Madam Bishop...?

Well, yes, I'm sorry that I haven't posted for months. Part of the reason is that I have been seduced by Facebook, like many others. And the rest is that lots of what I would like to air is subject to confidentiality, or at least sensitivity. One of my first posts was about women bishops. So it is a pleasure to me (if no one else) that the General Synod tackled the issue as head on as it ever will do. But throughout all the various quotes and pronouncings from CofE pro-women bishops people that I have read or heard there has been little in the way of triumph and much in the way of concern and almost sorrow for those who find themselves wondering if they have a place in their church.

Personally, I think that the statutory guidelines can provide good provision for those who in conscience cannot accept the ministry of women. It will be up to the drafting group and the Manchester committee to find that way forward. But my patience and tolerance has been reduced somewhat recently by experiencing (from the pew) an ordination by a flying bishop. I came out almost spitting blood, as my mother would said when severely provoked. 'A curse on all their house - let such dinosaurs leave and let's stop pussy footing around their sensitivities', I was thinking as I walked away from the church. I have calmed down some since then but I think that my anger was the result of feeling at the receiving end of what at best was rudeness and at worse was superiority of those who, of course, know best.

I am not intending to be even-handed in this post - I understand the arguments on both sides of the debate. But the experience was an insight for me into how reasonable, tolerant people (just like me) can lose those qualities and end up in the Us and Them situation. That is what I fear might happen when the women bishops measure draft makes it back onto the agenda of a future synod.

And just to cheer us all up again here is an appropriate image (or perhaps not) from the ever expanding collection chez moi...

Oh, what a morning...

Sorry for not posting anything for some time. It's not that I haven't anything I'd like to write about but they aren't things that are appropriate to post. This Easter is turning out to be very quiet for me - much more so than for several years. Just as well, having spent most of February being the only functioning dog collar here, and trying to complete and submit the dissertation at the same time. It's so quiet that I almost don't know what to do with all the spare time...

The Easter edition of the Church Times arrived this morning and I found that one of my images has been included in the special feature. At last - made it as a published artist!

My wishes to you for a happy and peaceful Easter.

The Imagined Village

I was watching last week's 'Later...with Jools Holland' on BBC 2 and watched/listened to the performance in this video clip with some amazement. The Imagined Village seems to be a collection of people from the folk, rock and world music scenes. Its members include Martin and Eliza Carthy, Paul Weller and Billy Bragg. My friend Ollie, who posted this clip on YouTube (where I got it from), says that they are the best thing to happen to folk for years. He also says that the album is fantastic. I might just check it out. If you get fed up with the buffering speed of this clip then go to YouTube http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=3QC2av7-_Ik#GU5U2spHI_4 I haven't quite sorted out how to embed YouTube in the blog. Enjoy...!

Scattering more roses...

My ear was bent the other day about the current fashion for music at a crematorium funeral as the coffin descends from the catafalque. Apparently it has become noticeably more common over the past 6 months or so. My friend got quite angry about it - 'It's sentiment, not grief', and 'People want it because that's what they see on the TV in the soaps.' I couldn't possibly comment on the last as I don't watch soaps and don't have a TV most of the time anyway. (Although I can watch again via the internet, I suppose.) Technically it adds to the complexity of choreographing a funeral, both for the crematorium staff and also for the officiant, who has the job of making sure that eveything that is needed happens without rush and with dignity within the timeslot allocated, which can be as little as 20 mins at some crems.
I have some sympathy for the first point my friend made - I suspect that we have become unused to death and funerals in real life compared with our forebears. But we see a lot of them on the TV and in films and then we can only respond with sentiment, not grief as it isn't 'our' funeral. In fact, it's no one's funeral but a depiction of a funeral. So it wouldn't be surprising if sentiment gets mixed up in our real funerals more than perhaps it should. And these fictional funerals become our model for real funerals.
Picking up from a previous post, our local freebie paper recently carried a comment column by David Self this week about funerals. Quoting from it:
'Some of the saddest sights in Fenland are the wayside shrines at the scenes of road accidents. What [they] prove is that we no longer know how to mark a death. We've forgotten the old customs and resorted to ordering teddy bear or wreaths of yellow chrysanthemums and suffer uncomfortable half-hours in crematoria. Less than 100 years ago the death of a girl was marked by a procession through the village, her white-painted coffin carried by her school friends dressed also in white. Lads were buried in black-painted ones, carried by their mates dressed in their darkest clothes and black sashes. It was what you did. It gave you something to do.'
And David finishes with 'And if we revived the custom of having the coffin in the front room until the funeral and making the children visit it, they would grow up understanding the reality of death...'

I must be geting old because I think that he might be on to something here.

Everything for your glory...

No series of images for Lent this year (at least not yet, maybe later). Meanwhile here is something for the desktop or whatever. The text is from a song that seems to stick in my mind at the moment - although, perhaps tellingly, I remembered it incorrectly. Should be 'everything I am is for your glory'.

'And scatter roses in her hair...'

As some of my fellow ex-Ridley curates have commented elsewhere, I seem to be somewhere near the top of the Ridley Leavers 2007 Funerals list, although I am only averaging just over 2 a month since I started taking them. Up this way anyway there is a tendency for mourners to turn up at the church and cemetery clutching single roses to throw onto the coffin once it has been lowered. Sometimes the funeral director provides rose petals to be thrown in. And recently I took a funeral at a crematorium where the mourners turned up with single roses to put on the coffin on the catafalque (wonderful word!) before it descended. (Which they either forgot to do, or there was no occasion to do as no one had mentioned it to the funeral director or me.) Some funeral directors here say that it has been unusually busy since Christmas. Others say that it's always like this but what is unusual is the large number of people up to about 20 years old who have died - many in road traffic accidents. And there are some very large roadside shrines around at the moment.
Add this marking a death by doing something like making a shrine or throwing flowers onto the coffin to what seems like an increase in people flouting cemetery and churchyard rules for decorating graves, and I start wondering if there is a pastoral need that isn't being met. Churchyard graves can only have a suitable headstone of a suitable size and material with suitable wording, plus an integral plinth that may have an integral flower holder. Anything else is forbidden - for the very practical reason that it makes it possible to keep the weeds and grass under control with the minimum of effort and cost. But people put all sorts of things on the graves. They use lawn edging to build a border and cover the grave with marble or gravel chippings. They put plants, wreaths, scarves, rugby shirts, toys, photos, and flower holders on the grave. And they get upset when the churchwardens remove all the forbidden things. There is nowhere in a churchyard to put the stuff legitimately and it would take a faculty to create anywhere - if the powers-that-be agreed anyway.
The obvious place for commemorative stuff is the church itself - after all there are plenty of monuments in churches already. There is space in many churches for a remembrance corner of some sort where people could leave flowers or momentos, light a candle, write a prayer, pray, whatever, just sit for a while. But many of our churches are closed and locked except when there is a service. So there just isn't anywhere for 'stuff' other than the grave. I suspect that some of the increase in people visiting cathedrals owes something to this need to remember or do something when someone dies. It would be interesting to provide a place for graveside 'stuff' alongside specific pastoral ministry for those who put it there and see what happened.
I've got the second funeral of the week tomorrow...

prayer-board

As a bit of an experiment I've started a new blog called 'prayer-board' which is for people to post prayers on to and to pick up prayers to pray. During my time last year in a cathedral that was open all day I was struck by the number of people who came in to sit and pray, sometimes not knowing what to do or how to pray. But there aren't many local churches that are open during the day for people to just drop into. So maybe the virtual world can be a place in which we can ask for others to pray for us. And by posting a prayer we are also praying ourselves at the same time. It doesn't matter which faith or religion you follow, or none. If you have someone or something on your heart or mind that you would like people to pray for then go to the site and tell us.

Find the link in the Blogs list on the right of the screen.

Shades of grey...

Here is a bit of a curiosity, seen out of the kitchen window in Cambridgeshire this morning – a black grey squirrel. There was at least one and I think that I saw two, together with a grey grey squirrel. It isn't a red squirrel, unfortunately, because the colour is wrong and too dark, and there are no eartufts. I have seen black squirrels near Toronto in Canada but haven’t heard of them or seen any in the UK. My guess is that this one is just a genetic oddity, a melanic form of the usual grey squirrel. But is it just a freak that turns up now and again, or yet something else that lands at the door of global warming? And if it’s just a freak, why aren’t they more common? It would seem to be a neutral genetic mutation or sport, neither an advantage or disadvantage to the individual. Does anyone out there know anything about black grey squirrels please?