To have Holy Communion today is, perhaps, a ‘surprise’ to some, although I announced it last week to give you the opportunity of staying away if you so wished! I only say that because our Communion Service, although it’s the most important it is often the least attended in the whole month. I so appreciate all the work that the choir and our organist and choirmaster, Ian Mackrell have put into this. We are extremely fortunate to have someone of such calibre as Ian to help guide us through the next while. The choir have responded with their usual gusto and loyalty and to all of them, thank you.

Since around this time last year, we haven’t had it easy in the Parish. Deirdre’s death is still felt among us. And then poor Brian has had to undergo various hospital procedures which took him out of action. In and amongst all this we have had usual parish life, births deaths and marriages (two weddings last week) Confirmation and all that that entails - You know I actually baptised some of our young candidates we had this year – that’s a bit scary. My Father always said that it’s only when you baptise the children of those whom you baptised, does it hit you that time has gone by very quickly. But, as I said at the Easter Vestry, with all the ups and downs and just trying to keep the show on the road, we’ve ‘held our own’; ‘our own’ being the operative phrase!

On top of all the usual commotion, we have had to deal with a legal battle over what we always considered our car park across the road from the church. It perhaps would not be fair to comment on this case since we are having a Vestry meeting and they really need to be told all the details first, but perhaps I could tell you that our Court date was last Wednesday, 6^th June, and we did the Biblical thing in the sense that we settled out of court, officially the day before, on the Tuesday.

The Representative Church Body (the Church of Ireland’s HQ) didn’t want to know, the Bishop didn’t want to know and the Diocesan Office didn’t want to know! In fact, I’m going to tell you something. We were the plaintiffs, and the defendants, during all these proceedings contacted various personnel to sway them. Not least one of the people the defendant contacted was our Diocesan Secretary; not the bishop’s personal secretary, but the Secretary to the Diocese. During a phone call, not long ago, I learnt that the defendant had been in touch with diocesan secretary by phone. He quite rightly said that he wouldn’t act on anything over a phone conversation and asked would the defendant confirm the conversation in writing. The defendant did this and when the Diocesan Secretary told me all of this I asked him would he send me a copy of the letter that the defendant had sent him (are you still with me?). It was simply a letter confirming a conversation. The Diocesan Secretary wouldn’t give it to me!

I don’t know how much legal clout, if any, such a letter would hold, but it showed that our adversaries were prepared to contact anybody and everybody who they thought might help their cause and perhaps for us then to back down, presumably.

Perhaps it is all because of our friend Alan Abernethy, who is to be consecrated as Bishop of Connor on 29^th June next, that the role of a bishop and the diocese is very much on the forefront of my mind. Only a short time ago, many of us endured General Synod in Kilkenny in the Diocese of Cashel. My room overlooked a playing field where we once used to kick around a rugby ball in the old Kilkenny College grounds. It was great to be back, thirty years later (!) and there were some good times to be had, I have to admit, but it gave you another slant of the whole workings of the Church of Ireland. If you ever have read a C. of I. Gazette lately and all the riveting reports about General Synod, you’ll have heard about the long debate about so-called ‘proper’ representation from the different Dioceses of the Church of Ireland. Because of population trends, the Northern Dioceses, particularly Down and Dromore, are claiming that they should have more clergy at General Synod than anyone else. There are a hundred things I could say about this, but one thing I feel is this. It sounds terribly disloyal to Down and Dromore but to have nine more clergy from this Diocese at General Synod and less from everywhere else would be a nightmare. I voted against the motion, and with my voting card held high, I was in perfect eyeshot of our Bishop who, I found out afterwards was furious that the motion had been defeated. Thank God for small mercies!

But here we have it: Parish life with its rough and tumbles of real life, choirs and music, Baptisms, Confirmation, weddings and funerals; the coalface, as it were. (A certain clergyman I know who is going to be our Harvest Preacher this October always used to refer to himself as a ‘semi-detached’ member of the diocese, and now he feels a complete ‘Fully-detached’ member of the Diocese!)

And then there’s the Bishop, sitting in his office trying to think up some new schemes and ideas, and his Diocesan Secretary downstairs sitting patiently waiting to hear from him, and all the real work being done by the Diocesan staff. But two people who you think would work with you, but when it comes down to it, it seems that certain personnel in the office are actually working against you.

And then the General Synod which tries to keep the whole dynamic together, working as a complete whole.

I once purported, not long ago, that bishop’s should perhaps have a shelf-life. That after a number of years, they should be made to return to parish life; the kind of vocation that they were first called to. And I quoted the wonderful story of the former Archbishop of York who retired as Archbishop and became an ‘ordinary’ parish priest at the Church of St. Margaret in Ilkley, West Yorkshire. David Hope is his name, and I was kindly given his book which I am looking forward very much to reading it.

But now I think I have another condition of Bishophood! That bishops should only be made bishops when they have completed at least twenty years in parish ministry, i.e. real-life ministry!

‘The church’, as we know it, is a most peculiar animal. I wonder what our Lord and Saviour would say about it now. If we asked that question more often, perhaps we would have a church that would work the way it should.