Virtual Methodist

Here is my last Good Morning Ulster "Thought for the Day" for a while, so you can safely put Radio Ulster back on in the morning until further notice. The text below is a slightly expanded version of somewhat garbled  the audio (I clearly hadn't had enough coffee on Friday) . https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p07nwqs3 Last week I had the privilege of attending the Ulster University Chancellors’ lecture at St Anne’s Cathedral given by one of my childhood heroes, James Burke. People of a certain vintage will remember him fronting the BBC coverage of the moon-landings, one of my earliest memories, but what I really remember him for is for Tomorrow’s World and his seminal TV series “Connections.” Tomorrow’s World sought to predict the future in terms of technological innovation, with mixed success, while Connections explored the link between different people, inventions and ideas throughout history. His lecture last Tuesday night, entitled “The Future isn’t what it u...

Here is the more long winded version of this morning's Thought for the Day (which you can find in its spoken form here, at either 20 minutes in or 80 minutes , devoid of any mention of Yellowhammer or the B-word for fear of winding up one side or the other...) If truth be told I was more fearful of tripping over my tongue in the first sentence than anything else. Good morning, especially to all paraskevidekatriaphobics... Those cowering under the duvet because today is Friday the 13th... With that tongue-twister coming from the Greek words Paraskeví meaning "Friday", dekatreís, meaning "thirteen" and phobic meaning “fear.” There are many explanations for today being perceived as unlucky, including  the arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday 13th October 1307, although that was first suggested in the middle of the 20th century, before being given greater credence via various conspiracy theories. Actually there are no records of any superstitious fear of...

I posted this meme on facebook earlier, ironically prompting some further badenage on the subject of who is right or wrong in this whole debacle. I have, you will not be surprised to hear, strong opinions on this subject, but the closer we get to what seems a climax in this constitutional craziness, the less I feel that my or anyone else's contributions on social media are actually helping...  There has to be another way, hence this past Friday's Thought for the Day... reproduced below in a slightly amended form, or here as an audio clip for those who would prefer to hear my dulcet tones.  A week is a long time in politics... Never has Harold Wilson’s now clichéd comment been truer than the past week. Indeed I wrote this on Thursday afternoon for approval by the BBC Radio Ulster producer’s approval, wary of what may happen between then and the broadcast the next morning... The only thing that has become clearer in this past week is how many of my friends and associates...

OK! Here's my final TFTD for a while. Hope you don't hate it...  Can hate ever be good ? Morning is not my favourite time of day… there are days when I hate it... and the news rarely does much to improve my mood… And yesterday was a case in point, with a number of news stories sharing a similar theme. One that, sadly, there have been at least 320 hate crimes against the small Muslim community here in Belfast over the past five years… Then there was the appalling video circulating on social media of young people, some wearing Northern Ireland football shirts, singing "we hate Catholics" to the chorus of Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now". The IFA were encouragingly swift to speak out against this, saying that they condemn sectarianism of any kind, threatening to ban those involved. Meanwhile it seems that a number of England players were subjectto racist abuse during the previous night’s demolition of Montenegro , with Raheem Sterling ...

This morning's Thought  the Day on Good Morning Ulster... Well do you feel your sap rising, with today being the Spring equinox… the day in the northern hemisphere when there is as much light as dark… hopefully heralding marginally warmer weather in the weeks ahead?  Today is also the International Day of Happiness, established in 2011 as a United Nations Initiative devised by social entrepreneur and UN advisor Jayme Illien to inspire, mobilize, and advance the idea of happiness as a fundamental human right. And as pat of that , today as in previous years, the World Happiness Report comes out with a league table measuring the happiness of different countries via some arcane statistics. Despite the economic doldrums of the past decade and the political rancor of recent years, the UK has remained fairly steady at around 18th out of about 150 countries… With central African countries generally rating very low and Scandinavians topping the league every year… Th...

Again, it's been a while again... and I didn't get a chance to post last week's Thought for the Day, but here is this morning's effort... you can get the audio version online later if you so desire... In Greek mythology King Aeolus ruled an island kingdom and the gods granted him control of the winds. According to the poet Homer, Odysseus and his crew arrived on Aeolus’ island after nearly being eaten by a one-eyed giant. Aeolus by contrast allowed them to rest and relax for a month, and as they prepared to leave he provided Odysseus with the gift of a west wind to carry them home. But he also gave him a large sack, warning him to keep it stowed safely away until they got to their destination. Thanks to the favourable wind they were within sight of home after a few days, but when Odysseus fell asleep exhausted by the whole ordeal, his crew, curious to see what treasures Aeolus had given their captain, untied the sack. Unwittingly they unleashed all the other win...

Here, as promised, is my "Thought for Yesterday". If you prefer to hear it, here it is ... they even went to the trouble of producing it as a stand-alone clip this week... That's my last TFTD for a while, and given my frequency of blogging recently it might be my last blog for a similar period...   My role as a Methodist minister means that I often end up moving from one event to another, hastily changing the hat that I am wearing, and sometimes other items of attire… The juxtaposition is sometimes stark. Moving from celebration to consolation to confrontation, from business meetings to baptisms to hospital bedside, from infrequent weddings to sadly more frequent funerals, from BBC studio to board table to the occasional windswept building site. Yesterday evening put two very different events side by side in my diary… First, I was “networking” with business and other civic leaders on the observation deck of the new Belfast Grand Central Hotel in Bedford street… Then ...

Ooops... This is actually last week's Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster. I only discovered that I hadn't pressed the "Publish" button when I went in to upload this week's offering... I suspect that the few readers that this blog has will not have been waiting with bated breath for it, but I thought I would still publish it for the sake of completeness... If you are interested in hearing my dulcet tones, the broadcast versions are still available at the time of publication  here at 25 and 86 minutes in. The news cycle has moved on, but the issues I touch on are sadly timeless...  I will publish today's "thought" tomorrow... If I remember... I don’t often pay much attention to speeches at Annual political and union conferences… They are usually, to use an ecclesiastical metaphor, an exercise in preaching to the choir… nor, if truth be told do I often pay much attention to the public pronouncements of Bishops or Archbishops, with the possible exc...

Here is my Thought for the Day for last Friday morning, which you can hear in it's live form, trimmed of the bits in italics in order to fit the 2 1/2 minutes, here , at both 26 and 86 minutes (in between thoughts about the late, great Burt Reynolds). Ten days ago fire devastated the old Bank Buildings in Belfast. Thankfully no-one was killed but it caused millions of pounds of damage and put Primark employees’ jobs at stake… It quickly became clear that it would also have a massive impact on the businesses around it, but most people were astonished that the pedestrian exclusion zone around the unstable shell of the building will probably be in place for around 4 months, causing disruption to traffic and commerce… leading to understandable demands from surrounding business owners for the empty shell to simply be demolished, despite the outpouring of affection for the grand old building in the wake of the fire… Difficult decisions need to be taken in the near future, and there wi...

It's been a while, but I've been outrageously busy in the real world of Methodism without attending too much to the virtual one (which is ironic given the subject of my post), but as usual the necessity of coming up with something for Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster has prompted me to post again... Here's this morning's offering which you can still catch here 26 minutes in and 87 minutes in... With a hat-tip from Alan Meban in a piece about checking emails on the way in to work in between. They will probably get round to posting it here as a clip later on. I am sure that anyone who has to travel during rush hour has noticed the increased travel time required over the past few days with schools starting to go back after their holidays… It will be even busier on Monday, and that’s without those in some parts of Belfast having to pay attention to the start of the new Glider service… The summer break is over for most us, and within schools and churches an...

Here is an amended version of the politics-free Thought for the Day that went out on Radio Ulster on Thursday morning... It was recorded before news came out that both Cathedrals in Armagh have altered the timing of their services to accommodate the Giro or I may well have commented on that (if that was permissible...)   Well, with the beginning of May the run in to the Giro D’Italia is picking up pace, with pink-tinted bicycle themed events popping up all over Northern Ireland… even in places the peleton will go nowhere near… For example the Donaghadee lighthouse is turning pink as part of their Giro DEE Italia event, and the Navan Centre’s website that says that this coming Monday the Celtic warriors there are going to swap their traditional blue woad for pink in honour of the coming Giro… And there was me thinking that the Ulster Cycle was a series of Celtic stories and ballads… When it was actually a bronze age bike! I also got a leaflet for a shop having an event celeb...

(Thought for the Day on Radio Ulster, Easter Monday 21st April 2014)   Alleluia. Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!    Alleluia! With those words Christian churches across the English-speaking world began or ended their services yesterday. But let me let you into a secret… There are many pastors, priests and preachers who, by the end of the last service yesterday, were secretly thinking Alleluia! It is over… Because whilst Holy Week and Easter is THE most important week of the Christian calendar, it can end up like the spiritual equivalent of a decathlon… with services throughout the week, prayer meetings, home communions, extended vigils on Good Friday and early morning services yesterday, often followed by baptisms, communions and/or special Easter celebration services… Some of my friends think that Holy Week is the only week of the year I do a full week’s work… But many ministers down tools on Easter Monday for a few days, and frequently take the S...

Hero or villain. Saint or sinner. No. I’m not talking about Luis Suarez, but I’m a Liverpool fan, so you might guess my opinion there. How we define people often depends on our personal perspective and the truth is usually more complicated than such a simple definition. We in this province know that well, particularly in the messy business of making peace after a period of prolonged and profound conflict. (You just have to check out the responses to the presence of Martin McGuinness at the state banquet in Windsor Castle last week for evidence of that.) This is Holy week, the run-up to Good Friday, where we reflect on the price Jesus paid to make peace between us and God, followed by the resurrection joy of Easter Day. Personally I’m fascinated by the characters we’ve traditionally portrayed as villains in the Holy Week story. Judas Iscariot - wondering what his motivation was for betraying his teacher. Was it all just a matter of money or something else? Pilate, the ultimate po...

Well, did you SPRING forward yesterday? Or did the loss of an hour’s sleep make yesterday morning more of a challenge than it normally would be? There’s a debate about whether there is much point in changing the clocks in spring and autumn any more, or whether we should simply have summer time all year round… If that guaranteed us actual summer time all year round I would be one of its greatest supporters, although in any normal year here that isn’t a great boon… where summer usually just means that we get slightly warmer rain… But the lack of sunshine in summer is not the only distinctive about this province. Every time the clocks change I am reminded of the old joke about the passenger plane landing at Aldergrove and the pilot announcing over the PA system, “We have now landed at Belfast International Airport, please set your watches back 300 years.” We do sadly, have a reputation for being more focused on our past than other places… Whether that past is hundreds of y...

I may be on sabbatical, but I'm not completely lounging around with my feet up... just taking a break from my circuit, connexional and chaplaincy responsibilities, freeing me up to to a few of the things that I enjoy doing and more reading and writing. Hence it was that I still found myself sitting in the green room of BBC Radio Ulster this morning at stupid o'clock to do the following Thought for the Day (for the next week you can listen to it here at 25 and 85 minutes in ) It's on a theme I've been touching on more than once here recently... Last week a number of banks posted their annual trading results, and as has been the case every year recently, the figures have been uniformly in the red… However, that hasn’t stopped bank executives being awarded hefty performance related bonuses, on the grounds that the losses weren’t as bad as last year! It strikes me that it’s a weird world where we don’t cap the bonuses of the bankers who got us into this mess, but do ca...

There is a saying that today's news is tomorrow's fish and chip wrapping, and while in these health and hygiene obsessed days the origins of that is a little more obscure, the meaning is totally true... and a danger when you are writing a topical "Thought for the Day" piece for radio. I often go to bed having written one, and hoping that a bigger story doesn't arise during the hours of darkness. Today was a case in point... although the bigger story had arisen before I headed bedwards, and I only became aware of it as I drove into the studio... Anyway, this is the Thought for the Day as broadcast on Good Morning Ulster this morning at 6.55 and 7.55 am. Yesterday I awoke to hear that because of EU equality rules, pupils resident in Northern Ireland holding Irish passports may qualify for free university tuition in Scotland, just like Scottish residents. This may be very good news given that university fees are now rising to a maximum of £9000 per year… As someo...

Nearly one month on from the riots in England, the repercussions and recriminations are still going on… and there seems to be no clear consensus of what really caused them… Was it a function of social marginalisation, or recreational rioting? A sign of general moral decline or shopping with violence… Riots can be sparked off by the slightest of things… I’ve even known riots in Belfast kick off because of a football result in Glasgow. But on this day back in 1752 there were apparently riots in many British cities because of a change in the calendar. Britain was one of the last countries to adopt the Gregorian calendar in place of the Julian one, and so by that stage Britain was 11 days out of sync with the actual position of the earth around the Sun, and consequently most of the rest of Europe… The solution… just lop 11 days out of the calendar… Hence in 1752 people leapt straight from the 2nd of September to the 14th… Producing the strange anomaly in Ireland that we remember the B...

I was doing a live Thought for the Day for Radio Ulster this morning at 6.55 and 7.55am, and one of the great fears when preparing something like this is that you go to sleep well-prepared but wake up the next morning to find that something major has happened which completely derails what you were going to say... Such as yesterday morning when I lurched into consciousness to the news of the death of former Taoiseach Dr. Garrett Fitzgerald. This put a whole different perspective on recent events in Dublin, because there is no doubt that the signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement by him and Margaret Thatcher in 1985, set in train a process which eventually culminated in the momentous visit of the Queen to Ireland this week… Many said a very loud “No” to that Agreement at that time… But in the wake of the later Good Friday Agreement, the majority of people on this island have emphatically and repeatedly said “Yes” to the attempt to put the past behind us and find a way of working together to o...

As I stated yesterday I do a monthly slot on Downtown Radio's "Just a Moment" every morning for a week and about four days a year when I am on Radio Ulster's "Thought for the Day". Today was one of those days when there was a conjunction of the two and so at 6.55am a fair chunk of the listnership in Northern Ireland couldn't escape my dulcet tones, as I was apparently in two places at the same time talking about two different subjects. Actually if truth be told I was in 3 places at the same time as I was lying at home fast asleep, since both talks had been pre-recorded. However, this time last week I had a bit of a diary disaster resulting in the difficult task of trying to be physically in two places at the same time. I have a weekly event every Thursday morning, but a few weeks ago I got a message asking me to speak at a local Primary School Assembly last Thursday morning. I said yes, but totally forgot to put it in my diary or rearrange my other appoi...