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?

Mozart & Listz...?

Came up in conversation over the Christmas dining table that people find the idea of ‘The Pisa of the Fens’ difficult to take seriously, let alone believe it really exists. So for those who need convincing here is a picture of ‘The Pisa of the Fens’. I have calculated the angle of lean at between 5 and 6 degrees from the vertical. Apparently a more accurate measurement puts it at a greater angle of lean than The Pisa Tower. But there seem to be some dispute about how much that leans anyway. The Pisa of the Fens has had a list since it was built over 100 years ago so it probably has many years of life left in it. There are many leaning buildings in the Fens because of unstable foundations and ground shrinkage after drainage. This building seems to lean as much as the world's most leaning building - or so some say - in Suurhusen, Germany.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1...

Only five services left to go. A couple of crib services – although Baby Jesus and the Wise Men don’t actually get to stay in the stable until Christmas Day or Epiphany; a couple of holy communions and lessons and carols with a brass band. I’ve nearly finished preparing the sermon for midnight communion on Christmas Eve, so I should have plenty of time to wrap the presents. It was very, very cold in church this morning in spite of the overhead heaters – I really look forward to sharing the peace in order to warm my hands up. One of downsides of rural and medieval churches... I could barely sign the service register this morning, my fingers were too cold to move properly. My 3-term attachment in training was to a church with little heating but this is worse. Plus there I was in cassock and surplice, and here I have one layer less because we wear a cassock alb. At least there is room to wear a thin fleece layer underneath, which helps. And, although my head gets some heat from a heater, my feet are on a stone floor… Singing hymns means that temporarily it is as foggy inside – with the breath condensing in the cold air – as it is outside. And this is in probably the warmest of our churches. The welcome is still very warm though and I left after the service with a couple of bottles to cheer up a meal or two.

And now, at long last, all the radiators in the vicarage work. Hurray!!

[The image shows part of the knitted Nativity set given me as an ordination present...]

It's all Greek to me...

Have you noticed that Microsoft could be seen as spreading a subliminal Christian message if you were minded to see it as such? Waiting impatiently as my computer booted, I saw the Windows XP screen as that program came on stream. No Windows Vista yet for me… And for the first time I really saw it – Windows Chi Rho, as XP would be be in Greek. And the same as the cypher for Christ. I don’t suppose that it is intentional but interesting all the same.

(Or am I, probably, the last person in the world to have noticed this…?)