This week I am starting to analyse the answers to my questionnaire on ministers with life-changing medical diagnoses, and will close the online survey at the end of the week.  If you are a minister (or know one) and would like to completed it, please feel free.  I have permission from both BUGB and BUS to conduct this project.  If online is problematic, feel free to print it off and complete longhand and I can let you have a land address on request.

Baptist type ministers can complete it here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8BPSDRV

Non-Baptist type ministers here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7JLT7B3

It's the same survey, just want to be able to identify the Baptists!!

Just as I was settling down to being looking at the demographic information - really interesting in its own right - I heard the 'thud' of something large being posted through my door... a UK-wide piece of research exploring patient's experiences of autolgous breast reconstructions after radiotherapy.  Via a set of tick boxes, and a large, if not vast, survey pool, two people are investigating this.  So, I set my research aside for an hour or so, ticked a lot of boxes, added a few comments where the boxes didn't quite tally with my experience and stuffed it back into a (pre-paid) envelope to send off.  Glad to be be able to help, if only by adding some honest-and-positive input to the melting pot!

BBC news website tells us that the 'eyes of the world' are on the royal birth.  Poor Duke and Duchess of Cambridge - a good job they will be far too preoccupied with the whole birth business to be aware of that.  But, really?  The eyes of the world?  Somehow I think not.  Western liberal democracy television news programmes, tweeters and bloggers (royalist and republican) maybe, but no, not the eyes of the world; most of the world has far more urgent and acute things to think about.

A quick bit of web searching suggests that in the UK today there will be on average "one born every minute" (about 2000) and that, sadly, on average on of those won't survive birth.  Globally there will be around 370,000 babies born (can't find a neat match to a UK city but a bit bigger than Nottingham).  And, if the click campaign of 2006 is still valid, around 28,800 children (one every three seconds) will die needlessly in poverty today.  It seems to me that the eyes of the world, if the press is correct, are actually averted from things that aren't quite so nice, and shiny and romantic, in favour of some fairytale.

I genuinely hope that the Duchess of Cambridge is safely delivered of a healthy child, and that parenthood proves pleasurable and rewarding to this young couple.  But my eyes are not glued to the goggle box waiting impatiently for the news.

You, God, slipped into our world without a media circus

The eyes of the Roman world were certainly not on a backstreet in Bethlehem

As a peasant woman brough forth her firstborn and laid him in a foodtrough for safety.

You, God, have your eyes on the squalor of poverty and the danger of the non-western world

You come close to the young mother whose birth pangs cannot be relieved with drugs

And whose haemorrhaging has only one, inevitable and disastrous outcome

You, God, have your eyes on the tiny scraps of humanity born in poverty

You come close to the child who attempts to suckle an empty breast

Whose life-breath is fleeting and failing, life snuffed out almost before it begins

You, God, have your eyes on the tenacious mother and determined baby

Refusing to be another statistic, defying the odds and suceeding to live

Who are bearers of hope and tragedy in equal measure, in a world we never see

You, God, have your eyes on every birthing stool and birthing pool,

Every maternity unit, every home, every refuge and transit camp

Every mother, every infant, every midwife, doctor and birthing partner

And You, God, have your eyes on the young couple in London

Anxious and excited, who know, deep within that, for all the technology money can buy,

Life is a fragile and beautiful gift, and upon your grace (named as such ot not) they depend

God who was born Prince of Peace

God who was born peasant of Bethlehem

God who was born refugee (even asylum seeeker)

God who was born into human life

It is your eyes that watch over every labouring mother

Every unborn child;

And it is to your safe keeping we offer them all

Amen

So, after yesterday's blog-frenzy (four posts is a lot, even by my standards!) it will all slow down again for a few days.

Today I am planning to catch up some admin type stuff, some sabbatical related, some domestic, and then do some more mulling over the two visits I've done whilst baking cakes to take to the friends I am visiting this weekend.

A weekend visit to friends is something of a luxury in my line of work, and indeed that of anyone who has week-by-week commitments in a church... musicians, Sunday School leaders, church secretaries, people who operate the sound desk or projector, and so-on.  I have a feeling that there is a risk that ministers grow so accustomed to working Sundays that we don't always appreciate that, but for these volunteers, our Sunday's would be very different.  So, as I head off for the kind of weekend that many 'in the pew' can take for granted, I spare a thought, and a prayer, for those whose commitment to the life of their congregation can make such luxuries a near-impossible dream, hoping that I won't forget once I am back in harness!

Thank you, God,

For Church Secretaries, collating the 'notices' or 'intimations' week by week

Making sure dates and times and places are announced

Pastoral news shared

And the visiting preacher cared for

Thank you, God,

For organists and pianists, guitarists and saxophonists,

For vocalists and SATB choirs,

And those who press 'play' on the 'Wesley' or CD player

Ensuring there is music in worship

Thank you, God,

For Sunday School leaders, preparing sessions

Hunting high and low for this video or that craft item

Sharing news and stories

With 'classes' small or large

Thank you, God

For the ones who put out the chairs (and put them away)

Who bakes cakes and pour tea,

Who hand out books or leaflets

Who welcome friend and stranger

Thank you, God

For hymn number board fillers

And PowerPoint preparers

For PA woofers and tweeters (whatever they may be!)

For door unlockers and alarm switcher-offers

Thank you, God

For flower arrangers (and distributors)

Water jug fillers

Toilet roll replenishers

Offertory counters and night safe deliverers

Thank you, God,

For those who, Sunday by Sunday,

Turn out, rain or shine,

To make worship work

By working on a Sunday

When I was planning my sabbatical visits, I had hoped to visit St Andrews Street Baptist Church, Cambridge, a church in which two Gatherers were in membership at different times, along with numerous other people I know through the wonderful world of Baptists.  This proved impractical, as their minister was due to retire at the end of June, and indeed he did.  I was disappointed, but could clearly see why the Diaconate would not want some random minister turning up to ask about their student work.

As I noted earlier today, the minister of another Cambridge church died suddenly at the beginning of July.  Truth is, had I been scheduled to go to Cambridge, I would have arranged to meet with friends from that church, and would then have been drawn in to trying to support them in their grief and loss.  And, harsh though it may sound, that would have been the wrong thing to do.

I do not, cannot, believe in some form of predestination or fore-knowledge that allowed the circumstances to work out as they did... but I do feel that somehow, the mysterious God is active in these situations, if only at a macroscopic level.  There is a lot that makes little or no sense, humanly speaking; a lot that seems like rather an ugly coincidence, but I do feel that it 'was not meant' for me to visit Cambridge this summer.

God of this place, God of all places;

God of this time, God of all times;

God of life, God beyond death:

Embrace in your love those who mourn

Restore those who feel overwhelmed

Bring new hope and new energy,

New vision and new direction

To these two Cambridge churches

To the EBA of the BUGB

And to all who have been part of the story

Past or present

And all who will be part of the story

Present or future

Grant your peace

Amen

One of the great joys of slowing donw has been reading novels!  In the last fortnight or so I have read two and half stories. 

One of them I had been slogging through since early in the year; it demanded a lot of determination to wade through and to be honest did not really repay the effort, save to say that I'd read it.  Interesting then, that this week a book has been identified as being pseudonymously penned by the same author, and deemed excellent within its genre.

Another of them was what my mother used to term a 'penny dreadful' - an easy read, women's magazine style story set mostly in a twee version of highland Scotland and ending happily.  An easy read, ideal for a long train journey and utterly undemanding.

The third was one recommended to me by another minister as a good read: Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Musuem, combined ease of reading with an interesting approach and a reasonable plot.  I enjoyed reading it, and in the closing pages found a couple of quotes worth pondering...

'"The past is what you leave behind in life, ..." "Nonsense ... The past's what you take with you."'

'...words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.'

Kate Atkinson, behind the Scenes at the Museum, pub. Black Swan, 1995, Kindle edition

The second quotation struck me, I guess, because it states much of what theories of semantics and semiotics refer too, and which the Post Modern philosophers get all excited about as words are 'slippery' and their meaning is determined (only) in context.  Words construct a world that makes sense - true - but arguably they do so best, or potentially only, in a specific context.

More interesting is the first one, which seems to me to recognise an important truth about the ways we may relate to our past, indivudally or collectively.  Is it what we leave behind, completed, finished, done with, or is it what we carry with us, shaping and informing our future?  My MPhil research was predicated on the second perspective, but maybe needs a bit of unpacking/unpicking?  Is our past a 'burden' or a 'shackle' that holds us back and prevents us from becoming who we are meant to be?  Or is it a 'gift' or a 'resource' from which we can draw insights and understandings that will help us become the people we are meant to be?  Or is it siumltaneously both?  Or is it neither, being simply neutral. Nothing I haven't already spent loads of energy exploring, but quite interesting to see, clothed in fiction, explorations that were not a million miles from my own ideas.

I have no idea what the title of the novel has to do with the story, save that it cleverly uses a series of artefacts as prompts for excurses to tell tales from the 'past'.  I did half expect it to end up with a set of seemingly random artefacts in a single display case and that the book was the underlying story, but no.  The link is, it seems, the facades of houeses from past times which form part of the York Castle Museum... so, a story of what may have lain behind the scenes inone such house.  An enjoyable read, and a bit of food for thought too.