Statistics.

Have to be careful when I talk about stats - for many years they were the way I earned my living, or at least the raw data that fed the way I earned my living, and now I have a Stats Prof among my congregation.

The advantage/disadvantage of having worked professionally with stats is knowing how to read them - or at least how to guess what questions to ask about how to read them.  But all that knowledge is a double-edged sword when you become part of the stats rather than a mere observer of them.  It sharpens your 'hermeneutic of suspicion' as to how the data are compiled and how much smoothing of complex multivariate stuff goes on to give some general figures.

I think it struck me most when I read that 'every 11 minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with breast cancer,' which is blatantly not true as no clinic is open 24/7 which would be needed for this to be the case.  46,000 a year (give or take) is equivalent to one every eleven minutes, but that's not how it works.  Today roughly 125 women and 1 man will be given this diagnosis - not neatly eleven minutes apart and not evenly spread throughout the nation.  Most will be over 50 and the oldest among them will have other age-related health issues but some will be in their twenties with everything to live for.  126 worlds turned upside down.

And then the are the other stats that arrive regularly - a child dies every 3 seconds in poverty, one every 15 seconds from lack of clean water; a women in the USA is beaten roughly every 15 seconds, and so on and so forth.  Again, not neatly defined, not equally spread, and not tidily 24/7 but whole clumps and communities devastated by disaster.  People in the poorest or most disadvantaged places, people for whom suffering is often normative.  People whose worlds I can never know or really imagine.

There's a point to the averages of course - a child dying every three seconds is something we can imagine, six-ish people an hour receiving a medical diagnosis is conceivable.  But it is all, ultimately, too big for our minds to process - we can only take in so much, can only care beyond the superficial for so many people or causes.  Maybe we don't need more numbers, or even better ways of presenting them, maybe what we need is time and space to think of the real people they represent.  On balance of probability, this afternoon in Glasgow someone will be told she (or he) has breast cancer... on balance whilst I've typed this stuff the equivalent of a whole primary school has died in some part of Africa... these are real people with real stories.  I can't know these people; I can't help them, but I can at least be aware of them.

... I thought it sounded better than 'drugged Monday' and slightly less likely to attract weird comments.  Last post-drug Monday I didn't post and it caused a good deal of anxiety among some of my most loyal and caring readers, so this week I thought I'd better say a quick 'hello.'

Always the danger of the plethoric blogger - do I own it or it me?  As one who refuses to go down the lines of twitter or facebook (I waste too much time on reading blogs already) I guess this is a rod I've made for my own back.  Ironically, just as I link Dave Walker's cartoon blog he gets a bout of blogger's block and has ten days off from posting - it's an occupational hazard.

Anyway, today will be anything but Manic Monday, as I rest after yesterday's great fun but rather tiring morning.  I may begin the mound of Christmas cards I need choose to write to people all over the UK (and some beyond) whose paths have crossed mine and continue to interwine with it to varying degrees.  I like this task - it brings back memories of times shared, good and bad, and reminds me why people I may not have seen in decades remain on my Christmas list.  Inevitably each year there are deletions but there are additions too, all part of the story we write as we wander through life.

So, off to flop a bit and then start the card writing...

Btw, it's a GLORIOUS morning in Glasgow (in joke)

This evening people from local churches meet to share in an annual service of "Grieving and Gratitude" at one of the C of S churches.  Last year I helped lead the service; this year I am exercising a ministry of flopping on my settee.  I am sad I can't go to the service as there are people I wanted to remember who this year slipped from this life to the life of eternity.  Of course we don't need a special framework to remember, and I don't need to be with others in some formalised rite, so I am sitting on my settee recalling those from my story who died this year.

So I start with B, and overlap from last year, a diamond in the rough whose second marriage I conducted, and for whom I had deep affection, who this time last year died very suddenly.

Just weeks later came L, a lovely Brummy who had was already terminally ill when I moved north, and whose parting wish was that I would take his funeral.  A delightful and funny man, whose mischeivous smile and open tears on my (metaphorical) shoulder I will not forget.

There was D, my local MP from down south, a man of principle who understood deeply what constituency politics was about who, too, suddenly died on Boxing Day whilst out walking with his family.

Then F, in her early twenties, a young mission partner who I'd met when she visited Dibley with BMS and who I had encouraged to explore a call to full time Christian service.  At the time I felt guilty that these words of mine had played a part in her dying so far from home; ten months on the guilt has given way to privilege in having met this amazing youung woman.

J was a gatherer, the only one I've yet had to farewell.  After a couple of years of burying 'my' flock in ever increasing numbers, it has been good to do so less; yet for folk here this was one more in a year of heavy losses.  She was a special member of our church with her trademark topknot and irrepressible humour; I am glad I knew her, if only in passing.

Lastly is M, who at 49 years 364 days older than me (a fact she loved to quote to me) was the second oldest of my Dibley flock, and the oldest, if nowhere near longest served, actual church member.  She combined practical wisdom and deep faith with a healthy measure of mining-community grit; she loved owls (her flat was full of pictures and ornaments of them) and she loved life.  I have always remembered the essence of her words spoken to me during an illness, "I'm ready either way, to live is good, to die is fine" - she showed me how Paul's injunction could indeed find expression.

So, tonight as I sit on my settee, in my imagination I light candles to remember these saints, now at rest, giving thanks for all the light they brought to my life...

For all the saints, who from their labours rest,

Who Thee, by faith, before the world confessed

Thy name, Oh Jesus, beforever blessed:

Alleluia, alleulia!

Always a good thing, I find, when in preparing my sermon, or the more so, when delivering it, I am preaching to myself.   So this morning, as I reached my final reflection, on Galatians 3: 28 - 29, our 16th reading of the day!!!

What, I said, if we move beyond the implied dualism of the age in which it was written and try to find a principle for out own time?  What if we said...

In Christ race vanishes

In Christ status vanishes

In Christ gender vanishes

Just a thought.

... to all Celts who happen to be reading.

Not entirely sure of the pronunciation of Samhain, the Celtic name of the festival subsumed first by All Hallows and then by Hallowe'en/Halloween, but it marked the start of the new year for the ancient Celts and, indeed Samhain remains the Celtic name for November.

The ancient missionaries new a thing or two about inculturation - how to look and listen to local custom and practice and spot the echoes and glimpses of what is spoken more profoundly in their Christian experience.  For ancient Celts the end of the harvest and cleansing of the earth with bonfires (hint - where do you think bonfire night comes from really?) coincided with the darkening of the year.  As the natural end of the growing cycle came and with it the slaughter of animals for food (hence the bone-fires), so there was a sense of 'thinness' between life and death, this world and the next.  Enter the Celtic Christians and, later, the Romanised Christians who developed the feasts of All Hallows and All Souls, commemorating and, in a more literal sense of the 'communion of saints', connecting with the 'faithful departed.'

For those of with strong protestant heritage such festivals are a little uncomfortable, yet I think they do have the potential to to remind us of important truths - our interconnectedness with the rest of creation, of the whisper-thin veil between life and death, of our own mortality, of those who have gone before us, saints official or unofficial, and of the new beginnings that can be marked on any day of any month.

Among our songs today is a childhood favourite of mine, which reminds us of the ordinariness of God's saints who we can encounter anywhere, "I sing a song of the saints of God".  Unfortunately the words aren't in HymnQuest but it can be found at

BPW 248 (the red Baptist book)

BHB 259 (the green Baptist book)

JP 115

Sunday School Praise 453

Fresh Sounds (if anyone still has a copy!) 85

BBC Hymnbook 353

plus one or two others.

It can, however, be found online if you Google it, here's a Americanised version which does, alas lose my favourite lines about meeting saints "at school or in shops or at tea" and that they "began just like me" but it's not bad.

   I sing a song of the saints of God, 
   patient and brave and true, 
   who toiled and fought and lived and died 
   for the Lord they loved and knew. 
   And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, 
   and one was a shepherdess on the green; 
   they were all of them saints of God, and I mean, 
   God helping, to be one too. 
   
   They loved their Lord so dear, so dear, 
   and his love made them strong; 
   and they followed the right for Jesus' sake 
   the whole of their good lives long. 
   And one was a soldier, and one was a priest, 
   and one was slain by a fierce wild beast;
   and there's not any reason, no, not the least, 
   why I shouldn't be one too. 
   
   They lived not only in ages past; 
   there are hundreds of thousands still. 
   The world is bright with the joyous saints 
   who love to do Jesus' will. 
   You can meet them in school, on the street, in the store, 
   in church, by the sea, in the house next door; 
   they are saints of God, whether rich or poor, 
   and I mean to be one too.
     

If you don't know it you can listen here

PS In the unlikely event that any trick or treaters knock my door tonight, I might 'treat' them to the 'trick' of taking off my headscarf... cue mean cackling laughter.