The green fire

The green fire is spreading up the hillside, but it has not reached me yet.In this latest of years I have been watching hopefully as the fuse first lit down at the coast has been edging slowly but firmly up and up, in and in. Now the valleys are blazing with new grass, budding hawthorn, and black ash buds.

Not here, not yet. Soon though. There are signs of its coming. Buds not yet broken are still swelling. A sudden riot of coltsfoot and celandine has broken out. Not the green, however, not yet. Not that sudden lushness all over the fields and hedgerows that means spring feeding, and lushness and the renewal of life is here.

Put not your trust in Traveline

It is delightful to have a Scottish travel card and to be able to use buses for free. when I had a meeting of the Scottish Episcopal Historians group in Dundee on Saturday starting at 11 am I decided that economy and ecology dictated using the bus.

Accordingly I spent some time researching times and buses on the Traveline website, which is very clunky indeed to use, as every place has to be verified. When I type ‘Buchanan Street Bus Station, Glasgow’ do I indeed mean Glasgow City? Er, yes. I was very careful to put the right date, as Saturday buses can be different. With a sinking heart I realised that in order to go by bus I would need to leave the house at ten to seven in the morning, which meant starting on the animal work at ten to six, and therefore, allowing for some organising and stretching, waking up at half past five. Driving meant leaving at 8.30 and therefore rising at a civilised seven. Still …

I booked the 8.30 bus form Glasgow and resigned myself to catching the 7.30 from Kilmarnock.

I drove to Kilmarnock. I parked. I waited for the bus, which did not come. I checked the bus stop paper-behind-glass timetable, and it appeared that on Saturdays there was no 7.30 bus. The next one would make me miss the connection I had booked. I therefore got in my car and drive to the nearest park and ride, and tried to catch the underground – the train left just as I arrived, and the next one was ten minutes later, and it got me to the bus station just in time to see my bus departing. Had I only driven straight to the park and ride I would have been in plenty of time. Still …

I enquired when the next bus would get me to Dundee – and the next bus was fully booked – bus travel would now get me there horribly late. ‘This happens all the time with Traveline…’ sighed the girl behind the counter.

Having now wasted a fiver, I went back to my car and began the drive to Dundee. It was expensive and wasteful and I had now been travelling for nearly two hours.  Still …

I got to Dundee just before 11. I had sat nav. I got to a roundabout just in front of my destination. It was utterly shut. I could not turn left. There was no indication of how one might later turn left, where there were endless obstructions.  In vain I sought a way – my poor sat nav did not understand and endlessly tried to re-route me to the roundabout. I sought to climb above it so as to drop down. The sat nav offered bus routes, and pedestrianised streets. On and on I drove.  My desperation increased. Finally, I managed to climb and fall slowly down to my destination, where I finally arrived at ten to twelve.  I had been travelling for five hours. The bus should have taken an hour less and driving should have taken a little over two. Gentle reader, put not your trust in Traveline…

Frog-off

It is one of the definitive points of the year for me – the most distinctive sound of, well, not quite spring, but pre-spring. A moment from which there is no turning back, on the path to spring, but not quite spring. It usually comes in February or March, and if March then in very early March.

It is the moment I first hear the mating call of the male frogs, or as I privately call it, frog-off.  This year I heard it for the first time last night – 11 April.  that is about a month late. Still, it is a happy sound, a positive sound. It is the most joyful of sounds.

Happiness is a warm hosepipe

The hosepipe was limp and warm in my hand this morning, which was a first since some time in February. Upland Ayrshire has not been exempt from the cold weather that has frozen the UK for the last month. The hosepipe has been stiff and cold.

The truth is that we have neither had the coldest conditions not the warmest. We have had snow, and one day thanks to drifts I was snowed it – and the drifts have only just thawed, though it was tiny frozen rumps that were left, like melted snowmen.

It has been the mis-match with the light which has been most strange. Some of the usual spring events are triggered by light. The geese, for instance, have been laying since February, and one is now sitting, and the curlews have arrived, poor things. Dear knows how they have managed to keep themselves fed, because the ground has been frozen solid, and I should not think they could have got their beaks in even in the ditch edges. The pied wagtails are here too, to breed. But the tits all fled, despite fat balls to feed them. It was just too cold, and they went further down the hill side.

There are, as yet, no frogs, and most of the time the pond has been frozen solid. However, the heron has arrived to frog, so I suspect she thinks things are stirring, and the pond is now thawed, because the nights have only been down to minus two, and the days up to a giddy 6 or 7.

Plant life has pretty solidly followed temperatures, and interestingly so have the guinea fowl, who have not yet laid an egg (I kept them in for a few days, to be certain of this. They were not amused …). The fields, not just mine, but all around, are bare and grey and brown. At the very best it will be another month before there is any grass at all, even if this week we get the few days of mild wet weather we so badly need.

This weather doubles, perhaps trebles, my work load. I am still damping hay for the ponies, and the poultry get little supplement from either insects or plants.  The sheep cannot be safely left out, and need to come in at night, and need to be fed hay and ‘cake’ (sheep muesli), and got buckets of water.  I am not alone in having extra work and expense, but I and the thousands in the same boat will not half be glad to see a real spring.

Joy, real simply joy

The small boy, the tiny boy, set off across the grass towards the duckpond, and I lumbered after him, retrieving him before he hurtled into the icy water. Scotland was not warm this Easter Monday. ‘Small children have such joy,’ I remarked to my companion. ‘Before life knocks it out of them’ she rejoined a little gloomily.

And suddenly I knew the answer – not to the Universe, which I already knew to be 42. Rather to the question posed earlier. The question of why I gave up good sleep on Easter Sunday, and appeared somewhat dozy at lunch when I could just have had a leisurely breakfast and really enjoyed the day.

There is not one simple answer to be given, but try this for size. I went to that place, a place some 22 miles from where I live, at that time, seven am,  and after feeding my livestock, and walking the dog, and on the morning the clocks changed, I went there because I knew that there I would find adults showing every sign of just that same joy in being. That is a very precious thing.

Turning off King Lear

Slowly it dawns on me that my friends who are outside the church tend to think that Maundy Thursday and Good Friday services are in the nature of theatrical performances, something to which I go so that I can enjoy them.

It is certainly true that I would not miss them unless I really had to.  Also, that they are highly theatrical. They are not so much a matter of intellectual as visceral impact. On Thursday, the beauty and the seriousness of remembering that first giving of the body and the blood. The foot washing, graciousness given and received, an assurance of acceptance, of essential equality, an embracing care. Then as the mood changes, a kind of desperation, an anger, in the stripping of the church of every nice thing, every beautiful thing. Then the procession of the sacrament to Gethsemane, where Jesus prepares himself to be faithful to the bitter end, and faces just how bitter that end will be. The clergy and servers arrive and prostrate themselves. Somehow this is unbearably moving, the more so as some of the brightest and best people I know are lying face down in humility and adoration before a young man in an agony of fear.

And the wait, the long wait until midnight, often in tears again, in silence, separate yet together, as the church slowly chills, waiting until the last of the sacrament is consumed and Jesus, so invariably there until now, is suddenly not, and there is no comfort, no hope and we all leave, in silence and utter loneliness.

And the next day, that Friday we dare to call good, when we sit and remember just how low human kind can sink, and what brutality they can perpetrate, and how many suffer, and how God suffers in them. And we ask ourselves how far, and what, we are doing to stop the suffering, and the answer is not comforting. It is the bleakest day of the year.

My outside-church friends think I go to it as the kind of catharsis one gets form watching King Lear. There is a degree of truth in that, in so far as a great deal of planning goes on to ensure that people CAN get to experience all that.  And also because something like washing the feet of upwards of a hundred people takes a bit of managing in the bowls, warm water and towels department if things are not to go on past midnight after all.

But the difference is this. King Lear never lived, and Cordelia never died. If Lear gets too much you can bring it down to size by choosing to remember this. But Jesus was real and he did die. And today, out there, people are still tortured, and Syria is a bloody mess, and little girls are shot to daring to make their voices heard and wanting an education, and sitting thinking about it all is really really hard.

And you cannot turn any of it off by reminding yourself it is make-believe.

 

Isaac Poobalan – real Christianity and real Islam

I do not really understand the pleasures of prejudice. I was brought up to detest it, and the enduring legacy that my difficult, demanding, unsatisfied father gave me was a conviction that other people are interesting and  approachable. A rock solid belief that it is going to be rewarding for both me and them if we meet as equals. I never realised just what a wonderful lesson and legacy this was until I got out into a world where people do not merely judge others, but pre-judge them based on a position of total ignorance about what they believe and what they stand for.

 

I am not alone in my conviction that we need to encounter others as real people, because the really-rather-wonderful Isaac Poobalan of  St John’s Episcopal Church in Aberdeen has been encountering real people. He encountered real people praying in the cold and he thought they would be better off praying inside his church in the warm.

 

The result has been warm congratulations from thinking, feeling people, and a storm of abuse from those who prefer the pleasures of prejudice. Because those he encountered praying were not Christian but belonged to one of the worlds other great monotheisms, Islam.

 

It appears that those attacking the Rev’d Poobalan are utterly ignorant of Islam. This is not the time nor yet the place, and I am not the person, to give you a full account of a noble religion, but let us deal with a few misconceptions. Allah is not a moon-god. He is the One True God that Christians love and try to follow. Islam does not believe that women should be oppressed and subjugated and denied an education, although regrettably a minority of its followers in unenlightened cultures do think that – and before we get sniffy about that we might stop and consider the really vile things a minority of Christians in our own country appear to believe. Not to mention the fact that our sister church in England still does not allow women to become bishops, and has just enthroned a man who still does not believe God blesses gay relationships despite what he admits is the evidence of his own eyes. But I digress.

 

Islam has as an utter key-stone the need to give to and support the poor, in a way that Christianity at its worse (though not at its best) simply ignores. Islam is to its core a generous faith. At times in history it was Islam which kept the light of learning alive, and the scholarship it promoted in science has left every one of us an important legacy. Indeed, the legacy of Islam in opening Western minds to the possibilities of creating clean, safe cities is also remarkable. Islamic states had them and we did not.

 

Never the less, a number of incredibly stupid people (have I offended them? Oh GOOD) have attacked Isaac through Facebook for his enlightened, sensible and utterly Christian stance. Our faith, too, is about generosity – about meeting people where they are and quietly, and for no ulterior motive, seeking to be of service to them. I just hope Isaac knows how many more people support him to the hilt.