Virtual Methodist

Reading Mary Oliver's "Mockingbird" this morning prompted this thought/poem, which is somewhat chastening as I had set aside this morning for some more focused "creative writing.." Of course this is not a patch on Oliver's and in itself illustrates the very point I am making in it... Ah well... The thief of other sounds the poet's description of the mockingbird could apply comfortably to me a magpie of shiny thoughts  because even when I am speaking from my true self I am only ever  a complex amalgamation of ideas, influences and inspirations a recombination of generations of genes  with only defunct or deleterious mutations likely to be remotely original and even then they  and everything else are  at source recycled stardust yet even in my unoriginality I am as the internet meme says unique just like everyone else.

The third and last of my monologues for Holy week from the perspective of Simon Peter. He was right… Everything he said would happen happened… And everything that I vowed I would do were only empty words… And I have cried myself empty in the time since… After the confusion of last’s Passover meal, it at first felt like a relief to get out of that room and head across to Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives… We’d gone there before with him this week… it’s there that he talked about the troubled times to come when the temple would be torn down… But we didn’t expect our world, our hopes and dreams to be torn down in a similar way… He went there to pray and had asked us to pray with him… but we were exhausted, and full of food and wine, and so we nodded off… three times he came to wake us up… And he was wound up in a way I had never seen him before… But the third time, while he was still speaking to us we saw a mob coming up, through the olive grove… there were temple guards among th

The second in my short series of monologues for Holy Week, tonight looking at the events in the upper room on the night before Jesus died. ‘Do you understand what I have done for you?’ he asked.  No I do not… the more time I spend with Jesus the less I understand… He is forever turning things upside down… If it’s not the temple traders’ tables, it’s the established order of things! I mean, take tonight for example… We’d all gathered to celebrate the Passover together… The lamb had been duly prepared and we were all together remembering the old, old stories of God rescuing his people from the hands of their oppressors… sharing not only the lamb, but the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs and wine… Everything was familiar, then in the middle of it he starts talking about the bread being his body, broken for us… the wine, his blood poured out for us… Andrew and John whispered about something Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptiser had said years ago, before I met Jesus, about him bein

The first of 3 new monologues written for our Holy Week Services on the New South and Central Belfast Circuit in a series entitled "In the Footsteps of the Fisherman" looking at the events of Jesus' last week through the eyes of Simon Peter. This one was based on the "mini apocalypse" of Mark 13, where Jesus says that before too long the Temple will be torn down (as it was 40 years later) before going on to refer to other unsettling events...  It’s time… surely it’s time… Time to throw off the yoke of our oppressors. To take control of our own destiny again. One nation under God. Time for us to be great again, as we were in the time of David and Solomon when the temple was first built… Time for us to throw out the foreigners like they did in the time of the Maccabees when the second temple was ruined. Time to humble the ruling religious elite down here in Jerusalem… They don’t care one jot or tittle for us up in the north… They’ve worked hand in glove with