Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Bliss!

Easter Sermon 2014

Picture the last supper. You are Jesus. Around the table are the motley crew of people who have attached themselves to you. Maybe you don’t like some of them. Maybe they’re not all that keen on you, but something makes them stick. You know that some of them plot behind your back. You know that some of them jostle for the place of deputy. Some of them have mammies and possibly daddies who are not above trying to get favours for their little darlings. They say one thing to your face, and something else behind your back. Some of them do the dirty on you. And all of them dissolve into thin air when the going gets tough. There is something of Satan in them all.

This, girls and boys, is us. In a few minutes time we will kneel at the altar and share in the holy mysteries. Next to you will be someone in one or more of those categories—and so are you.

Get over it. Getting over it is resurrection.

Forgiveness is resurrection. Put the past behind you. Don’t forget, but rather learn from whatever happened. If we do not forgive, we hurt ourselves more than we hurt the person we think has offended us.

Imagination is resurrection. Think how things could be better. Think what might increase the amount of delight in the world and work for it. Work, that is, from where we are, not from where we would like to be, or where we used to be. This means beginning by taking stock of reality.

Breaking down barriers is resurrection. We spend our lives building our own tombs, constructing them from the inside.

• We’re careful about how we seem to our friends – Facebook is designed for life in the tombs.
• We’re careful not to think too much or too deeply about anything, especially about ourselves and who we are.
• We’re careful not to say too much or to show our thoughts.
• We kid ourselves that we’re making ourselves safe as we build our tomb stone by stone. Stones of possessions, attitudes, notions, postures, bank balances, club memberships, prejudices. Then when we put the last stone in place, we reach that moment when we feel completely safe. Smug. We cut out the last ray of light from the outside, and we sit in the artificial light of the windowless room. There we stay, physically alive and spiritually dead.
• We shut ourselves off from life and from the Divine. We inclose ourselves in our own fat. We are so careful about controlling our lives that we exclude everything and everybody.

Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. Two different sorts of life: one risk free but spiritually dead, the other vulnerable and risky but alive. Like standing on the top of Everest and shouting ‘I’m alive, I’m alive, I’m alive!’ This is the real me living life to the full.

Resurrection is about breaking down barriers. The chick smashes its way through the shell. Nobody can see the light if you hide it. Nobody can see it unless you smash the pot it’s in. As we demolish barriers, we will feel vulnerable. When we are most vulnerable we are most in touch with, and completely safe in, the Divine. Some of you think I talk too much about death. That pleases me, for the main job of the priest is to prepare people for death. It’s good to get to the end of life feeling that it’s been one hell of a ride.

And that’s perhaps the best way of looking at resurrection: making life one hell of a ride. A very happy Easter to you all.

People from three C of I dioceses met today at the Emmaus Centre in Swords, County Dublin, to discuss sexuality. I’m not sure why. Simply exchanging views perhaps. The dioceses involved were Connor (north-east Ulster including much of Belfast), Kilmore, Elphin & Ardagh (north central Ireland including Cavan and Sligo) and this diocese (the ‘sunny’ south east). There was a wide spread of opinion, since it’s a fairly reliable rule of thumb that in the C of I south is liberal and north conservative. Here are some thoughts.

• Some people don’t believe in evolution, one giving as justification the ‘fact’ we don’t have tails. He was serious. Does he know that at a certain stage of embryonic development, we do have tails?
• Some think the Bible to have been ‘written by God’.
• Some take the first creation story literally: ‘Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve’ – yes someone actually said that, but are silent about whether Adam was one rib short after surgery.
• One person was ignorant of the facts of biology and was determined to remain so. I enjoyed, though, discussing with a farmer the ways that cows and bulls play with each other’s genitals.
• Many felt that of St Paul’s list of sins in 1 Corinthians 6, one—homosexuality (a dubious translation but the one that was used)—should be taken seriously, while others could be glossed over. This is probably just as well since the list includes greed, and there were plenty posh cars in the car park and fat people in the room. As for others on Paul’s list, for robbers think bankers and for slanderers think gossiping after services. And as for church members resorting to law to settle disputes, which Paul hammers, you wouldn’t believe what goes on if I told you.

The conference took place on the day gay marriage became legal in England and Wales. The Bishop of Buckingham, a courageous man, is reported as having said that several English bishops are in civil partnerships, but have not admitted it publicly. So much for honesty there.

Members of the Church of Ireland have a choice. They could continue as now, some of them convinced that they alone know the mind of God, and spitting venom at people who disagree with them. Or they could accept that there will never be agreement, that what consenting adults do with their bodies to express loving and faithful commitment is no business of anyone but those involved, and deal instead with stuff that really matters: economic evil, exploitation, greed, avarice, and spiritual wickedness in high places.

A day wasted, and at my age I can’t afford any more of them.

Bohr and Einstein

Nigel and I were discussing spooky events. He was telling me that people he once knew popped into his mind for no apparent reason, and shortly afterwards he heard that they’d died. I was remarking on how often I’d felt compelled to contact people who came into my mind, only to find that they were having a really tough time. This was particularly so for family members.

Normal electrical activity in the brain influences the environment to the extent that if you put electrodes on someone’s head, you can pick up brain waves more than 5 mm away. So, if someone is experiencing extreme emotions, could it be possible for the intense electrical brain activity to affect the physical environment? Does this account for poltergeist activity?

I’ve never knowingly encountered poltergeist activity, even though I’m convinced things move after I’ve put them down, but I’ve listened to several people who witnessed such phenomena and whose word or sanity I have no reason to doubt.

What’s occurin’?

Imagine two particles (electrons, say) from same source. Now let them be separated by a large distance. If the ‘spin’ of one of them is changed, the ‘spin’ of the other changes—even though the particles are so far apart that any information passing from one to the other would need to travel faster than the speed of light. You might say it would have to travel infinitely fast.

Quantum physics demands phenomena like this that operate external to time (e-ternal, ec-stasis), or at least ignore time as they ignore distance. Niels Bohr, one of the developers of quantum theory, is reputed to have said ‘anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it’.

Can anyone understand what’s going on?

If all humans came from one, or a few, ancestors, then we share particles from the same source. The notion that what affects one affects all is then by no means unlikely. Every one of us carries around material from the primeval soup: nucleic acids, elements, electrons, quarks or whatever. The notion that what affects one affects all is then by no means unlikely. Perhaps this is why dogs know when you’re upset.

Think twice about swatting a fly: it might be intimately connected to you in ways that you can’t imagine.

Albert Einstein played the violin, and his cousin Alfred (a respected musician and musicologist) accompanied him on the piano. After one session, Alfred chided his cousin, saying ‘the trouble with you, Albert, is that you have no sense of time’. A good story, but piffle.

He’s been at too many synods

I’m in big trouble. One of my wardens sidled up to me just before a recent funeral, whispering into my ear out of the side of his mouth (as they do in County Laois) ‘People complain that you call the coffin “a box”.’

Guilty as charged.

I don’t think I’ve ever done a funeral without saying to the assembled worthies something like: ‘One day we’re all going to end up in a box like that [pointing at same], and we never know when. How do you want to be remembered? What do you want to see when you are forced to look into the mirror and see yourself as you really are? Now’s the time to live the rest of your life so that when that day comes you leave behind as few regrets and as little unfinished business as possible.’ A colleague calls it an altar call.

Anyhoo, back to the plot. Having heard the complaint and lodged it in my frontal cortex, a funny thing happens. Up to the pulpit, burble, burble, burble, and then out comes the word ‘box’. Just as usual. The thing that I don’t want to do is the very thing that I do. Ah well, I’m in good company. Is it a form of Tourette’s do you think?

Our house was centre left somewhere

I like the word box. It’s earthy. Box is what it is. You can take the lad out of the North but you can’t take the North out of the lad. I’m not a Yorkshireman, though many have called me so (they probably think all flat vowels signify Yorkshire whereas the Yorkshire accent is merely lazy, and no vowel is flatter than a Cumbrian vowel). That having been said, I must have been infected by Yorkshire to some extent since down at the bottom of the garden ‘when aa were a lad’ flowed the River Eden. This, one of the few substantial English rivers that flows north, emerges into daylight in Yorkshire, then travels the rest of its 70-odd miles through Westmorland and Cumberland, to the briny Solway.

It must have been this river that brought me one of the rare bits of Yarkshire wisdom. On Ilkley moor baht’at.

The salient points of this literary epic, be they noted, dear reader, are these: live, sex, die, box (implied), reused. We live, we reproduce, we die, we’re in the box, we’re in the food chain and round and round we go. Our molecules go back to chaos then to kosmos once more. The great cycle of life. The resurrection of the dead.

I’ll stick to box, I think. If people don’t like it, it’s their problem.