Grace

                 

This week, Dunoon lost a warrior. Grace Page - or Dr Grace Dunlop, to give her her maiden name - died peacefully in the local hospital after a fall in her house. She was a week short of her 91st birthday. She had lived in Hunter's Quay as a child, an evacuee during the war, and as a frequent visitor during the years she lived in London with her husband Charles. But latterly, as travel became difficult, it was in the house in Hunter's Quay, with its view over her beloved Firth of Clyde, that she chose to live permanently, and, fiercely independent to the last, lived there until a few days before her death.

She became a part of my life, of our lives, through Holy Trinity Episcopal Church. That is where I first became aware of her as the most marvellous reader of lessons at the big brass eagle lectern. It was far too big for Grace's diminutive form to look over the top, so she would peep round the side of it as she read with enormous vigour, giving every character a different voice or adopting the persona of a prophet or St Paul as the reading demanded. It was obvious that she was completely unintimidated by an audience, this former University don, and had a firm grasp of the subject matter in hand.

For years she organised the Christian Aid collection for our congregation, challenging us to take whole areas as she did when she was well past the age when putting your feet up might be an acceptable option. When I took over her round with a friend, we were asked at every door what had happened to "the usual lady" - this in an area of hills and driveways, strenuous to visit. She cycled everywhere - though I do recall her driving and having an altercation with a fence beside a parking bay - and would appear at the top of Holy Trinity's hill with bike and wooly hat in all kinds of weather. In fact many of us will always think of her clad in the kilt, the wooly hat and her cagoule - prepared for Argyll weather at all times.

However it was through the music of the church that we really got to know Grace. Right up until the time when the church closed for the Covid_19 pandemic, she could be heard vigorously singing the hymns, especially the traditional ones, dropping - still perfectly in tune - to the tenor register when the melody went too high. Sometimes when she was very old she would confide to me "I really only come for the music, you know", and it was clear that the organist was the important one of the two of us. In the early years of this millennium, she paid for a new electronic organ, the old one (also electric) having gone up in smoke during a service one Sunday. Only last year, when this organ in its turn was showing its age (computers really don't last for ever, especially not in damp churches), she gave a generous sum towards replacing it. By now her memory was failing, and she would ask anxiously if she had indeed given the money, and if it was safe. We were glad she was able to be there to hear the new instrument and know that she was part of its story.

It is always sad to see someone of formidable intellect suffer the ravages of old age, and Grace knew what was happening to her. If anyone raged against the dying of the light, it was Grace. She became furious with herself, and those of us who had known her well knew the struggle this fury represented. She had never suffered fools gladly, and with the loss of memory came a loss of inhibition in letting us all know what she thought. But on the better days, she would tell us of her childhood, of her research work, of her days sailing on the Firth of Clyde, around Arran, all the wonderful places to which she was so attached.

In recent years, Grace longed for death, and her prayers for this mercy were audible. Now she is gone, and we have lost a formidable presence. Her legacy lives on, it is hoped, in the continuing presence of the PS Waverley on the Clyde, and, most poignantly, in the music of the church to which she had become so attached.  May flights of angels sing her to her rest, and may she rise in glory.

Mopping up

I don't blog much these days, and to find myself doing it twice in quick succession is quite a thing. I feel, however, that I need to clarify my own position after the comments that were left about the Translation of Bishop Kevin, and it's better done here, on a fresh page as it were.

My first point concerns the etiquette of online discourse. There are a couple of anonymous comments on the previous post, of varying degrees of bitterness and hostility, which digitally competent friends  suggested were attempting to hijack my post for their own ends and which should therefore be deleted. And yes, I considered this course. Although I know who wrote one of these comments, it is nevertheless cowardly to refuse to identify oneself with one's point of view. It may be incompetence that makes someone unable to pin an identity to a response, but nothing stops anyone from saying in the body of their reply who they are and what their interest is.

My reason for leaving these replies is that they show what the church is up against. The diocese of Argyll and The Isles covers not only a huge geographical area but also a vast range of different attitudes, some of which belong firmly in the mid-20th century. They also show, I am afraid, another face of what puts people off the church - the all-too-human side of the church.

There have been moments in the past week when I have felt like chucking it all in - but have been so supported by the clearly Christ-filled responses on various media and in private messages that I know giving up is not the answer.

Please note that there will be no more bitter ripostes published on this or the last post.

Hoolies I have known ...

This startling photo was taken by Karen Brodie last Saturday as the participants in the Festal Evensong that had just celebrated 140 years of the Cathedral of The Isles poured out in a swish of red and gold onto the steps and stopped to pose. Small people to the front, they said, and some of us obliged. Far be it from me to lurk in the shadow of a mitre ...

It's been a long time since my first posing on these steps as part of an ecclesiastical extravaganza - the picture below was taken in the summer of 1973, when I have to say I felt as if I had a bit part in a Fellini film. It wasn't long after that that I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and another 6 months would see me uprooting myself from Glasgow and moving to Dunoon on the back of an invitation from the priest whose institution as priest-in-charge of Cumbrae as well as of Holy Trinity Dunoon was the occasion for that bit of finery. You can see that in those days we were soberly dressed in black (I think they were our MA gowns, and cassocks for the boys) whereas nowadays we are more Whoopie Goldbergish in red (donated by an American church). The red gowns used to have dreadful white polyester scarves, but we managed over time to lose these ...

And if you look closely at the two photos, you should recognise one constant - or rather, four constants: the four members of the St Maura Singers, a relatively new group back then; a somewhat older one now. Two men, two women. We (the women) were both pregnant in the first photo; decidedly not so last weekend. So it's been a while, and we've seen a great many hoolies in this lovely place.

There's nothing quite like a full house to boost the spirits; nothing quite like a good choir to sing with to make the spirits soar. I reckon I've been lucky to have my faith journey as well as a chunk of my musical life linked into the Cathedral on Cumbrae - or the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, or the Cathedral of The Isles, if you prefer - for it remains special, full of benevolent spirits and still numinous in the incense-remembering silence of an evening alone in the Butterfield building. I've shared it with musicians, with retreat groups, with a Cursillo weekend, with a preaching workshop, and simply with our friend Alastair who is the organist there. But no matter when I go or with whom, this is my place* - which may explain why I look so pleased with myself in Saturday's photo.

That said, it was a crazy weekend. Many of us who made up the choir had arrived on the Friday for dinner and had rehearsed until 10pm; the following day we began at 10am and went on till 1pm with a 15 minute break; the Evensong - an enormous sing - took up the afternoon; we rehearsed till 10pm in the evening. On Sunday, we began at 9.45am to practise for the Eucharist (a Mass setting we'd never seen before); when that was over and we'd grabbed a salad it was back to get ready for a concert at 3pm. I haven't worked so hard in years, and neither has my voice.

I attribute its surprising resilience to a summer spent singing along to Leonard Cohen, actually - it's fair ironed out the break around Middle C that used to cause me such bother, and in a summer of builders and no choir it's been good to have something to sing with. How long, O Lord ...?

A final thought: I have no idea what anyone not involved in this kind of thing makes of it. It's clearly formed a big part of my life, and I've had a lot of fun. But normal? I don't think so ...


*This is not strictly true, you understand: there are probably hundreds of people who'd say the same, but ...

Fair buzzing in Oban

Victorious table at dinner

I've mulled it over for the past five days, but now I realise that Synod reports are being demanded - not, happily, from me - right left and centre and it's time I put down my take on the Argyll and The Isles Diocesan Synod. The main impetus, to be honest, came from two online sources: the Primus' blog, in which he said his synod had 'a buzz', and the commiserations of friends on Facebook that I should be enduring this thing.

I'll deal with the latter first. The only commiserations I might have deserved lay in the fact that the Synod itself was held in (yet another) windowless room on a gloriously sunny day in a location next to a sea loch and an attractively wooded shore line: I did get stir crazy, and spent the lunch break picking my way down to a beach and over dub and mire as the birds sang round me. The rest of the time I was really enjoying myself, both on the pre-Synod day (it's hardly worth it to bring people from such a far-flung area unless they get a decent shot at socialising) and during Synod itself.

And that brings me to the former stimulus: I don't know what caused the buzz at the St Andrew's Synod, but I have a good idea of what contributed to our buzz. (I'd really like to know, by the way, what manner of buzzing goes on elsewhere ...) First of all, of course, we have an extraordinary bishop who could cause a buzz in a morgue. He delivered an ode, for Heaven's sake. But actually it was more than this. I am convinced that the excitement arose from the fact that instead of sitting in stupor listening to presentation after presentation we were allowed to talk to each other, about everything from the balance sheets to the first time we'd encountered the Holy Spirit.

This was achieved by a variety of methods, but primarily by the fact that on the Pre-Synod day, reviewing our progress with Building the Vision, we had two facilitators making us mix - moving people from one table to another after the manner of a Snowball waltz, for instance. At Synod, each table had a facilitator (I was one) to get people talking, as at General Synod a couple of years ago. And yes, we talked about the accounts and as a result made demands for more detail, clarification, amplification ... Before anyone asks, I had a plant at my table, an accountant who could make more sense of a balance sheet than I care to, so that I could merely render into words the data he fed me.

By the end of the two days, I came to this conclusion: people are excited by what brings them together in a situation like this. They become animated by the chance to share it with others whom they don't really know - because this unlocks the kind of honesty you sometimes find in a hospital ward, the honesty of strangers, when inhibition and fear of something you say coming back to bite you can be cast aside. So that is what lay behind the astonishment of the imported facilitator when she remarked on the alacrity with which pairs and groups got to grips with the Big Questions - she couldn't believe how little fencing she met as she moved round.

I have to confess that I enjoy facilitating a group. I love being able to make people feel at ease with one another and with the topics they've been asked to consider. I love realising I've managed to break the ice without losing anyone under it.  It feeds all sorts of my own needs for interaction - and that's before we get on to the subject matter under discussion.

I haven't mentioned the other aspects of this meeting, that had me and others in Oban from late on Monday afternoon till late afternoon on Wednesday. I've not talked about a riotous dinner after the Synod Eucharist, nor about the quiz that my table won and the Bishop's Easter Egg (our prize) that I suspect may have vanished to Cumbrae. I've not mentioned the Monday night, the dinner on the pier with old and new friends, nor the delight of watching a first-time visitor grow in confidence as the days went on. I can't tell you how much I laughed, nor how much I was laughed at. It was all part of the whole.

So yes: there was an enormous buzz at the Argyll Synod. There was laughter, there were tears, there was pastoral work being done over lunch breaks, there was kindness, there were friendships rekindled. For me, there was also the knowledge that it was my last: I've served on General Synod for the past 10 years as alternate or elected representative, and it's time to step down. I'm not a committee person, and I hate being trapped indoors. But even with all that, I'm sure of one thing. I'll miss it.

A cold collation ...

The weather wasn't promising. Snow yesterday and a cold night - a typical recipe for a stressful cold coming to church in the morning, with the added complication of visitors driving over from Rothesay and the Bishop and Mrs Bishop making the journey from Oban. Verily a recipe for an anticlimax, if not a disaster. But the county gritters had seen to the roads and our heroic Priest-in-charge-now-our-Rector had cleared the drive so that even the most timid could get to church for the service that would collate Andrew as our Rector. (This was a new word for me, in this context: given the weather and the temperature inside the building I could only think of a cold collation that might be served if one turned up late at Downton Abbey - but I wander).

It was joyful to hear +Kevin tell us that we were a sign of the promise that we could be the instruments of our own change, that we had achieved what had seemed impossible and were a shining example, etc, etc ... and as I sat there I did think back to the days of doom and gloom and no money and doors that would shut forever after seven years, though mostly I thought that if we'd been less fortunate in getting this curate who used to design battleships then we might well have sunk without a trace. (That seems a suitable collocation of ideas, as opposed to a collation ...)

And there was another joyful thing. Yesterday - and on Friday, when the leak first escaped that the Episcopal Church in the USA was to be rapped on the knuckles for its acceptance of same-sex marriage, when the less well-informed press were announcing that they'd been kicked out for being naughty - yesterday I wasn't looking forward to today, much - didn't feel happy in my Anglican shoes, as it were. But then I arrived in the church, already pretty full of our own flock and the intrepid Rothesay people with whom we share our Rector - and found that all around I could see people were wearing badges. Not little, discreet lapel pins, but big, bright protest-style badges, courtesy of Kelvin, like the one I was wearing, like the one I'd given to Mr B to pin on his scarf (leather jackets and pins don't go well together). Badges like the ones in the photo. And I felt at one with the world - or at least the world in our part of it.

Because that's the point. There is no way a community can rejoice and congratulate itself and share fellowship if it is silently complicit in an injustice to not only many of its members but also countless other human beings who only want equality and justice. But I'd say enough of us are in this together to make rejoicing a possibility. 

It was a good day in this part of the diocese. A good day.

Meditation, corncrakes and rattling slates

People who follow me on Twitter will have realised from my sparse tweets that I've been away. In fact I've been on a 3-day retreat on Iona, one of the last places in Scotland where you find 3G phone connection, with such a sporadic signal to my Vodafone iPhone that all I could manage was the odd text message and wait for the signal to show before I hit 'send'. I think I could have managed the odd peek at Facebook, except that Facebook chose that week to demand my password, which of course I'd forgotten. So, quite unintentionally, it turned out to be a far more complete retreat for me than for any of my companions - and I found out how it's actually communication via my computer that keeps me up at night. For the first time in ages I was averaging a full 8 hours' sleep and still wakening before the alarm went at 7am.

I haven't been on a proper retreat for ages. Even my own Cursillo weekend - the last time I went off on a holy break and had people look after me - was over 13 years ago. Every other similar time away has involved me in some kind of work, usually providing some kind of service for others. My last silent retreat was in the '80s, I think - unless you count the one on Cumbrae where a certain blogger and I found silence in the same room challenging (it had to do with the ticking of the clock ...) So when the diocese offered some of us who had done facilitation work over the past few years a reward in the shape of a retreat in one of the diocesan retreat houses, I took it up, along with two others and a wonderful retreat leader.

I don't intend to go into the details, though I shall publish the writing that came out of the sudden focussing of my brain (it was a tad surprised by the opportunity, I think). But looking back, I notice how hard it was at first to switch off and then how much harder to switch back on again on our return. Both experiences were strangely exhausting in their own way. I realise that the first evening, when I was beside myself with the effects of a day that had begun at 5.30am in Dunoon, landed us on Iona in time to attend an unexpected concert in the Abbey at 1pm and had me scrambling up a dun before we even began our retreat, I was actually lulled into relaxation by staying up to talk for an hour after I'd started heading for my room. It all depends on the talk, and the surroundings (in this case, the gallery of Bishop's House chapel, which is used as a quiet room but is also the upstairs route from one end of the house to the other).

This was not a silent retreat. We had silences, but we also had intense discussion and some hilarious mealtimes. We walked, in sun and in gale-driven rain, and we ate scones in the middle of the afternoon (I don't do afternoon tea). We were well fed, our dietary peccadilloes well cared for. We met another guest who arrived for dinner on our second day; it turned out he knew my #1 son from university days. (We'd just been talking about degrees of separation ...) I was allowed to sing - the Lent Prose and other joys - in the chapel. I slept like a log even when the slates on the roof round my little room were rattling in the gale that would prevent us getting off the island on our planned ferry.

On our departure morning, we sat in the new residents' sitting room and waited to hear if the ferries would go on later. We watched as it crept out from its mooring on Mull and headed for Fionnphort. By the time it was making for Iona, we were halfway down the road, our cases preceding us on the back of a tractor-drawn trailer. We had to dash through the sea onto the ferry ramp, and were fairly hurled into the cabin by a random lurch of the boat. The crossing took twice as long as usual, as we made a deep V-shaped course into and with the waves. We were not sick.

The three of us who were there learned, I think, something about ourselves and something about each other - even though we've known one another for years. It was a wonderful experience.

And we saw two corn crakes scuttling under the hedge beside Bishop's House. Joy!

How was it for you?

It was great. I need to say that right away. After - as I found out today - 28 weeks in our own particular wilderness of worshipping on a badminton court, the joy of being back in the church was almost worth the wait. Yes, there is a heap of stuff still to be done - floorboards to replace grey chipboard, paintwork to be de-scabbed (you can see where - look at the sedilia), lighting to be tinkered with - but for heaven's sake, this is our lovely church, returned to us with a wonderful acoustic (not a carpet in sight) and the layout of the original conception uncluttered by the accretions of years of tinkering.

I had to laugh, though - laugh because losing the heid wouldn't have accomplished anything. I laughed at the person who informed me that the new kneeler-boards were dangerously large and caught her legs - laughed and told her it was better to be a short-arse like me. I laughed at the person who complained at the unfinished aisle. It was possible to laugh because I felt so relieved at the completion of the journey, and because I know there is still so much to be done. It was possible to laugh because we are no longer in danger of falling through the floor or being wiped out by the condemned electric circuits. It was possible to laugh because from the very first phrase of the very first hymn I knew that the acoustics were a dream, making singing a joy and speech wonderfully audible.

And it was possible to laugh because the prayers of the faithful from the past 160 years still saturate this building, because when we sang "O Lord, hear my prayer" after communion it no longer felt like singing in the wilderness, where the notes would be swept away in the wind. Truly, God is in this place - but if we forget to listen, if we can't hear God for the sound of our own voices, there is no point in any of it.

Importunate widows, spiders - they were all there with one message today. The gospel, the sermon, the hymns - they all said it. I for one found it exciting.

Cheers!

Home again!

We're ba..a...ck! (All right, that movie wasn't yesterday, but I can't resist the probably inappropriate allusion) A gang of us descended on Holy Trinity Church Dunoon this morning, fighting our way past the men in hard hats who warned us that once inside we'd not get out as they were dismantling scaffolding, negotiating the piles of scaffolding poles and discarded bits of mysterious metalwork to see inside the church we'd left looking desolate and dirty on Low Sunday. We weren't there merely to gawp, but to make it fit for use on Sunday. Gawping, however, came first. To the stranger, it might look as if little had actually changed; the sanctuary, for instance, has paintwork to be done and the central aisle has rough boards covering the space where the various heating systems have had their workings, but the hideous calamine-lotion coloured wooden dado has been replaced by dark red painted plaster and the whole floor is no longer the worm-eaten, rot-weakened potential disaster we had been sitting on top of for all these years. The strangely amateurish platform on which the choir stalls used to sit is gone, the whole area of the choir now restored to its original structure with not a carpet in sight. With any luck, that's how it'll stay. And those of us who've seen the photos of what has been done, we know the awfulness that has been transformed all around us.

The effect was strangely dreamlike - when I sat down as if for a service, I felt the unreality that accompanies dreams of familiar places, and I realised that there have been times in the past where I have indeed had near-nightmares about our church being taken over by people who changed everything so that it no longer felt like the same place. But there's a great feeling about this dream, a dream that includes using that marvellous space for musical performances that the carpetless acoustics can only enhance. And the narthex - just look at the picture of the narthex with its plaster gone and the stone laid bare - reminded me of the lovely buildings we stayed in in Sicily, where the bare stone contrasted with the modernity of the furnishings. I have visions of golden uplighters at floor-level ...

But all this - the enthusiasm with which we all set to work dusting and polishing (all the time hoping that the men on the scaffold tower in the photo don't make too much mess putting in the last window), the laughter, the marching through the rain carrying altar frontals and altar-rail kneelers, the determination to get rid of the foosty cardboard cups that had languished throughout the works in a cupboard under the tower and did odd things to the coffee - all this brought it home once again how important our building is to our worship and our life as a community. People have talked, recently and in the past, of how enlivening it could be for worship to be transferred to a modern space, perhaps one in the town centre where parking would be easy and more people might know we were there and come.

It's not been like that. After the initial hilarity induced by finding ourselves in a strange hall the worship turned out - for myself at least - to be difficult. On the days when I simply didn't feel like going, there was nothing in the environment to give me a nudge towards prayer or mystery. The music was hard going - the piano a sad thing, tending to die a little each time Mr B attacked the keys with anything like a forte; the dead acoustics accentuating the poor sound of the singing so that the less confident gave up singing altogether. The receiving of communion always seemed a tad strange, in that people didn't seem able to achieve a normal sort of progression from seats to front and back again without becoming entangled in each other. You can be jolly about this - and God knows we tried - but it becomes wearisome, a chore. It reminded me of wet days at the CSSM of my childhood holidays, when we had to have our services in a hall rather than on the beach - and there is no way I ever wanted these days back again.

So if anyone asks if this has been a positive experience, I would have to say that it may still turn out to have positive benefits in terms of valuing what you have - but I cannot say I shall miss any tiny bit of the worship over the past 6 months. I became an Episcopalian - I became a Christian, in fact - because of the enabling beauty and numinosity of the two church buildings in which I found myself, and I can't help thinking that we give our leaders an unnecessarily uphill task if we expect them to bring mystery to the mundane on a weekly basis. I don't think our congregation grew in any way because of the convenient location of the hall we were in, and I know for certain that my own spiritual growth was put on hold while I combatted the temptation to go for a walk on a Sunday morning.

Yes, it's good to be going back. And I must add one thing: somehow, we were given the right leader to see us through all this.  How often does that happen?

A pilgrim church?

What makes a church? The answer, the obvious answer, the answer you know to be the right one, is the people. The community that worships together. That's the church. And it was in that spirit that we met today in the venue shown in the photo, the church hall where, once upon a lifetime, I took the Managing Editor of BBC Online and the CEO of No Tosh Ltd to play with their pals in Toddler Group and Playgroup; where the wife of our last Bishop and I told people of the lively worshipping community on Kilbride Hill and encouraged them to join us and bring their children. It is also the hall where for years we went to vote in elections, outside which I used to stand with a CND badge and a stack of leaflets, picketing all those going in to vote and putting up with the banter of the Tories ... I could go on. It's a place with a lot of memories for me, and today and for the next few months I'm going to acquire a new set as it stands in for Holy Trinity church, about to turn into a building site as the lottery-funded renovation gets going.

Interestingly, the hall, which now belongs to the High Kirk and which they are graciously letting us use as we require, used to be a Scottish Episcopal Mission Church - the Church of St Andrew - so in a sense we were returning, with our 19th Century chalice, to roots that predated even the oldest member of the congregation.

How was it for me, do I hear you ask? Well, despite the fact that most of us resolutely sat in the same relative positions as we do in church - you can see two doing that in the picture, setting the trend - it felt nothing like church as usual. That's not to say it was a negative experience, but it wasn't what I look forward to on a Sunday. In the hilarity that preceded the service, it felt being in a holiday house with a large family as people discovered they had a heater overhead and had to strip off layers of clothing, or dropped hymnbooks and rummaged on the floor to retrieve them. The piano turned out to have a broken damper, throwing Mr B into a gloom, though neither gloom nor busted bit seemed to affect the music which miraculously shut everyone up and produced a tense unignorable silence (thanks, Larkin) before the service began.

So the good bits? The children had a room for their activities, with a door that shut, meaning they could make all the noise they wanted and have fun. (I think they did too). It was cosy. We felt like a family, perhaps even more than usual - a family on an outing. The calamine-lotion coloured tongue-and-groove boarding and the Virgin Mary blue of the wall miraculously replicated the interior of Holy Trinity's colour scheme, which raised a smile of recognition when I should have been concentrating. And our priest made it all work with an assurance that was in itself reassuring, interestingly.

On the downside, there was the dead acoustic, the feeling of being crowded, the piano accompanying the singing instead of the organ, the lack of visual beauty, the missing sense of the numinous that pervades our church building. I've worshipped plenty of times in a similar kind of venue, and this felt like one of these ad hoc communions for a meeting - jolly, enthusiastic, but lacking.

Once upon a time we were threatened with the loss of our building, the possibility that we might like to think about some modern, town-centre place of worship. This experience gives us the chance to see what it might have been like. I for one am happy beyond words that hard work and circumstance - and the Heritage Lottery Fund - have made it a temporary one. This week, the work begins on our church on the hill, and late yesterday afternoon we returned there to make a recording, the story of which is told elsewhere.

It was exciting - the acoustic, already fine, was wonderfully lively with the exposure of the stone flagged floor. I look forward to going home ...

A very Pisky hoolie

Choir at work
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Other people have posted about last Saturday's lovely service in the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae - not least Dean Swift (I love writing that!) whose day it was - or, more accurately, whose half-day it was: the Provost of the Other Cathedral was also being installed as a Canon, and all stops were duly pulled out for the occasion. So let's start with the image that cliché evokes: the organist for the day was Jonathan Cohen, remembered fondly by a certain age-range as the pianist in Playaway. He came from London specially to play for the Cathedral Choir, all of whom had also made a special effort to be there - from Edinburgh and Glasgow as well as  from Dunoon. We took with us another Dunoon alto who had never been in the cathedral before - she was well bowled over. As usual, we had to rehearse first - a scratch choir is an interesting beast, especially when there are no more than 3 voices to a part. The excitement of what is going on is amplified, if you like, by the frisson of wondering if we all know the notes well enough to come in as and when required, and if that person who claims not to have received the music in advance will lose his/her nerve at the crucial moment. So that, chums, is where my main photo comes from - that intense rehearsal when we not only deal with the music, but whether the new singer will find a red robe to fit without tripping her up - and would it be advisable to process in single file because of all the extra bodies in the nave?

Readers of this blog will know that my association with the cathedral goes back over 40 years, and that I have always sung there, and always in small groups. But there were people there to whom it was all new, and I found myself almost envying them the thrill of the experience, the whiff of incense, the sight of the candles and the gleaming brass, the pattern on the organ pipes from the sun through the windows. On the other hand, I had the thrill of singing Mr B's new anthem - a short setting of the Celtic Blessing "May the road rise to meet you" that had the hairs rising on the back of several necks.

I mentioned, jokingly, the Other Cathedral - the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Oban. Time was when I regarded Oban as a distant place where all the big diocesan happenings took place, but in recent years we have seen a distinct growth in the recognition of the special nature of the Cathedral of The Isles - not least because of the obvious delight felt by successive bishops in being there. A diocese operates most successfully when everyone in it feels tied in some way to everyone else, whether through personal ties made at Synod and meetings, or through the common links to the Bishop and his clergy. (I say "his" not out of sloppy traditionalism but simply because we have not yet appointed a woman to the post). And it will flourish the more when everyone feels welcome at both of the  cathedrals and in every church in Argyll and The Isles.

Our visiting alto's enthusiasm for what she had been a part of bubbled out all the way home through the rain and the rising gales. And what had made the biggest impression? Not +Idris' sermon, not +Kevin, not even the music she had so enjoyed singing - wonderful though each of these had been in their own distinctive ways. No. "Everyone was so friendly - and seemed so happy," she said.

And this is a mission tool that every charge can operate. Smile, children, smile ...

When two or three are gathered together ...

I have been attending the diocesan synod of Argyll and The Isles for some years now - since before I retired, come to think of it - and my memory of both it and the General Synod tends to involve an overwhelming desire to nod off after lunch. This could, of course, be blamed on the nature of our synod meetings: because people have to travel so arduously to come together in Oban, we have a two-day event - and the clergy have three days -  with a jolly dinner (left) after the pre-Synod day and the Synod Eucharist. (This year we all piled into a large bus in the rain and were swept out to the Bishop's palace by the shore to drink wine before returning to the Gathering Halls for dinner, but that's another story that might include my speculating on the effect on the neighbours if we'd all invaded the wrong house ...)

But to the Synod. This year, despite all the junketing, I didn't sleep at all at Synod. For a start, I had work to do; the entire meeting was held round tables on which were bowls of grapes and chocolates and bits of paper and a marker pen, and I was facilitating the discussion at one of them. I would never have believed the positive effect that this simple move had: instead of sitting in rows, able to communicate briefly and surreptitiously with at most two people, we were made to sit with people from all over the diocese and we were encouraged to talk with them, get to know them a bit, and - most importantly - come to trust them as we spoke.

By the time we came to the discussion of the Anglican Covenant, the knitting lady had laid aside her knitting and we were all leaning forward over the table. People became passionate but there was no hostility, and there were moments of sharing that seemed to belong to a real family. We could, it seemed, have gone on all afternoon, and found it hard to stop when we were called to order. It was alive, this church, and I could see that life on faces elsewhere in the room.

I don't yet know the outcome of our discussion. It will be assessed from written responses of the groups and then shared. I got the impression that we thought the Covenant un-Anglican, and that we felt very aware of our uniquely Scottish identity. But I had more than an impression of something else, something very closely tied to the presence that was in the midst of us as we gathered together.

And for me at Synod,  that was a first.

Argyll still kicking

The Electoral synod of Argyll and The Isles met yesterday. We should still have been in Oban today, deciding which candidate would become our Bishop, but there were no candidates to hear yesterday, and there is no election today. And I could perhaps have been forgiven for a bit of despair. It's been a long process since September, and we seem no nearer finding a suitable Bishop than we ever were.

But in fact yesterday's meeting was anything but despair-inducing. Without pre-empting the official sources (come on, chaps - what's keeping you?) I feel free to say that the mood yesterday was thoughtful, that our sense of purpose was stronger than ever, that our resolve to find not just any old bishop but someone who would have the special qualities needed for this diocese had deepened. I feel that we have changed over the 36 years I have known Argyll, that the laity are no longer content to sit back and smile indulgently at clerical quirks or leave all the thinking to one of two folks with cut glass accents or titles or both.

It was acknowledged more than once that just as managing a small parish could be a good deal harder than managing a large one, so the demands of running a numerically small diocese were in many ways more challenging than running a large one - and that's before you even begin to consider the ferries, the miles of single-track roads, the weather ... Yes: it takes a special kind of priest to do this, and we shall find one.

The road we chose demonstrates, I think, a profound acceptance of what it means to be a Scottish Episcopalian, and a considerable degree of trust. And after all these weeks of national politics, this felt good.


Stop press (or something): The official wording for what we decided can be found here. If you're too idle to go there, it says this: The Electoral Synod met yesterday (13 May 2010) and adjourned after discussion. The result of this is that the right of election will lapse to the Episcopal Synod, as provided in Canon 4 of the Church’s Code of Canons.

Casting off

Laying down the staff
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Yesterday the Bishop of Argyll ceremonially signalled the end of his episcopate by laying his staff and mitre on the altar of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in Oban. And with that sentence I lay aside any obligation to write sensibly about the event and free myself to blog as usual.

It poured, of course. It would seem unnatural this summer not to be scurrying through the puddles of Oban, not to be sitting in one's mac all through the service for warmth - or even, in the case of the unfortunate Dean, for protection from the rain which dripped on his head and his notes during the sermon. (And you wonder why they wear these big copes? Wonder no more). People had that windswept look - for there was also quite a gale blowing - that defies any attempt at glamour; there were two exceptions to this, whose photos appear on my flickr stream, but the rest of us had given up. Fleeces, trousers, cagoules - and these strange Masai warrior shoes which seem to have been taken up by the Argyll piskies, who will surely all be slim of thigh by the end of this dreadful summer.

The service was not without its hilarious moments. The ringer of the bell at communion may have broken his stays with his vigour (the obvious result was a coil of rope descending around him in an apocalyptic fashion) and the public address system had developed its own variety of flu and burbled alarmingly and at random. The Dean's sermon seems to have hijacked the Synod Clerk's farewell speech, so the latter improvised a variety of sermon which had us all - including the Bishop - on the edge of our various seats. The congregational singing was somewhat tentative - maybe in anticipation of a future without +Martin's wonderful voice - and we received communion in bread only, because we still, apparently, fear contamination from the flu.

That said, there was a great deal of illicit embracing at the end of the service, and a palpable sadness at the imminent departure of Martin and Elspeth. And yes, I too will be sad to see them go - but delighted to see another of my friends reach the sunny uplands of retirement and canter off into freedom. Thanks to +Martin's efforts, he is not, as Richard Holloway predicted five years ago, the last Bishop of Argyll, and we shall soon begin the process of looking for his successor. But take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again. Quote, anyone?