Virtual Methodist

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...

I said I would post more on what Duncan Morrow had to say at our recent meeting... And let me assure you that there will be much more. He generally says more insightful things in a talk scribbled on the back of 3 crumpled pieces of paper than I do in reams of closely reasoned and carefully prepared material. But anyway, our discussion was generally about the theology and practice of reconciliation (although after he left it majored on the theology and practice issue, without really focussing on reconciliation... dodging the issue again perhaps!) Duncan's thesis was largely that the western world in general, Northern Ireland in particular and the church par excellance were governed by 3 broad principles in dealing with current problems: Distraction Containment Denial I may come back to comment on the first 2 at some point, but what was most memorable for me was his assertion that while the church finds its origins in the confession of Simon Peter, its experience is reflected much mo...