The last post sent this running through my mind.

It will annoy me all night… so I thought I’d share it.

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles; and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

e. e. cummings

My day off flipped around this week, so off I went to Edinburgh to see some friends.

It was a good day, catching up on news, sharing stories, pondering the demise of hobbies and the meta-congnitive functions revealed in the ordering of bookshelves.

I have been blessed with more than my share of good friends over the years — many of whom put up with dreadful neglect and know to measure patterns of contact in years, not days.  But forming ‘new’ friendships is a tricky thing in a priest’s life.  We are never really off duty.  We are never not-a-priest and never wholly free to form friendships with those for whom we are ‘priest’.

So how is it that these two slipped under the cracks, I wonder?

I’ve known others to go through a ‘category shift’ (from ‘parishioner’ to ‘friend’ when our geography changed) but these two just landed in the ‘friends’ list as if by chance.

And although I forget all about the usual distinctions when I am with them, I am sure that the me I find when I am with them is the one who was first called and ordained.

I am grateful for it.

In the past two years, I have organized seasonal blogs for Advent and Lent.

At their best, the blogs:

• help us to focus on a season
• draw on the diversity of the church
• have established and strengthened relationships
• have offered a space for new — and often very powerful — writing
• given us a space to share favourite quotes, stories, photographs
• made us sit still for a few minutes each day in the midst of a busy season
• been a good ‘window’ on the SEC

but they also:

• take a lot of co-ordination
• demand a high level of commitment and discipline from the authors
• catch us all of guard sometimes, and send us into a tail spin as we cover our own and each other’s scheduling mistakes

So, my question is this:

Do we want to blog again this year, or has this project run its course?

Several of us who have been involved in the past have been struggling to keep our blogs active lately.  I suspect if we are going to do this we need some fresh ideas and new voices (along with some old familiar friends).

Those of you with blogs: please ask around, and send people here with responses.  Those of you who know creative types who might be persuaded to write for us, please get in touch by comments or email.

I’m willing to co-ordinate the blog again if there is sufficient interest, but my time for it will be quite limited this year, and I need to hear lots of enthusiastic voices if I am going to commit to the time it takes.

Last year’s blog is here:  Love Blooms Bright.

Imagine:

you are four years old, and your hair curls in front of your eyes, and your head hurts from an unaccustomed headband, which hold up your antennae.  On your back are the most glorious, carefully crafted wings of a monarch butterfly, and you are in the last months of innocence when it does not occur to you that you might look more like a woolly-bear caterpillar in your black leotard than like the elegant creature you have chosen to portray.

You sit, leaning over the radiator, catching the warmth, trying not to get burnt.  The cat purrs in front of you, as you pull the curtain back time and again, watching the streetlights go on, jumping at each passing car:  is he home yet?

Because that’s when Hallowe’en begins:  when your father gets home from the office.  Early, for him; late, for you.  Other fathers with other young children are already out there.  You’re getting worried that the pumpkin isn’t carved yet, and that it might all be over before you begin.

But then he comes.

And the pumpkin is quickly carved, and placed in the window so that your mother can answer the door as you and your father go out, out into the night.

Out into the unknown.  Way beyond what is possible any other day of the year.

In a world where children are seldom allowed out, seldom walk the neighbourhood, and never at night this is a time for breaking boundaries.

It’s scary, being sent up the long path to strangers’ front doors.  Ringing the bell.  Having to speak.

And sometimes, it doesn’t seem worth it.  Other, older braver kids rush up behind you, shouting ‘trick-or-treat’ and the push and act like fools and it is awful.  But you have to keep going, keep pulling and tugging and wishing in the right direction, because there’s that one house, off to the left of the road that normally marks your boundaries.  It is a grey house with a pointy roof and a big porch.  There was a tag-sale there once, and you got a wide flat basket for carrying flowers.  And tonight, tonight there will be cobwebs, and spiders, and witches in their pointy hats, and pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins.  And the strange old lady comes to the door, all in black, wearing a  velvet  hat, and you wonder : is she really a witch?

And if you’re lucky, the moon is full, and the air is just a bit too cold, and you can see your breath and scuff through the… sniff through the leaves.

It is a night when you meet fear and are told ‘don’t be afraid’.
when you encounter strangers,
and you may never know who they are,
but you are told ‘it’s all right’.
when you dare to knock on unknown doors,
and the people inside open them, are kind to you
and give you things.

Not Christian?

Nonsense.

It is a night of sheer grace.

For anyone with an interest in dance, drama, sanity, insanity, visualizing crucifixion and ascension, or the redemptive nature of love:  there are two more performances of Insane in the Brain at the macrobert theatre in Stirling.

I’ve never left a dance performance thinking ‘that was better than the novel’ before.

There’s more information here, though to my eyes, it gives you no sense of the mad beauty you’ll find.
Then again, there were times when the more the audience was laughing, the closer I was to tears, so it may depend on your point of view.

In light of Jackie’s comment, and after browsing the BBC website while drinking a cup of tea, may I suggest:

My Companion, my Sea Dragon, my Guide along the way.

(focus on the dance, forget about the fertility gods)

In our discussion on Language for God last night, the starter of Jim Cotter’s prayer wasn’t nearly as productive as I hoped.   We all liked ‘who is making the heavens and the earth’, and ‘My Unicorn’ did get some reaction, but when I asked that we play devil’s advocate and name the potential negatives and positives of the image, it was fairly dry.

I didn’t expect that.  Not even the prompt: “imagine that you are praying with a 6 year old girl — how might she experience the phrase?” got us anywhere.

Eventually, I had to face the possibility that much of what I assume of unicorns is American.

So, in the spirit of educational research, I need your help.

Free association word game, please, for Unicorn.

gold stars for originality and good use of evocative language.

See, I can be a nostalgic traditionalist too.

Remember this?

Our help is in the name of the Lord
who is making the heavens and the earth.

Dear God, we thank you for all that is good,
for our creation and our humanity,
for the stewardship you have given us of the planet earth,
for the gifts of life and one another,
for your Love which is unbounded and eternal.

O Thou, most holy and beloved,
my Companion, my Unicorn, my Guide upon the Way.

Jim Cotter, Prayers at Night

It seemed as good a way as any to start a discussion on the language we use for God in tonight’s Deepening session.

I took the pilgrim’s road and landed in heaven.  My heaven at least.  Undaunted by wind and rain, the gulls and I had a glorious day.

Time for the annual Autumnal harvest of poetry.  Here’s the poem that made me buy the book.

Imagine being that fluke of rock
that juts out from the face of the hill,

the rock that breaks the stream’s fall,
day and night, for millennia.

The stream runs over, sleek as mercury,
has no choice but to strike you –

shatters into beads that fire away
at more or less predictable angles.

All that varies is the weight of the water,
in drought, or after heavy rain;

the pace of the flow; the pitch
and volume of the shattering.

Imagine the deadlock,
the passion.  Imagine the stars.

‘Breaking the Fall’
Jean Sprackland
Tilt