Oban again

Off up to Oban today, to see Nicki McNelly made the new provost of Oban cathedral.  It feels rather momentous: the first female provost in Oban, only the second ever in Scotland.  There is now a female dean in Edinburgh, but overall the need for senior female clergy in our province is as great as ever!
So Nicki's role, as well as being one of my stipendiary colleagues, is to be a pioneer in our church.
Roll on a woman in a mitre: no canonical reason for this not to happen up here, we just need the right person and the right diocese.

Checklist:
Silver (borrowed) - polished: check
Cassock alb & stole: check
Falling apart black shoes: check
Wife & daughter (signed out of school): check.

I think we're ready!

Phew: what a month...

No blogging in August - what a wild month, with loads happening and far too much on the go.

Tomorrow - maybe something like back to normal (whatever that might be)

And then a few posts about all that has happened!

Hints: weddings, courses, ordinands, diocesan websites, ecumenical Highland games projects, new developments...

Phew - what a whirl!

...what *is* happening?

Someone asked me today, 'What is going on in your church at the moment?'

The question rather stopped me in my tracks.  It is frantically busy right now, with lots and lots of stuff to get done.  Some of it might even be important, just possibly.  But it's useful to be stopped in our tracks every once in a while to ask the question.  In the good old 'Seven Habits' terms, it's taking time to sharpen the saw.

So what is happening?

There is stuff to do with buildings, there is stuff to do with events, there is stuff to do with planning activities and worship in the future, there is stuff to do with people and what they are doing, what they want to do and what they will actually do.  There is stuff from well away that is good and stuff from well away that is toxic.  There are demands, there are gifts, there are plans, successes, failures. People, ideas, animals, time to be consumed.

Lots of stuff.  Plenty to keep everybody busy.

But I read a salutory lesson in an old friend's blog last week: Vicars that don't pray.  There is a real danger in all this busyness that the one thing that actually matters gets squeezed out.  And all those things that are going on only really matter if God is being paid attention to somewhere in the middle of it.  We are not a heritage preservation society, we are not a minor IT firm, we are not an entertainment provider, we are not a social club, we are not a counselling organisation, we are not a slightly posh group of cross-dressing men.

We are a church.

A church might end up looking a bit like all those things, which is fine - absolutely perfect.  But a church is Christ's body on earth, and a place for encounter with God.  It is a living community, in our case managing to be busy, but with God at its heart.

What is going in the church at the moment?

Lots of stuff.

What should be going on?

Female bishops - a view from Scotland

Have just signed the Church of England WATCH petition to lobby the house of (English) bishops to withdraw clause 5.1c of the amendment to the female bishop legislation.

Why, as a Scottish Episcopalian, did I do this?  I asked the same question of myself, and have hesitated to do so for some time because of this.  The Scottish Episcopal Church allows women bishops - we have just never had one (yet).

I was ordained deacon and priest in the Church of England, and did not expect or intend at that time to move north of the border.  I served my title in an English parish.  It was a rich, full and rewarding time of ministry.

I am now in a church that has maybe a little as 1-2% of the full-time clergy that serve in the C of E (I think there are 16,000 C of E clergy, and maybe 170 or so SEC clergy who are paid - this is a bit of a hazy guess...).

But there is an issue of justice here.

I am an Anglican priest - part of something much bigger than the charges I serve, the diocese in which I work and the province that I find myself within.  The rules in all the many Anglican provinces on gender and ministry vary, as do they on, doctrine, inclusion etc. etc.  There are plenty of justice issues in this world, but to perpetuate, even implicitly, division and historical reaction WITHIN our church structures.  I feel the theology of this issue is tainted...  We need bishops who are humans - that is what the incarnation teaches...

Show me a petition about a human justice issue lying within our Anglican Communion, and I will, as an Anglican priest, sign that petition...

*shouts* "Timbe-e-e-e-e-er!"

The forestry up above the reservoir near where we live is being harvested.  I guess it must be 25 or 30 years since the trees were planted, by the size of the trunks, so this very slow-growing cash crop has taken a generation to be ready to be felled.  I was walking the dog there the other day when I saw one of the logging machines (not quite what's in the photo above) and just stopped and watched.  The machine has an amazing head on its arm, which cuts the tree where it stands.  The jaws hold the trunk while it's stripped of bark and branches and cut into 10-ish foot long sections.  All in a few seconds, leaving a post-apocalyptic wasteland on the hillside.  The operation and the machine has a menacing, primeval sensation to it.  It was mesmerising and slightly scary  to watch this machine at work, picking 18 inch diameter trees as if they were blades of grass and processing them into cut logs in a few well-designed hydraulic strokes. It would have taken individual men, even with chainsaws, days to do what this machine can do in a just a few hours, driven by a man using his fingertips to drive the hydraulic devices.  

Reflecting on this, as I tore myself away to finish Molly's walk, humanity is unique in the way that we, with technology, control our environment.  This first hit me many years ago when I was becoming a ship designer, and I learned that the design of a vessel is dominated by the waves that hit it.  The waves, millions of them, will destroy the ship, eventually, as the steel cracks like an enormous paperclip.  The trick is to correctly design the life of the steel and scrap the ship before this happens - humanity wins by designing the technology correctly.  The same feels true of the logging machine: the trees grow and are harvested impressively by the somewhat menacing machine - humanity wins!  Trees and other plants will grow up in the harvested wasteland, but humans, by controlling the environment, have taken over this environment.

I guess there's a post about ABUSE of the environment here, but today I'm more interested in human creativity and determination.  No other species controls the environment to the extent that humanity does.  As a person of faith, looking at the divinity in this, humanity has been given this creativity and ability to adapt and control and go beyond natural limitations. We live in hostile parts of the world, and even in space. Is this the human echo of the divine creativity that Genesis attempts to describe?  Created in God's own image: is God the ultimate environmental engineer, devising schemes and systems that allow life to flourish and grow? Devising the life itself (and the Higgs-Boson particle that lets it all exist...)?  A post on intelligent design doesn't really interest me: proof of God is not something I seek.

But a sense of awe at a God who has equipped humanity with creativity, drive and the ability to harness, control and exist in the universe.  That sounds like something worth exploring...

Two years of the dance...

It's just been the second anniversary of starting ministry in Bute and Cowal.  Two years of the business of being a priest in a church community, trying to make sense of it all.

Things have changed for me, in leaving a curacy, and leaving the Church of England.  Things that really seemed to matter are held more lightly.  Things that didn't seem so interesting before are now critically important.  Boringly, I can't really say which are which, not in an open blog post at any rate!

And who knows where the next two years of the dance will take my family, my churches and I?  I suspect and intend that we will still be in Cowal and Bute, trying to make sense of it all.  But what will have changed, evolved this time?

The unexpected sherry and cake after the eucharist on Sunday on Bute was a lovely surprise.  There are still plenty of those in this life, I am delighted to report.  And God: God is there in all sorts of ways.  One has to remember to keep on looking, all the same...

Transformation

Tired after eight years of sun, rain, ice and all that England then Scotland can throw at it, poor old Dalriada's red paintwork was long since brown with yellowish patches (the latter largely from an inadvisable experiment with marine cutting compound some three or more years ago).

But no more!  Fresh from the heady delights of last week's Scottish Episcopal Church General Synod, this week I am painting a narrowboat red!  A spot of dial-in meeting to Oban has varied the pattern a little, as has collecting and delivering Elly from her S4 work placement in the Glasgow Riverside aka Jaggy-roofed Transport Museum. A little close manoeuvring in the 60 foot boat to turn the sides has been rather good for me, to remind myself that I can still do it!

And the rain has held off enough (by Weds evening) for both starboard and one of the port coats to have been applied.  That really IS a miracle in Kirkintilloch in June.

And to reflect upon all this in the context of life? Elly will be goine soon, in a couple of years, to we know not what.  And by then the shiny red paint will be rather browner than it is today.  It all continues, it all fades, and we find ourselves back again, in our metaphorical white coveralls (of which more another day) doing it all over again!  

Thanks be to God!