Happy New Year

Hello world!

You may, and not entirely unreasonably, be wondering why I am wishing you all a Happy New Year. Surely it is still August; surely the daylight (here, at least) lingers until almost 8pm; surely the Turkey population of Norfolk is in fine fettle. While I am at it, let me introduce you to the cartoon characters that most helpfully illustrate my personae - the one people think I have and the one I actually have. There you have it, in the forms of Ren and Stimpy, a timely pointer to my inner-misanthrope. 

Well, I took my rest. I stopped, I read, and indeed have written. It is true to say, dear reader, that I am using you as an excuse to step away from all matters "epiclesis", such as is my scholarly pleasure these days. The summer has proffered its own ups and downs but the English weather has erred towards the optimistic and my vegetables grew so that is alright. In fact, if you want runner beans, let me know - I am sick of bloody runner beans. 

Back to my unseasonal greeting. It bares a specific relationship to my last post when I effectively signed off for a while. During the intervening period I have also had a specific and full break from work (including the severing of electricity from the Silicon Chip Mistress for a full two weeks). I have discovered the very real pleasures of the Isle of Wight and enjoyed some very real quality time with my family. I continue to miss the worlds of Twitter and Facebook but not the effects that they had on me. Now, you may know what I mean when I say that in taking some time away (and I even locked my own study door and gave the key to someone else) I found some return to form in terms of creative juice. During my ordained ministry I have discovered that the summer holiday becomes a very rich seam for new and good ideas. So much so, in fact, that the return to work after a good summer holiday feels like a proper and good new beginning. 

For all sorts of reasons I have had to give serious thought to my working patterns. I, like all clergy, am my own worst enemy and only by my own hand will I live or die in this job. Fr Haggar will claim that I am bragging again, but the truth is, that 60-70 hour weeks, every week, is tantamount to gentle suicide and as such is quite removed from boasting about being awfully busy, to being a confession about getting the balance completely wrong. I think it is fair to say that I have approached my incumbency with the mindset of a business manager. I have placed high regard on targets in their form, the delivery of the product, getting it "right", success and growth. When I was a business manager, I was fairly successful and it paid the mortgage, but that was that and this is this. I am not a business manager, yet have significant responsibility for the Parish Plc. There is, whether we are honest about it or not, something of a spiritual profit involved, and for those profits to slip is regarded as anathema, failure, bad, wrong. So what to do?

Do you know what? I am going to try and achieve more by doing less. I am going to stop more, even start having lunch once in a while. The fact is, my summer vacation has been teaching me a yearly lesson that I have completely lost sight of - that when I am still, God speaks. When I am silent, I hear. When I shut my eyes, I see. When I stop thinking, I start to learn and begin to know. When I put down the tools of the trade, I can become very creative. It is also fair to say that pathological workaholism is an uneasy escape from the real work that is asked of a priest.

And after all, the results weren't and aren't ever really mine in the first place. 

Happy New Year, friends. Thank you for your companionship and for taking the time to stop by and read my paltry offerings. You are a blessing. 

Winding Up God for Summer

First, some housekeeping. Some of you may have noticed that in the Facebook and Twitter worlds I am little more than an apparition. To those of who noticed and took the time to comment through the kind ministrations of others, thank you. The simple fact is that I discovered the hard way some of the dangers of social media, and felt that deletion was the right and proper action to take at the time. It was a tough choice, but a needful one, and the resultant hole in my mediocre life is not insignificant. 

Secondly, my absence from blogging. I am a serious advocate of the view that if you have nothing worth saying, don't just say something to keep the hit rate flowing. Many bloggers fail in this and you the readers deserve better. I look back and see my own proclivities in the world of inane waffle and choose now to write only when a worthy thought (or not so worthy) emerges. 

Thirdly, I have found time that I didn't know that I had. Take life and subtract Facebook, Twitter and pointless blogging and you are left with a hole that can contain the reading of books and the embracing of twins! I have managed to read "The Godseeker's Guide" (Rabbi Blue) and am fast consuming "If This is A Man" (Primo Levi) - who would have thought that I would find time to read. There are lessons to be learned about managing social media, but only from the stand-point of the former addict presently absent. 

So, to the post. As a curate (and an idealistic one at that) I used to rail against the tendency to wind down ecclesiastical operations in time for the school summer holiday. I would be the first to observe that God didn't take a holiday so why should we. Oh, the simple life of curacy. My sainted Training Incumbent would do as he often did and utter "calm down dear" in the face of my protests. However, it is right to say that incumbency and all that Vicaring lark brings with it a more balanced sense of self-preservation. 

The thing is, during August you have two choices (as the Vicar). First is that you tear yourself a new tailpipe upon the stress of wondering where everyone is (the simple answer being 'on holiday'). Alternatively, you can be realistic and take the lead of the punters and thereby take the size 11 from off the gas. A lack of self-aware honesty is probably a significant cause of clergy stress and burn-out (aside from poor gin, another cause). August is a gift for stopping, or simply slowing to a less frantic pace. As ever, we measure our ministries in the volume assigned to task and not to the quality of our life's own experience. The other way of putting it is that God probably needs more of me at Christmas and not in August. Even God is telling me to give it a rest - perhaps the Omnipotent One does take a break in Ibiza after all. 

So, I have told the gang this end that during the summer holiday (framed and mitigated by the teaching profession, of which God is surely a member too) I will be less visible even if still available. I need to write, I need to pray, I need to rest and I need to think. For a whole manner of reasons, 2013 has been a shit of a year and I wonder if it isn't time to take ownership and make good. It isn't easy, that said, because this computer is an unforgiving matriarch who has a look - a knowing look - that observes that she has been neglected for too many moments. 

The Importance of the Summer Fete Season

Today I have three of them, others of you may have one or two. Yes, it possible that some of my comrades with seventy-six churches in their benefice will need to rent a teleportation device, but this is the season for the Church Summer Fete.

These are not simply social gatherings. They are the yield of a year of planning, of committee room sparring and of flounces flounced. Among the cream-teas and silly-hats, danger lurks for the hapless cleric:

 - The dog show needs judging, and if you get that wrong you can kiss goodbye to your biggest 'giver' (and the fete organiser, churchwarden, organist, head server, PCC secretary ... all these roles being held by the same nonagenarian). This pales into insignificance when placed next to the worst of the worst - the Cutest Baby Contest. Be afraid, Vicar, be afraid.

 - Produce Stall: You don't know what is in that jam-jar, when it was made or by whom, but if you are to get through the day un-murdered, you will need to shell out the £8 a jar and buy three. No jam, no chance. Cakes are normally safe, but a hasty sprint from the car upon arrival will be only way of assuring a purchase. Failure to arrive early at the Cake Stall will mean that you will lose to the large person who always buys ten and freezes them (for a period of consumption that remains a mystery).

 - Tombola: Did you ever stop to wonder who Tom Bowler was? He was the first vicar to overlook to buy twenty-quid's worth of tickets for the raffle, and after his execution, they formed a new game and named it after him. It's written in the Olde Englyshe nowadays. Well, your are laughing if it is a Bottle Tombola, but beware the queue - though that said, the odds of winning that Single Malt are 3,600,000,000,000,000,012 to 1. 

 - Raffle: Twenty is plenty, but any less and you become the social pariah (see above). You don't want to win that jigsaw with the missing piece, and lavender smellies are not your thing, but avoid the Raffle at your mortal peril. 

 - Bric-a-Brac (a sort of rhyming slang for 'A Load of Cra...' you get the idea): A pile of unwanted goods, a single stacked-heel boot, a computer disk with software for the eagerly awaited ZX Spectrum, a kitchen device hitherto unseen by human eyes, a collection of four chipped Hornsea pottery mugs, a spittle-washed teddy bear (wrenched from the arms of its devoted owner only days before), and some pants on a scale that suit Moby Dick. You need to buy, vicar - just one thing, but buy you must. They don't have change for that Tenner though. 

 - Book Stall: No theology here, Farv - but lots and lots of Maeve Binchey and more smut-fest Mills and Boons than you care to swing the Vicarage Cat at. If you are really really lucky, there will be a Haynes Manual for the 1976 Austin Allegro or a book on the forgotten episodes of Star Trek (though the pages with the good bits will be long long gone). There will be some Tracts though. The Tract Fairies always seem to appear in the dark of the night and infiltrate book stalls, and so titles like: "Why God Doesn't Like It When you Eat Cake", or "The Forty-Six Prayers of Jesus During His Sleep" - eight copies apiece, but no-one knows how they got there. 

 - The PA System - oh my word, the focus of all that can (and will) go wrong! Button-up and it's on. Button down and it's off. Easy. Or so you would think. The average vicar will get it wrong to begin with and so will greet his crowds in near silence (which will annoy the person running the Cutest Granny Contest because the contestants are still fighting over the loo). Conversely, the microphone will be live when the Reverend feels it appropriate to comment on the daft hats, the poorly attired, and the basically funny-looking attendees - all at eight-thousand decibels. Worse still if the Vicar visits the loo with handset in pocket convinced that privacy will be assured. "Beans last night Vicar?"

 - The Barbeque: Now it is absolute fact that only nutters drive the Burger Stand at Summer Fetes. You may think that the articles places in your grasp is charcoal with nasty sauce, but you would wrong. That was incinerated with malice-afore-thought, and just for you. What is brought to the stall holder is a nice array of burger patties, Lincolnshire sausages, Cumberland sausages, marinaded chicken drum-sticks - what you get is a symphony of the incinerated similar. "I think that was chicken, Vicar. Onions with that? The sauces are over on that ... oh, in the dog's mouth"

I love a good Summer Fete. They are church life at its best in my opinion. It is the 'inside' coming outside, and for the outsider, it is a chance to regard the sallow skinned, sunken eyed Sunday Shufflers and see that they are human and can, despite all that is heard, work as a team for two hours a year. The church will raise some much needed cash and in the end, they are a sure sign of the Kingdom. 

School Shoes and Easter Eggs

Firstly, noble reader, I must apologise for not spewing forth this last few days. Sometimes, the Day Job gets in the way - you know how it is!

Today I want to grumble about something ["Makes a change, Farv", I hear you hollerin']. 

I was watching the Gogglebox over the weekend, ensconced as I was amid the gubbins of the Matriarch, and an advert appeared which took me wayyyyyy back to my halogen days of yoof. It is was a 'Back To School' advert for some shop or other. It reminded me of those bitter-sweet days of yore, the last day of school when half of me couldn't wait to get the hell out, and the other part of me that is clingly and needy and would miss the routine of daily school life. Normally, the Scarper Tendency won, and I can still remember a considerable number of those moments when I left the school for the last time for the summer. We weren't a family for copious foreign holidays so I had the prospect of a whole six weeks at home mucking about with the others in the park or at home - blissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.

 I used to spend the odd summer back in the Homeland with my Nan and Grandad - memorable and wonderful days of Sesame Street, Painting with Nancy, Laurel and Hardy, Crossroads (with Benny and Miss Doi-anne) and Granada News at Six. We would go to Oldham Market and Nan would buy me gladly recieved plastic crap that only an 8yr old could love. We'd have Scotch Pies for lunch, perhaps a trip to Presto for something for Grandad's tea, a drop by the big Co-Op where Nan used to work - then past C&As where it all went horribly wrong - 'Back To School', on the 18th of frigging July!

It must happen now for the little poppets as they gaze forth to a near-eternity of holiday wonderfulness - only to be assaulted in so many media by the stark reminder that they will have to go back to school sometime. Leave the kids alone, man! Oh, the humanity!

But it happens in all walks of life. I have no doubt that supermarket warehouses will already be holding full pallets of Christmas fodder. By the 3rd of January, Easter fodder starts to find its way to the shelves. Fourteen seconds after the Lord rises from the tomb, summer-holiday fodder is called to the front. We are in such a hurry ..... The problem with this is not so much the cynical profiting from religious feast days the meaning of which has been lost by most, but more because in all this hubbub of retail foreshortening, the year seems shorter and increases our sense of hurry. It is the McDonald's effect - food presented for delictation in less than minute that causes the punter to neck it at Warp Factor Nine. Speed begets speed. Hurry begets hurry. 

I know that in about eleven seconds it will be Easter 2011. I daren't sleep anymore, life is happening too fast now. I might miss a Christmas and a Valentine's Day if I use the loo. Welcome to the 24/7 World that never stops, even if you are caused to by the needs of living.

Endings

I am not normally one to write blog posts whilst in an emotional state (except the misanthropic), but I need to refect on the day that I have just had.

I have spent the day at the school in Aylesbury where I serve as both chaplain and governor. It is has been a wonderful day for a panoply of reasons, among them:

1. Year Six Leaver's Assembly: Awards were given for a range of wonderful gifts and skills, most significantly for effort and good endeavour. Yes, there were cups for those who were good at sport and science, and rightly so - but the most poiganant awards went to those who bust a gut trying. It was my (painful/emotional) job to close the Assembly for them with a Blessing, painful because it is tough to let go, even to crowds of kids you don't really know very well. I reflected that in them we all have hope. I reflected on the quality of their characters in all the colours and hues they were made manifest, that grace poured out from them to us. It is my belief that if we invest in children properly, that the world might just be saved one little bit at a time.

2. The Headteacher Retired: Today was the day when the Head retired. I commented that she reminded me of the Good Shepherd: loving her flock, knowing them by name, laying down (all but) her life for them, looking for the lost sheep, and so on. I am part of that flock, a young(ish) Curate who entered her school after ordination petrified. I am now a gob on a stick thanks to her oversight and care for me. Even kids feel the pain of separation, and I can't be sure if the tears were for the leaving kids or for the leaving Head. Oh Lord, how I wish I could bottle the purity and intensity of care and connection that children have for and with others, whom they trust with just about anything.

3. Being mobbed: I have worked my socks off to be a positive clergy presence in the school. I am there with collar as often as I can be, and when I am, I am a normal human being. I don't do needless piety or waffly kid-centric theology. We have fun and we 'do theology' at the same time. At three points today, this 38 year old priest, in blacks and collar, was being chased by well over a hundred screaming kids around the school field. They loved it, and so did I - what a remarkable privilege to be a priest whom kids are not afraid of, or diffident about. Maybe I have had the the good fortune to convince some children that being a God-botherer is ok, a bit fun, acceptable even - possible maybe. These moments were among the Magic Moments of Vicarring.

4. Leaves from the Prayer Tree: Kids are so instinctively altruistic. The things they they hold in their prayers are remarkably mature and insightful. There was a simple prayer saying 'thanks for pencils', for example - that is one child who does not take the richness of the gift of their education for granted. I recieve them termly and pray over them at church so that they have a way of 'processing' them meaningfully. They pray for those in need and for loved ones, quite without prompt and in private (the tree is in the main hallway and accessible at all times). If I could pray like a child, my own flock would be the better off I think.

I nearly cried (fool that I am) at one point when addressing a full school hall. Our children are the best asset that we have as a society. They are real and pure and believable and honest in a way that adults simply are not. Perhaps childhood is wasted on the young, I don't know - but I know that I would love to be seven-year-old again. Tonight (heat and twins allowing), I will sleep safe in the knowledge that the world we live in isn't quite on the edge of peril as I had once feared.

May God bless those and all children as they start their holidays. May they find rest, live in safety and surrounded by love, and may they return safely next term. Amen