• Sermon preached for St Mungo – 13 January 2013

    I have to confess that for most of my life I did not give St Mungo much of passing thought. I certainly encountered him when I was in primary school up the road in that I remember a wonderful Primary 5 teacher in Bearsden making us do a project on the great urban conurbation that we were living so close by. The topic was Glasgow and thus we all had to draw our own version of the city crest – the bird, the tree, the bell and the fish – each representative of miracles in the lives of our patron saint.

    After that I didn’t think of him again until a couple of years ago. During the time after Bishop Idris had retired and before Bishop Gregor started, there was a period of time when there was no bishop around to go to civic events. These ended up being divvied up between the Dean and the Provost and perhaps the Synod Clerk, to ensure that the Episcopal Church was represented at events which needed a bigwig.

    I don’t know what I expected when I entered the ordained ministry of the church. I certainly didn’t expect to be a stand-in part-time bigwig going to events like that.

    However, it can be fun – so long as you learn to smile and nod a lot you go far (more…)

8 responses to “Mitre over the parapet moments”

  1. Kimberly Avatar

    Thanks for linking +David’s post. I’d read it, and the first few comments, but missed that later discussion. It represents a new level of blog dialogue in the SEC, I think.

  2. Rev Ruth Avatar

    Who’ll be next, do you think?

  3.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Thanks for the episcopal summary – I take back my previous criticisms about the bishops. They are being rather splendidly thoughtful at the moment. As was Archbish Sentamu on Radio 4’s question time 🙂

  4. bishop david Avatar

    Kelvin – thanks for your linking and attention-drawing activities. It’s hard not to be aware that there is a common thread linking all of those ‘over the parapet’ contributions – which is that the tone of recent contributions from our Catholic colleagues has been unfortunate. But now that we seem to have some momentum, I hope we can move on to be a bit more successful at shaping an agenda rather than simply responding to others.

  5. Duncan Avatar

    What’s the clergy equivalent of a mitre over the parapet?

    A biretta over the altar?

  6. Stewart Avatar

    …only when it is snowing!!

  7. kelvin Avatar

    I can see snow on Cruachan. Birettas may be worn.

    (See number 79 of my 100 things if you’ve no idea what Stewart is alluding to).

  8. Phil Avatar
    Phil

    I am afraid the discussion with +David on his blog came to a sad end….have another look!

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