Liturgy for St Anthony's Day

Archdruid: Peace be with you.

All: Sorry, Eileen, we've lost our service sheets. Any ideas?

Archdruid: Nah, forget it. They'll probably turn up when we least expect it.

Those Obvious Scams in Full

They started in the days of folklore, and went on to faxlore. And now they're Facebook lore. I refer, of course, to those scare stories that tell us to be careful of stuff that isn't really a threat.

The trouble is, they're so plausible. You read them, and they sound about right - so you resolve never to open an email that has the subject "Dear Mum, why on earth are you not reading my messages?" because they might be from your Son, trying to con you out of twenty quid to go to the White Horse.

But here's a quick roundup of all those current scams. Don't be fooled!

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People are running around Milton Keynes carrying dustbins. They ask if you can check your hat size. If you take your hat off, they shove the dustbin over your head and run off with your hat. This happened to a friend of my cousin's in Furzton. Don't lose your hat!

If you take out a mortgage with a bank, they will expect you to pay the interest every month. They are trying to make a profit. They are not, as they pretend, just there to help you own a house.

If you see a large thermometer outside a church, they will be trying to raise money to keep the building up. They are not telling you the temperature - it's not that cold.

When vicars say in sermons that something is true "in a very real sense", they don't really mean it. It's not true at all. Or, at least, not in a real sense. If you're not careful you could end up believing in things that the vicar doesn't.

The line "over the mountains and the sea, your river runs with love for me" was written by global-warming scientists trying to panic the public. There are no rivers running over the mountains and the sea. There may be a river running through the valleys and over the fields, but this is less alarming - at least in a rainy winter.

When somebody phones up, giving large number of details about your upbringing, knowing all about you and saying they're your mother - it's probably your mother. Be very careful.

Anyone who says "that's how I roll" is unlikely to be capable of rotary motion. They are almost certainly square.

People standing in the town centre with a sign saying "Can we pray for you?" will pray for you if you ask them to. They're ruthless like that.

An insurance company is going round, cleverly getting money out of people who think they are contributing to bereaved Caledonian woman. Don't be fooled into thinking Scottish Widows are a charity.

Don't let the poor spelling deceive you. Stationery shops never go anywhere.

If you see a man with a shiny face telling you his banks have lost all their money and you have to help pay it back, he's the Prime Minister. You have little choice for the time being.

The CIA is spying on all of us through listening devices cunningly hidden as daffodils. Take no chances. Dig up all your daffodils. I did, and I know the CIA aren't bugging me in the spring anymore. Because they were all, in fact, daffodils. But I feel much safer knowing that.

If you are approached in the street by somebody saying  he's a Freemason, and can he take a photograph of your bottom - run away.  He just wants to take a photograph of your bottom, and the freemasonry is a diversion.

If you come across a large building called "Tesco", they will lure you in with shelves full of food. But you will be expected to pay for it when you leave. Do not be suckered in.

Don't let so-called "postmen" put letters through your letter box. They're doing it for the money.

If you receive an email from me, saying I've got a load of money from a Nigerian dictator, please send the cheque to "Archdruid Eileen, The Great House, Husborne Crawley, Beds."

If you receive an email from someone saying that they're a conman, and can they steal your money, don't reply. There's a good chance they're a conman who wants to steal your money.

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(And try not to fall for this scam that John the Lutheran has noted)

The whole series inspired by this from @TlfTravelAlerts

And here are some real scams, from the nearly-always-reliable Snopes.com

Quick "Rebecca" Joke

Last night, I dreamed of Mandalay again.

Due to a mis-reading of the brochure, that was the worst Cornish holiday I ever had. Burmese clotted cream is rubbish. And there's a limit to how much entertainment you can get out of watching flying fish.

The Apocalypse Unfolds on Social Media

People are inviting their friends to play the new "Armageddonville" game. Others wonder if they'll ever reach the last level of Candy Crush.

The #suppersready hash tag is popular among formerly long-haired clergy in their 50s.

Many people wonder what Michael Fish would be forecasting now

The "CityofBabylon" commerce website is showing a holding page. The merchants of the earth weep, for their courier networks are no more.

Police tweet - "Please do not report outbreaks of pestilence on Twitter."

The #uklocusts web page gets a record number of visits.

A picture of a sad cat in front of an exploding litter tray goes viral.

Richard Dawkins is telling us that it's still more likely to be a hallucination.

Spoof 4square accounts for Jesus are checking in all over the place.

It's generally agreed that the End of All Things isn't as impressive as the Opening Ceremony.

There is a Twitter storm as people demand the use of the correct term, "Equestrians of the Apocalypse".

The lower teenage reaches of an atheist teenage subredit is full of sniggers that "Whore of Babylon" sounds a bit rude.

#itoldyouso is trending.

John Prescott tweets to blame David Cameron, and says we'd have had 1,000 years of peace under Labour.

Ricky Gervais tweets respect for the One person who's clearly got a bigger ego than he has.

Numerous "God" and "Jesus" accounts are deleted. The owners wonder whether the heavenly cache will last longer than Google's.

Someone on Facebook posts a photo of herself and her family, afflicted with boils. It gets 87 "likes".

On Google Plus, someone wonders whether this is more like a Postmillennial or Amillennial of the Apocalypse. Nobody responds.

This is the way the world ends - not with a bang, but a Twitter.

Eating Mythical Apples

To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your labor pains; with pain you will give birth to children. You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you.”
But to Adam he said, “Because you obeyed your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground thanks to you; in painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life."
(Gen 3:16-17)

See, to me there's a bit of a problem with blaming all the destructive, apparently random stuff in the world on the Fall. If I were a Creationist, I'd not have this problem. But I want to have my 14 billion year old cake and eat its moral icing.

So you can't blame the physical and very historical matters of earthquakes and volcanoes and exploding stars on human disobedience, without dragging in some kind of retrospective quantum catastrophe which rewrote everything. And what kind of fool would do that?

But if that's the case, then what do we take from the story of the Fall? Because it's definitely a story worth working through. It has all those ingredients that are so popular in film and television in these troubled times - naked people, power struggles and talking animals. What's not to like?

I would like to note, in passing,  this article which postulates that it was maybe the Fall that cost humans their ability to synthesize Vitamin C. If we imagine the Eden story as factual historically and scientifically, I'd suggest the opposite - if Adam and Eve had working Vitamin C genes, they'd not have needed to eat any fruit in the first place, especially that fruit.

I guess I prefer to have a play with the idea of choice, human intelligence and the HPtFTU (let the reader understand). See, i reckon we had nettles, thistles and all other kinds of woe before any mythological First Lady was conned into eating any apples. Likewise earthquakes, tidal waves and - let's say it - death.

But something happened to us in evolution. Dunno when precisely - whether before Cro-Magnon or at the time the valley of the Neander was full of its eponymous folk. Our brains got big, and our hearts gained the ability to be warm, soft or hard according to how we decided. We found we could eat apples, or not according to choice. And if God told us not to, we could do it regardless - and then try and hide from God later. And if we decided to kill one another,  it wasn't just one of those unfortunate natural skirmishes. We'd deny it, or try and excuse it - I never did it. That herdsmen deserved it. He was different. Smug so and so.

And it wasn't that there were no nettles and thistles before, either. But to an animal, they're problems at just that one point in time - when you're pushing your way painfully through them. It's only we naked apes who worry about them in advance - who can feel anticipated pain. And of course, being naked apes, we knew all about it when pushing through thistles and brambles. And we're the ones who can anticipate the terrors of death, fear the pain of it before we know it for real, and wonder with hope and trembling what lies beyond it. It's not just that work is hard - what animal doesn't have a hard life? But we're the ones going to bed, knowing we've got to get up and face it again in the morning. We're the ones that can go home from work on a Friday, regretting that it all starts again on Monday.

But these amplified pains come with our unique joys - it's a package deal. Hope for years - and an eternity - to come. Pleasures we can work for - and the work itself can be a pleasure.

It was a double-edged sword, eating that apple - giving us the ability to use metaphors, but also to mix them. And those big brains that gave us choice and strategy came at a cost; as those upgraded skulls squeezed through the previous release of birth canal.

And always at the end of that glorious riot of choice, happiness and fear was death and futility - the waste of dreams and dissolution of those big brains. And those brains that let us love, also let us fear and mourn. And the snake - symbol of the eternity into which we are launched - looks like he's won.

But isn't that where God's other judgement comes in?

"And I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; her offspring will attack your head, and he will crush your head." (Gen 3:15)

But that's another whole story of choices, isn't it?

Quotations from the NET Bible

A deeper Logic behind the Experiment

In the Beginning was the Word.

And that Word was Logos in Greek. Which gives us the word Logic.

And the Logos created the earth, and everything else that goes with it, and holds it in place and goes on and on sustaining it. And the existence of this Logos isn't provable. And the reasonably decent fit of the universal constants that keep us all hanging around here instead of flying apart or smashing together isn't a proof of that Logos - but it's consistent with it. And the fact that it happens if there were a small Universe we would never be here, and if there much more Universe we'd never be here, and there's just about the right amount of Carbon and Oxygen knocking around to enable organic life - and the way things keep on going just the way they're going and it's all kind of predictable and comprehensible - that's not a proof of the Logos, but it's consistent with it.

And this universe may be predictable, but it's not totally nice. There's a chunk of sadness in a creation where to produce carbon-base lifeforms, a star has to die. There's a chunk of cosmic irony in the way that the origins of life on our little blue-green planet depend on the cataclysmic events of the earth - volcanoes, lightning and earthquakes - which deal both life and death. But all, still, with that coherent, faithful logic that holds the universe together and holds the stars in their courses.

And if that were that, as humans evolved the sense to ask the question - why is there something here, not nothing? - then the answer would probably be pretty stark. We are the lab rats of a cold, doomed universe - or, as Frankie Boyle put it, we're a bunch of monkeys clinging to a dying rock. We're the thrown-off debris of a cosmic experiment in beauty and terror. We're here to run through out mazes, while the one who set up the Great Experiment,  the one who makes the rules, inspects the notes on his clipboard and decides that the ones in the middle of the earth don't respond well to a lack of water.

But there's a story that goes, that the Word that holds the Universe together, decided to join the party. That the Logic behind the laws of nature made the rather odd decision to become subject to those laws. In a human body, the Logos joined those of us who grow, wonder at the world, try to understand it, suffer from some unexpected cataclysm - or just fall apart in the normal way. Not in the way that the Olympian gods would prance around, untouched and unharmed by the world. Not even the way Frankie and Benjy mouse hang around the lab, taking notes. No, the great Scientist became a genuine part of the experiment - the observer became the observed - a part of the trial.

And when that decision had been made, and the One who provides all logic became subject to the ones whose logic is all about power and fear, and he'd been in pain like we are, and thirsted like we do, and died like we do - that Logos showed us that there is a deeper logic. And it's a strange logic, that says that against all the one-way signs of entropy that show our world going from order to chaos, from Big Bang to long, slow, fizzle-out - while all nature dies, there's a hope beyond hope. One that says "Catch hold, and I'll pull you up. Cling on and I'll never let you go. Have patience, and I'm coming soon."

I've no idea how that final resolution will be - in this world when it is scoured by fire, folded like paper and laid out anew - when the dark, empty spaces and terrifying depths become the rolling plains of Eden. But it's enough for now to know that the Word's in it here with us - subject to his own deep logic, taking it all on and yet somehow holding it all up. And I'll wait for the day when the lion and the lamb lie down, and the light with which our faces shine is the light of reborn suns, shining with the light of the true Sun.

The Awdryite Guild

They are a little-understood group - some say they're the Anglican Opus Dei. Certainly, and probably with good reason, they are secretive. But their power within the Church of England, even at what seems to be their darkest time, is hard to imagine.

In many ways, the link between Anglican clergymen (I use the gendered term avisedly) and steam trains is easy to comprehend. An outdated concept, out of touch with modern technology and of no use to the present day, using obsolete terminology and achieving its ends inefficiently and unreliably -  and steam locomotives aren't much better than the Church of England. Do you know the distinction between a train and a locomotive, by the way? Use the terms interchangeably and someone will soon tell you the difference. You will also learn why, in some Iron-age languages, the words for "pedant" and "sacrificial victim" were the same.

The Awdryites accept three holy canons - the Bible, the BCP, and the "Thomas the Tank Engine" stories. Of these three, the greatest is Thomas. Their prophet is the Rev W Awdry himself, and his works are regarded as a coal-fired parable for the life lived well.

The Awdryites are an all-male, all-clergy group. In theory women are eligible to join. In practice none has ever tried. This is probably because of the world-view that Awbry presented. All the lead characters - the engines - are male. The passive, awkward coaches are female. The exemplars of feminine virtue on the island of Sodor are Annie and Clarabel - at their best when placidly going where they are told.

The meetings of the Awdryites are held, secretively, in Gothic railway station waiting rooms, during the day, when they hope nobody is looking. Each member of the "shed" is allotted the name of one of Thomas's friends - Henry, Douglas, whatever. They swear allegiance to the shadow figure known as the "Fat Controller", and vow that they will always be ready to help pull one another's burdens, and to oppose all rebellion by trucks.

Any member of the Awdryites that breaks one of the group's many, tedious rules is assigned the role of "Dirty Diesel". They are treated as a hissing and a byword until "The Great Western shall rise again".

At the end of each meeting of the Awdryites, Dr Beeching is burnt in effigy, while an uplifting Betjeman poem is read. They have long memories, the Awdryites.

However, the most controversial aspect of the Awdryites is the "Thomas Oath", featuring the line "I will strive to be a really useful engine, that at the end I may attain the heavenly sidings prepared for all tank engines." Some claim this is proof that the Awdryites believe in salvation through works. But others just say
that's the least of their problems.



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The Doomed Romance

If I'm a little shirty this morning, i hope you'll forgive me. It was a disturbed night. Even round here, it's unusual for me to be waken at 1am by a bunch of Beaker Folk with flaming torches, demanding we get in an exorcist immediately.

It was when Abelard went to bed last night. He says as he dried himself, shivering (I've switched the hot water off now we're past Beltane), he felt a presence in the room - from somewhere behind the wardrobe. Naturally he went straight down the White Horse for a restorative.  When he described his experience, Weird Erica from the village told him the history of the Great House.

Erica told him how, before Cromwell's men closed it down and gave it to my family, it had been a convent. And before it went single-sex, it had been - by a remarkable piece of historical coincidence - a coenobitic community - one with both monks and nuns.

Well, that was always going to cause trouble. It's bad enough with my bunch - and they don't take vows. Burton is, I assume, celibate but probably not through choice.  And a monk and a nun fell in love over the screen that was down the middle of the chapel, and their relationship bloomed right up to the point when Abbess Eileen caught them at it, one balmy day in the vineyard.

Naturally the Abbess acted severely.The monk had all his privileges cut off. And, if that were not punishment enough, he was bricked into the walls - just behind Abelard's wardrobe. The nun pleaded her belly, and after her confinement went on to be the mistress of Henry I. Their son was taken in by the Russell family of Woburn, married a daughter of that family, and his descendants (my ancestors) took the convent, in an ironic twist, at the Dissolution. The monk's spirit has hung around the place, keeping an eye on his descendants, ever since.

It's a lovely and touching story, spoiled only by being completely untrue. My great-grandad built the Great House after he made all that money in beetroot. Our connection with the Rusells consists of a random encounter between the"Randy Duke" and a milk maid in the 18th Century.

And the "Presence" behind the wardrobe turned out,  on investigation, to be a badger on the lawn outside. The speed the Beaker Folk went off, you'd think they'd have preferred a ghostly monk.

Speak like a Clergy

It's one of those things we always celebrate at the Beaker Folk - the great richness of our English accents.

Indeed, we sit on one of the great accent divides - between the Cockney tribes  to our south and the East English accents to the North and East of us.

But there is one way of speaking that manages a remarkable consistency across great swathes of our green and yellow land. I refer, of course,  to the Clergy Voice.

You may at this time be considering a career as a Clergy.  Or perhaps you already are a Clergy, but had the misfortune to be born Northern or Brummy. Or possibly you are a notorious con-person, needing to impersonate an Archdeacon in order to swindle some pearls out of a Duchess. Whichever it is, you will need to sound like a convincing Clergy to succeed.  And I'm pleased to say I can share the following tips with you.

Emphasis is all-important. Any fool can manage an approximation to Received Pronunciation, but that just identifies you as a member of the down-at-heel Posh Classes.

What makes the real difference is emphasis.

Read that last sentence out loud to yourself,  as follows: let the tone of your voice rise on "makes" and "diff". Leave unduly long pauses after "makes" and "difference". Run "is" into "Emph". Stretch out "emph" as long as you can. It should now sound a bit like this.

What makes... the real dif-ference... is-emphfff-asis.

Try this two or three times.  If you are doing this on the train, it's about now that you will realise that you're alone in the carriage, and the carriage next door is really crowded. But if you're safely at home, you will be becoming aware that you sound a bit more like a Clergy.

Secondly, learn to identify those words that you can randomly emphasise - either in normal speech, in liturgy or when preaching. Words like "rejoice", "exalt" or "smote" should be shouted out as if they are printed in bold and small-caps. Get it right in church, and the old folk in the back row should rise about three inches into the air. At the other end of the scale, "lament", "repine" or "mourn" should generally die away to a quaver. But this is not an absolute rule! Suddenly shouting out "darkness", when the congregation are thinking that's more of a dying-away-to-a-quaver word, can elevate the back row even up to five or six inches.

If what you're saying has a series of monosyllabic words- you'll be reading from something here, as a Clergy would never normally average below about four syllables per word - try kind of singing it in a monotone. Particularly effective if you discover, to your joy, that there's a "repent" to shout out at the end of the sentence.

And don't forget your "r"s. Any word beginning with an "r" should be rrrrrrolled out as long as you can. Gives a rrrrrremarkable rrrrrrhetorical rrrroundness.

Should you have followed my instructions, you should now be sounding like an authentic country or small-town Clergy. But maybe this isn't enough for you? Maybe you aspire to being the Clergy of a well-heeled trendy suburban evangelical church? In that case, just follow this one easy step. Go to Eton.

Even St Paul would have had Second Thoughts

There is that whole weird thing when you look back and think - how did we get from where we were, to where we are?

It was Eddie Izzard,  I think - and if not then it was someone who shared the same dressmaker - who said Christianity started with Jesus, all relaxed and groovy - and after 2,000 years we've managed to boil it down to mumbling in dark buildings. And you can see his point.

I mean, if at any point it had occurred to Jesus that one of the results of his life on earth would be the witch crazes of early Modern Europe, it makes you wonder what he would have thought. Maybe he would have failed to comprehend how anyone could have got from a message of radical love.

And if St Paul had been granted just one glimpse of the future...

"Dear Corinthians

Just another little note.  I was just picking the lice out of my beard this morning, when I was lifted up in a vision.

I saw what seemed to be a church, but- and I speak of mysteries here - that church met in a house where nobody lived. And on the walls of the house there were smooth stones. And on these stones were written the names of dead people who, while they were alive, were the richest people in their town.

And they were singing a lively song. And it was revealed to me - although I understand not their Germanic tongue - that the song was called "Lord of the Dance."

Sometimes, O Corinthians, I wonder if it's all worth it. Is the Olympian pantheon really all that bad?"

Labyrinth Retreat News

Please note we have extended our much-loved Labyrinth Retreat.

For the time being, we're just saying another two days. But that's really for guidance. We'll only really know when they find their way out.