Virtual Methodist

Starting 2020 in similar vein to where I left off in 2019,  thinking about how we deal with the past and with fear of the future. In this I pick up on the legend concerning the location of the Omphalos (navel) at the centre of the world by Zeus. He supposedly set off twin eagles from either end of the Earth and they met over Delphi, which was the site of the mysterious oracle of Apollo. In later Christian tradition the "omphalos" was said to be in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a place which again has not been devoid of conflict. The place where two eagles meet Past and future fighting on the wing While down below The profound present Remains to be explored. Selah

This piece was initially prompted by my current parallel reading of Gladys Ganiel's "Considering Grace", dealing with how the Presbyterian Church handled the Troubles, Robert Harris's "The Second Sleep", which turns on the relationship between the past, future, presnt and faith, a book produced by my son Ciaran's archaeology department, and Avivah Zornberg's psychoanalytic, midrashic comentary "The Murmuring Deep" from which I posted the following quote by Osip Mandelstam on Sunday.  "poetry is the plough tearing open and turning over time so that the deep layers of it, its rich black undersoil, ends up on the surface.... Mankind ... craves, like a ploughman, for the virgin soil of time."  I took the liberty of stealing a particularly evocative line, but then I freely acknowledge that artistically and intellectually, I am little more than one of those birds that swoop in after the plough or the seed drill to snatch some...

A poem prompted by reading Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's midrash on Rebekah and Rachel, a family birth, fears for the future with the New Year just on the horizon and the abiding inability to deal healthily with the past in this part of the world. What binds us to what was, Or what is yet to be? Is it life-giving,  Or necrotic,  Poisoning both?  There comes a time  After the agony of emergence  That the cord must be cut.  Only then can both survive  And thrive.  A scar will remain.  A memory of the unremembered, Both nurturing and traumatic, Too often disregarded  As a focus of selfish contemplation,  Seeing oneself as the centre of the world, Yet actually a relic  Of dependence and devotion. But there is no going back  Nicodemus was right in that.  A new connection  Must be made and tended. But first, cut... Selah

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...

There has been a lot of fuss (and a fair amount of humour) at the news that many cheap burgers in various supermarket chains have a large percentage of horse in them. Not only would many Europeans be surprised at the furore concerning this, I was flabbergasted a couple of nights ago, when a vox-pop of some shoppers had them saying that they were really appalled because it made them wonder "what were they really feeding to their children." Given that they were already feeding them the lowest-priced meat products available this is perhaps a question they should have been asking earlier. A friend of mine is behind the current health campaign in Northern Ireland pushing for weight loss and a healthier diet. I fear he may be on a beaten docket with me and many others in this province. However, recent weeks and particularly the edifying experience that the Nolan Show on BBCNI was on Wednesday night, made me think that actually there is another dietary problem here in Northern ...

Oops... Haven't been paying attention... This was supposed to go online on Tuesday, but I've been a tad busy over the past few days... However, it seems as if a lot of you had picked up on it already. It touches on some of the issues I raised in my post on Sunday, but was originally inspired by the fact that for various reasons I, and others have been looking back to significant anniversaries over recent weeks. You can find it online for the next few days at BBC's iPlayer at 26 and 86 minutes, but here is the original text. Two weeks ago was my 20th wedding anniversary. Last week it was the 40th Anniversary of the opening of our church building in Dundonald. A few people remember the first of those 2 anniversaries… many more remember the second… But infinitely more will remember the events of this day 30 years ago… Because today in 1979 Pope John Paul II became the first Pope to step onto Irish soil. Those who subsequently saw him at Phoenix Park, Drogheda or Knock will nev...

Well today the Beijing Olympics came to an end… And while the closing ceremony was not quite so over the top as the opening ceremony, it was still astounding, especially in terms of the lack of expense spared and the sheer numbers involved moving with split-second sychronicity. The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius." "Swifter, Higher, Stronger." And that has been fulfilled in these games… This has been an Olympics of superlatives. The performances of Usain Bolt on land and Michael Phelps in water… And the British athletes exceeding all expectations with their best performance in a century, the best performance by any cycling or sailing teams ever, and a medal haul which, in proportion to the size of population is 12 times as successful as China’s and over twice as successful as the Americans. The only problem is… How can Britain top that when the show comes to London? We cannot hope to match the scale of the opening ceremony. We will be very fortunate to mat...

Recently I was at an event where the Rev Leslie Griffiths (or Lord Griffiths of Burry Port if I were to be official about it, and name-drop with an enormous "clang") told those present that he lived and worked surrounded by a significant graveyard around Wesley's Chapel in London. This, he affirmed, served to remind him not only of the past, but of the future... the future for all of us. His comment reminded me of the fact that in my first station, a rural one, I was the only minister in the local clergy fraternal who didn't have a graveyard around my church buildings, a fact for which I was perennially thankful, not because of any squeamishness but because my colleagues lives seemed to be dominated by the petty politics involved in administrating grave plots. Yesterday I was back in the same room as the discussion with Leslie Griffith, but this time the speaker was Duncan Morrow (many more postings will probably stem from what he said, here and elsewhere...). During...