Category: Blog Entry

We’ve been doing some exploring of companionship links – and are in period of ‘courtship’ with the Diocese of Calcutta. So it was a real pleasure to be visited by Bishop Ashoke Biswas and Rev Nigel Pope during the week. They visited some of our congregations and came with me to the Perth 800 celebrations in St John’s Kirk and met the Earl of Wessex at the Civic Reception afterwards.

I suppose that I realised that I was in the grip of forces beyond my control when I introduced Bishop Biswas to the Lord Lieutenant – and they immediately plunged into a detailed discussion about which of the churches of the diocese was the one in which his parents had got married. Welcome to Perthshire!

So the photos show the bishop and myself – with Canon Val Nellist and Rev Nigel Pope

They don’t obviously belong together. But here they are.

I contributed six days of Prayer for the Day

I also contributed a Platform piece on the Church in the Rural Community for the Scotsman. It was useful to be able to contribute that during the Highland Show

Well as you know there is only one priestly TV programme for me .. but I still made time to watch the first episode of Rev last night.

It’s hard to know what to think. The whole UPA scene is somewhat distant from Perthshire but the issues are the same. But I’ll content myself with two comments for the time being.

One is that it was good to see them sketching out a serious moral/ethical issue at the heart of ministry. Of course getting your child into a highly-regarded CofE Primary School may not rate with the big issues of our time. But when you are dealing with people who want what they want …. It’s a good reminder that everything tells you everything about everbody and nothing is hid. In my experience, it’s always in the set of the mouth.

The other is my fascination with the spouses of clergy. Please don’t misunderstand .. nothing inappropriate. But I’m the one who came home from the Lambeth Conference saying that the wives of the bishops were often far more interesting than the bishops themselves. But it’s obvious, innit? Those who didn’t choose this for themselves [and I know we would claim to have been chosen, etc] but who are often – in the most direct sense – the backbone of their partner’s ministry … how could they not be interesting? And so it was last night.

Diocesan life in the Scottish Episcopal Church happens in relatively watertight compartments. So it’s been good today to break out of that.

I was in St Paul’s Cathedral in Dundee this morning. I couldn’t get to the Institution of Jeremy Auld as the new Provost. He’s taken on a challenging ministry and I was glad to join them this morning – a lovely building, wonderful music and a congregation in good heart. So this is what I said

This evening saw the Ordination of Valerie Walker in our Cathedral in Perth – the preacher was Bishop Mark of Moray, Ross and Caithness. We’ve set up Valerie’s curacy as a Diocesan Curacy – in which she will serve in Holy Trinity, Dunfermline, with St Margaret’s Rosyth and in St John’s Alloa. We need to provide good training curacies for our newly-ordained clergy. But we find it increasingly hard to find single congregations which can take that on. So holding it within the diocese enables us to broaden the experience for the curate – and give more of the diocese the encouragement of being part of the ministry of a newly-ordained person.

There’s a sort of rule that I don’t allow the various bits of my life past and present to collide here – but I’ll make an exception in this case.

Back to Portadown yesterday for the opening of the new Parish Centre at Seagoe. It was a wonderful day for the Parish and great to meet people with whom Alison and I shared so much. These things take a long time – this project has been 15 years in thinking, planning and praying. My successor Terence and I looked at each other in mutual admiration – him at the effort which we all put in to getting the plans agreed in my time; me at his ability to find £1.3m and the energy to get it built. Why so long? Paradigm shift, of course. This is the move from Church Hall as a place for recreation and friendship for the members of an existing church community to something quite different .. a building for mission, facing outwards to the community, equipped for hospitality and learning, directly linked to the church and with a new worship space at its heart. One other thing. The 15 years happened to coincide with some of the most difficult years of community tension in Portadown – and yesterday this bit of the Church of Ireland community made a very positive statement about its future with representatives of church and community there to share it and the Roman Catholic Bishop on the platform. And this is what I said

If you want a look at drawing and plan, they are below

We’ve had quite a focus on rural issues recently – most notably with the publication of the Report of our Rural Commission at the recent General Synod. So it was interesting to visit the Royal Highland Show today and talk to people about the state of rural community today.

The thing which is most striking is the number of people employed in farming and all the related food production industries. It wasn’t just the people titivating animals before their show ring appearances – Lorna our Communications Officer has a particularly impressive picture of me with a prize bull – but the huge range of employment which depends on farming.

The rural population is predicted to increase – so we’re starting to realise that we are not necessarily facing a steady attrition of our rural congregations. But I think that we need to become much more interested in the issues which affect the state of the rural community – tourism, education, transport, health services, employment. I’ve written a bit about this for Saturday’s Scotsman.

Time for a quick trip to Iona for the dedication of new windows in the Chapel at Bishop’s House. The windows were given by the Friends of Iona.

Getting there is easy – 6.30 am start from Blogstead and a quick run on the Autobahn which now links us to Oban [which my Android predictive spelling changes to Obama] By 1045, the Passat and I were forging our way across Mull gently nudging tourist cars into the passing places on the 35 miles of single track road. And then things began to slow down .. the mobile phone signal vanished .. and then the radio and it was time to visit what they call a ‘thin place’ We were there by noon.

Anyway, we had a great time. Bishop’s House is in good shape under the leadership of Ben, its new Warden. You’ll find all the details here and they’ll be glad to see you.

Which brings us to the dedication of the windows. Once again I was on the look-out for mixed metaphors. So I did ‘light of God shining into our hearts’ and then ‘looking at the beauty of creation and worshipping the creator’. Then I felt ‘seeing through a glass darkly’ coming on and decided it was time to stop.

You will know that I have a ‘thing’ about cycling. I suppose we could shimmy left and think about what it is – maybe the mechanical almost-perfection and simplicity of a bicyle; or maybe it’s a way of revisiting childhood cycling; or perhaps there’s a freedom thing about it and a way of working off the adrenalin. So there’s the hybrid in the garage, the Brompton in the car ready for instant use – oh and half a tandem left behind in Ireland. So the bishop’s wife and I took ourselves down the former branch line from Leuchars to St Andrews – now part of National Cycle Route 1 – today including a crossing of the fairway for the 18th at St Andrews.

But I would rather have been carrying the Brompton in procession at the Blessing of the Bicycles at our St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow. But I am sure they got on fine without me. I wonder what the hymns were?

I’ve emerged blinking into the daylight after General Synod. Using the simplest measurement of all to decide whether it was a good Synod or not .. the number and quality of contributions from the floor … it was a good Synod.

The visit of the Presiding Bishop was an important event and there was maturity and generosity in the way we managed our diversity at that point.

You may be interested in the Primus’ Charge from the Opening Eucharist and this statement on the Anglican Covenant.

We engaged fully with the outside world, twittering, blogging, audio-streaming, updating our website, etc. Our Synod was widely reported on websites across the world. But the local media seem just to have given up altogether. The Scotsman on the opening day had a brief report on ‘Church to discuss sex and the environment’ below a much larger report on Fiona Bruce’s success as ‘Rear of the Year.’

So the Saville Report has finally arrived after 12 years and £195m. The responses to it suggest that justice has finally been done and people are ready to move on.

In 1972, I was a student in Dublin – living in Hatch Street above the appropriately-named Hatch Street Maternity Home. It was a dreadful time. I went on the huge march in Dublin which took place as the first funerals were held. I was in Merrion Square when the first of the attacks which led to the burning of the British Embassy took place.

At this distance, I find myself more and more often asking the ‘What if ?’ questions. So what if these killings had never happened? What if the Widgery Report had been less unsatisfactory as an account of what happened?

I fear that the reality is that the Bloody Sunday deaths were joined by many, many more .. as Bloody Sunday drove recuitment for the Provisional IRA, intensified and prolonged the conflict.