I had been wondering how to use our new-found leathery friends in worship. Not least because we're not allowed to use them in any way - after checking with a few legal bodies, I've confirmed that we're not allowed to dunk them in fluorescent paint and switch on the UV lighting, no matter how attractive that would have made them look. No, making bats glow in the dark is always wrong. And, more pertinently perhaps, illegal. In fact, it's not even legal to own or sell dead bats (or any part thereof). So bang goes my idea for the Beaker Bazaar. And, of course, the spell in Macbeth is now an incitement to commit an offence.
So we've come up with quite a worship aid. We've adapted an ultrasonic detector to pick up their night-time squeakings, which we projected onto the Big Screen. It gives us a lovely visual aid and some of the more suggestible Beaker People are now busy trying to work out whether the bats are trying to tell us something.
And the good news is that in theory we are not interfering with the bats. I say "in theory". In fact, of course, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle tells us that the minute we start to measure them, we change them. I just hope that we can't be prosecuted at the quantum level.
I was prosecuted at the quantum level once, the rozers made the fundamental mistake of passing me through the bars of the cell, they knew I was running away but couldn't pin me down to cuff me.
ReplyDeleteThat must have grated, Steve! I bet you didn't know where you were. Or if you did, I bet you didn't know where you were going.
ReplyDeleteI have a Pentecostal friend whose church regularly showers its worshippers with angel feathers, gold dust and assorted (cut!) gems supposedly gifts from the Almighty. I sent a prayer complaint saying "How come all that falls in my church is bat droppings?" and was directed to the account of Canon Buckland who being shown the miracle of fresh martyrs blood reappearing on a cathedral floor licked it and declared it to be 'bat urine'
ReplyDeleteAs William Buckland is long dead there are creative possibilities here ripe for exploration.
Anonymous, I'd rush round to your friend's church with a sack. But since you're Anonymous there's little chance of knowing who your friend is. And I'm not going to hang around every Pentecostal church on the off chance. There's too many of them and they're too enthusiastic for me.
ReplyDeleteIt's a lottery this Pentecostal thing, you're just as likely to get 'slain in the Spirit' which is all very well in a deep carpeted USA church but in your village C of E with flagstone floors not so much fun.
ReplyDeleteThe nearest we've got is when the retired doctor's wife collapsed during a Christmas service and we rapidly discovered that box pews make extracting bodies difficult.
That was the Christmas when the lectionary had been left on last Sunday's page and the stand in vicar declaimed to the once a year assembled village,
"Woe to you brood of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the wrath to come?"
I was surprised that so many considered it the worst Christmas service that they'd ever been to; I thought the expression on the vicar's face was quite priceless as it slowly dawned on him that this wasn't precisely the Christmas message.