Storyteller's World

Tom drew my attention to ecto, a blogging utility for Mac OS X - and there's a Windows version available too. I'm not quite sure what its advantages are, whether it really is better and more streamlined than Blogger's built-in way of doing things. But hey, there's a fortnight's free trial, so why not give it a whirl?

Covered with confusion, I have to report that the hymn books have returned. They were not, in fact, stolen by weasels or wildwooders, and I offer my sincere apologies to the man who broke down the robes cupboard door, for even suspecting him of having anything to do with it. (However, I still owe him a whacking for the door episode, and will be happy to repay that debt whenever he wants to claim it.)

The hymn books were in fact legitimately borrowed by a member of the congregation to use with one of the Advent study groups. S/he had asked me if it was OK and I said Yes, and had forgotten all about it. In mitigation however, I would say I never could have imagined that s/he was asking for, or intending to use, 12 music copies, when only the words were necessary. Nor that s/he would not have returned them by the following Sunday, when they were actually needed for both services and, without them, the choir had to make up the tunes they were singing.

What can I learn from this incident? Probably, that I just have no idea how much even key members of the congregation are unaware of the needs of other aspects of the church's life, or other services, that they do not attend or are not involved in. I take it for granted that everyone knows that we sing hymns at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m., that we have a choir, that the choir need music editions. Perhaps someone who at present mostly comes to the 8 o'clock doesn't know these things.

A couple of years ago the Bishop invited me to become a Pastoral Selector for ABM, which is the board of the C of E that selects candidates for training for ordination. You might think this was the passport to real power, at last. But in fact it is a thrilling, fascinating and humbling experience. There are many horror stories about selection conferences that haven't worked, people who surely should have been selected but weren't. Maybe we can even think of some people who have been ordained, who should not have been ... But my one experience of serving as a selector left me with a great respect for the people who do this work, the process, which really is prayerful and spiritual, and most of all for the people who offer themselves, who are of such a high calibre.

One reason I've only done it once so far, is that the process is being revised (including a change of title from Selection Conference to Bishops' Advisory Panel), and tomorrow I go to London to be trained in the new procedures. They include candidates preparing a theological reflection on a subject of their choice, relating to one of the criteria for selection. In preparation, we were asked to write a reflection of our own on some topic relating to the criterion for Mission and Evangelism. This post is my first stab at it. Comments welcome, although I reserve the right to delete any of the variety 'If you went to a selection conference now, do you really think you'd be selected?' I've already worked through that one.

It is now widely recognised that the cultural context in which the Church of England is operating at the beginning of the 21st century, is one of mission. An integral part of that mission of God in the world, which the Church exists to serve, is evangelism: the proclamation of the Good News of Jesus Christ. In a culture in which we can no longer take it for granted that people (even those who would think of themselves as 'Christians') have any real knowledge of what the Christian faith is, there is every chance that the Gospel really will be news to many people. Yet one of the problems for evangelism is that many people experience the Gospel neither as news, nor as good. Why is this?

I believe there are two major parts to the problem.

a) The implicit requirement that anyone wanting to be a Christian must first change. However much the Church preaches that God accepts people just as they are, and that salvation is by grace through faith, the accompanying appeal to repent and believe the Good News is all too often perceived as (and maybe communicated as) a demand that 'you' must first become like 'us' in order to be a Christian. This has implications for communicating the Gospel in society generally, where the Church is often perceived as being predominantly middle-class, and inaccessible to other social groups. It affects communication between the Church and the increasingly diverse sub-cultures within society (youth, urban, rural, ethnic, hi-tech). And it has implications for the sexuality debate, where many gay and lesbian people feel rejected by the Church and unable to respond positively to its message, because the demand to change who they are is implied by the Church's current stance on sexuality.

This feels like the Church playing the same old game of trying to control people's lives (so, not news) and telling them they are damned if they don't change (so, not good).

b) The intellectual content of the Gospel is alienating to many people. The best evangelistic efforts are often associated with a very clear-cut, definite message, often expressing a theological position at the evangelical end of the spectrum, which some might even characterise as fundamentalist. Yet in most other areas of life, people know that there are no clear-cut answers to the deepest and most difficult questions of human existence, and are rightly suspicious of anyone who claims that there are. Vulnerable individuals, at different times of need, may respond to such a definite presentation of the Christian faith. But this may then have a negative effect as if it were abusive or manipulative. Many people know, or have themselves been, casualties of this kind of 'evangelism'.

There is then a real dilemma for the Church. We have good news that we want to share, and unless that has some clear-cut content, it will fail to qualify as good news. But at the same time, if it is clear-cut to the point of appearing dishonest or delusional about the major obstacles to religious faith, it will also fail to win a hearing. The way forward is to make sure that what we proclaim as Good News is not a set of propositions to be assented to, but a relationship with God and with other people that is honest and open about uncertainty, and encourages questions without being in a hurry to give easy answers.

In this context the experience of the Alpha Course, one of the most successful tools of evangelism to emerge in recent years, still calls for serious reflection. It has been welcomed by archbishops and other church leaders, even many who would not share its theological basis, because it appears to work where not many other things do. But I would suggest that if Alpha works, it is in spite of, rather than because of, its theological content. The process of welcoming people, sharing a meal with them, getting to know them, encouraging their questions, is probably what attracts them. It embodies the widely accepted concept of getting people first to belong to a Christian group, and then helping them to believe the Christian message. What the Church needs is a broader application of this principle, together with a more open, flexible and questioning presentation of the content of the Christian message.

A friend was talking to me about how she equips her depressed clients with an armoury of tools to strengthen them against the blues. Since she obviously can't do the same for me (I'm a friend, not a client), I have to do it myself. So here are today's contributions. Reasons not to be miserable:

1     There's no getting away from God anyway, for "You did not choose me, but I chose you." (John 15.16)
2     In view of our mortality, every day could be my last. And if it's possible I might die today, I'd much rather my last day on earth was a happy one than a miserable one.

Come to think of it, you'd have to be in a fairly odd state of mind to find these thoughts encouraging ...

John Naughton describes in today's Observer the threat to intellectual freedom - to say nothing of how we use our computers, watch videos etc., presented by a bill currently before Congress.

I've been thinking quite a bit about stability over the last month or so. It has always seemed to me to be one of the most attractive and useful aspects of the Benedictine ethos. Apart from anything else it provided a justification for what less charitable souls might consider my lazy, cowardly or unadventurous side. (Who, me?) Or, more positively, it gives sound theological foundation, from the tradition, for that long-term vision for ministry, which is so counter-cultural in the present age of looking for quick results, and using short-term contracts as a form of centralised control of parishes. Sorry, I mean strategic deployment, and resource management.

At any rate, I determined to practise and model stability by remaining in this particular place, and doing this particular job, until I got a definite prompting, nudging or kicking from God to move on. What I hadn't realised, is quite how difficult this would get, and the personal cost it can exact. I've been here nearly 14 years now: long enough for clergy colleagues who ask, "How long have you been vicar there?" to give you a funny kind of look when they hear the answer, as if the thought, I wonder what's the matter with him? had, all unbidden, momentarily crossed their mind. There is, undoubtedly, a temptation to think that if you're doing well, you might be in line for 'promotion' to a more significant parish or other appointment. For while all parishes are equal, it appears - who would have thought it? - that some are very much more equal than others. There is an element of boredom with the same people, places, events; and with one's self, because of that common enough feeling that I could be a much more interesting, energetic and successful pastor and preacher, if the surroundings were more stimulating. These are the normal temptations of parish ministry, even in these latter days where the system doesn't allow so much in the way of differences of prestige and wealth from the clerical profession.

But one of the surprising knocks, was coming across a photograph, in the course of clearing the drawers. This photograph was taken 9 or 10 years ago to carry greetings from us to a church in Africa that one of our members was going to visit. The problem with having been in the place so long, is that I look at it now and see all the dear brothers and sisters who are no longer with us. Two retired couples have moved away from the area. One young family decided to transfer to another church. Seven or eight of this group have died, and in some cases their widowed spouse has moved away. And all the rest of us are that much older and changed: in the case of the children, a delight; for many of the adults, a loss of strength and faculties.

Stability is all very well. But there comes a time when you find that it requires you to be standing still and firm, in the midst of a tempest of change, which is changing you too. The easy thing to do is cut loose and let the flood sweep you away. But I still think what Benedict calls his disciples to do is the harder thing of letting the waters shape you into something different and more beautiful, more apt for the purpose you have been placed here for.

The workshop where we are to toil faithfully at all these tasks (of good works that lead to growth in holiness) is the enclosure of the monastery (the parish) and the stability of the community (congregation). (RSB 4.78)

Can't believe I nearly missed Howard Goodall's 20th Century Greats first programme on Lennon and McCartney. In fact, I did miss the first quarter of an hour; but the rest was fascinating. Goodall's assessment is that the Beatles will be recognised as among the truly great musical phenomena of the 20th century, because their innovative work changed not only pop music, but revived the whole Western musical tradition which had been ruinously damaged by the classical avant-garde of the 50s and 60s.

Can't wait to see the later programmes on Cole Porter, Bernard Herrmann and Leonard Bernstein.

I've finally taken the plunge and subscribed to broadband. What I hadn't realised was how expensive it would be (a 'free' installation from the provider involved calling out the security engineer to put another filter in a place that I cannot reach) and how much time it would take up - because there are so many places I could never think of visiting before. Like this French computer engineer's CV, which some might call irritating. (Don't even think about clicking this link unless you have broadband, I'm warning you.) It's amazing what some people get up to.

So the next thing now is how to network all the family computers. Probably cost money, I suppose.

As far as I'm concerned, every trace of Christian charity goes out the window, when it comes to these people who try and break into parts of the church building and steal things. I mean, no doubt they are deeply needy people. But I can't help feeling the thing they chiefly need is a damn good whacking.

Apart from anything else, I don't have a lot of sympathy with them because they must be so thick, if they think there's anything worth stealing in a church. Almost any other building in the parish has got stuff of more value in it. Yet there are still people who seem to believe this rumour that 'the church' - wherever and whoever that may be - is incredibly wealthy, and therefore any small parish church is worth knocking over. In practice we have taken to locking as little as possible in the building, on the grounds that if it's not locked, people can look inside and see there's nothing worth stealing, and won't bother to break the lock. The only major locked door is the vestry door, where we keep what little stuff might be called valuable like the photocopier, the altar silver and the parish registers; and this door and lock probably are impregnable to all but a chain saw. This is not a challenge! We have also put a lock on the robes cupboard, because a couple of years ago several of the choir robes were stolen. To what end I shudder to imagine, for I haven't yet seen any vagrants walking around in the choir women's old garments.

Well, on Tuesday afternoon someone found himself in the church alone, with a locked robes cupboard door in front of him, and thought with his tiny weasel mind that there must be something worth stealing inside, so broke it off its sliding track. This particular individual did not have any secret desire for choir robes, so left them there, having caused enough damage to cost us as much as replacing a choir robe.

It was while we were assessing the damage that we noticed that about a dozen music editions of Ancient and Modern New Standard were missing from the choir cupboard. This absolutely beats bizarre into a cocked hat. Has the Bible kidnapper turned his attention to hymn books now? Is a rival congregation trying to rob us of our music? or set up in competition?

I am having extreme difficulty persuading people I did not set this up myself in order to force the PCC to buy new hymn books ...

For the benefit of anyone who did stop reading this evening's OT reading where we were told to, the story ends like this:

The king gave a command, and those who had accused Daniel were brought and thrown into the den of lions - they, their children, and their wives. Before they reached the bottom of the den the lions overpowered them and broke all their bones in pieces.

Once again, those pusillanimous, patronising, mealy-mouthed lectionary compilers have excelled themselves. (What is it they've got against Daniel?) Mustn't let people know nasty things happen in the Good Book! Let's pretend all is sweetness and light. And so they ruin the Story once again. How do they imagine it's supposed to end? Like this:?

And so, children, the satraps and all the people who had been nasty to Daniel and tried to bully him realised how naughty they had been and promised ever so solemnly that they would never be naughty again. And they all lived happily ever after.

No child would ever stomach that kind of ending. A child can appreciate a Story's proper ending. It's the grown-ups who find that more than they can stomach.

I hope Sun will forgive me for a little boasting, since she recently commented on one of my other posts.

She has just started teaching RE to secondary age schoolchildren at a South London comprehensive. (Well, calling takes people in odd and unaccountable ways.) She told me how she was telling the story of the Ramayana to a class of 12-year olds, (with some powerpoint slides, but I'll forgive her that) and they were so enthralled that they gasped when the holy man turns back into the demon and Ravana and kidnaps princess Sita. It seems she's inherited a storytelling gene from me and Alison. And is grateful for it. So am I - that's my girl!

But in truth, this is one of the things that thrills me about storytelling. If I had attended a masterclass with, say, Yehudi Menuhin, I would probably have thought, That was marvellous: I could never do that. But when I first heard Duncan Williamson - the first professional storyteller I ever heard - what I actually thought was, This is marvellous: I could do that! We already have some mastery of the instrument - though there's always more of it to learn. We are all storytellers. This is what makes it such a special art, or craft, or mystery.

Here's a Conundrum ...

We have some friends who travel frequently to the States, have a lot to do with the church there and are often invited to minister in various places. Their links are, however, with the much more evangelical, traditionalist, and anti-any-change-in-stance-about-homosexuality end of the church spectrum. So they bring back horror stories about the church situation there, depicting the evangelical faithful (primarily within the Episcopalian Church) as an embattled minority, persecuted and discriminated against by the liberal, anti-scriptural, and apparently unbelieving hierarchy. Their latest account of the Gene Robinson affair is that it was not primarily about sexuality, but about the whole way that the liberals have abandoned scripture and any semblance of obedience to God's word.

Now this is so different from the picture I get from other sources - the relatively few American Christians I know, what I read in Church Times or in people's blogs, etc. - that I simply don't know how to reconcile these different versions of the world. It suggests to me a possibility that all the talk about schism comes not from our substantive differences of opinion - which no doubt are real - but from mistaken understandings of what the other person's opinions or motivations are. Perhaps the words 'from not listening to the other person' may not be entirely inaccurate?

But can it really be that liberals in ECUSA claim that they are ignoring scripture? Surely not: surely this is an anti-liberal libel. But if that is how non-liberals actually perceive and are able to represent the situation, then I reckon liberals haven't done a good enough job of explaining why a liberal position in the homosexuality debate is compatible with - I would say, demanded by - a faithful reading of scripture.

Lambeth 1998 urged all Anglicans to listen to the experience of gay and lesbian people. I wish we would. Because that is what really made me think again about the whole issue. It's when you realise - and really come to believe - that sexual orientation is not chosen, but part of our God-givenness as humans, that you can start to address the question, How, then, can we live holy lives? rather than, What acts are or are not sinful?

The problem is that it has been so difficult for gay and lesbian people to testify to their experience, and faith, within the faith community that has so long misunderstood and persecuted them, that it is almost impossible for anyone to really listen to and hear those whose views or experience are different.

One of our family sayings is, "I wonder what normal families talk about at mealtimes?" I think it was Tui who coined it a few years back, when most of the offspring were still at home, and one mealtime we were all sitting round the table involved in one of our regular discussions about word derivations or usage. This is the kind of discussion which makes it essential, in our house, for a dictionary to be kept on the dining table (next to the Crockford's Clerical Directory). We were some way into this discussion, when this rather younger Tui added her two-pennyworth: "I wonder what normal families talk about at mealtimes?"

This came to mind during this evening's meal (now reduced to just three of us at table) when we began to speculate on the commercial process for pitting olives. I'm afraid to say that Ask Jeeves didn't help much with this - frankly, I don't know why I bother to retain him - and as so often it was Google that came to the rescue.

We now know that most of the machines for commercial olive pitting are manufactured around Seville in Spain, and exported throughout the world. The essential process was as we imagined, but some questions remain unanswered, particularly: How are the olives positioned and held in these machines? But you can read as much as we found out at the Olive Oil Source.

If anyone happens to have one of these machines at home and could describe it to us in more detail, I'd love to hear from you.

Breaking the habit of a longtime, I am surprised to find myself reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. What's surprising about this is that it is over 900 pages long (aargh!) and the first volume of a trilogy (double aargh!) of which each volume is similarly long (triple aargh!); when I have come to prefer exquisitely small and beautiful one-off, stand-alone masterpieces like Salley Vickers'.

Nevertheless, there's something about Neal Stephenson's work that makes me want to make an exception. It somehow feels like a cross-genre work. It reads like science fiction or fantasy, yet it has a historical setting. Perhaps you could call it historical science fiction, since some of its central characters are the founder members of the Royal Society: John Wilkins, Robert Hooke, John Locke, Isaac Newton; and part of the action revolves around the controversy over whether differential calculus was invented (discovered?) by Newton or Leibniz. But it's also about all the religious and political intrigues of the Restoration, the latter years of the Stuarts, the Glorious Revolution and the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne. It leaves you thinking over deep questions of philosophy and theology, while you're still laughing at the picaresque events, and chuckling over the knowing anachronisms. (I think they're anachronisms - but here's where I'm afraid of showing too much ignorance of the period.)

So, if I stick it out, this lot will keep me busy till way after Christmas, I should think. As a non-historian, and just on the level of the story, I think this is a great yarn. I'd be really interested to hear what a proper historian makes of these books.

The other volumes of the Baroque Cycle are:
The Confusion
The System of the World

I was thinking again about how extraordinary storytelling is, after yesterday evening's Scouts Service. I had devised quite a simple little story about someone receiving a 'gift', and finding that it grows and improves when they use it to help other people. The story itself was quite thin and insubstantial, so I had to make up for its light weight with a bit more 'technique' than usual: mime, detail, pauses, etc.

And it went down a treat! The church was full, and everyone listened in rapt attention. Yet these young people are supposed to be a generation whose attention span is so atrophied that they can only concentrate for a few seconds before needing some new image or stimulation. Even though these are children who belong to uniformed organisations, and therefore more used to discipline than some of their peers, it didn't seem to quite add up.

But then I remembered one of Alison's reminiscences from her days as a primary teacher on one of the more deprived estates on the edge of this city. She had a class of Year One children with so many social and domestic problems it was an education for me to hear about them. One day Alison decided, instead of the usual Story Hour practice of reading a picture book to the class (to model reading to them) to tell them a story: The Three Billy Goats Gruff. When she came to the end of the story, the whole class spontaneously applauded. There was something about this event that even these kids recognised as different, more worthy of appreciation, than the being-read-aloud-to that they were used to.

Storytelling has this impact because it engages the listeners. The whole person of the storyteller, body, soul, sound and gesture, enters into some kind of comm-uni-cation with them. It compels attention, because it is the giving of a gift, not just a thing that is external to teller and hearer alike (even if it's a well-known old tale), but that somehow is a giving of a part of the teller's own being. A sharing of life.

Looking back at my life, I realise that I have never lived alone. For all my preferring to be solitary, and being fairly anti-social, I have always lived with other people.

I thought about this over the weekend, when for twenty-four hours (a whole twenty-four hours!) I was alone with my own company. This because Alison was down in Brighton giving a paper at some day conference, and took advantage of it to stay a couple of nights with Jorj and Maggie, while Naomi was visiting some friends from uni days.

The oddest thing about this time was eating alone. And I found myself wondering whether eating alone isn't actually some kind of unnatural practice. (To add to many others we might think of.) There are some meals I prefer to eat alone, and get quite stressed if someone else is around. Breakfast is one of these: not my best time of day, when I prefer to read a book with my toast or cereal, as a preventive to biting off the heads of passing innocents. Lunch (on a working day) is the other, when the eating is also part of a necessary break. I have only recently and with reluctance accepted the idea of the 'working lunch' - barbaric notion! - and find that if I do consent to the occasional one, I usually need the afternoon off to recover, so its whole raison d'être is lost. But the meals I ate alone over this weekend were not among those I'm accustomed to.

Saturday lunch. I wanted to be in town anyway, so I went to All Bar One in the High. And there, eating alone was definitely odd and unnatural: I seemed to be the only person doing it. Everyone else in the place was part of a couple, or a small group of friends, or in one or two cases large and cosmopolitan groups including people from the South Seas and Southern Minnesota. Who found Oxford on a November day bitterly cold. It didn't even help, pretending to be a writer or intellectual, because it was all too busy and crowded.

Saturday tea. That was OK because I watched a video (guilty, solitary pleasure!)

Sunday lunch. Now, the sensible thing, if I had had my wits about me, would have been to prepare for this in advance by either a) inviting someone round for lunch, or b) getting someone else to invite me. But since I seldom have my wits about me, I hadn't done (b), and really wouldn't inflict my cooking on anyone I liked enough for (a). At the same time, I didn't want just a microwaved meal out of the freezer, so I did cook myself a quarter chicken with roast potatoes. Which itself felt a strangely decadent thing to do, especially when it needed a couple of glasses of wine to accompany it. And gave me some small sense of how hard it is for married people suddenly left on their own, to go to the trouble of cooking for just one.

I think maybe we are not meant to eat alone.

The author of The Chimes of England, Arthur Cleveland Coxe (1818-1896), was the second Bishop of Western New York from 1865 to 1896. Apparently bishops in those days were like popes or English monarchs - you don't get them to retire, they go on and on and on till they're promoted to glory.

The author of this astonishing tribute to English church bells and bell ringing wasn't even born in England, as he tells us in the last verse of his poem. His take on the USA, his Forest-land, the joy of all the earth, where God is King, is an intriguing one for us in 2004. You could say.

This evening I welcomed members of the City Branch of the Oxford Diocesan Guild of Church Bell Ringers for their annual service. Last time they came to Marston we sang the following gem. Not all the verses, but certainly enough of them to get the general drift. This time, we didn't. We sang some alternative ringers' hymns. The one thing they have in common is a certain - how shall I say? quaintness. I don't know if anyone has written a hymn for bell-ringers for some decades.

The Chimes of England

The chimes, the chimes of Motherland,
Of England green and old.
That out from fane and ivied tower
A thousand years have tolled;
How glorious must their music be
As breaks the hallowed day,
And calleth with a seraph's voice
A nation up to pray!

Those chimes that tell a thousand tales,
Sweet tales of olden time;
And ring a thousand memories
At vesper, and at prime!
At bridal and at burial,
For cottager and king,
Those chimes, those glorious Christian chimes,
How blessedly they ring!

Those chimes, those chimes of Motherland,
Upon a Christmas morn.
Outbreaking as the angels did,
For a Redeemer born!
How merrily they call afar,
To cot and baron's hall,
With holly decked and mistletoe,
To keep the festival!

The chimes of England, how they peal
From tower and Gothic pile,
Where hymn and swelling anthem fill
The dim cathedral aisle;
Where windows bathe the holy light
On priestly heads that falls,
And stains the florid tracery
Of banner-dighted walls!

And then, those Easter bells, in spring,
Those glorious Easter chimes!
How loyally they hail thee round,
Old Queen of holy times!
From hill to hill like sentinels,
Responsively they cry,
And sing the rising of the Lord,
From vale to mountain high.

I love ye, chimes of Motherland,
With all this soul of mine,
And bless the Lord that I am sprung
Of good old English line:
And like a son I sing the lay
That England's glory tells;
For she is lovely to the Lord,
For you, ye Christian bells!

And heir of her historic fame,
Though far away my birth,
Thee, too, I love, my Forest-land,
The joy of all the earth;
For thine thy mother's voice shall be,
And here, where God is king,
With English chimes, from Christian spires,
The wilderness shall ring.

Arthur Cleveland Coxe

One of those wonderful places on the Web is A Vision of Britain through Time, wherein I discovered this about my own little bit of Britain.

In 1870-72, John Goring's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales described Marston like this:

"MARSTON, a parish in Headington district, Oxfordshire; on the river Cherwell, near the Oxford and Bletchley railway, 1¾ mile NNE of Oxford. Post town, Oxford. Acres, 1,212. Real property, £3,301. Pop., 452. Houses, 94. The ancient seat of the Crokes here was the place where the royalists made formal surrender of Oxford in the wars of Charles I.; and is now a farmh ouse. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Oxford. Value, £195. Patron, the Rev. Dr. T. H. Whorwood. The church is later English; and consists of nave, aisles, and chancel, with porch and tower. There are a national school, and charities £39. "

There are so many wonderful things out there in BlogWorld, that life is just too short to read them all. If you were writing a PhD, for example, you'd be in serious danger of spending all your time reading and/or writing blogs, and not getting on with actually writing your thesis.

I hope this isn't happening to Claire (though she sometimes seems to lament the fact that it might be) because her blog is currently one of my favourite sources of fascinating new links and blogs to read. If you haven't visited yet - what are you waiting for?

Good luck with the thesis, Claire!

We are faced with another steep rise in Parish Share next year: almost 10%. This is partly the penalty for success, as it's calculated by the deanery on the basis of electoral roll numbers (and we have always had an inclusive Roll: lots of people in the community want to 'belong' to the church even though they seldom attend and contribute little or nothing financially) and income (and we have always taken stewardship seriously, encouraging people to renew their pledges and banker's orders each year). The upshot was, as our treasurer told us, that in three years our Parish Share has gone up by 38%, but our planned giving only by 9%.

The PCC discussed this, and the general feeling was that the most important thing to do was pray about it. So it was agreed to have a special time of prayer from 7.30 to 11.30 p.m. which came to be called variously an Evening of Prayer or a Half-Night of Prayer, depending on whether you were an optimist or a pessimist. (Or vice versa.)

This event took place yesterday evening; and well, it was remarkable. The intention was that people should be able to come and go and stay for as long as they could. In the first hour there were about 20 people there, by the end there were 8. Altogether I suppose about 30 people, say a quarter of our main adult congregation(s) were there for some part of the time. Six of us stuck it out for the whole four hours, including Alison and myself. I felt I should no more drop out halfway than a junior officer would have hung back when ordering his troops to go over the top. This is one hard call where the leader has to go first.

In fact it was tiring (very tiring), but not quite the ordeal I had feared. It was even, in a way, exhilarating. There was a tremendous sense of faith, solidarity with each other, mutual care and affection, openness to God, attention to what the church and parish need and should seek, hope and expectation (amidst the anxieties and the real pain some folk are going through). At one point I shared about how I had been feeling quite low recently, and was invited (told?) to stand out in the middle while everyone laid hands on me and prayed for me.

I have never sought or initiated this kind of prayer meeting before, and this one wasn't my idea either. To my mind, the church already prays corporately twice every day - even if I'm the only one there - and three times on Sunday, and whenever and wherever any of its members is praying, besides. I have major problems with anything that suggests that prayer 'works' better (whatever that means) if more of you do it all at once, or for longer, or in your own words instead of the liturgy. But yesterday makes me think that the value of that kind of experience is not that we did something which might have greater leverage with God, but that it would have a big impact on us. Our offering of our time - and some sacrifice of comfort, given the hard pews and cold building - makes us that much more serious about who we are, what we are doing, what we are wanting and seeking as a believing community. Remains to be seen what fruit it will bear in the longer term, or what we (or God) might do as a result, or at any rate after this.

Once again those strange nameless characters who compile the daily lectionary have pulled off the astonishing achievement of shooting themselves in the foot by making a chapter of the Bible meaningless. (I mean, who are these people? Do they even trial these lectionaries? 'Cause it sure as hell looks as if they don't actually use them!)

This evening we were invited to read Daniel 1.1-7, 20-end. The story of how Jerusalem was besieged and captured by Nebuchadnezzar, many of its leading citizens taken into exile, among whom were four young Jews who were assigned to serve in the royal palace. They were given new (Babylonian) names, and trained ... and they came top of the class, excelling even their native-born Babylonian colleagues.

Now I'm all for leaving out of Holy Scriptures anything that looks like a polemical tract in favour of vegetarian teetotalism (Daniel 1.8-19) - I like my beef and beer like the next good Chestertonian. What I can't forgive is the violence these lectionary compilers do to the Story when they mess it about like this. The whole point of the Story is that Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah were faithful and obedient to the Lord and to the Law, even at the risk of their lives, and resisted the temptations offered by the Babylon of their day. And because of their faithful obedience, they were blessed, and came to be in a position where they could be used by God.

A generation that only read the Bible in the filleted, meaningless form of the present daily lectionary, wouldn't have a clue about this.

(I can only pin my hopes on human nature. Which, if most people are like me, means that when you're told to leave out some verses, those are exactly the ones you want to read, to find out what's going on. Perhaps the lectionary should have a warning like the Radio Times: May be edited for its vegetarianism.)

So that's what it is, according to thisBBC NEWS report.

Though in the case of some clergy and other public speakers, you wish they would shut up.

Thanks to John Naughton for this great picture.

That was the great line I was thinking of the other day, from Star Trek of blessed memory, of course. It became quite a running gag in the course of successive series, and was recycled in a huge variety of guises, coming full circle and culminating I suppose in the priceless moment in Star Trek Voyager when Robert Picardo's character utters the line, "I'm a hologram, not a doctor!"

So this came to mind when I saw maggi dawn's post about how we need specialist theologians. I'm with maggi on this one all the way, against the resenters and detractors of theology and theologians. But in my incurably parochial way, I fell a-thinking about where the ordinary, run-of-the-mill parish clergy like me fit into this picture. We may or may not feel we are 'trained theologians'. No doubt someone once tried to train us. No doubt we practise our trade (art? craft? mastery? mystery?) in our little corner of the world, as best we can, but probably without the skill, the resources and backup, or the opportunities to read and study and discuss, that maggi is able to draw on.

The nearest analogy I could think of was the medical one. Here in the parish we are like your local theological GP, having to know a bit about everything and dabble in the whole spectrum, while the Church also needs its consultants in theology, who probably know a lot more about everything than your average GP, but will also have specialised in a particular area. Even your GP may be better at throats than prostates (and who can blame her/him?), so I guess the parish clergy also have their particular strengths and interests. I like to think I'm stronger at telling the Story, than telling people what to do with their lives. But for other people, it's listening, or loving young people.

In the end I think the important thing for a theologian is to look at the whole of life with curiosity and wonder, through God-coloured glasses, and then think and talk about what they're able to see.

A wise theologian long ago put it in the words, 'The theologian is one who knows how to pray.' And I don't think we can say it better than that. Fortunately that's a calling which is open to all Christians, be they what the world thinks of as the theological equivalent of consultant, GP, or layperson.

The Chapel of the Blessed Archangel Michael. In our back garden. July - November 2004.

After four months, the summer visitor to our garden has departed, leaving just a patch of dead turf to show where it has been.

This morning's sky was all over pink, so I knew that somewhere there would be some very anxious shepherds. But for the time being, as the pink dispersed, it was dry and bright, so I walked up the hill to Elsfield. I had got up so paranoid about not sleeping, so panicky about all the tasks that had piled up to be done, so dry and uncreative, that I knew my only option was to take an hour to walk there and back, and not hurry through Morning Prayer while I was there.

Walking up the hill to Elsfield is probably the most dangerous thing I do. There is no footpath, and there are long stretches of virtually single-track road, where only the brave or the very thin attempt to pass an oncoming vehicle. For some reason the number of cars is hugely increased these days - perhaps there are roadworks on one of the other possible routes - so that for about a quarter of a mile they were nose to tail back up the hill. Right up against the grass verge or dyke, so there was nowhere for me to walk but on the left, with my back to the traffic on that side. When the traffic is moving up that lane, it tries to travel at 40 or 50 m.p.h., so I was glad there wasn't much going that way.

(I longed for the speedy prosecution of that other campaign in the ongoing civil war, that will close the private schools; for it's notable that when their term ends, the volume of traffic is roughly halved.)

Whether it was the danger or the steep climb, my heart was going like the clappers when I got to the church. But it was well worth the time, the exercise, the risk-taking. I felt refreshed; the panic was nearly dispelled; and I got through most of my tasks when I did get back to the vicarage.

The sky was red again this evening. Must be a lot of very confused shepherds around somewhere.

This looks like one of those trivial domestic drama /crises which should be resolved in moments (or at worst, days) but which looks like becoming an epic almost as long as and much more tedious than the Kalevala. (With apologies to Finns, who may find the Kalevala thrillingly gripping; but I think it is almost defining of an epic that it's one of those bores we all think we know, because we're half-familiar with so many of the episodes, but we can hardly bear to listen to or read. I've struggled with the Mahabharata, the Mabinogion, Beowulf, who knows what, and in the end I conclude most of us are only able to tolerate the nearest epic. As who should shrug their shoulders apologetically and say, 'I know it's an epic; but it's our epic.')

It is a beautiful thing, O Muse, to move into a brand new home, that we own, with a fitted kitchen. Especially after having lived in rented flats and clergy houses for thirty years of married life. A beautiful and heart-warming thing, to know that we have this place as an investment, a retirement home in waiting, and a holiday home and bolt-hole in the mean time. A beautiful thing, until something goes wrong; when having a bolt-hole more than a hundred miles from where you bolt from, can be something of a disadvantage.

For over a year - of course, just over a year - the fridge-freezer in our fitted kitchen worked perfectly. It was not overtaxed by being kept full of stuff, and having its door opened and closed several hundred times a day. I should have said its existence and work-load were pretty much what any fridge-freezer would have been happy to get away with. It was working fine when we were here for our summer holiday in August.

But when we returned a fortnight later for a couple of days over the August Bank Holiday, it had died. Tepid milk and orange juice for breakfast are not appetising ingredients, let me tell you.

We looked at the documents and found that we had to have proof of purchase in order to qualify for service under the warranty. Proof of purchase is difficult, when the item came as a fixture. However, we managed to talk our way around this. Eventually, that's to say. Because the first thing you find when you dial the phone number in the owner's guide, is that the companies have changed hands, or the telephone numbers have changed, and you get recorded messages telling you to dial a different number. You then have to dial the first number again, because you weren't expecting this and didn't have pencil and paper ready, and/or in any case the recorded message tells you the number too quickly, in formats or number-groups your brain doesn't recognise ("Double five seven twenty-nine three hundred". Then you dial the new number and there's one of these push-tone menus, where none of the options are about what you want, but there isn't any 'If you want to talk to an actual person ...' at the end of the menu.

Goes without saying that no one can come out on a Bank Holiday anyway, so the next time I can arrange to be at the flat is three weeks later. So,

September 21. Engineer calls. Finds motor burned out. Replaces motor. Since it is over a year old, but still covered by 5 year parts warranty, I don't have to pay for the motor (£200+) but only (?) £75 call-out.

October 15-16. We come to flat for business meeting of the owners. Find fridge-freezer not working again. It's a weekend, so no way of getting an engineer out.

October 27. By this time it's half term - except they don't call it that in Oxfordshire any more, where they have six terms in the school year - so I'm spending a couple of days' holiday at the flat. Engineer calls. Finds motor burned out. Was afraid of this; must be a gas leak. Phones office, they decide only thing is to replace the whole thing. They say they will phone to arrange delivery. No phone call.

November 1. Back at work in Oxford. Phone call from office. "We're delivering tomorrow. Then you'll have to phone again to get an engineer to come and install it."

November 2. Fridge-freezer delivered. No way I can be there, but Joan, our friendly neighbour, lets the men in.

November 16. The earliest date I can be at the flat to let the engineer in to install new fridge-freezer. This is standing in the kitchen, six feet high, having to be danced around every time you go in and out, and felt round the back of in an excessively familiar fashion whenever you want to turn the light on or off. The engineer removes the broken fridge from its fitted niche, squeezes in the new one, which is a couple of inches taller but fortunately the same width and depth; then tells me he's a engineer, not a kitchen-fitter (haven't I heard that line before somewhere? Doesn't inspire mega-confidence.) No one at all takes old fridges away any more, so naturally he doesn't either. This leaves me with a broken fridge, six feet high, by the kitchen door, having to be danced around and felt behind etc. etc. and the modern equivalent of the Quest for the Holy Grail, viz. finding someone who does take dead fridges to their final resting place. It turns out this may be the local council, who may or may not charge a supplement to the council tax we already pay. Particularly when I tell them me and the old dutch live in the old folks' flats, yes the upstairs one, and their nice young men will have to carry the dead fridge (six feet high, etc.) down the stairs first. Maybe it would be better to put an aspidistra on it and call it a feature. Or use it as a storage cupboard.

To be continued, apparently ...

From today's Observer:

Tony Blair will tomorrow set out a new world vision for tackling poverty and the threat from failing states as he tries to refocus the war on terror on the root causes of conflict.

But just when you start thinking this is really good news at last, you read on:

The Prime Minister's Strategy Unit is drawing up plans for more proactive intervention in countries on the verge of collapse, which risk becoming havens for drugs, crime and terrorism that threaten the West.

No, Tony. The reason for helping places like that is not to save the West from being threatened, but that no one should have to live in that kind of hell. The thing that threatens the West is that for too long we have been content to maintain our privileged lifestyle at the cost of millions living in poverty and oppression, and have propped up the corrupt regimes which enslave those people, and which eventually, inevitably, collapse into anarchy and chaos.

MENE, MENE, TEKEL, PARSIN.

There was singing in the chancel and hurrahing of hassocks,
There was censing of the altar and dancing in our cassocks,
When the Book - came - home!

With thanks to all who have taken an interest in this small saga, searched out estimates of cost of replacement, maybe even prayed about it, or for the person who removed it, I can now report that our wandering lectern Bible was returned this morning.

Alan found it propped against the churchyard gate when he arrived at 7.30 to prepare for the 8 o'clock. Good job it was crisply cold and dry, and not pouring with rain.

Going into the dark, and the cold - how I hate it! Today was the first day it has really felt bitter going outside. Hats and gloves weather for me, who feel the cold so much more than the rest of the family, or indeed anyone with their natural thatch still intact.

So it's time to look out the times of sunrise and sunset for the next few months. I don't know whether it does any good. It's a bit like the homesick child at boarding school, or the prisoner on remand, crossing off the days that remain till the day of freedom. Right now it can only get more depressing before it starts to look brighter again.

If you go with the calendar for London, Oxford times are about 5 or 6 minutes later. Or if you prefer a customised calendar, the latitude and longitude for Oxford are 1.25 W, 51.76 N.

I'm off to hibernate, I think.

It hasn't been returned yet. But neither have we received any ransom notes, so we are still hopeful.

This was the first time I've been to this annual event, which features stalls run by over 40 voluntary organisations promoting fair trade or campaigning around various issues including peace, the environment, asylum seekers, intermediate technology, vegetarianism. From the worthy to the seriously wacky, though it's more than my skin is worth to say which I think is which.

Here are some links:
Oxford Cycle Workshop
Fair Trade
Intermediate Technology
Pachacuti: Fair trade clothing and crafts from Latin America
Zaytoun: Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil
Oxford Vegetarians
- in no particular order of importance (or worthiness or wackiness.)

It was all great good-natured fun, and lunch at the One World Cafe run by the Oxford Oxfam Group, to the accompaniment of live music from a jazz trio, was an added bonus.

Next year's One World Fair will be on November 19, 2005, in Oxford Town Hall, and will be opened by Jon Snow.

I had just finished ringing the bell when a young man walked into church. He looked - how shall I say? - not like the kind of person who might be intending to join me for Morning Prayer.

- Can I help you? I asked him.

He told me some kind of a story. He was staying with a friend who lived just behind the church, and he hadn't a Bible with him. He wanted to borrow one to read. And by the way, his friend was called Stewart, and was interested in seeing if his name appeared in the Bible as he wanted to find a biblical basis for his name. I could only think of Shebna, the steward in Isaiah 22, who was misusing his position to enrich himself, and the Lord threatened to cast him out of his office. So I lent him a copy of the NEB which is surplus to requirements, and off he went.

That was when I noticed that our big lectern copy of the NRSV wasn't in its usual place, but had somehow gone missing. I took the video from the CCTV system home and settled down for the long and tedious process of looking through the recording for evidence. There are a strange number of visitors to the church during the course of a day! It wasn't till 4.43 p.m. on the previous day, that a strange visitor turns up, enters the church and leaves two minutes later carrying our lectern Bible under one arm. It's about six inches thick and weighs a ton. And the strange visitor looks uncannily like my own morning visitor to church; but the picture quality isn't very good, and I don't know if it would stand up in court, and in any case, what are the police going to do about a Bible theft from a church, when there are exciting helicopter surveillances and drug busts to be involved in instead?

While thinking about what to do, I set off to church for another Evening Prayer, and there is my stranger cycling past. He wishes me a friendly good evening.

- Just a minute, I say. Was it you I spoke to yesterday? Do you know anything about a big Bible that went missing? Because our CCTV film seems to show you carrying it out of church.

- Oh, he says. I know a guy who looks a lot like me, but goes to another church. He does crazy things like that, taking things from churches.

So I say I'd really appreciate it if he would ask this friend if he 'borrowed' our Bible, and if so would he please return it and no questions would be asked. He assures me he will do so and cycles away.

So what happens now, I wonder? Sometimes life in the parish is just too totally weird to understand it. I say the rot set in when they took the chains off the Bibles.

The English Civil War of 1642-49 often feels strangely contemporary to me, partly because both my present and previous parishes have their special Civil War history. On different sides, naturally. Marston was the Parliamentary headquarters during the siege of Oxford, and it was in one of the houses in the village that the city's Royalist governor signed its surrender. One of the local pubs used to have a plaque on the wall that read 'Oliver Cromwell sat here while waiting to liberate the city.' Lydiard Tregoze stood on the other side. Its parish church contains 17th century monuments of the St John family, including the life-size 'Golden Cavalier', an effigy of Captain Edward St John who was killed fighting for the King at the second Battle of Newbury. It was his younger brother - who fought on the other side - who later inherited the title when his father died.

Reflecting on these diverse histories, I've come to the view that the Civil War never really ended, in the sense that nothing was resolved. It's not just the many places in the country where parishes still feud with their neighbours in the next parish, and it turns out it's because they took different sides in that long-ago conflict. It's that somehow our failed experiment at republicanism, and the sudden, fearful and obsequious submission to a dissolute monarch that brought it to a close, seem still to shape the peculiar nature of the English class system (and we are class-ridden in a strange and different way from anywhere else in the world) and so many of our social institutions, political divisions and conflicts.

The recent ban on hunting with hounds, and all its surrounding kerfuffle, are just the latest manifestation of this. In this scenario it is the townie majority, the hunt saboteurs and the politicians, who are the heirs of the puritans and roundheads. While the countryside alliance, the hunt supporters and protesters, descend from the romantically embattled cavaliers. Feelings about this issue run so deep, and are so irrational and unintellectual, that they can surely only be the survival of something deeply tribal, a visceral memory of old grievances and wrongs. Country people feel a whole way of life is under threat from dictators who have simply not understood it. While the town faction are utterly baffled that so many workers in the countryside, far from feeling oppressed by the hunting 'toffs' and longing to be liberated, actually find hunting an exciting and central part of their life.

I have no love of hunting, which seems like a barbaric and primitive ritual. Nor do I warm to the hunting fraternity, who are only slightly more loathsome than the hunt saboteurs. But I don't think an outright ban on hunting was a right or well-judged move. It's crazy to alienate a whole sector of our society over an issue like this. If it is just the latest skirmish in the unfinished civil war of town against country, new wealth against old, puritan against cavalier, modernism against tradition, enlightenment against barbarism, it is far too trivial. It is a spiteful little slap in the face that merely hardens the will of the opposition; an annoyance and irritation, that merely distracts from the possibility of striking a blow to really bring the Civil War nearer to a conclusion.

No, if we really wanted to do that, we would have to do something truly, significantly radical. Like closing the private schools (in a peculiarly British piece of double-talk, called 'public' schools), which are the mainstay of our continuing class divisions. That would get my vote.

The question for those of us who are ministers, but also often feel as if we are giving greatly of ourselves in performance mode, is how to reconcile the lovie wisdom (that you should never read, let alone take any notice of, your reviews) with the modern epidemic of feedback forms, which presumably you are supposed to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest, in the hope of making it even better next time around.

I've just received a copy of the feedback responses from that diocesan readers' conference. It's great to bathe in the warm glow of the ones that read like this:

• Brilliant! Not only did Tony 'sell' the idea of story telling, but he actually ministered to us as he demonstrated, inspiring many of us - I'm sure - to have a go.


• Excellent, useful, practical and an excellent demonstration, clear highlight - worth coming just for this.


• I was really bowled over and became totally involved, like I was almost there listening to Jesus. The Text really came alive.


• Breathtakingly moving.

But guess which one leaps off the page, and lingers in the mind? This one, naturally:

• Rather tedious. One interesting central point on the value of memorising scripture, but otherwise a missed opportunity - very biblical or home-produced material.

Ain't human nature a bummer?

Version 1.0 of the Firefox browser is now available. It's free. It's secure. It's downright better in every way than Internet Explorer. If you're not already using it - why not? Get it from http://mozilla.org/products/firefox/ and enjoy!

Why redesign the look of the blog?

Because I can. Or, more accurately, because I didn't know whether I could or not, and wanted to find out. Because I like the idea of cascading style sheets: they're efficient, they appeal to the lazy man in me. Because I wanted my blog to look different from other people's. Because I wanted a linked style sheet that I would be able to edit and change without having to edit the blogger template and republish the whole blog each time.

It's not quite right yet. I'm not too happy about the colour scheme (or color scheme, as the style sheet terminology insists on calling it.) CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) style is pretty unforgiving: leave out one semi-colon, and it pretends you haven't said whatever it was you were trying to say. But once you get the hang of it, it has an appealing logic. Like canon law, and having to observe its letter.

Flushed with the excitement of last week's experiments with style sheets, I'm going to have a shot at editing and changing the appearance of this blog. Regular visitors may notice strange new sights; indeed, if I get it wrong the whole thing may disappear! Any comments or suggestions will be welcome.

What the books say about it really does seem to work. I actually felt better over the weekend thanks to some or all of the following:

1. Physical Exercise. A walk into Oxford and back made some of the joints and muscles feel their age a bit, but it was a good ache.


2. Chocolate. Yes, after all that exercise I rewarded myself with a bar of chocolate. But I'm told what you should eat is the dark black strong variety (rationing yourself to one piece every couple of days) which gives you the fix without the calories.


3. Other treats. Why not? You deserve it.


4. A Dose of Progeny. Tom dropped in for a couple of hours yesterday, and it was good to go out for lunch with him and Naomi. We talked a lot about computers, naturally. (Oh yes, we touched briefly on the upcoming wedding.) Spend time with children, then.


5. Keep up with friends and people you love. The danger is you will avoid them, because you feel so awful and so unlovable that you don't feel anyone can want to be with you. Don't avoid them: they do love you.


6. Anti-depressants?.
   (With thanks to Mumcat for the suggestion of a more balanced approach.)
   Sometimes the crash is so great you may need help from medication. If a doctor you trust prescribes anti-depressants, by all means follow their advice, as I have down twice. At the moment, though, my preference is to try and avoid tablets and deal with the blues some other way. I found anti-depressants fuzzed up my thinking processes so much that I preferred the depression. But even that probably means the tablets 'worked', by giving me the incentive to get better enough to stop taking them.

Sympathies to all fellow-sufferers! Only intelligent, sensitive, gifted, creative people suffer depression, I reckon. :-)

About seven weeks ago, when I went to tell stories, and talk about storytelling, to the diocesan annual readers' conference, I had a few minutes after arrival and before supper to look at the bookshop in the centre.

There I saw a book I hadn't seen before, by someone I know and admire, on a subject that really looked important and interesting. I have several of his books already, and most of them are some way over my head; but this one looked as if it might be written more for the average reader like me. (i.e. I might understand it.) I made a mental note to return after supper and buy a copy.

Then I discovered that the bookshop closed for the evening, and didn't reopen until after I had to leave the following morning.

So I went to Blackwell's in the week and asked for the book. I had remembered the name and title correctly, because a) it was by someone I know, and b) it was a subject I was interested in. It wasn't in the Blackwell's computer. The man at the theology desk said, "It doesn't sound like anything by him. Are you sure?" I said, "But I've seen it. Haven't you got a list of books about to be published?" - for I suspected that what I had seen was a pile of books displayed before the publication date, in a place where people don't mind about such small details. They didn't have such a list. Whatever happened to Bookseller - one of my favourite reads when I was in the librarian business? Reader, I wavered. Yes, I even began to think I might have dreamed it, or that there was another writer with the same name, maybe somewhere strange like America. But I didn't really think so. I decided to wait and see.

Then today, when I had forgotten all about it, I was in Blackwell's and there it was! I snapped it up and slapped my hotly clutched book token on the counter. Alas, my friend from the theology desk was not there today, but I hope he has hung his head in shame for being a doubting Thomas.

The book?

Keith Ward's What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for Fundamentalists. Published by SPCK at £9.99.

I think this will be an important contribution to an important debate. Sadly, the people who most need to read it probably never will. But it could provide important material for the rest of us.

I mentioned Sam Williams' Free As In Freedom a while back. It's a book about Richard Stallman, the patriarch and prophet of free software, arch-hacker and author of GNU Emacs, computer genius and prickly conscience for many in the strange and wonderful world he inhabits.

It's an interesting book, partly because in accordance with RMS's own principles it is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL). This means that everyone is assured the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or non-commercially; and at the same time the author gets credit for his work, while not being considered responsible for any modifications. While you can buy a hard copy of the book, published by those excellent publishers O'Reilly, you can also get it free online at the author's web site. This version is capable of being modified, kept up to date, corrected, and thus co-authored by anyone who wants to add their own thoughts or reminiscences of RMS.

I shelled out about £16 for my hardcover hard copy, for the simple reason that I am, I confess, a bit of a book-sniffer. I love to hold a book, look at it, caress it, feel it, smell it. It's nice to be able to access content and read it on the Web (though not yet as easy to read as in hard print) but for sensual pleasure, it doesn't come close to a real book. I don't mind paying for this pleasure. But what I do mind, is the shoddy editing of this particular volume. There are spelling errors, even! in an age of ubiquitous and not always useful (or used) spell-checkers. There are mistakes in grammar. There are various other infelicities which pain has erased from my memory. And for some reason, where I wouldn't object so much to these in a 'free' Web-based edition, it makes me angry in one I have paid for.

This morning I choked on my toast over "Tracy invited Henning and I to go out for drinks", and spent several minutes shouting at the book, "No, listen to I! Don't take any notice of he! Him is just ignorant! 'Anyone and I' is only correct if it is the subject of the sentence, otherwise it has to be 'Anyone and me'. You wouldn't talk as me is doing unless you was a Mummerzetshire yokel, dammit." The book sat in stolid, unbending silence while my toast grew cold and my rage cooled with it.

With few enough grammatical cases in the English language, it does seem strange how often this particular one trips people up. I blame the lack of a classical education. But the good news (I'm pleased to say) is that rather than blaming the author I think I can probably blame a half-awake editor at O'Reilly. For the Web version, correctly, has "Tracy invited Henning and me to go out for drinks". (In the interests of complete disclosure, I should also tell you that Sam later proposed to and married Tracy, so it was an invitation well made.)

Speaking of cases like this brings back a childhood memory of North London, then still semi-rural, perhaps, in which there were interesting case-formations still in common oral usage. Friends of mine really used to say: "This is mine. That one's yourn. This is ourn. And those are hisun and hern." Teachers used to treat these as cloddish, but I suspect their users were actually the true traditionalists, speaking English as it was spoken generations back.

One of the real problems with this job is that it comes complete with so many built-in occasions for failure. Things that you can't avoid, that show that you're really not much good at being a vicar, or even a Christian.

This morning some of our flower ladies came to the door with the news that there was a stranger in church, lying down next to one of the radiators in the chancel. When I went to investigate, I found an unkempt, bearded homeless man. He had slept rough last night and was cold and hungry. So I made him some sandwiches and tea, and told the flower ladies we would let him stay there and get warm, and he would probably move on when he was ready.

I was still getting reports that he was fast asleep there in mid-afternoon, from people going in to clean their bit of the church, who were not prepared to do their cleaning if it involved being in the building alone with an unpredictable stranger. I said we'd let him stay a bit longer. He was still there when I went for Evening Prayer, when I woke him up, with some difficulty, and asked him to leave as I would soon be locking up. When I told him I was not going to make him another cup of tea at that point, he became abusive and it took me 15 minutes to make him leave, having to listen all the while to a stream of accusations (that I was a liar, hypocrite, unbeliever, fascist, wimp, paedophile etc.) and threats which were so deranged that fortunately I could not make head or tail of them, though I think having to face God and burn in hell featured there somewhere.

I don't find WWJD a great help in these circumstances, which I am relieved are not frequent. WWJD? Why, heal the man, of course. Or take him into his home and set him on his feet. Trouble is, I can't do the one and am not prepared to do the other. What I most wanted to do was knock him down or call the police, neither of which Jesus would have done, so not doing them myself was at least a small success.

Does being God's person mean we should let the mentally ill, whom society isn't helping, spend the night in our church buildings? What can we do for them? I've failed to do much for this man today. The community is still failing him, too. But somehow that doesn't seem to console me much.

Thanks to Karen at Heretic's Corner: Christopher's new blog, Bending the Rule: Queer Entries on Pilgrimage with St. Benedict's Rule...

And thanks to TomPaine.com, the victory statement of Barack Obama, only the third African American ever to be elected to the Senate.

Mood goes downhill very fast at this time of year. It's not what's actually going on in the world around. OK, Dubya has won his four more years; and OK, we're still embroiled in a foreign war of uncertain justice and unknown and potentially disastrous outcome; and OK, global warming is getting worse by the day and by the time my not-yet-born grandchildren are young adults, a third of Britain will be under water. One rises above such things.

No, it's that little hour by which the clocks went back last Sunday. Just sixty minutes; but it's like having the sky fall on your head, or being mugged by the US Marine Corps. From one day to the next, instead of daylight through the stained glass at Evening Prayer, there is darkness. And this tells you that it won't be long before the windows are black for Morning Prayer, too. And you'll get up in the dark and come home in the dark. And that's how it's going to be for four more months; and all through that time, whatever moments of relief there might occasionally be, you'll feel like you're firing on at least one cylinder fewer than whatever your full count of cylinders is.

November is the month when all my serious mood crashes have happened. The worst one ever was the day after going out to dinner with some dear friends, and having a great time with them, and that following day being plunged into deepest despair. Knowing the pattern makes it a bit more survivable. When the black dog appears, instead of taking to your bed with a bottle (or a gun), you say "Oh, there you are already. Well, come in - you're going to anyway - and for God's sake try not to cause too much trouble this time." But there are days when it feels very like clinging on by the skin of your teeth, and double-praying every relevant word of the psalmists (who were fellow sufferers, for the most part). Like this evening's "O go not from me, for trouble is hard at hand, and there is none to help me." (Psalm 22.11)

The truly worst thing is knowing that the reason November is a bad time, is not that it is the worst, but that it brings with it the fear of what the next four months will be like. It's fear itself that kills. Perfect love casts out fear ... but I haven't yet found a way to love November that much.

See:
SAD Association
SAD Learning Centre

From the 'These Have Inspired Me' Department

I've been thinking a lot about Frank, today. When I first came to this parish, he was a parishioner, and a regular worshipper. He was also a professional politician, at one time a junior minister in a former Government, and out of office was still a doughty campaigner in the Cause. He had a special interest in social justice and development issues. I admired him greatly, so it was enormously valuable to me that he also appreciated my ministry and preaching. I got nervous when he complimented me for being 'very courageous' when I ventured to say anything mildly political in the pulpit. Like at the fall of Communism, when I preached on 'Actually, however evil the practice of communism was, in its social ideals it may have been closer to the policies the Kingdom of God might espouse, than the policies of aggressive capitalism are.' That seemed so obvious to me, that I wondered if, rather than being courageous, I may just be foolish and naive to say it.

On that ghastly day in 1992, when Labour expected to win the General Election and were trounced again by a morally bankrupt sitting Government, I was in despair. I went whinging to Frank about it being the end of the world, and what hope could there possibly be for us, and how could any of us carry on after this?

I'll never forget his reply.

"Well," he said, "we'll just pick ourselves up, and beginning first thing tomorrow morning, we start campaigning to win the next time."

The Office of Government Commerce have reported that Linux and other forms of open source software have reached the stage of being a viable alternative to secret, proprietary programs (let the reader understand). Not only that, but open source is more secure than M*cr*$*ft. This suggestion was, however, sexed down by the Government, according to this article from silicon.com.

Statement on West Papua by Benjamin Zephaniah, Poet, Author and Activist

"My heart goes out to the people of West Papua. In times like these when everyone is talking about 'Democracy', and ridding themselves of their colonial masters, I think it is outrageous that the plight of the West Papuans is not seen as a priority by what we now call the 'world community'.

None of the colonial rulers of West Papua have cared about the country; why not give the people a chance to take care of themselves? It seems to me that the people of West Papua are not asking for any more than their most basic human right, that of self-determination.

The very least the United Nations can do is to review the so-called 'Act of Free Choice (1969)'. As for me, I shall continue to show our solidarity with the long suffering people of West Papua. I believe all freedom loving people should do the same, until the day that the great people of West Papua will be proud to take their place amongst the free nations of the planet Earth."

See West Papua Action

It's my day off; and Alison's on retreat, being blessed (and I hope having a lot of joy in the process, as well as the breaking down and putting back together again); so what better pastime than trying to understand the stylesheet of this blog, and trying to revise my own stylesheet for the rest of the website. Not bringing them completely into sync, I don't want that; and you probably won't notice very much difference yet. That's because most of the pages will need a bit of tweaking some time or other.

Here's one for the guys. Particularly those of a certain age.

I've been Doing Science today, taking part in a survey conducted by the University of Oxford's Primary Care Education Research Group, into information men want about PSA testing. This is a blood test for Prostate Specific Antigens, which may (or may not) indicate the presence of prostate cancer. They sent me a selection of information leaflets about PSA testing, and whether or not it can indicate prostate cancer, and what you might decide to do if such a test proved positive, and so on. If you do have heightened PSA levels, you still need to have a potentially painful biopsy to discover if you do in fact have cancer, and this can give false results in a huge number of cases.

As a result I know far more about the risks and side effects of treatment for early prostate cancer, than I ever hope to need to know. As things stand, it looks very much as if the best thing is not to choose treatment, since it's far more likely to lead to diarrhoea, bowel and bladder problems and impotence, than to actually prolong life in any significant way. If I've got this wrong, then obviously the information hasn't worked.

In the interests of public health and information, some useful web-sites are
Cancer Specialist Library
NHS Cancer Screening Programmes
DIPEx.org: Personal experiences of health and illness

It all reminded me of that Victor Meldrew moment when he's reading the medical encyclopedia account of some especially nasty kind of brain tumour - 'There are no symptoms in the early stages' - and exclaims, "My God! That's exactly what I've got!"

I find the Church very confusing sometimes, in the way it deals with culture. On the one hand, the new Calendar and Lectionary positively encourage us to celebrate some of the major feasts (All Saints, Epiphany etc.) on the nearest Sunday. They know people won't turn out for mid-week major feasts, and they think these should be celebrated, so let's do it when the people are there. This is the most cowardly and timid kind of capitulation to secularism. Whatever happened to the sacramental idea of holy time, and that there are such things as holy days set apart from worldly time, which should be observed just because they are separate?

On the other hand we are busy with the idea that for many people, Sunday church is no longer a realistic possibility or expectation, so let's provide opportunities for meeting and worship on some other day of the week.

Why not somehow combine these contradictory tendencies and have our alternative, non-Sunday, congregations providing the strong core of the midweek meetings? Or is it, perhaps, that the Church is just separating out into sacramentalists (but secularised ones) for whom only holy time is holy, and 'Quakers' or others for whom only any and every other time is holy?

I don't think 'confusing' says the half of it.

Karen at Heretic's Corner has an interesting piece about keeping Halloween as a form of community transformation, in which innocent kids get to rule the mean streets for one night of the year.

Over on this side of the great water, Christians are generally highly resistant to Halloween because of all its connotations of paganism, witchcraft and devilry, the way it encourages the young to roam the streets demanding favours with menaces, and (probably worst of all) that it is an American Invention. (Yes, I know it probably came from Ireland originally, but ...) So I was wondering what other Brits thought about Karen's piece? Will we see churches in the UK promoting Halloween as a way of bringing that community renaissance, instead of their present puritanical opposition, and handing out of tracts about why we don't do Trick or Treat? Or will we continue to close all the curtains and sit in the back room and disconnect the doorbell?