I’ve been here in Porvoo for the last three days – at a meeting of the Primates of the churches of the Communion.  It’s a very beautiful place – about 50 km from Helsinki.

I preached at the closing Eucharist in the Cathedral [above].  The [slightly remarkable]  picture is with the Bishop of Porvoo and the Dean.

The Lutheran Churches are fascinating.  The founding documents of the Lutheran Federation state that ‘This Federation is a Communion’.  So they deal with the same issues as beset Anglicans.  They also have stresses and strains around sexuality issues.

And then there are the eye-watering amounts of money which come from church tax.  Porvoo is much smaller than Perth.  The parish has 25000 people and 10 priests.  Could it really be that the income of the Finnish Lutheran Church is 800 m euro per year and it has 21000 staff?

More like passing through, I’m afraid.   We spent yesterday in Dublin celebrating the marriage of my godson, Owen, to Raffaella.  They both work for the International Red Cross in challenging places.  One sits with the older generation in the shadows of the celebrations muttering that the new generation isn’t really so bad after all.

Tomorrow I’m off to Porvoo for a Primates’ meeting and will be back Wednesday evening.  Tim the Geek now has the Netbook fully plumbed in to the office server back in Perth.  So normal service continues.  I suspect that life was simpler for everybody when that wasn’t possible.

I’m quite looking forward to learning more about the Porvoo Communion and the chuches of Scandanavia.  I have the northern European programming that the only direction in which one heads is South.  It comes as a pleasant surprise to find that there is rather a lot of Europe to the north of Calais.

It was strange to fly into the Isle of Man yesterday.  Last here in 1968 with the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra.  They talked a lot about birching then.  I vowed never to return.  So here we are.

Actually my heart softened a bit because over the summer I re-read Jonathan Raban’s lovely book ‘Coasting’.  Coasting expressed his attitude to life and his journey round the British Isles in Gosfield Maid.  A wonderful book for armchair sailors – Amazon has it for 1 p.  In his early navigational struggles in the Irish Sea, he describes searching for the Isle of Man to starboard – only to find it steaming by on his port bow.   That’s rather how it seems to be – centre of the British Isles but not quite sure where it is.  Beautiful day yesterday – but this morning there was the cloak of mist called the Simmerdim which is reputed to hide the island from invaders.

Sorry – forgot to say why I am here.  Meeting of the Celtic Bishops.  Like the Walrus and the Carpenter, we talk of many things.  I am interested in testing whether there might be a common Celtic approach to the issues of the day.  We are not England, nor America nor anywhere else.  But of course that doesn’t mean that we know who we are or indeed where we are.

I spent today in the Kingdom of Fife. A beautiful day and a paradise for cyclists – criss-crossed with marked cycle routes. I visited our church in Cupar in the morning. It seemed like ages since I had been there – but they seem to be getting on just fine without me. In the afternoon, I went to our church in Ladybank – where the railway line from Perth meets the line from Dundee.  I love going there because it reminds me of St Patrick’s Hall in Killicomaine – the only place I’ve ever been where it was possible to take a break for a chat in the middle of the liturgy.  When I first went to Ladybank, the neighbours would hand a bucket of water over the fence so that they could make tea. Today marked the end of a massive building project which gives them a kitchen and a toilet. It’s clean, neat and efficient – the water heater is movement-activated. But the previous arrangements had charm and an outreach dimension which has been lost.

Spent quite a bit of my week at a meeting of our bishops at Scottish Churches House – the ecumenical study centre which sits in the shadow of the beautiful Dunblane Cathedral.  One of the sides of the Memorial for the 1996 tragedy reads, ‘”If there is anything that will endure the eye of God, because it is pure, it is the spirit of a little child.” – from The Children’s Prayer by R H Stoddard (1825-1903).  A long meeting provides much opportunity to ponder these things.

Clean sweep refers to a slight problem with the wipers on the Passat – now 183000 miles.  They have acquired a life of their own and stop and start at will.  Google tells me that I may need a new motor if the ‘stop’ switch can’t be replaced on its own.  For now, the only way of stopping the front wipers is to operate the rear one.

I suppose I’m a child of the mobile times I live in. I don’t really have anywhere that I call home. Home is where I live.

So it was interesting yesterday – Back to Church Sunday, of course – to go back to the very first church to which I was taken as a young child. It’s Rossorry Parish Church just outside Enniskillen. Arthur, one of my former curates, is now the Rector. So we headed west through Northern Ireland … past the sign that says ‘CH … CH What’s missing? UR’ and past the appropriately named Lungs Gospel Hall.  It was the kind of congregation which I don’t see too often – diverse .. suits .. lots of people younger than we are.  And I met all sorts of people – people from my Primary School class and Nurse from school.

I went up to Portora Royal School before returning.  They have a nice blue plaque nowadays to mark the fact that Oscar Wilde was a former pupil.  I thought there was a sort of irony about that.

Well labyrinth actually. And of course they’re different. A maze is for getting lost in. Labyrinth is a journey with one way in and one way out.

I met with the Chaplains and others today at Stirling University to dedicate their new Labyrinth – pic’s to follow, I hope. Interesting that labyrinth ‘ticks the boxes’ for spiritual without seeming institutionally churchy. So I did my best to seem suitably non-institutional. Quite a feat – or was that feet?

You may have noticed that today marked the 250th Anniversary of Guinness – popularly known in Ireland as Uncle Arthur or ‘the black stuff.’

Slainte!

It’s easy to lose track of days.  I’ve spent the last 24 hours [apart from time for sleep] with our Mission and Ministry Board.  Churches make decisions in funny ways – bit of passion, bit of policy, bit of precedent and [since I like alliteration] maybe even a bit of predestination.  But we’ve been trying to find a measured way of deciding what we need to decide – if, that is, we know what it is that we are trying to decide about.  I sometimes think that things may just have been easier when I wasn’t around here.  People were very patient and persevering and we plodded forward together.

I then moved on to joust with a journalist.  That’s become a fairly regular part of my life.  It’s part of our attempt to place our church in the ‘public square’ and I think that’s important.  Always sexuality and the Anglican Communion.  It’s hard to get attention for anything about mission and growth.  I’m still waiting to use the line which I learnt in media training in the USA – when all else fails you say, ‘Let me tell you what I’m really passionate about’  But I am learning to recognise when the journalist is trying to shape our conversation into a headline.  It’s when they ask three times, ‘Would you welcome …?’ or ‘Would you say then that .. ?’  Our Communications Officer keeps me safe as best she can – I wouldn’t risk doing these without her.

And finally a Reception at the Scottish Parliament to mark the 200th Anniversary of the Bible Society for Scotland.  This kind of event is always a useful place for making contacts – and congratulations to the Bible Society for bringing on an actor [didn’t get his name] who did a splendid monologue on the life of William Wilberforce.  The event was a triumph of experience over expectation.

They were at it all night – four giant machines just across the road from Blogstead working their way through a vast field of broad beans.  We woke up to the smell of them and to the roar of the machines.

Still – a beautiful Perthshire early-Autumn morning as we headed for Pitlochry and Blair Atholl.  The mist was doing that wonderful thing of lying along the line of the Tay and the Tummel with sunshine all around.  But by the time we were coming back, it had returned to being just an averagely dull September afternoon.

I’ve been in London most of the week – doing whatever bishops do in London.  I think we’re supposed to hang out around The Atheneum – but not this one.  I was due to come back from Cambridge this morning – a bit fraught since they seemed to have forgotten how to run the trains  between Cambridge and Stansted.  Croziers on the line at Bishop’s Stortford as Reginald Perrin would have said.  I had to buy a taxi.

Just time to draw breath before launching the episcopal electoral process for the Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway at the Preliminary Meeting of the Electoral Synod on Saturday.  This requires an intimate knowledge of Canon 4 which sets out how it is done.   For obvious reasons, I am a fan of Canon 4 – tho’ it is incredibly demanding of those who submit themselves to its scrutiny.  And of course the one thing that Canon 4 doesn’t help with is the most important and difficult of all – the task of vocational discernment.  I’m happy to tackle most things.  But vocational discernment – whether of potential ordinands or of clergy seeking congregational appointments …   Prayerful and insightful humility, I think.