Storyteller’s World

I had a phone call offering me a gig telling stories to adults at a social event in the autumn.

And had to refuse.

It’s the evening of the day Li is getting married. I don’t suppose it would be too popular in family circles if I ducked out of the reception and the bride’s father’s speech because I was telling stories to some other group of people Out East.

Darn.

One or two people have kindly noticed I haven’t blogged much this month, and asked if I was OK? Or, as Sun put it, in the way that only a daughter can, “You haven’t been writing much in your blog recently. I was beginning to wonder if you were dead or something.”

It’s true, I’ve been taking a bit of a break from blogging. And here’s why:

1. I just haven’t been feeling inspired.
2. I was painfully conscious that the quality of what I was writing wasn’t up to the standard I hoped for. (Though this is true quite a lot of the time. You’ve got to take the rough with the smooth in blogging, you can’t be Shakespeare - or even Samuel Pepys - all the time.)
3. I’ve been overwhelmed with extra work.

   This is how it happened. A few years ago, when I was still Area Dean, I took three months’ sabbatical and a neighbouring incumbent covered for me as Acting Area Dean. When I stepped down the following year, at the end of my five-year stint, the Bishop appointed her as Area Dean in my place. She’s now taking a sabbatical in her turn, so I’m returning the favour of deputizing for her in her absence.

   The trouble is, the job has got bigger in the mean time. The diocesan senior staff now intend that the deanery should play more of a key role in strategic planning and mission. (I have my reservations about this. No one has asked the parishes what they think about it, and we’re the people who are paying the piper, for goodness sake.) But one result of this new role, is that the Area Dean is being included in the selection process for new incumbents. (Again, no one has asked the parishes or chapter their view on this: it would make you a lot more careful about who you nominate as Area Dean when the Bishop consults.) We currently have two parishes vacant in the deanery which I will be involved in filling, and a third on the way. The first to come up is very attractive, and there were 48 applicants. It took a whole afternoon and morning to read their papers, and then a two hour meeting to shortlist them to six for interviewing. The interviews take place next week, and that will take a whole, I imagine pretty exhausting, day. Don’t expect much blogging about that.

   (This whole paragraph probably contravenes my own Blogging Guidelines. So please ignore.)

4. Last reason: Following my Lenten revelations, which I probably didn’t describe too well for the same sort of reason as St Paul was reticent about some of the things God told him, I got cold feet about some of my blogging. Has it been for me a seductive waste of time? What about what I’m really called to do?

So, while the soul-searching goes on, there may be the odd day - or even week - when this all gets a bit thin. Ora pro nobis, and all that.

The Observer’s new campaign with Amnesty International to free the internet.

Visit the site at irrepressible.info.

Here’s a sample:

Am I the only person who thinks this is like the medieval canard about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or am I missing something that’s blindingly obvious to everyone else?

Of course no one knows how many illegal immigrants there are in the country. If they did know, they would know who and where they were and would be able to do something about it.

This really is not a sensible stick to beat the Government with. God knows there are enough of those lying around (failing to keep their promises about education, university tuition fees, Iraq, tax laws that still favour the rich…)

But I suppose it would be too much to expect an Eton boy to spot any of those.

I never cease to be amazed that any time there’s some real drama in the parish, I always miss being an eye-witness to it. In fact, it would be fair to say that the Vicar is usually the last person to know when anything interesting happens.

One evening last week there was a police chase and road block in the village, ostensibly to catch a drunk driver. It sounds as if the car was trying to get onto the northern bypass and took a wrong turn up the lane which used to join the bypass, but has long since been sealed off. When it turned back, it found its two possible exit roads blocked by pursuing police cars.

The police then proceeded, with a lot of shouting, to arrest the men in the car, who were armed with machetes and a hand gun - apparently common equipment that young men take with them nowadays when they go to the pub for an evening’s drinking. For self defence, it goes without saying, in case they are attacked by evil and violent fellow-citizens. One of the neighbours relates that the police smashed a car window with a crowbar, injuring one of the occupants with broken glass. (Another version says the said occupant was hit on the head with the crowbar.) The police then knocked on the neighbour’s door asking for a bucket of water to wash away the shed blood.

Clearly this is one of those stories which becomes wonderfully enhanced with successive tellings. The initial four police cars involved had grown in number to something nearer twenty, in the last version I heard. It still wasn’t enough for me to have heard or seen anything of it. We were probably in the back of the vicarage watching CSI at the time…

“An evening of programmes on the conspiracy theory that threatens the Christian Church.”

Hmm.

Ever been to one of those in-service-training days, where you can’t remember why you signed up for it months ago when the bumph came round, but it seemed like a good idea at the time? I went to one of those today, on the Book of Common Prayer: A Liturgy for the 21st Century.

Actually, it had its fascinating moments, and a good lot of participants: people who would not necessarily choose the BCP as their own favourite style of worship, but who find themselves ministering in parishes where that’s what the congregation wants, so they have to learn to deliver it, and if possible, love it. (It works so much better, if the leader is enjoying it. A whole lot better than when the leader is hating every minute of it, and thinking how boring and irrelevant it all is.)

And then there were the moments when one of the input providers seemed to be squaring up for some kind of a fight the whole time: a fight that no one there was even trying to get into. This is an entertaining spectacle, something like watching an elephant inviting passers-by to get into a punt with it.

‘The Stoics had the right idea,’ Gus resumed. ‘Trouble with this age is it’s got hold of the crackpot notion you can do away with suffering. Jeffries and his type are responsible for that kind of babyish attitude. Someone says, “Help, help, it hurts,” and they hand out a bloody drug, and say, “There, there, this’ll make it better.” That’s sticking-plaster mentality. It doesn’t make the bloody awfulness go away. It just covers it up. Pathology. The logos of suffering, or the word on suffering. Well, the “word” on suffering is it has to be bloody well suffered, not covered up.’

From Salley Vickers, The Other Side of You

Storytelling Quote of the Day:

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales.
If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales.

Albert Einstein, quoted in the latest issue of Facts and Fiction

Quote for the day:

Churches don’t need new members half so much as they need the old bunch made over.

Billy Sunday, 1862-1935