Available Light

  This is a sign in the door of a café in Finisterre. Finisterre means "The End of the Earth", so it's a kind of joke: the Restaurant At The End Of The Universe - Douglas Adams! Geddit? ...Oh never mind. Anyway, when I got to this place the café was closed, and had a sign on the door to say precisely that, but unless you read a little Spanish you might still try the door. That's the thing about signs: they are one dimensional and depend, for their effectiveness in communicating information, on a commonality of understanding between signer and signee. All across Spain we blissfully entered museums by the wrong doors, parked in the wrong places and queued at the wrong ticket windows because our commonality of understanding was somewhat impaired.  But there were other signs we encountered that didn't depend on language.  Like this one for instance.  Walking past this little chapel, on a mountainside at sunrise, I didn't have to ask what kind of building it was. B...

On Wednesdays we have a Eucharist in the office. Anybody who wants to come is welcome to join us, but mostly it is just Ginny, Debbie, Alec and me. Today I was a minute or two early. I sat at the low round table,where the wine and the bread had been placed amongst the pamphlets and educational brochures, and flicked idly through the prayer book I had taken at random from the box. I realised that this was one of my own - or to be honest, one of Clemency's - that had somehow got mixed into the office stock. It looked like it had hardly ever been used, but tucked into the funeral service was a little sheaf of papers: my notes from a funeral I had conducted in Hamilton in 1994. 22 years ago a baby had died. She was only 18 days old. There was an outline of the eulogy I delivered, and the name of the hymn we sang. There was a sheet taken from a letter pad on which I had made notes during my conversation with her family. And there was another sheet, written in an unfamiliar woman...

I am not sure how many people were at the Eucharist yesterday morning, but there were several hundred people in their teens and early twenties seated in the aisles and ranged around the back and sides of the congregation. We bishops sat on a pedestal at the front in our layers of red and white 17th century clothing while the Fijian sun beat down on us. The rest of the people, apart from the young people at the sides and back that is, were shaded under the several peaks of a marquee. About half an hour into the service a merciful breeze sprang up and I could see the thunderheads gathering in the sky behind us. I waited for the rain but apart from a few very unenthusiastic and half hearted grumbles of thunder it failed entirely to show. Bishop Gabriel Sharma told me later that he had prayed that the rain would stay off until after 1 pm, and it seems that, as in pretty much everything else in the planning and conduct of the service, The Lord was listening to him. It was one of the most p...

I finish as Vicar of St. John's Roslyn this Thursday, so today was my last Sunday. I was awake at 4:30 am, so had no bother being on time for the 8:00 am Eucharist . I wasn't very pleased with the way my sermon went at the early service: it seemed more like something for starting the next chapter rather than finishing this one; so between the services I swapped it for something else. Just before 10 I gathered with the choir for the last time and said my vestry prayer, then, also for the last time walked down the aisle as Vicar of St. John's. Or as Vicar of anywhere as a matter of fact. It's been 11 quick watch us as we zip past so darned fast you won't see us unless you're very sharp years here in Roslyn. But it's been 28 years since I first walked down an aisle as the Vicar of somewhere else. Half my life, more or less. Today we had two visitors, so I knew who the other 162 people were although that didn't stop me having a couple of mental blocks re...