The literature review exercise I am currently undertaking gives me a mixutre of great joy - I love the reading - and immense dread - am I reading enough, am I reading the right things, am I engaging with it at the right level and, ultimately, am I missing something blatantly obvious?

Today I finally found a little essay that, to some degree, reassured me!  A study of a Quaker congregation using narrative approaches offered concerns over Hopewell's work similar to those I had felt, added some new dimensions and connected more directly to some of the things I've read on historical method.  It also teased around the edge of questions of authority, with its ideas of individual, local and canoncial narrative.  It recognised the complexity of what it was trying to do, but seemed to offer a metaphor of braiding - which I took to mean plaiting - threads together.  Immediately my mind went to the tapestry metpahor I've posted about before, and also to good old Eeyore, sorry the writer of Ecclesiates, whose three-stranded cord is noted for its strength.

I am still waiting in anticipation that someone has already looked at all this stuff before and living with the dread that six years down the line someone will say 'so and so has already done this' (not lack of trust in supervisors, just an intuitive doubt that I can be onto something new), but in the meantime I am at least able to do a little bit of 'Brianing' (making connections) with what I have read.

I have, at very short notice (that's down to the undertakers round here) been asked to conduct a funeral for someone who died suddenly, overseas and became an organ donor, enabling two other people to live.  This fact gives some comfort to the family and they (rightly) want it mentioned in the service.  I am trying to think of a non-naff way to link this to a Bible reading, which is quite tricky.  John 11 (I am the resurrection...) gets used in the opening bit anyway and I guess at a push there is John 10:10 (life in all its fullness) or 'unless an ear of wheat...' but I don't really like either very much.  The internet is no help either!

A funeral is hardly the place to be talking about the Film Jesus of Montreal where organ donation was the way that the good news went to people of all nations (if you haven't seen the film, this will make no sense, but it was for me a very powerful ending) but there is in some sense a kind of resurrection, new life element to it. 

Anyone got any ideas?  (The funeral is Thursday a.m.).  One day, when I've finished playing with Baptist historiography, I'll contribute something useful to pastoral/liturgical life by collecting and ordering precisely this type of resources.

Oops, Brian McLaren has a lovely typographical error on page 226 of A Generous Orthodoxy.  In talking about Baptism and its variants he observes in brackets...

This.. does not take into account various modes of baptism, such as full immersion, infusion or pouring, or sprinkling.

 

Infusion?  That's what you do with tea leaves/bags!  I'm pretty sure he means affusion, and that this isn't a Transatlantic shift in meaning.  Try as might, I cannot think how to make infusion as a method of Baptism work - immersion looks the same outwardly but the meaning would be quite different.

Made me smile anyway.

I am currently reading A Generous Orthodoxy, and thoroughly enjoying it.  It is one of those books I almost wish I'd found years ago, one of those books that is somehow a 'friend' where you keep finding yourself nodding quietly and smiling as you think 'you too.'  I don't agree with absolutely everything I've read in it, but it has such wonderful resonances that I am thankful to have discovered it.  Whilst Mclaren's list of what he is becomes complex, I am happy either to say 'I don't do labels' or to be known as a 'happy heretic' or 'whacky Bappy', either of which is a little more snappy.  I guess I am even a bit of a theological chameleon, in imitation of the apostle Paul (all things to all people).

At first I thought, I wish I'd found this book years ago, it might have saved the heartache and struggle of trying to be what various denominations/persuasions expected me to be.  But actually, when I think a little harder, it is precisely the wrestling, struggling, praying, failing, succeeding, wondering, doubting, encountering... (I'm starting to sound like him now!) that has brought me to where I am and who I am.  I don't regret any part of the 'journey' and have gained so much from the various experiences I have known.

I do think that the book ought to be mandatory reading for anyone entering ministerial formation in any denomination, partly because it is a gentle introduction to having your boundaries stretched, but also because for all his almost total absence of references, Mclaren has actually read a lot of important authors.  Anyone who cites Bosch, Brother Lawrence and Grenz (to name but three; haven't found any Barth or Moltmann yet but I'm waiting hopefully...) must be alright in my view.  It's also a book I feel I could with integrity to give to my non- or anti-Christian friends as it is neither patronising or prescriptive. 

I have just read his little chapter on the role of the Bible and found stuff that sort of relates to my thinking about use of historical resources.  Made me smile, this is so often the way I experience God at work.  My categorising brain gathers and sorts various bit and pieces to make nice neat stacks of information that might come in useful... and I mutter that all my best ideas have been thought of by someone else first.

Now this could land me in seriously deep water with copyright law, to say nothing of the more serious matter of offending Mr Clever and Little Miss Brainy...

Last night Little Miss Bossy (LMB) wrote a story in the syle of (well, -ish) the Mr Men which can be found here (sorry I don't have the necessary to turn it into a PDF.  Had to copy it to Word from Publisher because it seems the latter gets srambled in translation, hence pagination is not quite right if you print it off).  'Mr Clever and The Mysterious Transfiguration' may sound more Potteresque, but it is definitely not in the style of Rowling.  LMB is not renowned for her skills in writing fiction but now and then Mr Mischief sneaks into her brain and this is the result.  Btw, if anyone can find me a better picture for the last page to replace the cobbled together one based on a book cover, I'd be grateful.

 Still in preparation - 'Little Miss Bossy and the DPT Literature Review' - no pre-orders being taken.