I just discovered, via PAYG, that today is the Feast of the Chair of St Peter.  Wondering just what on earth this was, I resorted to that fount of all all dodgy information, Wikepedia, which assures me that there are relics venerated as chairs (cathedra) upon which the Apostle Peter sat.  It also tells me that by synecdoche (no I didn't know what it meant either) it becomes essentially a celebration of the papal office.  Not a feast a good dissenting Bappy is going to mark!  But it did put me in mind of another possibility, born of my expereince as a member of a House Group in the late 1990s. 

Our hosts had two settees.  The one on which I sat became known as the 'silly settee' because we would make flippant remarks (I recall us all saying 'yeah, right' when an elderly King David needed a beautiful young virgin simply to keep him warm at night; 1 Kings 1:1-2 (v 4 assures us of his chastity, so clearly ancient readers thought likewise!)), we would see the funny side of either the passage or the questions in the leader's 'Big Book of Questions' (it was called something like 'Search Ye the Scriptures' and consisted of loads of questions on every book of the Bible - and no answers!), and sometimes we would push the envelope on topics like predestination or religiously sanctioned genocide.  The 'Silly Settee' was an important part of my growth in disicpleship and a place I recall fondly for those who shared it and the fun we had in the studies.

So I hereby declare today the 'Celebration of the Sofa of Silliness' a liturgical commemoration of the role of group discussion in the ongoing formation of disicples of Christ.