Love your neighbours?

How does a Christian know she is living out her faith in her everyday life? (I'm not excluding chaps here, not at all, but I'm a she and it was going to be tedious to keep giving both pronouns. Forgive me.) This was something that came up in discussion at our Lent group yesterday; we reached no conclusion other than that it can be difficult to have any certainty for oneself, no matter how you may look up to others. At least, that's what I took from it.

But of course one example of living a Christ-inspired life is all over the news at the moment, because the Reverend Isaac Poobalan of St John's Episcopal Church in Aberdeen has invited the Muslims from a neighbouring mosque to share his church building rather than pray outside in the snow when there were too many of them for the space available. Presumably his vestry members also approved this move, so there's some more people doing real Christian stuff. And, as Jesus himself predicted, discipleship like this brings abuse.

For Fr Poobalan is being subjected to a torrent of abuse from internet trolls, according to the Huffington Post. Apparently they call themselves Christians, these trolls. Up this way we might call them something very different, but I shall restrain myself.

Instead, I'm going to say something positive. Fr Poobalan's action and continuing determination to love his neighbours makes me proud. Proud to be a member of the Scottish Episcopal Church where such things happen, proud to say I'm a Christian.

It's as simple as that.

Celebrating MacCaig in style

This is The Library in Waxy O'Connor's pub in Glasgow, where I spent a delightful evening with seven others reading and discussing poetry in honour of Norman MacCaig's 100th birthday. The interesting thing was that I'd never met any of these people before (except Mr B - I met him 43 years ago), and that the medium of communication that brought me there was Twitter. (That makes it sound as if there was nothing else to interest about the evening, but don't be fooled)

I am grateful to Bill Boyd for instigating this evening on several counts. Let's begin with the prosaic. Instead of the usual Sunday of getting the dinner in the oven, eating it and then dozing in front of the telly till it was time for bed, we hied off to Glasgow, ate wonderful tapas in Café Andaluz (ah, the green chillies!), had coffee with Duffy (an irrepressible FP - again arranged via Twitter) and then realised a long-held ambition to visit the building with the flaming torches outside the portico. What is more, we both stayed awake, didn't yawn, and talked all the way home.

And, less prosaically - indeed, positively poetically - I found the desire to write welling up again. I realised how seldom I have the chance to share poetry, to enthuse and be understood, to listen and to discover new things and revisit old friends - and all this in the company of a group of people whose link was the poems of one man. Somehow that cut out all the distractions of shared lives, all the small gossipy details that distract, leaving us with the words, the ideas, the mastery and the mystery that is great poetry. We didn't need to be polite, to make small talk, to organise anything, and that was a release.

Of course it couldn't last. But we were outside in the freezing street before Bill realised that I was a certain Ewan's mother. And then we weren't discussing poetry at all. We were roaring with laughter. And that too was good. A good night, in fact. I look forward to the next one.