Alison and I are doing a series of meetings around the Diocese – exploring Lambeth and its implications with people.  Full marks to Trinity Wall Street for their Video Diaries – no better way of giving people a feel of the Conference.  When I showed some sections to our clergy, I think they were positively relieved to find that the Anglican Communion which we value is still in existence in the measured contributions of bishops from provinces all over the world.

But why would anyone come out to a meeting on a cold night in Scotland to hear about Lambeth?  Strange that.  Some curiosity .. undoubtedly some concern about the future and whether we will be able to cohere .. the desire of people in a small church to belong to something bigger.  Strange thing this Anglican Communion.  I’ve just decided that it doesn’t really exist and then …

We met today with the congregations of our St Andrews West Area Council – in a Leisure Centre in Glenrothes.  These are the congregations which have probably seen the greatest social change – the end of mining in Southern Fife and the gradual development of a culture of commuting across the Forth Bridge into Edinburgh.  So times have been hard for some of them and they’re still very much alive.

The gospel reading was the Unjust Stewards – and this is the globe which the children created during the service to symbolise a world exploited and spoilt.  Children?  Yes .. gradually becoming visible in our congregations.  Hope for the future.

Well it was, shall we say, a not unpleasant interlude in the best of company. But what is this Celtic thing? In the humour, maybe? A certain elastic lateralness of the mind? I wonder – after all most/all of those present are of mongrel background. The Irish Primate is English – the SEC Primus is Welsh. I may feel very Irish – but I have big slices of England and Germany in me.

So here are two things to think about.

The most obviously Celtic group seem to be the Welsh – who live closest of all to England. The strength of the Welsh language movement must have something to do with it – but why is that movement so strong?

I suppose – particularly in the immediate post-Lambeth period – we wonder whether there might be a distinctive contribution which the ‘celtic’ churches of the British Isles might make. The Church of England is in a different place – big, established, central to the institutional life of the Anglican Communion through the Archbishop of Canterbury, colonial past … At its best, the celtic tradition is spirituality and missionary energy.

I spent a couple of years of ministry looking at this mural on the east wall of Bangor Abbey in Northern Ireland. It shows Gall, Comgall and Columbanus receiving the great missionary command from the ascending Christ.

The Church of England has just published its new rules which make it easier for couples to get married in church. There’s a shift going on – to seeing a church wedding as something which can be positively offered to couples as distinctive and special. We’re moving in the same direction and experimented [very successfully] with a stand at a Wedding Fair in Glasgow.

I’m very happy with that. Some of the best of ministry is in working with a couple to custom-make a wedding liturgy. People get drawn into that process and begin to find that this is not just something which the church ‘does’ – but they can shape it so that it expresses their love and their hope for the future.

Contrari-wise, I think we are still more accommodating than is wise with weddings outside churches. Yes, I too feel the pull of the island in the middle of the loch. But more often it is just the hotel .. and it suits people .. and it risks just being a piece of ‘bolt on’ religious ceremonial rather than something with the richness and status it deserves.

Welcome to the biennial meeting of the Celtic Bishops – meaning the bishops of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. We’re in Chepstow – which I understood was to the east of Cardiff. So why did the taxi driver who picked me up at Cardiff Airport say that it was to the west? Anyway, I’m delighted to be here, wherever it is. And wondering precisely what Celtic means in these circumstances. Yes of course it means more than ‘not English’. But what does it mean?

Anyway, we all went to have a look today at St Fagan’s – welsh equivalent of the Ulster Folk Museum. And it was fascinating. A bit wet and cold and dark. Otherwise grand.

I’ll be home on Thursday night.

Ever wondered what it would be like to meet a car going the wrong way on the motorway?  A driver was jailed this week for doing this on the M4.  And it happened to me .. travelling on the M1 west of Belfast in the faithful Passat .. with my sister, mother of three young children.. Sunday afternoon. We were, as is my wont, ambling down the right hand lane passing out a line of lorries. There’s a car in the distance and it’s coming closer .. at 150 mph closer. I dived for a gap between the lorries and was fortunate to find it – then expired on the hard shoulder. And suddenly the other side of the motorway was all police cars and sirens. And my sister said, ‘I heard somebody screaming and realised it was me’

So what was all that about? First, the driver had a head on collision about a mile up the road. He was killed and, fortunately, those he hit were not seriously injured. I went on to Portadown and conducted Evening Prayer. I am a chap, after all.

The police told me that the driver had entered the motorway and had a minor accident. He was being interviewed on the hard shoulder by the police when he suddenly got back into his car, turned around and drove off the wrong way up the motorway. And they watched him go.

A year or two later, I visited the parents of a young women killed with her friend further down the motorway by a drunk driver travelling the wrong way.

It was a while before I felt confident again .. Never so close to death, I think. But thankful.

Busy weekends recently and much variety. Saturday started with Kerry and Malcolm’s wedding in St Andrews. This was a somewhat Northern Ireland event with lots of old friends – and it was great to see them. We all did a bit of, ‘yurlukkinawfulwell’ and that sort of thing.

And on to St Mary’s, Dunblane for the licensing of Nerys as Lay Reader. This also was a pretty remarkable occasion where I stood in the middle and many interesting things happened all around me. It is a remarkable congregation – about to be looking for a new Rector following Janice’s retirement. They seem to have passed the ‘critical mass’ point in having children and young people around – and in involving people in ministry. And Nerys is both symbol and encourager of much of that. My favourite image of the weekend was Nerys saying ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord’ and using a gesture as if driving the congregation out of the church to do the work of mission.

This morning it was confirmations in Aberfoyle – we had that wonderful mix of family, grandparents, godparents and others who gather on these occasions. A good time was had by all – and Nick the walker was saying how much he had enjoyed every one of the 98 miles he had walked.

I normally do links to sermons and things but I realised during the weekend that I was getting somewhat behind. I pondered the all-purpose episcopal sermon, yet again. And wondered also if the sermons for the three events might be interchangeable – would they notice?

Which called to mind the elderly vicar in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Handful of Dust’ who had written his sermons while a padre in a garrison church in India. He continued to preach them unchanged in his retirement in a Sussex village: ‘Here we are far from our loved ones … ‘

Which further reminded me of Garrison Keillor’s Wobegon Boy in which the black Lutheran lady pastor used to squeeze members of her congregation during the Peace ‘as if testing them for ripeness.’

I was conducting quite a serious interview yesterday and found myself reading one of my own bits of paper upside down.

It was headed Diocese of St Andrews, Dundeld and Dunbland.

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have been ‘having a spake’ about the financial system and its inequities. +Rowan says that ‘the biggest challenge in the present crisis is whether we can recover some sense of the connection between money and material reality.’

Quite so. I first began to ponder these slippery realities while sitting in the sun in a cafe in Greece somewhere around 1970. ‘How could it be’ I asked myself, ‘that the sole visible economic activity in Greece consists of people hanging around cafes either serving or being served fizzy lemonade?’ Yet apart from the baneful presence of the Colonels and their dictatorship, everything seemed to be getting along just fine.

Meanwhile, nobody whose financial well-being is hitched to the SEC could possibly be described as a plutocrat [note the Greek roots by the way – nearly as good at Boris]. But I am quite a supporter of more wealth as a driver of human progress… opening the doors of educational and other opportunity .. the enhanced status of women .. the lowering of the birth rate .. the easing of sectarianism.

But my mind bends at the idea both that money must always be connected to material reality – and equally that it doesn’t need to be. Both seem to have elements of truth and I understand neither. Perhaps that’s why we’re in the mess we are.

I find it easier on the level of values. Aspiration seems to me to be mainly a ‘good thing.’ But its second cousin, envy, is surely not. The desire to create wealth is largely a good thing .. but it is better if the wealth creation is done with a clear eye to the true environmental and human cost of it. Better still if it is used to care for the poor.

Meanwhile I carried out my own researches into the state of the commodity market among the second-hand cars of a Honda dealer in Kirkcaldy yesterday – not, I can reassure you, with an eye to replacement of the faithful Passat which at 166000 miles has plenty of life left. But why would I buy that leather seated, low slung, wonderful-noise-making crumpet-catching supercar which I can’t afford, when I could have this 54 reg, 35000 mile Toyota Corolla at £5999 which I can’t afford. I could have spent time exploring with second-hand car salesman Ken why his job and mine are alike – but I contented myself with, ‘I’m sure you’d give me at least £500 off that for a straight sale.’

Fizzy indeed.

At the end of an interesting weekend, that’s the phrase that sticks in the mind. A new picture of ministry, perhaps?

Nothing at all, of course, to do with the special Diocesan Synod on Saturday at which we affirmed the proposed Diocesan Strategy as Diocesan Policy. The vote was overwhelmingly in favour. But I’m not stupid and I know that all sorts of people are anxious about aspects of it. It was the interviews that helped. People may not much like pretty diagrams and management-speak – particularly not in the church. But they know authentic faith story when they hear it. And large numbers of people have been involved in the shaping of it. It’s a great moment – a gesture of faith in God and in ourselves.

Not much either to do with our visit to Kinloch Rannoch on Sunday. It was one of those bright and clear mornings – but with enough autumn to give mist around the trees on the lower slopes. We slowed down and just marvelled at the view as we came over the hill to see Schiehallion and the glen below leading to Loch Rannoch and Rannoch Moor beyond.

Our congregation there functions quite happily without a resident priest. They run the church, have an ecumenical partnership with the Church of Scotland and are involved with the community in running the internet cafe and the petrol station. In fact, they could comfortably run a modestly-sized cathedral.

And then we had the AGM. We talked of the worship, the finances, the building, changes in rural society, their children’s group [Yes!] and Godly Play. En passant, they mentioned that they had encouraged someone to help pay for the cost of re-roofing the mausoleum which abuts the church. And the history says this:

The early documents of this building were lost in a London taxi by Col. Parker, probably around 1950. We therefore have no exact details. The church however has attached to it a mausoleum belonging to the Macdonald family. Three of the General’s children are buried there. The fourth is commemorated in the church itself but he died storming the palace of the Begum at Lucknow. His brothers, the Lt General who lived at Dalhoshnie, and the Major who died of heatstroke during gun drill at Meerut and sister Jemima who died in Southampton are in the mausoleum.