Virtual Methodist

The word that I frequently use at the conclusion of my blogs is, as most of you will already know, found repeatedly in the Psalms. Throughout my sabbatical I've been doing some reflecting on the Psalms and I am now returning, both to work, and a piece of writing, collating and revising the many responsive paraphrases of the Psalms I have done over the years, and part of that has involved thinking how to "translate" this word. Most modern translations have given up trying to translate it as its meaning is uncertain. The consensus is that it is a musical direction of some kind. Some have suggested that it is derived from a word meaning "lift up", though there is no agreement on what the reader is being encouraged to elevate! The majority opinion, however, seems to be that it is the equivalent of a musical rest, a pause for reflection, and that is the sense I have opted for, using the phrase "And breathe" (which as some 4 Corners veterans will know has a ...

Just back from a swift visit with my wife to my mother in law in Ayr. As a youngster Ayr was a frequent holiday destination, and I wasn't to know at that stage that I would end up marrying a lassie from that vicinity. On Sunday afternoon, before leaving, we took a short visit to the beach at Seafield on the southern edge of the town, which would have been a regular haunt of my wife's when growing up, but we found it much changed from previous visits... Since 2020 it has been the subject of one of the many projects around the UK seeking to re-establish sand dunes as a coastal erosion and biodiversity initiative using discarded Christmas trees as the foundational matrix for trapping the sand... A mere 6 years has made a discernible difference, and I was surprised when doing some research later that I haven't found more written about it... merely a couple of articles in local papers announcing that they were going to try this, but no "before and after" pi...

During my sabbatical I am trying to make some progress on a couple of writing projects, including a series of poems prompted by places in my home city of Belfast. Many of these focus on pieces of public art. Over the weekend, after joining the large anti-racism rally at City Hall I took a detour via one of our most recently erected, and best curated statues in a seemingly unlikely corner of the city, near the junction of Lombard Street and Rosemary Street. It portrays Frederick Douglass, the black American anti-slavery campaigner, who actually was only able to buy himself out of slavery following his speaking tour of Ireland in 1845-6. As part of that he spoke in the building now known as "First Church" in Rosemary Street, which was then a politically liberal Presbyterian Church. The sculpture was created by Alan Beattie Herriot and Hector Guest and was erected in July 2023. This piece begins with a quotation from Douglass, but whilst Saturday's anti-racism ra...

I'm in London as part of my sabbatical and found myself in a time warp last night and this morning watching the news of the riots in my home city, with a friend and colleague caught up in the midst of them, trying to make a difference. I'll leave it to others back home to comment on things on a deeper level. My prayers are with those involved in the original attack that lit the blue touch paper, and those picking up the pieces including the emergency services and those in East Belfast Mission... But this is my initial, emotional response to the whole mess with credit/apologies to Paul Brady . Four decades ago I sat in a city not my own, listening tearfully to a song that sang about the skies of Lebanon burning, with television pictures of women and children dying in the street, whilst back home we were sacrificing our own children and leaving twisted wreckage on the roads... carving tomorrow from a tombstone. Many tomorrows have come and gone, and too many tombsto...

As many of you know I'm currently on sabbatical and largely staying off social media and other sources of news, but the coverage of this week's English local elections and the Welsh and Scottish devolved assembly votes has been hard to avoid. But whilst rootling around on my blog to find material for a writing project I am working on about Christ as King and the Kingdom of God, I came across this dialogue that I posts almost exactly 10 years ago in the wake of elections that week and thinking about issues of sovereignty that were looming with the Brexit referendum the next month... how little did we realise how much the results of that would still be rumbling on after a decade!  So I thought it was worth another post, with a slight amendment... As I said then, I'm not entirely convinced by the fetishism of democracy, especially given it's tendency to be subverted by tribal interested or the undue influence of those with vast amounts of money, which has been emphasized o...

Yesterday was, as noted previously, the last of the lasts in this circuit, after spending the last 13 years back in this part of Belfast, and 8 years as Superintendent of Belfast Central Mission. Thankfully the BCM board are letting us stay in our current Manse until after I have had my sabbatical and move to my new post in July, so I won't have to spend all of my sabbatical filling boxes. But I cleared my office at BCM HQ in Grosvenor House on Thursday and posted the attached photo on social media. This is the first of two pieces prompted by the photo (I haven't finished the other one yet). Throughout my time in BCM when at that desk I have been very aware of the pictures of the 11 previous Superintendents looking down on me... wondering whether they would approve of what I was doing or where things were at. The space left for me as the 12th Superintendent in that seat always had a certain inauspicious sense of "completeness" to it, although I genuinely h...