‘I note with great satisfaction how Pope John Paul’s call to you to walk hand in hand with your fellow Christians has led to greater trust and friendship with the members of the Church of Scotland, the Scottish Episcopal Church and others.’

It was good to hear that call to stronger ecumenical relationships in Pope Benedict’s Homily at Bellahouston this afternoon. I believe that our ability to engage with this society is directly related to our willingness to make a real commitment to strong inter-church and inter-faith relationships. Then speaking at Holyrood this morning, the Pope said: ‘the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society.’

And, just to complete the circle, I listened yesterday in Oxford to Baroness Warsi telling the Anglican Bishops of the UK that the coalition ‘does God’ The message seemed to be that in the ‘big society’ faith will come in from the cold – if you’ll forgive the mixed metaphors. We’ll wait and see.

Yes I do share the Pope’s sense of exclusion. The Scottish Government tries hard to involve faith groups – and contacts with public representatives and institutions at more local levels are often very good. But the press .. we’ll leave that for another day.

I think that the danger in what the Pope is saying is that an indifferent society and a pietistic church become mirror images of one another. Put it like that and it becomes a challenge for the church to muster all the openness and integrity at its command to engage with this society. But it’s tough.

One of the things which amused me on the cruise in August was the difficulty which ordinary members of the C of E seemed to have in working out what I represented. ‘Are you a member of the House of Lords?’ they asked. ‘No’ ‘Do you have a seat in the Scottish Parliament?’ ‘No’ So – as they questioned John the Baptist – so they questioned me. And they struggled to grasp that I am part of a cheerfully independent Anglican Province. We’re catholic, evangelical, liberal, conservative. We have high levels of lay participation. We’re not much into hierarchy and certainly not into establishment. We give a very high value to worship, prayer and spirituality.

What Pope Benedict might find a little strange – but maybe I underestimate him – would be the nature of a church in which almost everybody has a view about almost everything; in which I and others offer leadership and exercise authority with almost none of the visible props with which he is familiar.

It can be maddening, slow and circuitous. But it is in the best sense edgy. We talk about most things and we’re getting better at working out how to talk about things we have difficulty talking about. Most elephants in the room get noticed after a while.

Pope Benedict’s visit next week raises all sorts of questions about what kind of society he is visiting. Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Kinloch Rannoch. If he was able to join me – Passat rather than Popemobile, I think – he would discover that Scotland is a virtuoso performance by the Creator. But it is pretty secular. I think I can safely say that the House of Bruar just beyond Blair Atholl will be doing better business than any of the churches along the way.

The Pope and I would of course talk wistfully how wonderful it would be if there could be more than the nine or ten utterly faithful souls who will be in All Saints tomorrow. But then he hasn’t had the chance of meeting Rose, Anne, Lucy and the others. We might talk about confessional states – places where the social and moral teaching of one church has an undue influence on government policy and popular culture – like the Irish Republic of my childhood or Northern Ireland as Ian Paisley would have shaped it. Maybe there were bits of that in Scotland when I visited it as a student.

So on the way back – passing the crowded car park at the House of Bruar – we’d talk about the positive aspects of the secular society. Yes it is full of individualistic indifference – the shrug which says, ‘if you want to do religion, that fine. Just don’t ask me .. ‘ But it is also an open place with a proper separation between church, state and judiciary. And because there are lots of people floating around who have lost their former denominational ties, it is a place which suits a small-ish church like the SEC. It gives us lots of people to talk to – particularly if we can get better at listening to them and responding in a faithful but undogmatic way.

Of which more another day ..

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.

So some kind of order has been restored to life and work.

The e mail backlog is still around 150 but I’m getting there. But it gets harder to knock them off as the number reduces. I did a Thought for the Day on Rabbi Yosef – judging from my Inbox I can forget about that trip to the Holy Land for a while.

Followers of the faithful Passat will be interested to know that it passed 200000 miles last week and has survived a trip for service since. So now that that milestone – as it were – has been passed, it should be fit for the next 100000. It needs a set of front tyres so that’s a significant investment.

Looking ahead, I’ve made the bookings for the various bits of travel associated with the Pope’s visit. It involves separate trips to Oxford and London – followed by a visit to Dublin for a family wedding. Sounds like another e mail backlog coming up.

Well we jumped ship in Leith in the end – having gone most of the way round the British Isles in a sort of bubble of unreality. Many of you will know that my mother died just as we set out – after a short illness which progressed very rapidly. Thank you to everyone for their prayers and kind messages.

Sheila was the last surviving grandparent for our children. She was a huge influence on all of us. Like many women of her generation, she carried an unfulfilled vocation to ordained ministry – I know that in some measure my vocation has been part of that. But she fulfilled that calling in other ways – not least in her work as an Educational Psychologist working to reduce illiteracy levels among children in some of the most troubled areas of Belfast. As everyone does on the death of a parent, one ponders and reassesses.

I was also sorry to see today news of the death of Rev Cecil Kerr. Cecil grew up as I did in Fermanagh – and he was taught by my father. After time as Church of Ireland Chaplain at Queens University, he took a great leap of faith and founded the Christian Renewal Centre in Rostrevor in the 1970’s. While I was never directly involved in the charismatic renewal movement, I went there often in the early years. In those grim times, it was one of the few places where one could catch glimpses of future possibilities as people from both sides of the religious and political divides came together to acknowledge that spiritual change and renewal was the only way forward. Cecil plunged into dementia soon after his retirement – may he now enter into the peace he sought to plant in the hearts of others.

We’re now reached Kirkwall in Orkney on this journey round the outside of the British Isles. As always with the passage of time, an amorphous group of passengers begins to become something more interesting – characters and distinctive personalities begin to emerge. The ship is known variously as the ‘English country house afloat’ or more prosaically as ‘The Church of England afloat’

One feels that it is only a matter of time until the passengers are gathered in the Darwin Lounge, Poirot steps forward twirling his waxed moustaches and we gradually begin to discover who the murderer is.

Well this is great. We’ve fetched up in the Cruise Terminal in Greenock – not exactly the kind of travel which broadens the mind. But being on a ship does make things turn up in a slightly different order. We left Killybegs last night – went past Glencomcille and all the familiar bits of North Donegal including the wonderful Tory Island – and came up the Clyde past Cumbrae.

Meanwhile I and others are lecturing to the clientele. This particular ship is known for being the Church of England afloat – tho’ it seems to have aspects of the SEC adrift about it. I hope I have enough inside me to get to the end.

I’m talking my way round the British Isles for a living – and for a holiday. This is the famous McCarthy’s Bar in Castletownbere. I happen to think that ‘Round Ireland with a fridge’ was far more entertaining and original – but there you are. Anyway it’s fascinating to visit your own place as a tourist. The guide on the bus this morning said that they had no problems in West Cork and that it was great that ‘they now had peace for all time’ – which seemed to me to be a rather more expansive claim even than Chamberlain’s.

This cruising thing of course is very strange to us. The last time we were in Kenmare was 1975 in the Renault 4. It was a bit of a struggle and our tent blew away at the wrong moment. On a cruise of course you just sit there and they wind the scenery past you. I don’t find it altogether easy.

There is of course a certain something about long journeys by train. You may not have met the Man in Seat 61 – take a look if you haven’t

So having taken almost 90 minutes to get from Perth to Edinburgh, things are improving a bit. And we’re going to try out the high speed line from St Pancras en route to Dover tomorrow. I can’t imagine that this particular train is very green – East Coast’s now elderly diesel trains are well past their best. But I suppose it is better than the plane.

It’s also sort of sociable in a way that the plane never seems to be. The lady next to Alison – she comes from somewhere in Ireland of course – is showing pictures of her grandchildren and the atmosphere is becoming something like a rural bus journey in the midlands of Ireland. Certainly there is none of the pressure which led the Jet Blue flight attendant to inflate the escape slide and go for it. Tho’ I’ve pondered the meriots of such an exit myself now and again.