. So with a sigh in my heart, until they improve the service, looks like it's going to be a drive to work.

Shame, as I really approve of trains. That's the way to go. But unless you live round the corner from the station (I don't) or you're going to London (I'm not, any more) then they're always awkward.

North Londonshire

2010-03-04T23:13:00.003Z

The BBC and others report that the North Northamptonshire Development Corporation is to spend 1.3M pound of our money on a "North Londonshire" campaign to encourage Londoners to live in Northamptonshire. The Facebook campaign moaning about this had, at the last count, over a thousand members.
Speaking as a 2nd-generation London overspill descendant (via Beds, the London Overspill County next door), the only encouragement my family needed to leave London and head north was from Mr Hitler. I don't want to discourage the people of London from coming up here - how could I? But why does anyone need to spend money on it? We like coming up here. We don't need advertising.
I have a proposal to improve North Northamptonshire. Save 1.3M from this ridiculous campaign, and then scrap expensive, unaccountable, pointless so-called "Development Corporations". Then spend the money on painting the Northampton Lighthouse in green and white stripes.

Of the Real Beaker People - or What did the Jutes do for us?

2010-02-13T11:51:00.004Z

I've just finished reading the 3rd edition of Christopher Chippindale's Stonehenge Complete. Which, as the author of another Stonehenge book has said, is one heck of a hostage to fortune for a book title. I wasn't too pleased with the 3rd edition isasmuch as it seems to me an untidy updating of a brilliant 2nd edition - but I will review that elsewhere when I've finished the other Stonehenge book I'm reading.

Stonehenge and its related stone circles and henge monuments fascinate me. There's a socking mystery in them. We know that Stonehenge lies along the midsummer sunrise / midwinter sunset axis. By analogy with the way we enter old churches and then face the altar at the east, and given the layout of the Avenue with respect to Stonehenge, the assumption is that it was actually the winter sunset that was of most interest. The summer sunrise over the Heal Stone is actually an illusion, and also irrelevant as it appears that the Heal Stone was originally part of a pair.

So the recognition of the sun as some kind of deity seems to be written in there. But we know so very little else. If they faced the setting winter sun, did they engage in some kind of ritual like the Husborne Crawley act of "darkness fear"? Was the moon involved as well? The evidence is uncertain. What other gods did they have, if any? We don't know.

The running theme of the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley is that of re-inventing traditions and retelling history to comfort ourselves that the way we are now is right. The original Beaker blog post was actually on this blog, sometime in - I think - 2006. Sadly the early days both of this blog and the Beaker Folk were lost in the Time Wars. But it came out of a frustration with the concept of "Celtic Christianity". To search for a deeper spirituality - for a living experience of God - is a good thing. But to do so by effectively inventing a tradition and claiming it's rooted in something that was totally different is bizarre.

But we all do it. I note a debate over at the Catholic Herald, as to whether the Anglo-Catholics as currently manifested in the Church of England are truly "Catholic", with a heritage that stretches back to before the Reformation, or whether the "tradition" was in fact invented by the Oxford Movement in the 19th Century (in which case the "traditionalists" in the Church of England are in fact the Evangelicals). I'm with the latter viewpoint myself, but again it shows the power of history and tradition.

And so we move on to the Beaker People. An older view of history saw them as one of the "waves" of peoples that invaded the British Isles - following on from earlier Neolithic peoples, and in turn massacred and replaced by the evil Celts with their cheaty iron swords. Sorry, went all Eileen there for a moment. The Celts in turn were subdued by the Romans, who went home and were replaced by the Angles, Saxons and, according to some, Jutes - these were then taken over by the Normans. At which point we stopped losing. This is a view of history very in keeping with an Imperialist view of the world - where those with the better technology over-come the unsophisticated ones and bring them the benefits of wine, the Law, the roads etc etc. But what did the Jutes do for us? This was a view of history that at first couldn't see the prehistoric people of this land being able to build Stonehenge - it must be the Romans. Or the Phoenecians. Or the Mycenae. Or else aliens.

But then we stopped seeing the world like that. Suddenly to be primitive makes one possessed of deep knowledge from olden days. Ley[sic] scientists start to determine how the former inhabitants - now promoted to our "ancestors" - engaged in harnessing the power of the earth - but working alongside nature, of course, not oppressing her. Although they did engage in a certain amount of deforestation, of course - Stonehenge's downland setting is not "natural" in any way, and dates back.

And the invasion hypothesis goes out the window as well, in these post-imperial times. Now it's about trading relationships and globalisation - the sharing ideas, as part of presumably a very slow, Neolithic form of social networking. So the Wikipedia entry doesn't appear to Beaker Folk appearing - it refers to Beakers doing this. And it refers to "Beaker Culture" - although the link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_folk makes sure you get it both ways. So invasion is out (although nobody told Tony Blair) - but the sharing of culture and technology is in. Very 21st century.

And the people camped outside the fence at Stonehenge claiming to be druids - they have no idea what the original people of Stonehenge were like. And those that think they were a peaceful lot, at one with each other and nature (the latest theory being that Neolithic "forts" weren't actually defensive) - what do they think of the child buried at the centre of Woodhenge, its skull split in two? Or maybe, in the peaceful Neolithic, it was just the victim of a tragic domestic accident, and Woodhenge an over-sized mausoleum?

A shift seems to be evident in the attitudes to the movement of the Stonehenge bluestones, as well. As is well known the Stonehenge bluestones (the little ones nobody thinks about, not the sarsens they made trilithons out of) have their original source in the Preseli mountains in Wales.

In the Middle Ages, it was contended that Merlin or giants moved them. In the days of can-do optimism on the technological front, it was gangs of blokes using rollers. And in these days of climatic worries, the "moved by glaciers" theory is favoured by some. The discovery of the remains of a bunch of Welshman in the area is support for the "blokes with rollers" theory again.

And of course in the 60s some still thought they were moved by aliens...

I remember a musical production many years ago of "Crows and Methodists". The audience smiled and laughed at the remembrance of the days when Methodists were hardy evangelists who'd go out in all weathers on the frontiers of civilisation to make converts. And having reassured ourselves of our denominational roots, we wandered off back to our comfortable houses and tried not to think of our congregational and denominational decline.

Don't know where this all going really, except to say that we have to be careful. Re-inventing history is a powerful thing. But when all's said and done, it's not the truth.

The Wise Man's Story

2010-01-06T08:23:00.000Z

I remember when we first saw that star - it rose and we watched it for days - we couldn’t keep our excitement down, we knew what it meant - a special king was born.

We’re scientists by training - we observe, we study and we learn. But we couldn’t keep a scientific detachment when we saw that star. We knew that we had to be there - wherever the new king was. So we set out across the desert. There was a searing heat by day, and it froze by night. But we followed it to where it set in the evenings - out over the western horizon. We took a few detours - and we met that snake, Herod - but eventually we found the place.

He was just a tiny mite. A poor mother and father - their first child, and you wondered how they would ever make ends meet. A little Jewish kid. We looked at them, and I thought, so this is the new king who’s been born?

But you should have seen his eyes. It was like all the depths of eternity were sunk into them. Somehow you knew, earth and heaven had met up in that little body. All my studies - the rise and fall of empires, the rising and the setting of the sun - stars being born and stars burning up - they all came into focus and they all looked so tiny in his presence. It was like every hope, every prayer, every great human idea that was ever thought of - they were all summed up in that face.

We offered him our presents, and then we fell down on our knees and worshipped. We couldn’t help ourselves. We were priests and magicians and noblemen, and yet we fell down and worshipped a baby. And if I never read another scroll, and I never see another star, it won’t matter. I saw God, the day he came to earth.

Where Opposites Meet

2009-12-24T22:24:00.001Z

Christmas is a time when opposites meet. We know joy, and celebration, the enjoyment of family and company. And yet we also know the sadness of loved ones no longer here; of loneliness; of eating alone, or of eating in a happy company and yet going home alone. And the memories of happy Christmases past, can make us happy or fill us with regret at this Christmas present.

The Shepherds saw many things in opposition that first Christmas night. The country, and the town. The darkness of the night sky on a hillside – and the brilliance as the sky exploded into light. The silence of the fields – and the praises of an unexpected horde of angels. They leave the glory of God shining on the hill – they head, not to a palace but to a house or a stable or a shed – and they find the glory of God, shining so much more brightly, in the presence of a tiny child. The Maker of the universe is sleeping in a cradle borrowed from the farm animals.

There in that manger lies Mary’s son. And Mary knows that the hopes and joy and fears that that tiny frame carries. Anyone who’s had a child knows that clash of opposing feelings when you see them asleep. The pride, and the happiness and the care and love. And yet the concern that they stay well. The fear that something might happen. The way you have to go sometimes – and look at your sleeping child – and wait and listen in silence, just to make sure they’re breathing.

But this child carries not just Mary’s hopes and fears – but those of the world. The joy that God has come down to earth, that God is with us. The hope of knowing that God is going to walk lanes and high roads of the cities and fields of this battered world of ours. And yet God also has his fears – the things that Mary doesn’t know. That the tiny hands that grasp her finger when she puts it playfully in his palm – that one day they will be nailed to a cross. That today she cradles her beautiful, perfect baby boy – and one day she will hold his dead, shattered body.

In that room, many opposites meet. Heaven kisses earth, just as Mary kisses her holy son. Heaven comes down to earth – and God’s fullness is seen in that tiny boy, far exceeding the carolling of the angels. And birth meets death. All humans die – it’s what we do. But this child – this child is born to die. And in dying, to give God’s life to his dying world.

And the shepherds – they came looking for a baby and they found one. But they find their own shepherd.

Shortly we will bring these contradictions together – in the Creed, as we remember that the immortal God became a mortal human being. And in the Mass, as we celebrate tonight the birth of our saviour – by calling to mind his death. We remember that our shepherd – the shepherd of our souls – was also the pure and innocent sacrifice, the holy Lamb of God.

But for you tonight – how do you respond? If you already know Jesus as your God, then give thanks as we celebrate his birth and death and his rising from the death. Sing your praises knowing that he has made his home in you. That he breathes his Spirit in you. That the glory of God that the angels radiated and that terrified the shepherds – that is glowing in you.

And if you don’t – maybe you think God is too distant, too holy – too much like God, in fact. Well, Mary was not too unimportant for God to be her son. Bethlehem was not too small for him to be born there. A manger was not too scruffy for God to sleep in. A tax-collector was not traitor enough that he couldn’t be Jesus’ friends. Fishermen were not too sweaty and smelly to be his disciples. A cross was not too much disgrace for him to bear. And a grave was not final enough to hold him.

He’ll live in your heart today. He won’t worry if you’re not very good at theology. He won’t mind if your life’s not good enough. He’s not going to wait for you to clean up your act – because he knows that if he has to wait that long, then he may be able to wait forever but you can’t. He’ll take you as you are. He’ll fill your life with his Spirit. And he’ll give you the Christmas joy that lasts all year and for always.

Christmas is a time when opposites meet. Earth and heaven meet. Death and life meet. Joy and sorrow meet. And the God who made space and time, who holds the universe in his hands, becomes a helpless child. Happy Christmas.

The Angels discuss the Annunciation

2009-12-15T18:49:00.002Z

May have posted this once before, but then hey it's nearly Christmas...

Gabriel and Raphael are having a chat...

G	Morning, Raphael.
R	Alright, Gabriel.
G	Nice day.
R	Yeah. Hang on, what do you mean? It’s always a nice day in heaven.
G	True. Except when it snows.
R	Yeah, but it only does that at Christmas. Out of interest, what is Christmas all about?
G	You know, I’ve been trying to sound the depths of love divine on that for ages. And I think the little errand the Boss sent me on this morning may be giving us a clue.
R	Oh, you went, then?
G	Yep.
R	And did you find her?
G	Yep. I soared down from the realms of glory, winged my flight o’er all the earth, and found her.
R	In a palace, no doubt? In Rome? Or Athens?
G	No.
R	But she’s going to be the Mother of God.
G	Yep. But she’s in a little village in the hill country, called Nazareth.
R	Oh, right. Doesn’t sound like much of a place for Him to grow up. Anyway, what did you say to her?
G	Well, I came over all King James. You know… Hail Mary, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.
R	And what did she say?
G	“Oh, dear”.
R	“Oh, dear”?
G	Yep.
R	Not what you’d call encouraging. Why the reaction?
G	Well you think about it… name someone else that the Lord blessed by highly favouring him?
R	Joseph
G	Brothers tried to kill him
R	Jeremiah
G	Dropped in a well, went up to his neck in the mud
R	Solomon
G	Had 700 wives.
R	What’s wrong with that?
G	Could never get into the bathroom in the morning.
R	So what you’re saying is, God blessing you can be hard work.
G	Yeah. I mean – Mary – she’s going to be the Mother of the Son of God.
R	A great honour.
G	Yeah. But think of the responsibility. I mean – give him food he doesn’t like – make him stay in to finish his homework – not someone you’ll want to upset.
R	True. And it will all have a happy ending, I suppose?
G	No – and yes. She’ll see her son put to death. But she will also see him after he rises from the dead.
R	So did she come round to it in the end?
G	Yes. “My soul shall magnify the Lord, and my spirit shall rejoice in God my Saviour.” That’s what she said. Very nicely put, in my opinion. Made a nice little song.
R	Yeah. Nice.
G	And she’s picked the colour blue for her clothes. Very important, when you’re going to be the woman with more statues than any other in the world. Do you know, all generations will call her blessed?
R	Nice one.
G	And she’s off to see her cousin Elizabeth. She’s having a baby, too.
R	Well, it’s like a little population explosion, down in Palestine, isn’t it. Oh, yes – married girl, is she, this Mary?
G	Engaged.
R	Nice lad?
G	Very nice.
R	Pleased about the baby?
G	Oh…yeah. That’s the thing I meant to tell you. The Boss has a job for you as well. He says can you go downstairs, find Joseph, and tell him the full story. And tell him to calm down.
R	Does he get to sing a song, or pick a colour, or be blessed by all succeeding generations?
G	No. But he does get to lead the donkey.
R	I get all the great jobs. See you later.
G	See you.

Some music meme

2009-11-25T09:00:00.006Z

I'm just a sucker for these. This one came from David Keen, and it's as follows:

Think of eight memorable musical moments, not necessarily all time favourites, but those when, for example, you felt compelled to wait in the car when listening to this amazing song on the radio because you just had to know who it was by. Or the piece you heard on the tv in a drama that drove you straight onto iTunes to download... (remember once we spent the princely sum of 6s 8d on a vinyl single?!). Optional details for each song give where, why and Spotify or youtube links ...

Not that I ever spent 6s 8d on a vinyl single, you understand. They'd changed to decimal before I ever bought a record.

"Are 'friends' Electric" - by Tubeway Army (actually Gary Numan masquerading as a group) - on TOTP in 1979. Ashen-faced, trend-setting, eery and bleak are just a few of the adjectives that spring to mind. This is from the Whistle Test:

Seen originally on TOTP again - "There's a guy works down the chip shop". 'nuff said.

Can't remember when precisely, but the first time I ever watched the Blues Brothers. Just the whole of it. But especially "Everybody needs somebody". You have to link to this one...

Standing on the seats on the back row of the Hammersmith Odeon on my 21st birthday (my mate Dave kept falling off) - singing along to "Script for a Jester's Tear"... awesome...

Incredibly, I remember being stunned by watching the trailer originally - how can you not love "Man of Constant Sorrow"?

30 years of loving the song, and I finally heard it live last year at Twickenham. Acheingly beautiful, haunting and before Phil Collins went all solo and girly... I give you Afterglow. This bootleg is marvellous for the bloke singing along... Not me, I hasten to add. I was up in the stands. And in tune.

A Christian one! I'd been a Christian for a couple of months. And I joined in the singing of "Our God Reigns" at the Communion at Greenbelt, with all my Methodist mates. Alongside my new girlfriend (now wife of 20 years). It sounds such a corny and dated song now. But then... moved beyond words.

And another hippy-ish one. Summer 1980, Filey Butlins, Space Invaders machines and a bunch of gullible kids who we could persuade to run into the "Penny Falls" machine. We got rich, they got thrown out... and "Oh Yeah" on the jukebox, not the radio.

As per tagging... Sally, Steve Borthwick, Mike, go on, go on, go on...

An update on the Park Tavern, from my previous post. In fact it's not closed. It just looks it. But it is up for sale.
And update on the Litten Tree. It's re-opening in a couple of weeks as a "retro over-30s" bar. With my choice in music sounds about right.

Gary's Rather Sad Pub Crawl

2009-11-04T18:06:00.008Z

Sad because... well, I think it's pretty obvious. These were all open 2 years ago... This is approximately half the pubs in Wellingborough. Not saying they were all very good - one or two of them could be terrifying - but they were each a part of a community. Two more pubs are currently closed but looking like re-opening.

Two quotes -

"Change your hearts or you will lose your inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your inns drown your empty selves for you will have lost the last of England." - Hilaire Belloc

"And, for those people who are in the licensed trade, there are opportunities here for a whole new group of people who might think that going out and having a drink, in moderation, is actually not a bad thing to do, because they don't have to worry about that exposure any more." - Caroline Flint MP.

The Royal

Dun Cow

Working Men's Club - now being let for offices

Oxford Tavern

Old Swan

Litten Tree

Park Tavern

Prince of Wales

Duke of York

Calendar, Queensway

Eagle, Queensway

Kingfisher

5 deeply de-Christian doctrines

2009-11-04T08:08:00.007Z

So I received the tag from David Keen -
List 5 doctrines that are taught within the Christian church that you believe to be deeply de-Christian.
I'm going to interpret "within" as not necessarily meaning "throughout" So I'm going to go for:

1. Creationism. The idea that being a Christian somehow requires you to hang your hat up by the door when you come into church, ignore the concept of "genre" and challenge uncontrovertible scientific evidence with an unneccessary, embarrassing and absurd pseduo-science of your own.

2. The subordination of the Spirit (taught en-passant, so to speak, in the Filioque clause in the Nicene Creed). Inserted for political reasons, institutionalising hierarchy and driving a wedge through Christianity for 1000 years.

3. Universalism.

4. The idea that filling up every moment of your time with Church activity is in some way a Christian responsibility.

5. Believing that Christianity has a set of morals that can be read off from the Bible as if it was a European Directive on Turnip Shapes. Because 1,000 years of pondering, reflecting and listening to the Spirit didn't produce a code of conduct. It produced a mosaic.

Over to you: Sally, Mike, Helen. I would tag more people that comment on my blogs, but I don't think they'd recognise me....

Darwin and Drivel

2009-10-27T19:31:00.002Z

According to the BBC website (and thanks to Steve Borthwick who's also commented on this, maybe from a slightly different religious angle..) - 60% of British people want to see other theories than evolution taught in Science regarding the origins of life. At least that's what I think it says. It's not terribly well-written.
How did we come to this? What other theory should be put forward? Do we teach the phlogiston theory in Chemistry? That babies are found in cabbage patches in Human Biology? Perhaps we should give a fair hearing to the Flat Earthers in Geography? Has this come about because of religious sensistivities? If so it's only the religious sensitivities of nutcases. Steve suggests that creationism should be taught as a theory of the origin of the universe in Religious Studies, but that seems inappropriate as most Christians don't believe in Creationism either as a literal story. It should be seen as the myth and religious/political polemic it is and not as pseudo-science. Or would that mean we couldn't dumb everything down?

On being an Anglican

2009-10-26T12:58:00.003Z

I took three services yesterday morning, which is quite a lot for a SSM with a full-time day job.

The first was 8 am Mass, Common Worship but traditional language. A staunchly Anglo-Catholic parish but one whose PCC recently overturned Resolutions A & B after nine years. About a dozen of the faithful, one of whom was new to the service and asked did she really have to sit in the nave when the service was in the side chapel. (Answer - No. Come in the side chapel with the rest of us. We've no idea why those other people like to attend a service they can't see or hear). They were celebrating Dedication Sunday.

Then 9.30 Communion, Common Worship in 20th century language. My own parish's Parish Eucharist. 50-odd adults, ten or so kids, 10 minute sermon (from me) on the subject of the Bible, all 80-odd books of it.

Then 11.30 Baptism. A family that have been to church once before - for their younger child's baptism. Church nearly full again, and full of people who never go to church. A chance to show we can be friendly ("Can you please switch off your mobiles before we start - only someone's phone went off during the last service and I was a bit worried God was trying to get a message to us"), and to share the Gospel with people who don't otherwise hear it. And to send them away to their post-Christening party feeling good, but having heard the Gospel (OK, a part of it), and heard a challenge.

If I went with my gut feel on infant baptism, I'd never have taken part in the third service and missed all those people who so need to hear about Jesus. If I were anti women priests, I'd never have been in the church where I am curate and so never could have served those people. If I were too fiercely pro-women priests, I'd not have such a good relationship with that Church that has just revoked the resolutions, over the last 15 years. If I was a narrow Protestant, I'd never have been in a church where I have to hold the Host and Chalice up and tell everyone confidently that this is, in fact, the Lamb of God.

All those chances missed, if I were safe in a sectarian bubble.

It may be frustrating, illogical, frequently depressing and founded on the whims of a mad king, but I love the Church of England.

Premier Radio Website Shows almost no Christian Sense of Irony

2009-10-25T13:53:00.002Z

The is the Premier Radio Website comment on that Alpha Poll that got trashed. And please vote for the Moon Gibbon on the Beaker Folk site "Does the Moon Gibbon Exist"- 5 votes so far and counting...

Harvest Festival

2009-10-05T22:30:00.001+01:00

Another Harvest Festival has come and gone.

Much excitement Saturday, when my new chasubles arrived - a red one, and a purple one, if you're interested. Just leaves me needing a white one now. And maybe a nice pink chasuble for Our Lady.

But back to Harvest. Morning was presiding at the All Age Eucharist. Which was all very good and well-attended. And in the evening, preaching at a BCP Evensong. We don't do these very often, and I sometimes wonder whether it's about spirituality, nostalgia (not mine - I never went to a BCP Evensong until 2001, and I was leading that one) or some kind of aesthetic experience. Anyway, I was preaching on the contrast between Ps 104 ("God's in his heaven, all's right with the world" being quite a good summary, and the uncertain, apparently random state of the world and its many disasters. I concluded by referring to the Cross - where all random deaths, apparently pointless suffering and wasted lives meet God's mercy and love - and to eschatology. If indeed they aren't the same thing, as I believe they are.

Missing out on the Harvest Supper (due to half the family being down with swine 'flu we've not really got organised for things like going to Harvest Suppers) nipped up the Lamb for the quiz, where I joined up with a few friends and came a respectable second. One question in particular stays in the mind - "what unit of measure is equal to 2,471 acres?" We ummed and ahhed, tried some arithmetic and eventually had a stab at a square mile. Back comes the answer - hectare. Hectare? We argued a bit, gave up. So this evening I look up the number of acres in a hectare. 2.471. Either the questionmaster can't tell commas from decimal points, or he's French.

A tendency to Feedjit

2009-10-05T22:06:00.002+01:00

Google really is a lovely thing. Latest one I enjoyed was somebody who ended up on the Beaker Folk, via the search "Spiritual Entrails". Whatever they were looking for, it wasn't what they found...

If this report is to be believed...

2009-09-27T22:19:00.001+01:00

Then the New Labour regulation of people's lives is almost complete...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8277378.stm

10 Random Beliefs

2009-09-27T20:27:00.003+01:00

Seeings everbody's doing it... such as David Keen, Sally, Steve Borthwick and even the Beaker Folk...

1. God is good. But he's also bigger and wilder and scarier than even the wildest imagination can conceive.

2. Jesus Christ was God on Earth and is a human in heaven. Why God chose to become one of us, who knows? But see #1. I suspect there's more to it.

3. Fond as I am of Rushden and Diamonds FC, they are not - by a long chalk - "by far the greatest team the world has ever seen". That was Liverpool in the late 70s.

4. The Spirit gives gifts. But some people never know they've got them. And others fail to realise they haven't.

5. We must give help to the poor, and care for the environment. And in doing either one we do both.

6. There is some truth in all religions.

7. Although women are still restricted in their ability to exercise leadership in the church, at the grass-roots it's men who suffer from an environment not designed for them.

8. God has favourites. They're the poor.

9. The current epidemic of pub closures is a national social disaster.

10. Angels in heaven don't play harps. They play Fenders.

Devon and Back

2009-09-27T19:59:00.006+01:00

Woken up this morning by a bunch of maniac cyclists who were cycling across Dartmoor and thought 6 am was a good time to get started. I was still quite warm, sleeping in last night's clothesand a hoody, in one sleeping bag and under another. But then I stuck my nose out and found out it was damp, foggy and freezing. 42°F, or 5°C if you've caved in to the Europeans. Or 278.15K, if you prefer, which at least sounds a bit warmer. So I got dressed and cleared off as fast as I could. Dartmoor was absolutely stunning as the sun rose, with pools of fog dripping across the moor. So for a nice bit of perspective I had my breakfast in a McDonald's in Plymouth.

Then went on to St Peter the Apostle, Wyndham Square, for Fr Simon's ordination. Nice to see another scientist and IT man elevated to the priesthood. And also to talk to another BNC

Chemist. There's not many of us about. I've never been called "Father" so many times in a short period.

The trip home was long, very long. I was hoping to take in the Rollrights, which I always try to visit on the way back, but traffic trouble on the M5 at Taunton and again at Bristol left me running quite late so I skipped that.

But I did take the time to call into Rich's Cider Farm for a pin of one of my favourite ciders. Seeing my dog collar and my 20 litre cider box, the guy behind me in the queue remarked "are you finished for the day then"

With 160 miles ahead of me, I'd barely started.

Down to Devon

2009-09-26T19:39:00.006+01:00

(Backposting)

Quite a long day. After the Saturday Morning Football Taxi was over, headed off for the South and West. First leg of the journey, in the car on my own, was kind of inevitable.

Went all the way down there and then promptly met one of the managers from our Health and Safety department, who works about 50 yards from me.

Had a nice long chat with one of the Druids, apparently a friend of King Arthur Pendragon. And she was telling me about their campaign to get the archaeologists who removed some human remains from one of the Aubrey Holes to put them back. They seem very rational - for a group of people who believe the druids were at Stonehenge - and are very polite about it all. They're not even saying that the archaeologists shouldn't be able to carry out some experiments - just asking that they bring them back afterwards. Seems very fair to me - just because someone's 3 or 4000 years dead and from Wiltshire seems no good reason not to let them rest in peace in their chosen place.

Then onto the Plume of Feathers in Princetown, apparently the highest town on Dartmoor, to camp overnight. But just time for a couple of ciders and a Woods Navy Rum or two before bed.

Small things eating other small things

2009-09-21T18:35:00.002+01:00

Went out for a walk at lunchtime on the Heath, to watch the most amazing life and death struggle. A spider locked in combat with a wood-ant. The spider was suspended from a thread of silk, and the combatants went up and down the thread as the fight progressed. Those wood-ants are nasty beggars, but the spider was well in the lead when I left.

As opposed to a much less well-matched battle that apparently took place Saturday. We had the head and tail of a squirrel deposited under the study desk. Thanks, Reuben the Cat.

It's an amazing natural world, but a wild one.

Specialist subject the bleedin' obvious

2009-09-18T22:32:00.002+01:00

"Among the reasons for the less drastic melt are that Arctic temperatures have been cooler this year than last, researchers said, and that winds have helped disperse sea ice across the region." -

So "researchers" say that the reason the Arctic ice isn't melting so much, is that it's colder. You know, sometimes I wish I'd stuck with the scientific research game. So much money, and quoted on the BBC, for being able to spot such a deep causal relationship...

A wasted search?

2009-09-14T22:04:00.003+01:00

Sometimes people end up on the wrong web page when they use Google. Apparently somebody ended up on the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley by typing the search words "what causes burning feeling & feel cold & crawley on arms" into Google. Try it - it works. But unfortunately for the poor soul they would have ended up reading an apology for the burning of Abp Cranmer.

Bike Ride

2009-09-12T20:39:00.002+01:00

So out on the Northants Historic Churches Trust sponsored bike ride. What with one thing and another, training weekends and retreats eating up spare time and so on, it's been 5 years since I last did it.

Last time I did 30 or 40 miles, and visited 20 churches. This time round I had Number 1 Son with me, so we shortened the trip. Also with my wife not feeling well I didn't want to go too far.

And, to be honest, I did 30-odd miles Wednesday so the parts that have closest contact with the saddle were probably a bit on the worn side.

Any way - quick run down:

St Mark's, where I was told "well you don't look much like the chaplain". Don't know why he'd say that. Given the Number 2 haircut, 2 days' stubble and the Liverpool replica shirt, who else could I have been?

High Street URC, the "Pork Pie Church", who were shut. Apparently having decided that for a bike ride that lasts from 10 am to 6pm, noon is a reasonable time to shut up shop, beings that's when the coffee morning ends. But I caught the lady who had been running the coffee shop - so I managed to get her to sign the form. The All Hallows, where I met a few old friends and was thanked for my agreeing to lead Mass at 8 am a few times this autumn. Then All Saints, with my namesake (but not, as far as I am aware, relative) Headley's name on the War Memorial. Then St Mary's where I met their local member of a religious order.

And then the Locomotive, for a pint of Gwynt y Draig cider.

Then St Mary's Finedon, and then Finedon Wesleyan, who had decided they weren't taking part after all this year. But since the guy was there who told me this, he signed in anyway...

Then Burton Methodist. Nice people. And Isham, the church where the whole congregation was rather gassed with Carbon Monoxide a few years ago when the boiler went on the blink. (They were all fine).

Then Orlingbury, home of Jock of Badsaddle (and the Queen's Arms). And Little Harrowden, home of the Lamb. And then Great Harrowden, where there was a sign announcing the church but nobody there and the church was locked. Thanks, Great.

So home. Maybe raised a couple of hundred quid, which is nice, but there weren't many about this year. I know that here in Waendal country we already have one big troll around the countryside every year, but it was a lovely day for seeing these beautiful churches in this wonderful county.

Next year we think we may be back to doing 30 miles.

The Alpha Curse

2009-09-10T07:51:00.004+01:00

I probably wasn't paying too much attention as I went down the road into central Northampton on my bike yesterday. Or else the wind had just folded the banner a little. But at that angle, I'm pretty sure the church was advertising "The Alpha Curse". As I got a little further in front I'm pleased to say that the "O" appeared.

I was due to take a funeral this morning, but sadly my wife's unwell so I managed to swap with the vicar, God bless her. This afternoon I'm currently due back to my day job, but I'm trying to get that off as well at the moment.

And God said...

2009-09-08T08:29:00.004+01:00

It's the early 6th century BC. You're hundreds of miles from home. You and your family have been dragged from your home country by the invading army who have destroyed Jerusalem, tortured and/or murdered your royal family and desecrated your places of worship - both the temple where you should have been worshipping, and the other, local places where you maybe shouldn't. Children have been slaughtered. A people has been ravaged and exported.

And you're in a country whose gods are everywhere. Their boast is that their gods are bigger than everyone else's. After all, they won. They get to choose the gods - just as their gods chose them. You thought your god was so mighty? Well, go back down to Jerusalem, if they'll let you - and see what's happened to the temple. And the gods of these people are a crazy bunch. In their creation story the mother of the gods got killed by her children, cut up and turned into the earth and the heavens. Mind you - the only story you've got about how the world began involve a man, and woman and a talking snake.

And you sit down and write. And the first thing you write is "In the beginning, God created the earth..." but the word you use for God literally means "Gods". And yet the sense of the passage is clearly in the singular. Maybe you're saying something about the power and majesty of your God - even with all the evidence of his weakness around you.

And you go on - "And God said let there be light. And there was light." And not just the light - the world, the atmosphere, the seas, the animals, and human beings - all on their chosen day, all in their carefully selected order. And the two refrains repeat... "And God said..." "...and it was good".
This is a parody of their creation myth. And it's a challenge to it. This God is not to be compared to the scruffy random gods who create a universe through family squabbles. This is a God who, when he says it - it happens. Who really is in control. This is a God who creates a world that can be trusted to be coherent, consistent, understandable - and above all - good.

This is not a scientific treatise. This is an act of defiance. It's a piece of intellectual, religious and philosophical rebellion. These are words of liberation. It's an act of trust in God who created everything, has power over everything, and holds everything in its place. So surely he's going to pull you through this as well. Who can "sing a song in a strange land"? You can. And you can share it with your friends as you wait out your days in exile. And you can pass it on to your children's children, as age after age they sing the song "How Long, O Lord"?

Around 700 years later, a man called John is looking for the words to express the amazing things that the Church has seen. And he looks at this passage and he sees the creative power of God's word, and he realises. And he writes - "In the beginning... was the Word." And he says - we saw the God who created the heavens and earth. He was here among us.

And 2000 years after that, some people who can't cope with logic and science decide it's God's manual for how to make a world.

But for the rest of us - the story of a God who makes a world that's ordered; that's functional; that's consistent; that's good; that's the story of a faith and a life worth living.

Science and Faith?

2009-09-04T19:07:00.002+01:00

I wouldn't normally post an academic essay up - it feels pretentious and lazy, 'cos I wrote it more than a year ago. But maybe I can get away with it because (a) it's a kind of comment on what David Keen is talking about and (b) although my theology's only Diploma standard my Science is Masters level. OK, it's not a "proper" MA, it cost a tenner. But I got a decent BA, and I had to stay alive for four years afterwards to get the MA... Please forgive the Essay-y nature of it.It does feel a bit "My Aunt, who I live with, had a parrot called 50s. The late 50s..." After all, it's an essay...

What follows from the belief that God is “maker of heaven and earth”?

Introduction

If we look at what follows from believing that God is “maker of heaven and earth”, there are a number of things to consider: is what follows conclusions about the nature of God? About the nature of heaven and earth? Or about our own actions? And finally, on what basis are we considering “God”? To answer fully all of this would take a substantial essay. So I will restrict my discussion primarily to what this belief tells us about the nature of God, in the light of God’s self-revelation in the Bible and in the scientifically-understood universe in which we life. I have reflected on this in the light of the Hitch-hiker’s Guide “trilogy”, as Douglas Adams’ view on the nature of “life, the Universe and everything” reflects a profound view of the apparent meaningless of life in this big, doomed Universe.

I will explicitly not discuss the subject of sin as a part of the suffering of the world, nor of judgement in this temporal world or in its eternal consummation. This is not to downplay the depth of sin, or the suffering it causes, or to ignore its place in the Crucifixion. It is rather because of the stand I will take that death and suffering necessarily exist regardless of human sin.

Creation

Big

“You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist”, remarks the Guide, “but that’s just peanuts compared to space.” (Adams 1979,p 62). Its size is literally beyond human comprehension – having been in existence for around 15 billion years (O’Murchu 1997, p 93) it is about 150 billion light years across (Whitehouse, 2004). That in itself should give us pause for thought – matter itself can travel no faster than the speed of light, so by “normal” physics the Universe can be no more than 30 billion light years in diameter. In fact, space itself stretches; and this causes the apparent anomaly. If God is maker of heaven than earth, then God is clearly extravagant. In creativity, scale and breadth of vision, clearly God is beyond our imaginations – “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isa 55:9). In contrast to the Gnostic view (McGrath 2001 p 297-8), God clearly loves “stuff”. After all, there is a stunning amount of it around.

Being amazed at the size of God’s creation is not solely a modern phenomenon – “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers… what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” (Ps 8:3-4). Yet in a human mind, the whole universe can be eclipsed by one moment of joy:

“Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in!

Say I'm weary, say I'm sad;

Say that health and wealth have missed me,

Say I'm growing old, but add,

Jenny kissed me!

(Leigh Hunt).

Small

The God who creates the expanse of the sky is clearly also capable of dealing with the detail of human relationships – a reflection of the nature of the Trinity. Going from the very big to the medium-sized, we can consider the fine detail of the Creation - at the quantum level. At this level the rules of physics laid down by Newton – or even by Einstein – are modified in a world of probabilities, uncertainties and wave-forms (Richards & Scott 1976 pp 14-21). At this level, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle sets the limits on what we could ever know, and mysteries are veiled (Polkinghorne 2004 p 76-78). At this level, matter is free from the determinism with which evaluate the universe on the macro scale. The Quantum Theory can be seen as the consequence of God’s self-emptying in setting the universe free – in setting, as it were, every particle in the universe free God has let the universe off the leash – give the whole thing a kind of free-will. This is a universe where God has neither stood back like an absent watchmaker (Dawkins 1986, 4), nor exists “in the gaps”. Rather, “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). In my opinion the Quantum Theory also undermines the Liberal view that rejected miracles and the Incarnation through a theological appropriation of 19^th century determinism – Maurice Wiles’ (1977, 5) rejection of the concept of the Incarnation demurs at the idea that we can accept a concept which “one cannot even spell out in intelligible terms” – but Quantum Theory had already been presenting concepts that could not be spelt out in intelligible terms for 60 years. Likewise Goulder’s (1977 pp 58-60) idea that accepting a miracle gives us a “God of the gaps” is based on an Enlightenment view of a closed universe with immutable laws – rather than one where the “laws of science” are descriptions of what normally happens rather than deterministic. This is not to argue that Quantum Theory “proves” miracles but it is to argue that the Universe is more veiled, more mysterious, than a supposedly “scientific” world-view may realise.

Quantum Theory also appears to give a reflection of the Trinity within the Creation. A particle’s wave function is solved (for the simplest case) assuming that the limits of a particle’s wave function extends to infinity (Richards & Scott 1976 p 20) (and this explains the phenomenon of nuclear fission). So in a sense every particle does indeed pass through every point in space simultaneously (Adams 1979 p 79) (improbable as that may sound). In fact the concept of quantum entanglement confirms that we are far more involved with each other (and the rest of the universe) than anyone may like to think in our individualistic society (Polkinghorne 2004 p 75). Polkinghorne notes how apt this is to concepts of God where the Trinity is described in perichoretic terms. The universe reflects the Creator’s divine perichoresis in its quantum interpenetration.

Elegance

For all its size and apparent complexity at the cosmic scale, and mystery and unpredictability at the micro level, the equations that describe the universe are remarkably elegant. The 1/r² law or Schrodinger’s wave equation, for example, are incredibly simple and intellectually satisfying – and the apparent complexity of the universe comes about from the sheer amount of stuff interacting in it, rather than the underlying science itself. The way the world works is not the scientific equivalent of Pratchett’s world rotating on four elephants on the back of a giant turtle (Pratchett 1985 p 11). In other words, we do not need a God of the Gaps – or a bunch of capricious gods sorting out the frayed areas around the world of science. Paul Dirac famously assessed the mathematical underpinnings of modern science on the basis of their “beauty” (McGrath 2004 p 71). The insight of both Einstein and the quantum physicists was that the universe is comprehensible through the human mind (Howse 2008 p 33). There is no particular reason why the universe has to be this way – but the way the universe reflects the Biblical view that the universe reflects the Logos that formed it – “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (John 1:3).

Suffering

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move” (Adams 1980, p 9). The universe is full of destruction, the part with which we are most familiar is full of suffering, life ends in pain and despair. Yet human beings grasp to ideas of a good god or gods – or “progress” – in the midst of this. “Human beings hesitate to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own”, (Hardy 1912 p 453), and attempt to excuse God from what goes wrong. A scientific analysis of the situation, but which takes notice of the Biblical accounts, gives an unsettling view – but perhaps a fruitful one.

A simplistic explanation of suffering might begin with the Fall, and explain everything that has gone on since as the consequence of the action of human beings. However that will not fit the facts. Since the moment of creation, the process that has led to our human life on this planet has been predicated on destruction. The carbon, oxygen and nitrogen within our bodies – and, with the exception of hydrogen, the elements that make up the whole physical world – are created in the depths of stars – stars that have since exploded, and whose contents have re-coalesced around our own Sun (Polkinghorne 2004, 69). On our own Earth, volcanoes, lightning and ultraviolet light – all agents of destruction – were responsible for the creation of the organic precursors of life (Attenborough 1979,19). Evolution, far from being an organic version of the 19^th century’s love of progress, is in fact blind (Dawkins 1986 p 5), random (Polkinghorne 2004 pp 66-67) and wasteful (Attenborough 1979 p 130).

In creating the heavens and earth, God acts as both Shiva and Brahma – but rarely, it would appear, as Vishnu. There is no balance in a world that is constantly in destructive and creative change. If God is creator, then the blueprint for the universe incorporated destruction, death and suffering from the outset. How can this be squared with a Christian view of God? The traditional problem of theodicy (McGrath 2004, 224-5) is that God cannot be both good and omnipotent in a world of pain and suffering. Yet if creation has these things designed into it, then can God even be good? McGrath concludes that these things will only be comprehensible at the End – but clues to them can be seen in the Cross.

Incarnation

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.” (Adams , 1984, pp 7-8)

A solution to the problems of “life the universe and everything”, where “no one would have to get nailed to anything” is a constant human dream. In the case of Fenchurch (above), her insight was lost when the world was “unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass” – a reflection from Adams, perhaps, that actually the world’s not that easy.

God has created a world where death and destruction are built-in – are in fact the preconditions of life. To say that God has pre-planned destruction can be seen from some perspectives as heresy against the God who has compassion “over all that he has made” (Ps 145:9). But it has resonances with Calvin’s doctrine of providence and in the book of Job (Migliore 2004 pp 122-123). But within this view of the universe, maybe God’s behaviour is in a sense excusable only if God suffers alongside the suffering universe.

Wallace (2001 p 223) sees the Spirit as suffering within the suffering world. Wallace’s concern is mostly with the world as it suffers from “ecocide” (ibid, p 210) – but in that the Spirit is involved with Creation, groaning with that Creation in awaiting its restoration (Rom 8:18-27) – we can see the Spirit as taking a part in God’s self-emptying into the universe of pain that God has created. In that the universe is incomparably bigger than the world, and capable of displaying destruction on an immense scale, the suffering with which an indwelling Spirit has solidarity makes the matter of a little local trouble on Earth apparently insignificant. And yet, as noted above, at any moment the cosmically unimportant becomes the most essential matter in the Universe.

Wallace also notes that “death comes from life” (Wallace 2001 p 223). Most specifically, this is seen in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. In the Word become flesh, God enters fully into the life – and death – of the world. It may be useful to see another Biblical image of atonement – one associated with lost sheep, coins and children (Luke 15) - that of finding. God comes to a world which God has allowed to be created in destruction, to persist through death, and to be doomed to futility. In Jesus Christ, God adopts the same cell growth and death, maturing and ageing, to which we are all subject by our inheritance as part of this universe. At the point where he is subject to exhaustion, thirst, and ultimately physical death – sentenced by an oppressive regime – he is at the lowest point of human existence. And this is where he finds us. And from this point on, God lifts the universe up – starting with the Resurrection.

The End

All things come to an end. The Earth itself probably has a few billion years before the Sun finally consumes its last hydrogen supplies and becomes a red giant (Polkinghorne 2004, pp 143-4). Ultimately all things will come to an end – in a “Big Crunch” or in the long slow decay of heat death (Polkinghorne 2004, p 144). If the latter is true, the world truly does end “not with a bang, but a whimper” (Eliot 1925). It is not to Science that we can look for any hope here. Nor indeed to History - the greatest civilisations are a moment in such a timescale. Thus Max Quordlepleen, considering the ultimate “it”, tells his audience - “It really gives one hope for the future of all life-kind. Except, of course… that we know it hasn’t got one!” (Adams 1980, p, 97). Even in our own bodies, the mere act of staying alive sows entropy – “Time’s Arrow” - into the rest of the Universe.

Polkinghorne (2004, p 146)points to the “vertical” dimension of the End. If God is creator of heaven and earth, then the creation “must make sense everlastingly” – his conclusion being that the creation must therefore be redeemed from transience. As Polkinghorne again notes (2004, p 148)., what is remarkable, given modern theology’s rather narrow view on such things, is that Paul was able to see this so clearly – “all things”were reconciled with God on the cross (Col 1:20), and the creation itself looks forward to its freedom from decay (Rom 8:20). It is not merely human beings that will be redeemed – how poverty-stricken could this view be in such a massive universe – but the whole earth, already full of God’s glory (Isa 6:3) will be at peace (Moltmann 1994, vi).

We can read the model for the End of Time into the Bible, in the Little Apocalypse: the darkened sun and moon, the stars fall from heaven, and the “powers of heaven will be shaken” (Matt 24:29) – although I am not suggesting that Jesus thought in terms of heat death! But if God loves the creation he has made, and it has been redeemed on the cross, then when the End comes it is in fact just the Beginning (Eliot 1942, v).

If the earth is to be redeemed, and God loves it, then it matters how we treat it and how we act on it. If every moment is of infinite significance then the here and now are crucial. If the world is burnt up, destroyed and forgotten - or left behind by a liberated soul, then it really does not matter (Moltmann 1996 p xv). But if Christian hope is involved in a world that itself will be renewed, then politics, history, the environment, science all have meaning – the Kingdom of God is not to be confused with an earthly society, but neither is it totally divorced from it. Rather the dawn glow of eternal glory can already be seen illuminating the world as it is today. And in this sense, the mystery of suffering created along with, and programmed into the world, makes some kind of sense. We are not looking forward to the recreation of an originally pristine world. Rather, through the struggles and tears of humanity, heaven, earth and the triune God, we are reaching towards creation’s ultimate destiny (Moltmann 1996, p 264-5). If some could talk of felix culpa – the Happy Sin that gave us a saviour – we can talk about the sufferings that give birth to a new creation. These current days are not the death-pangs of a dying world – rather the birth-pains of the creation as it reaches for its fulfilment (Matt 24:8). In fact it is the temporary nature of the creation as it stands that gives the possibility of the new and completed creation (Moltmann 1996, p 266).

Conclusion

I have discussed the considerations that flow from holding a belief in the good, life-affirming God of the Bible in tension with the observable facts of a universe of decay and destruction – and moreover one that is apparently designed that way. My conclusion is that the sorrows of this world can only be seen in the context of the creation’s ultimate conclusion – the time when God “will wipe every tear from their eyes” (Rev 21:4). At that time every human pain, every unfulfilled life, and every planet which evolved life just in time to see its sun go supernova will receive its completion.

In the beginning, God makes all things “good” (Gen 1:4). This never changes, whatever the scars of suffering and sin – but the God who enters rest on the Sabbath is working ceaselessly towards a Sabbath for the earth and for the people of God (Moltmann 1996, p 264; cf Heb 4:9). This will not be “a day of liberation from the earth” (Fellingham 2001) – rather one of liberation for the earth, and for those who rise with it. Then the eternal size of space will not blow the minds of human beings with its horror (Adams 1979, p 64) – rather it will be a creation of infinite size and beauty, reflecting the beauty and goodness of its Creator and illuminated with the light of the Lamb (Rev 21:22).

“We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time....

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one”

(Eliot, 1942).

Bibliography

Adams, Douglas 1979 The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Books.

Adams, Douglas 1980. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. London:Pan Books.

Adams, Douglas 1984. So long, and thanks for all the fish. London: Pan Books.

Attenborough, David 1979. Life on Earth. London: Collins / BBC.

Dawkins, Richard 1986. The Blind Watchmaker. New York: WW Norton & Company.

Eliot, TS 1925. The Hollow Men. At http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/784/. Accessed 1 April 2008.

Eliot, TS 1942. Little Gidding. In: Wain, John (ed) 1986. The Oxford Library of English Poetry. London: Guild Publishing pp 343 - 348.

Fellingham, N 2001. There is a day. In: Songs of Fellowship vol 3 (2003). Eastbourne: Kingsway Music.

Goulder, Michael 1977. Jesus, the Man of Universal Destiny In: Hick, John (ed): The Myth of God Incarnate pp 48-63. London: SCM Press.

Hardy, Thomas 1912. The Return of the Native. Penguin Popular Classics edition, 1994. London: Penguin.

Howse, Christopher 2008. Why the Big Bang is not Creation. In: The Daily Telegraph, Saturday 22 March 2008.

Kantitha, VP 1985. Hinduism. Hove: Wayland.

Leigh Hunt, James Henry. Jenny Kissed Me. In: Wain, John (ed) 1986. The Oxford Library of English Poetry. London: Guild Publishing.

McGrath, Alister E 2001. Christian Theology: An Introduction 3^rd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

McGrath, Alister E 2004. The Science of God. London: T&T Clark International.

Migliore, Daniel L 2004. Faith Seeking Understanding 2^nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Miles, Maurice 1977. Christianity without Incarnation? In: Hick, John (ed): The Myth of God Incarnate pp 1-10. London: SCM Press.

Moltmann, Jűrgen 1996. The Coming of God: Christian Eschatology. London: SCM.

O’Murchu, Diarmuid 1997. Quantum Theology. New York: Crossroad Publishing.

Polkinghorne, John 2004. Science and the Trinity. London: SPCK.

Pratchett, Terry 1985. The Colour of Magic. Corgi edition. London: Corgi.

Richards, William G and Scott, Peter R 1976. Structure and Spectra of Atoms. London: Wiley and Sons.

Soskice, Janet Martin 2001. The Ends of Man and the Future of God. In: Ward, Graham (ed) 2005: The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology pp 68-78. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Wallace, Mark I. 2001. Earth God: Cultivating the Spirit in an Ecocidal Culture. In: Ward, Graham (ed) 2005: The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology pp 209-228. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Whitehouse, David 2004. Astronomers size up the Universe. Friday, 28 May 2004. BBC Website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3753115.stm. Accessed 21 March 2008.

Bible Quotations are from the Anglicized New Revised Standard Version.

Dutch Church

2009-09-04T13:11:00.002+01:00

Forgot to mention this. I went to a Dutch Church last Sunday. Well, I was in Holland...
It was just nice to join in the worship. The first hymn was by Keble, which was nice, so I knew the tune and I was vaguely aware of what the hymn was about. I managed to decipher enough of the reading (which they'd conveniently printed out) so that I knew which passage of Romans it was. I'm one of those people who never learnt chapter and verse numbers, and I'm unlikely to start now. After all, they've been added to the text later and therefore, according to the end of Revelation, accursed. (is this right? must check with incumbent...)

It would be untrue to say I didn't understand a word of the sermon. I recognised God, (ponounced "Hodt"), and Hoop (pronounced "hope"). Which, really, is more than you can get out of some sermons that are ostensibly in English.

They only sang two "actual" hymns, but they had sung responses (and lots of candles) which makes them very high church for Dutch Protestants. Despite having Martin Luther and John Calvin in the stained glass...

Oh, and the town is in the area evangelised by an Englishman. St Willibrord. It may not be trendy to say it, but God bless Anglo-Saxon Christianity... brought the Gospel to the Frisians.

And the dutch for chalice, is beker. Just thought I'd mention it.

And I did receive communion (from a shared chalice - less swine flu in Holland). Which was great.

And also - I did sing along with the hymns. Which must have left me sounding, to a Dutch person, like Clouseau or that British postman in 'Allo 'Allo. They've got some really tricky dipthongs have the Dutch.

And just one more thing... I note from the Wiki articles above that three denominations united to form the Protestantse Kerk in Nederland. And due to the resulting splits, that means that three denominations turned into... three different denominations. Ecumenism, doncha love it?

A rest?

2009-09-03T20:42:00.003+01:00

Well, 10 days on holiday in Holland. In theory a rest, but Sharon wasn't really well. On the bright side, spent a lot of time swimming, the kids spent a long while on the funfair, and we had several pints at 't Hoekje, a pub that basically translates as "on the corner". Unusually for a Dutch bar it sold a wheat beer on draught and has banned Heineken from the premises, which is why I honour it with the term "pub".

Came back late on Tuesday after a 10 hour journey, to find one of our rabbits had fly strike. He'd been looked after by a friend but these things happen rather quick. So sadly at 12 midnight I was in the emergency vet's in Northampton getting him put down. Cost an extra 100 quid but I couldn't really leave him to morning, could I?

And now I'm back at work. And after one day back I'm worn out. Just raised the energy to pick the songs for the 10.45 service and wishing I wasn't watching Dolce Vito who must be the most annoying TV person since those shouty blokes on Masterchef.

And one of our music group members sadly died last week. A larger than life bloke in many ways. We'll miss him a lot.

What I won't be preaching on Sunday

2009-08-19T10:41:00.005+01:00

“It is the Spirit that gives life – the flesh is useless” (John 6:63)

You can read this verse on its own, and decide that it means that we should not care about this world, about our bodies... our flesh. Because that's not important. It's spiritual things that matter. Why should we care about these bodies - that will only wear out after 80 years - or less if we decide "what the heck" and eat saturated fats and drink Theakston's Old Peculier or Harvey's Dry Sherry? Why should we worry about a world that's gone to hell in a hand-cart anyway, where we raise the CO2 levels through the roof and watch ice sheets melt. Why should we think that much about a world that's clearly doomed, and that will in any event one day disappear into the furnace of an exploding sun, before collapsing into the heart of a black hole? What do pandas, the Arctic, the islands of the South Pacific have to do with us?

Because we're all right. We're all going to live forever. In a castle in the sky - where there is no hunger, or pain, and God keeps the spiritiual CO2 level just right for a climate where we can walk around in white robes, and raise our spiritual arms in worship for all eternity. So much better than the rides at Thorpe Park, where you can't raise your arms in warm weather because it's sweaty... The Flesh, after all is useless - isn't that right?

That's the message that modern worship often gives. Escapist, spiritual, without earthly content - "There is a day that all creation's waiting for. A day of freedom and liberation from the earth" sang Phatfish. From the earth? So the Gnostics were right? We need liberation from the earth? "I'm coming back to the heart of worship and it's all about you" sang Matt Redman. Well, it's all about something. But if it's all about Jesus, then it seems to be all about a disembodied, spiritual Jesus who we only encounter in "worship". Not the sweaty, dusty Jesus who hiked through Palestine for those three years. Not a Jesus surrounded by the thrashing and smell of fish, down on a beach by Galilee. Not a Jesus covered in blood nailed to a tree on a patch of wasteland outside a city wall.

No - the Flesh is useless, we decide. And we worship to lift ourselves away from all that. All the drudgery of daily life; the washing up; unloading lorries; serving customers; writing computer programs - what have they got to do with God? We want to be away from all that - we want to come to church to be free to focus on God and leave all that behind. After all, one of these days that's what we're going to do forever isn't it?

So there are no choruses about finding God in a computer keyboard - or a loading bay - or a supermarket checkout. And in our prayers it's easy to pray for bishops and clergy - and maybe even for teachers and nurses. But when do we remember binmen, or fork-lift truck drivers? We divide the jobs people do into spiritual and non-spiritual. Doctor's surgery? Caring. God is there. A warehouse on Brackmills? Godless. People moving clothes, or shoes, or radiators about. What's that got to do with God?

I think we've inherited a lot of this from the Victorians. They wrote hymns like "All things Bright and Beautiful" -created a rural paradise- just as they were building their railways and their factories, and sweeping up people who were starving in the country so they could die in squalor in the towns. We've built ourselves our spiritual wonderland, where no dark thing comes and we leave the rest of the week behind on a shiny Sunday that has no relationship to the rest. We've divided our lives up - and rush for shelter with our eternal nursemaid and fairy godfather, away from the nasty world out there.

Which begs the question - if that's the way we see it, what are we doing when we receive Communion? Why is the most spiritual thing we could be doing - feeding on Jesus - concentrated into bread and wine? Earthly things. If the Flesh is useless in that way, then what could be more fleshy - more earth - more unheavenly - that "the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands"? How is our most spiritual moment tied up in something so - so solid? So material? Something we can eat and drink - something we digest. Something - something we can chew, for goodness' sake?
And if the Flesh is useless in that way, then why didn't Jesus appear to men and women in a spiritual form? Why did he get caught up in all the blood and mess and pain of a human birth? Why did he go through all the messy biological processes we all do? Why did he eat and drink and sweat and excrete like all the rest of us? Why cry when Lazarus died? Why get rejected by his disciples? Why go through all that stuff on the cross? Why not just smile and wave sweetly from a cloud?

Because the Flesh may be useless - on its own - but it's very important. Because the world is where we live. Because it's what we made of. Because God likes stuff - the stuff of which we're made - so much he made a whole universe out of it. Because where we are, and what we do - what we do in our daily lives, as much as what we do on Sunday mornings - matters for all eternity.

On the wall of chapel by the sea in a little sea-port, I found the words of Ps 107 - not surprising, in that place - “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep.” The people that worship under that text know that God is not just in a church.

Don't get me wrong - the Flesh is useless. The Flesh is hopeless. The Flesh is powerless. On its own it can do nothing. It's going to die, it's going to rot, it's going to burn up. Without the Spirit, bread and wine are just bread and wine. Human bodies are just a short-lived clump of protein and water. Human society is, as Frankie Boyle put it, just a bunch of monkeys clinging to a dying rock.

But when God takes on Flesh, he raises it up. When God comes to earth, he makes it holy. When God works as a carpenter, and joins with fishermen, he makes work sacred. When God dies on a cross, he gives even death a purpose.

So we're going to receive Jesus's body and his blood. And we'll do that in something that looks just like bread and wine - because that's what it's made of. And in doing that we offer back to God the world of farming - because farmers grew this - and the world of manufacturing - because someone made these. And the world of distribution - because someone had to bring these here. And the world of retail - because somebody sold these. And the world of banking and finance and commerce - because somebody paid for these with money. And we offer him the world of nature - because grapes and wheat are things that grow. And this useless Flesh will be filled with the Spirit and our failing bodies will make up the body of Christ.

And we can go to our daily lives tomorrow morning knowing that even Mondays are special - because God is there as well as here.

Beaker Holiday Club

2009-08-19T10:36:00.002+01:00

Amused as I drove up the road today to see a bunch of kids playing on the climbing frame at the Leisure Centre. They were supervised by a group of teenagers, and all the kids were wearing hi-viz vests. Nice to know that the Beaker Folk are running holiday clubs, but have they considered the Health and Safety implications of wearing hiviz while climbing on a climbing frame? A wee tot could easily by caught up on some projecting piece of apparatus, and left hanging there in a dangerous situation. Not to mention that the hi-viz will make them easier to spot for all the molesters out there, as well as their so-called carers. All in all I think a risk assessment is called for.

Catching up...

2009-07-29T21:52:00.002+01:00

Just a fortnight to catch up on then. I really should blog more often. But then as a rule my brain is stunned by the kind of time of night when I could be blogging.

I've taken two more communion services - one Sunday morning and one Tuesday evening. And preached a sermon on the Loaves and Fishes. And done a baptism. Oh, the baptism... the mother of the candidate was 15 minutes late for the service, one of the godparents didn't turn up and was replaced, the congregation wandered around taking photos regardless of what they were told...

I'm not a massive fan of infant baptism. It's not that I think it's an invalid sacrament; I just think it's a bit... well, a bit silly when the parents aren't churchgoers. And this really didn't help.

Oh yeah - and last Wednesday, since Dave had gone too far the previous week, we had a meeting up at Wootton WMC for a pint. 15 miles from my house, so one heck of a bike ride.

Went straight through Northampton (pronounced "nthampton") on the way. Had a quick one at the Malt Shovel, the best pub in the town, to prepare myself for the hill past Delapre Abbey. And by pure chance, met my mate Bob. Nice to see him - it had been a fortnight since last time I saw him (and three years since we'd met up before).

Then a couple of relaxed, happy pints and a long debate about swine flu. I'm a bad person to appraoch with the line "swine flu - it's a fuss about nothing, isn't it?" - on account of my year researching influenza virus, I get very nerdy and quite scary.

And then the cycle home. Thanks to poor signposting in the Brackmills area, a bit of a schlepp round aforesaid industrial estate. And then that scary, scary, ride from Billing to Ecton, between the Landfill site and the gipsy camp and the sewage farm, with the circling bats... oh, deep joy, as another Northants person often said.

But apart from that a really good ride.

And the day job? Well, let's not discuss that...

Working Tax Credits - A Rant

2009-07-22T10:11:00.006+01:00

When I was a young man I used to vote Labour. I realise that it is a common experience to move from Left to Right, but I've not really done that so much as moved from Left to quite a Libertarian position. In simple terms, I've a real problem with people telling me (or anyone else) what to do unless we agree to that position. Not that I'm advocating anarchy in the streets. I just think the State should butt out unless it's necessary.

That's why I now loathe New Labour. It's not so much their economic incompetence, although I think that's obvious. It's not the way Gordon Brown latched onto his far more charismatic ex-friend as a means of securing unelected, rigged, undemocratic power.

It's their habit of pointlessly interfering with people's lives.

For me the tipping point was Fox Hunting. Now let me get this clear - I don't hunt foxes. Never have, never will, wouldn't want to. I regard it as a silly and inefficient way of killing foxes. And probably not very much fun for the fox. But it clearly gives a lot of people a lot of pleasure, brings a lot of employment, and doesn't kill many foxes compared to, say, Toyota Priuses or guns or poison or starvation or disease. So to ban fox hunting was never about animal protection - or we'd set up a little NHS for the dear woodland creatures - it was about stopping people doing something that New Labour didn't agree with.

Same for the Smoking Ban. I don't smoke. I've never smoked. But if I didn't like the smoke I had the free right of movement, in this free country of ours, to move to a less smoky pub. Which is that is considerably diminished in Wellingborough now. The Litten Tree, Old Swan, Dun Cow (last time i looked), Eagle, Prince of Wales, Servicemen's Club, Royal, Calendar, and probably one or two others I've not checked are closed. That's a lot of pubs for a small town to lose. The Smoking Ban is clearly not responsible for all of these - ludicrous rates of duty on on-sales are also to blame, and clearly people are going to stay in and get plastered on £3 bottles of wine rather than going to go out at £3 a pint in these credit-crunched times. But the Smoking Ban, as far as I can see, is another factor - maybe the final straw - that pushed these pubs (not all great pubs, but still pubs) over the edge.

And so to Tax Credits. Over the last week I've wasted about 10 hours of time collecting the information and phoning up the Working Tax Credits helpline to give them details of my earnings last year. So they can give me some money. Money I gave them previously in tax. How anyone working 30 hours a week in a white-collar, technologically-based job, with a partner who works another 30 hours a week, albeit in a less well-paid job, needs tax credits is beyond me. Why the system has been set up with the aim of taking money off me, then paying it back, is totally beyond me. How families that earn more than £50,000 a year could ever be regarded as needing benefits is equally beyond me. Unless it serves two other purposes - one - to put people in employment processing my phone calls - and two - to establish just a little more control over me, my income, and my life circumstances. To remind me once again that I'm not a free human being - I'm a subject of our absurd, top-heavy, power-hungry, useless Government and Establishment. Romans 13 tells me that I have to pay tax to, and obey, the authorities. But then Paul was lightly taxed and didn't have to spend an hour on the phone to someone in Scotland to get money back for his children. Mind you, about as many people had a say in who was Caesar as in who we got to be Prime Minister.

SSM

2009-07-18T19:34:00.003+01:00

The term "NSM", for non-stipendiary minister, has now been replaced, as these things tend to be, by the more politically-correct abbreviation "SSM". But what does SSM actually stand for? Some suggestions...

State Supported Minister - an ordained job-hunter

Self Supporting Minister - a minister who never has enough time, to the dismay of the retired members of his congregation who all seem to have loads of spare time.

Spouse Supported Minister - a fifty-five-year-old woman priest whose husband goes out to work and whose children have left home.

Sainsbury's-Sponsored Minister - due to a nifty tie-up with the local supermarket, in receipt of a decent deal but has to wear a brown cassock, clip-on tie and the motto "Try Something New Today" on his/her back.

Still Single Minister - entered the Church to meet women, but then found out they're all older than his gran.

Self Starting Minister - ready to create new exciting initiatives all over the parish, but only has three hours a week, so has to confine him/herself to the odd baptism.

Day of rest

2009-07-15T16:47:00.002+01:00

Yeah, right. So the washing machine man arrives at 8 am. Not joking, 8 am.

So after he'd gone, I had a cup of coffee and a bath and then set off for Northampton.

I reckon a 30 mile round trip. My legs ache now. But the good news is that the Malt Shovel is as good as it ever was, and selling Thatcher's Cheddar Valley. God bless them.

Tired now. Glad there's curry a-cookin'.

ALIEN ENCOUNTER ON THE TEARDROP LAKES

2009-07-15T08:56:00.002+01:00

It was a warm, gentle, evening in June, and a lone cyclist was skimming along the redway on one edge of the Teardrop Lakes.

Brian, a commuter on his way home from Milton Keynes station, had had a very pleasant early evening. An office leaving party had started off in the work bar, then spilled over into the pub next door. As a result he had consumed a reasonable amount of London Pride. He had left London, he thought, early enough to have daylight when he arrived home. However, in his fuddled state he had miscalculated by an hour. There was still a slight afterglow over towards Towcester, or would have been if it had not been drowned out by the sulphurous light-haze that hung over Milton Keynes, but around the Teardrop Lakes, the only useful light was from the row of lamps that ran alongside the redway. This was enough for Brian at present, but he knew that eventually he would have to enter darker parts of the park on his way home, and he had no lights on his bike.

This particular redway runs alongside the lake on one side, and the railway line on the other. A West Coast Mainline train crashed past at this point, on its way to Birmingham and all parts north-west. He reflected that, if he had spent another twenty minutes in the pub, he could caught that train instead of his slower one, and been home at much the same time.

There are four Teardrop Lakes between Childs Way and Chaffron Way, and where the brook joins each lake to the next, there is a bridge. So there are three bridges in total, and our hero had to choose which one to cross. Over the past six months he had crossed over both of the well-lit ones many times, in comfort and convenience. So it could only have been the London Pride in his system that encouraged him on this occasion to go over the other, rather darker, bridge. Humming a cheerful tune, he turned a sharp right, leaning into the bend in a polished manner. There was an almighty crash and it all went dark.

What he had not reckoned with, was the different positioning of the bollards. All the bridges had bollards, presumably to stop people in Minis racing around the redway system. Two of the bridges had bollards on either side of the path, so that the inebriated cyclist could cruise straight through the middle without let or hindrance. Once of the bridges, the one he had chosen this evening, had a bollard in the middle of the path, so you have to go round it to the left or right. What Brian had done was to hit it full on, at about fifteen miles an hour. He was thrown a reasonable distance over the handlebars, landing on his back in the middle of the path.

He lay there for a moment with his eyes closed, mentally checking all the bones and connections in his body. Two hands; two feet, all functioning. One head, apparently OK. One back - complaining loudly. He opened his eyes.

Due to the glow of the streetlights, it's never very easy to see the stars in Milton Keynes, but out in the middle of the park by the Teardrop Lakes is probably as good a place as any to see them. They were really very pretty as they hung there above him, placidly looking down at this strange example of humanity. For a moment, he felt quite relaxed. Then he heard voices.

The first fear was that they might be muggers, but then he realised that they were speaking too softly.

"He seems to be unconscious," he heard from one of the voices.

"No, his eyes are open. Are you alright? That seemed like a nasty bump you had there."

He heard someone walking very close up to him. Then a light shone directly into his eyes, and he felt quite stunned. He decided to risk what damage he might do to his body, and clambered to his feet. What he saw was terrifying.

There were about five or six of them in all, about the size of men, ranged around him. He could not see their faces, assuming they had any, as each of them had glowing from his head a bright light, and all of these lights were blazing straight towards him.

"I'm fine! Leave me alone! I'll get my bike," he screamed. He staggered over to where his bike had fallen, and picked it up. He slung his leg over the saddle and peddled off. The front wheel had clearly been warped by the crash, so that the bike wobbled wildly across the path, but other than that it was possible to ride it. He charged off into the darkness, hearing the siren voices behind him:

"Come back!"

"You don't know if you're hurt!"

"We can help you!"

When he got home his wife did not believe him. She was inclined to believe that he had suffered concussion when he landed on the ground, and insisted on driving him down to MK General for a checkup. On a Friday night, MK General is not the place to be seen to quickly. There had been a fight in a restaurant somewhere in the city centre, and the people who had taken part in the fracas occupied more than half the waiting room. In particular a large Geordie, with a makeshift bandage round his head, was shouting at the nurses to get a move on, as he was bleeding to death. He had two members of the Thames Valley constabulary holding on to make sure he did nothing too rash. Eventually the Geordie had waited long enough.

"I'm not waiting any longer," he announced to a passing nurse, "these ****** will only beat me up again when they get me to the station, anyway."

Thus saying, he strode out of the door, dragging the policemen behind him, and escorted himself into the police car. Brian, promoted up the queue, was seen more rapidly than he expected. He was given assorted tests, X-rayed, and pronounced to be completely lacking in the symptoms of concussion. His determination that he had seen alien life-forms by the Tear Drop lakes, however, led a doctor to take his wife to one side for a quiet chat.

"Leave it a few days. If he persists with it, ask your GP to arrange a scan."

So she took her husband home. He realised which way the wind was blowing, and didn't mention aliens to her from then on. Mind you, he also avoided the Tear Drop lakes after sunset. And he was quite a hit on the Alien Abduction group on Facebook.

A couple of months later, armed with a brand new pair of bike lights and a straightened front wheel, he forced himself to retrace his route across the park going home one night. It was a little earlier in the evening than last time, but the year was more advanced, so it was just as dark. He travelled all the way across the lakes, enjoying the warmth of the late-summer air and the babbling of the brook - I'd describe it as something other than babbling, but somehow it's such an appropriate word for brooks - as it ran from lake to lake. He didn't see any aliens. The only intelligent life-forms he saw were the fishermen, sitting with their lines and little tents along the water's edge. Each one equipped with a torch on his hat, so he could see what he was doing with both hands free. Brian thought of asking them if they'd seen any aliens that June evening, but decided they would probably think he was mad. Reflecting that he was the only person in Milton Keynes to have escaped an attempted alien abduction, and that he had 132 letters from members of the Southern England UFO Society to answer at home, he pushed on a bit harder and raced back home.

The Urban Folklore of Milton Keynes

2009-07-15T08:52:00.002+01:00

A long time ago, in a New "City" far away... I wrote a series of Urban Myths of Milton Keynes. At the time I posted them on a back-water of my Thomas Hardy website.

Time moves on and the ratbags of BTInternet have taken away the ability to maintain the sites, leaving them in a strange limbo of half-workingness. Now I could go and get them rehosted but that would take time.

So in the interim, I hope you enjoy the Urban Folklore of Milton Keynes.

Another week goes by

2009-07-14T21:43:00.003+01:00

So Saturday. And a trip to the Queen's Arms Orlingbury for Hog Roast, and the wonderful if rather rude music of Dr Busker and his Revolting Peasants.

Dr Busker was of course brilliant. Always is, in my experience. Revolting Peasants very amusing as ever.

And then we come to the Hog Roast. People who can't be blamed for that authentic extremely small Hog Roast experience (no salad, practially no pork) include the QA (they only hosted); Dr Busker (don't shoot the piano accordian player); the Warwickshire and Northants Air Ambulance (they only benefitted from the raffle) and the caterers (who supplied what they were told to). Sadly the organisers clearly didn't realise what a draw Busker et al are, and sold twice as many tickets as they had arranged for the caterers to feed. I'm not going to name the organisers. Merely say that with organisation like this, it's no wonder that Small Businesses go out of business at such a rate.

Sunday was the day for the traditional "priest's first blessing", postponed from last week when we had to run around too much between the main communion and the rock n roll service. It's a bit odd at first, individually blessing 50 or so people. But very moving indeed for me.

Then two days of the usual trying to do a million things at work. And now a day off. Can't wait till Christmas. The nights are drawing in already...

Wellinblogger

2009-07-09T21:53:00.002+01:00

I've just finished posting up an online version of the Wellingborough 1939 Guidebook. It's all genuine - I scanned it in. An interesting tale of a small English market town before the war and the Londoners.

http://wellinblogger.blogspot.com/

Chimney Swept

2009-07-08T10:38:00.001+01:00

Nice to see the guy who installed our Stove, back to sweep the chimney. That wood-burner (and smokeless fuel burner...) has been fantastic all winter. Won't say it's saved us any money because logs are expensive. But it makes the living room. And now it's all lovely and black again and the chimney ready for the autumn. Can't wait for September.

Ordination

2009-07-08T10:34:00.001+01:00

Good stuff from Bishop Alan. Particularly for those of us from a more evangelical tradition...

And another day dawns...

2009-07-07T13:01:00.003+01:00

So after the Priesting, the First Eucharist, the 10:45 and the lunch, all feeling very special... get in yesterday to a resignation and the usual set of deadlines and problems. Then in the evening a baptism visit. And back at work now and tonight visiting Eldest Son's new school tonight

Then tomorrow my day off! So I can collect the kids from school. And a bike ride into the country for a pint with me mate! And the chimney sweep coming round. At least that's an unfamiliar event. Haven't had the sweep round since I was a kid and my parents had an open fire. And I'm meant to be giving a bass lesson, which is ironic for anyone that's every heard me play the bass.

You know you really want a long break when you realise that even an ordination retreat seemed a bit busy... Shame it's a way off till I get one.

One or two things to catch up on...

2009-07-05T16:53:00.005+01:00

So Wednesday. As part of my campaign to visit as much as East Anglia as possible in a week, after last weekend's meanderings I did the following: Downham Market to see Sally and Tim (and Chris) who kindly gave me lunch and I discovered there's a bunch of very fervent Christians Chris knows who, having seen the Beaker People blog, prayed for my soul. Which was nice of them. Then on to Walsingham, a place I associate in particular with my mum (she was seriously ill the first time I went there, and had left us by the second time I went there, and I've offered a lot of prayer for her there over the last few years). And then Ely, to start retreat.

A good time at Ely, quiet, of course, with a chance to catch up with all the other deacons who I hadn't seen all year due to having my day job when they have training sessions. I was quite surprised to realise, alongside those other curates of their various persuasions, that I seem quite High Church these days.

And then yesterday, went Peterborough for a stupendous service with 14 of us priested, and 10 or so deacons-to-be looking on at what they could look forward to. Thanks to Sally for getting there as part of her Ordination Crawl, and my old college pal Paul, and of course my church and a few Gleneagles' people and to the former vicar of All Hallows, my parish priest for eight years. An incredibly hot day, and all those extra layers helped...

And then this morning, a truncated first communion - I don't mean we missed stuff out, but in order to fit in the 10.45 service we always have a Prayer H, two-hymns only service first Sunday. I even managed not to knock anything over, although I noticed I was a bit shaky holding up the chalice so I must have been a bit nervous under it all. Wonderful to see Simon and his wife there, on their tour of the south midlands, and I look forward to seeing them again tonight. The 9.30 lasted quite a lot longer than it should have, as there were presentations and such like... so the 10.45 started at 10.55. Even noisier than normal, as we now have a drummer! As usual I sound checked my vocals and guitar, was assured it was fine, and then the congregation were so loud they just blasted over everything except the guitar and drums. It is an extraordinary change between those two services, with largely the same congregation. I really hope and pray the 10.45 develops the way we intended; it's only its third month (and so only the third service) and we generally get a few of the more fringe church members, and the occasional extra family, as well as the hard-core who attend both. I just wonder whether it's now a bit *too* loud...

Jonesy's last stand...

2009-06-28T21:55:00.003+01:00

"Mr Mainwaring! Mr Mainwaring! If those Germans don't arrive soon I don't think we're going to get out... they don't like it up 'em, Mr Mainwaring...."

Belting about

2009-06-28T19:58:00.003+01:00

Thu pm - boss off in SW doing a presentation of the new website to important customers. Leave work 20 past 5, all is well. Half past - text - just says "Site down". Oh, the site's down. And so is all the sites. And all the internal apps. And email. and web access. In fact everything, it appears the computer has lost all knowledge of what it is.

Fri am - total waste of a morning. In at 7.30 together with one of my Seniors to check everything out. It's all still down. Fri lunch - leave for Peterborough, ordination pre for priesting next week.,

Sat am - drive Hemsby. On the way me & eldest went down Grimes' Graves. Very interesting, very thought-provoking. That site was in flint production for 1000 years! English Heritage describe Grime's Graves as a "grassy lunar landscape". Surely the whole point of a lunar landscape is that there's no grass?

Sat lunch - Harry Ramsden's, to spend the voucher I got for complaining about them last time! Much better this time, possibly because we went to the take-away. Nice big fish.
Anyway - afternoon on the beach, with the lads spending most of the time flint-knapping. Obviously the trip to Grime's Graves had an effect.

Sun morning - quite a quiet time, took the lads down to the big slide in Hemsby. I hadn't been to Hemsby in 35 years, and it's an odd place. The village is... a village. The strip down to the beach is the most concentrated English Seaside experience you could imagine - every inch covered in amusement arcades, bits of funfair, pubs, bars, cafes... and then you walk over the dunes to the beach and... it's totally different. Big, sandy, empty... just lovely, actually. A very poignant pill box, covered up to the roof in sand. I bet it was on the dunes last time I was there...

And then down to Esses for Mike's First Mass. Very well spoken, I thought. Just a few more elaborate hand movements - maybe raising the Host higher? But I thought it was very nice of Mike to wear his Liverpool replica chasuble for the occasion. All cool.

Home now, just time for a few hours' sleep before I find out what chaos the morning brings.

an Sarai sez lol...

2009-06-28T19:53:00.003+01:00

ht to David Keen for his link to the lolcat Bible. I quite like it. First Priestly sermon next week, and it's gonna be on; "

Jebus saiz, “oh hai. I iz teh whey n twuf n teh laif. no wun can has walkin da catwalk wif Ceiling Cat wifout me. srsly.”"

Iran (and on and on)

2009-06-16T13:13:00.004+01:00

Can't actually blog Beaker stuff at the minute. I know I can occasionally be satirical but I seem to have lost interest in anything that's not associated with the Iranian protests and they're not funny. I've been following two Iranian twitterers, and when amongst a list of people who've disappeared or died you get an update from a friend that says "is suffering from hay fever", well I ask you... I guess it's because they use "our" communication methods, blog, twitter, Youtube that it makes their struggle, their suffering, immediate in a way that TV showing say Iraq doesn't. It no doubt also helps that to us in the West it appears more black and white than maybe Iraq or Afghanistan or even Israel.

On the other hand, I bet Gordon Brown wishes he'd thought of announcing that the election results might not be quite right and they'll have another go at counting them...

Normal service will be resumed as soon as people aren't dying in Iran.

Iran

2009-06-15T23:34:00.001+01:00

I can't believe the bravery of the Iranian people and their tweeters. Pray for peace, justice and democracy.

Harry Ramsden's

2009-06-13T23:25:00.001+01:00

The catering Empire that is Harry Ramsden's have sent me a £20 cheque for the poor quality meal we received while in Yarmouth. Very fair of them, I thought. By co-incidence we'll be in the area in a few weeks. We'll have to get the fish and chips from the take-away part this time, see if they're any bigger and better.

Small things can be very powerful.

2009-06-13T22:41:00.001+01:00

Flu virus – 100,000 across my fingernail… yet killed 20 million people in 1919

Uranium atom – 100,000 times smaller than that – and yet if one splits, and splits another two – and that splits another two… can produce the power of a nuclear power station or a nuclear bomb.

A seed – so tiny. An acorn – can hold it in your hand. Yet has the instructions coded into it, and the potential, to build an oak tree given the good soil.

A few years ago – pack of Old English cottage seeds. Produced some lovely flowers – particularly remember Love Lies Bleeding… strange old plant with its red flower. But one I didn’t notice so much at the time – just a few – Love in a Mist. Now… all over garden.

Jesus – warning them about big ideas about how the Kingdom of God was going to come in?

-> Army / Messiah / Conquest

No – just a heart changed here; a life fulfilled there – and then the message passed on.

We get the same big ideas. Like a mighty army moves the Church of God said an old hymn – in the days when already the Church of God was in retreat. But continue to think that it’s different. We hear about the big churches – or the exciting churches – we long for the big name preacher that will make all the difference.

But the kingdom of God is not like some oak tree that someone’s dug up and moved. Just picked it out of the ground and moved it cross-country and dropped it in a big hole. Instant spreading oak just where you want it.

Let’s face it, most of us would be pretty grumpy if we had an oak tree in our back gardens anyway.

No – K of God is like a tiny seed – like my Love in a Mist seed. The first year it grew and we didn’t notice it. We had Love Lies Bleeding and Canterbury Bells and foxgloves and all sorts and cornflowers. And the second year there was a couple more and I thought oh look… Love Lies Bleeding has self set. And the third year it was in the front garden, and thought- wonder how did that? And fourth year it was all over the place and I was charging around chopping it down stop it choking everything else.

I’ve never encouraged it. Never needed to.

Kingdom of God is one seed of the Good News sown in one heart. Someone hearing about Jesus and thinking – is there something in this man? In the things he said; in the things he did; in the live he lead – in the death he died…. And is there something in this crazy story that he rose from the dead? Could a man actually do that? And if he did – what does it mean for me? And that seed is sown. And the seed grows. And it may grow strong in that one place – or it may drift. And someone else hears about Jesus from that first person.

10:45 service – we’ve done some advertising. Not much, didn’t have much effect. Just enough so people have heard of it. But the way that something like the 10:45 service succeeds is not when 300 people turn up in response to the advertising and suddenly you have a church that’s full because you’ve bunged leaflets through doors and given them out to the schools and all the rest. Not least because it doesn’t work. It succeeds when one person who’s here goes and tells one other person – you know I went to church last week and it was fun? Or when someone tells their friend – I go to Communion because I know that is where I meet God.

Wednesday Bike Ride

2009-06-10T09:55:00.008+01:00

Wednesday was the day I'd finally scheduled, after 5 months of Wednesdays off, to really doing what Wednesdays off are really for. After 5 months of trips with kids, holidays, moving Church chairs around, posting leaflets and hanging around in pubs in Wellingborough while my bikes were fixed - I finally got out into the countryside properly.

At the peak of my cycling, 4 years ago, 50 mile rides were a breeze. So surely a 20 mile journey was going to be OK.

And yes it was. After a breeze past Hardwick and through Little Harrowden, my first real challenge was the hill up from Harrowden. Not yer Pennine or even Chiltern kind of a hill, but still a nice sharp little climb for half a mile or so.

At the top of the hill is Orlingbury, home of the Queens's Arms pub (not open at that time of the morning) and the rather lovely St Mary's Church. As well as having quite a high tower, particularly for the spire-world of Northants, it was rebuilt quite well by the Victorians and is a tidy, square-set, really nice church.

It is also the home of Jock of Badsaddle, the wolf- (or possibly boar-)killer. Jock came from the now-abandoned hamlet of Badsaddle, now the site of an abandoned farm and a slightly spooky wood.

From Orlingbury there's a four mile run to the little village of Hannington. Hannington is very rural, although only a mile off the A43, very pretty and very quiet. To me it's the epitome of the trouble with English villages. The pub (which had been the Red House long enough to have a road named after it) is closed. The church doesn't give the impression of a huge congregation, and typically has services every other week.

Ss Peter & Paul is a very odd church in one way. It was the home of a group of Gilbertine Monks. They were coenobitic in the more extended sense that there were both males and females in the community. But their division is clearly seen in the pillars that run down the middle of the centre aisle, to make it quite clear who was supposed to go where.

Must be really odd taking Mass at Hannington, as I can't believe you could see the congregation...

From Hannington it's just a mile or two uphill to Holcot. Hannington's unusual in Northants villages in being in a bit of a dip, whereas Holcot has the more traditional position on top of a hill. They'd heard of flood plains in Saxon times, and unlike us more "advanced" people they knew they were better off staying out of them. Either that, or all the villages they built on the plains got washed away. Holcot is most famous for its ducks, which live in the pond down the hill and waddle across my route to work during the rush hour. Bless them. It's also the home of the (resolutely open) White Swan. Three good ales, serves food (which I've never eaten but it looks good on the blackboard), skittle table, pool table - this is a pub to be respected and kept.

So from Hannington on to Sywell, home of the Airport and shooting range. And the heavens opened. So I was forced into the Horseshoe for half an hour while I waited for the deluge to stop. Eventually I gave up and cycled the last four miles home getting progressively heavier as my jeans soaked up the rain. I wasn't expecting quite that much rain. And after I got home - the sun came out.

But a good ride, round some of the best cycling country - rolling countryside enough to be interesting, without the long hills that stop it being fun.

Holiday

2009-05-31T09:56:00.002+01:00

Nice having a week off, even with the constant battling of two lads. Eight trips to the swimming pool (indoor and outdoor) must be some kind of a record for me in six days.

Odd place, Kessingland. The village is mostly nowhere near the beach. Nice, a bit quiet except round the caravan park, but with a big flat shingle beach. I get the feeling the cottages on the sea front really know about it when there's a spring tide and a northerly.
Went to Pakefield Church, but the curate was off for the weekend. Caught about 100 crabs in total at Walberswick, which seems to be the small-scale crabbing capital of Suffolk. But the beer's very expensive at the pub there. More reasonable (just) and a good selection of Adnam's at the Sailors Home (no spelling mistake...) Kessingland. And a noisy parrot. Very well restored from its disastrous (but thankfully non-fatal) fire.

I've sent a complaint to Harry Ramsdens'. Now I know we went there because we had Tesco Vouchers, and I know they're a chain and Harry himself lies quietly in some Yorkshire graveyard. But that still doesn't excuse them battering sprats and passing them off as cod. Probably the smallest helping of fish that I have ever seen. Chips were rubbish as well.

Ian Cundy, Bishop of Peterborough

2009-05-19T21:37:00.002+01:00

Sadly I couldn't make Bishop Ian's funeral today. I have literally run out of holiday already.

But 40-odd bishops and hundreds of others made it, for this very good man who left us far too early.

Ian was a quietly-spoken, thoughtful man, with an amazingly wide range of interests. When I went to see him for my pre-ordination interview, we spent most of the time discussing the appropriate use of typefaces for the Web as opposed to print. He was a good friend of my old church congregation, which might have ceased to belong to the Church of England if we hadn't been aware of his support. In person, he was approachable, friendly and never given to airs and graces. A real pastor.

May he rest in peace, and rise in glory. He will be greatly missed.

Freudian Slip

2009-05-16T09:29:00.002+01:00

The Peterborough Diocese website is advertising the following.....

Saturday 13 June
Caring for those with dementia (for Licensed Lay Ministers)

or do they mean....?