Only the C of E would see this as entertaining...

More fun would be if they had Rev Dr Rowan Williams (m) and Rev Rowan Williams (f) in the same church (and they do both exist).

This from ASBO Jesus worth a moment's thought...

Advance posting as I am away at an Ash Wednesday Quiet Day with our local C of S ministers in Dunblane - a welcome pause before the Lent events begin.

I am looking forward to Lent, Holy Week and Easter for all sorts of reasons.

I am intrigued to see how the Lent studies work, using material I've used before, but with people I am just beginning to get to know.  Might need a few bleeps when we show the film on which they are based (1980s Yorkshire miners at their expletive best!) but it should be good fun.

I am pleased that there are folk who enjoy leading various aspects of the Lenten offerings, and Holy Week especially promises to be excellent with a balance of giving and receiving rather than the all-out-rush of recent years.

Each lunch time of Holy Week we will offer a 15 minute 'pause point' on the road to Calvary and each evening our Cof S friends offer more formal services.

Maundy Thursday will be a Tennebrae organised by some of my folk (a relief cos I've never done one and wouldn't know where to begin!) to which I am looking forward as a time of reflection and stilling.

Good Friday will be a sort of labyrinth thing, using materials I have developed, made, copied, whatever over many years.  A multi-sensory 'drop in' Easter Encounter suited to all ages and hopefully appealing to folk who aren't (yet) part of the church.  Then a quick trot to the cathedral (piskies) for the Easter Vigil three hour service.  Two very different opportunities to enter more deeply into the story.

Easter Sunday will probably see us "communioned out" (with apologies to all the sacramentalists out there!) with early breakfast, Easter Celebration and evening Emmaus Walk each including some form of communion.  Of course with my low, memorialist (or super high sacramental-universe) theology every meal has eucharistic potential so thrice in one day is fine.

Exciting and inspiring, lively and leisurely, light and heavy, slow and fast, long and short, experiential and cerebral, ecumenical and denominational... I think we have most options covered one way or another.

Advance thanks to those who are making it happen in such a lovely diversity of ways.

Next week I move house and will lose my twice-daily walk through the Botanic Gardens. Whilst I am eagerly anticipating the move (if not so enthused at organising all my stuff!) I will miss this source of delight and wonder.  Today, despite early morning mist and a fairly keen frost, the signs of spring were abundant - new leaves on trees and catkins bravely clinging on despite the best endeavours of sub-zero temperatures.  As I look forward to new pleasures to be discovered on my new walk to work, I am moved to praise of the one in whom the beauty I see each day has its beginning.

So, some pictures taken this morning, mainly in the Botanics but one at church, which capture a fraction of the beauty of the morning.

For the beauty of the earth,

For the beauty of the skies

For the love, which from our birth

Over and around us lies,

Lord our God, to you we raise

This our joyful hymn of praise.

Yesterday's Bible notes began a short series on the beginning of Genesis written by a Rabbi.  This almost inevitably ensures a less familiar exploration of the text, which cannot be a bad thing.

She began by observing that in the Bible (Hebrew Scriptures) the book of Beginnings (Genesis) begins in Hebrew with the letter B (or Bet(h)), the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet.  This, she asserts, serves as a reminder that the Beginning of Creation was not the first thing, a reminder that before any thing (anything) God is and God does.  Creation as we know it is only ever secondary to God's creativity.

This made me think of the Alpha and Omega (this blog editor doesn't support Greek characters, sorry) attribution to Christ in, for example, Revelation.  The idea that God in some sense brackets or contains everything else.

It also got me playing around with words beginning with 'B' in English that might be reflected upon in this way...

B for Beginning

B for Bible

B for Big Bang

All of these are secondary to God, to God's Word, to God's Breath/Spirit - which seems to put creationists and evolutionists alike firmly where they belong, as secondary to God, the source of all that is.

It also made me think about my title 'something beginning with 'B'' which can be a really bad pun...

Some thing (creation) starts with 'B' for beginning.  Maybe there is the potential for a link to the prologue to the fourth Gospel... through Him all things were made that were made, without Him no thing was made....

Not sure this makes a whole deal of sense, but it gave me something to mull over last night.  I glimpse, with my limited perception, that some thing starts with 'B'...