Juxtapositions

What I sometimes – but only sometimes – feel I enjoy about my life is that all sorts of very different things seem to jostle for position allathesametime.

So I spent Monday in fairly fruitless media fire-fighting because portions of the media had been led to believe that we are changing the way we address God. The reality is that our College of Bishops has approved eight optional inclusive-language alterations to the 1982 Eucharist. ‘Do we still say, ‘Our Father’? asked my friend William Crawley of BBC Northern Ireland. ‘Yes we do.’ ‘Wise up’ as they say in Belfast.

Meanwhile Poppy’s diabetes is looming fairly large in our lives. Injecting the cat seems set to become part of the daily routine here at Blogstead – indeed, given the amount that we shall be away over the next while, it looks set to become part of the life of almost everybody who lives here. She was very ill on Sunday but much better now, thank-you.

And in amongst all of that, I shall be giving a fair amount of next week to the Pope’s visit and a meeting of bishops in Oxford. It amuses me that, amid all the media hype, nobody has actually asked me what I think about it. I’ll be interested to see it, of course – who wouldn’t be and honoured to represent our church. But I find myself feeling more and more that the life of a small, independent [or was that ‘autonomy with inter-dependence] never-established Anglican church with mildly Celtic tendencies is not the worst thing.