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Posted by husband November 19 2009 | Tags: power, training, vocation | |  I’ve been trying to write a blog about vocation, interference, arrogance, uninformed decisions relayed by third parties, complete lack of negotiation on the part of someone who does not know all the facts and can’t be bothered to find out. And then I gave up since saying what I actually think at the moment would probably not be politically advisable. I have therefore suppressed myself – at least a bit.
Back to Pink Floyd again: Dark Side of the Moon this time.
“I’ve always been mad,
I know I’ve been mad, like the most of us are…
very hard to explain why you’re mad,
even if you’re not mad…”
If accused of being mad, it’s just as hard to explain that you are not mad, since trying to prove it only underlines your need to prove you are not mad, which must mean you are mad.
This is directed at the C of E, not Coverdale Hall by the way. They’re mostly still wonderful.
Posted by admin November 12 2009 | Tags: trains, work | | I have perhaps already alluded to the logistical challenge of being a VFIT. Many people have jobs which take them away from home, and many of those have both partners doing full time jobs. So we are by no means unique. But VIT and I are renegotiating the way we interact with each other over diaries – it’s not easy but I think it will be OK. In fact I think it may end up better than before.
 A related aside: if there can be such a thing. The government is taking our local railway company back into public ownership on Friday night (the 13th…). I think that this will be a good thing, although it does mean new ties for the staff, new logos, trains and stations will need repainting again etc etc. But in case the new company decided to take away the online booking thing, I thought I should look up how much I have spent on train fares in the last 18 months. A shocking £12,690. I wonder how much of the next lot will be spent on new ties.
Posted by husband November 7 2009 | Tags: calling, spouse | | VIT is away on a retreat. (In a few weeks I’m going on a retreat too. Except that the dynamo that is leading it for our company says he does not “retreat” and so we are having a “Company Advance.”)
Anyway, VIT is on retreat, and so today the wonderful people from the spouses group laid on a bring and share lunch which was a relief on both the catering and childcare front. This was no soggy quiche experience. The stew and the puddings were fab. Smallest VIT ate a full portion of both.  One marvellous person spent almost her whole lunchtime painting an inexhaustible line of small children, including smallest VKIT who now has a Liverpool logo on one hand and Toon Army stripes on the other.
Various absent spouses had communicated from the diocesan advance house is the wilds of the countryside. Some have texted, at least one has managed a Facebook status update. (I think he’s the one with the turbocharged telephone, since all the others claim the signal is awful.) There has evidently been some serious late night whisky drinking (I like to imagine them at 2 in the morning deciding to invade Scotland even though they claim to have been praying for each other) – and lots of intense stuff about their vocation and future plans.
 It’s an odd business this vicar factory. Church of England training uses the word “formation” a lot. Are they are being “formed” like Plasticine into a C of E mould like the familiar character opposite? I don’t think so, but there’s something a bit disturbing about the term. Some of the VITs are single, some just married, others like us have been married for longer than most life sentences. I’ve known my VIT for more than half my life. It’s quite easy to slip into fearing that this formation process risks forming them into a shape you don’t know any more, and I think they fear this too at times. Except that the end result is something they believe and feel called to in an inexplicable and inescapable fashion. So this should actually help them become more perfectly formed. Let’s hope Coverdale Hall takes care of them during the moulding and that they all end up with as much of a smile as Morph.
Posted by husband November 5 2009 | Tags: family, placement, worship | | Part of VIT’s training is to go to a parish not too far from Coverdale Hall. There she has to take part in services and generally muck in. She’s going to a Saturday breakfast club next week, with a Speaker.
Of course there are almost as many different flavours of local church as there are milk and coffee combinations at Starbucks. In VIT’s case there are two parishes together in the usual incomprehensible Church of England formula which results in a parish called Lilliput St Gulliver with Laputa St Lindalino. (This same formula brought a friend of ours recently, newly instituted as parish priest, to post onto his Facebook status “I’m wondering how I ended up with 2 parishes but eight churchwardens.”)
Anyway, VIT has nice parishes to go to, although not hugely provided with children’s ministry. So the conundrum is, do I, as VHIT go and support my VIT with the VKITs (what a great sentence that is) or do we stay in our home church, in which the youngest VKIT, at least, is well established?
For some families who’ve moved to this little northern city far away, maybe it’s less complicated. The VIT has a placement parish, and families can go too, especially if there are small VKITs and a crèche. But for us it’s more of a conundrum. I have to confess to finding some experiences of church rather unfulfilling, but the one we go to close to home hits a few spots, and it seems odd to go somewhere else. Except that VIT is going somewhere else.
We’ve been a couple of times to the placement parish, and everyone treated us really nicely, almost as if we were the bright shiny “new young family with children” (even though I’m 46, I’m still one of the youngest there), but also as if we were going to be staying. Which, of course, we’re not. VIT is there to get trained and then to go on somewhere else. So if we go, we go….. because…. well… because it’s good to support the “other half” and when I go to a Sunday Eucharist, I quite like going to church with the person I’ve been married to for very nearly half my life.
But I think for me a major part of belonging to a church is belonging to a community. A flawed mixed up, messy, sometimes belligerent community, but a community nonetheless. And of course we have no intention whatsoever of having a long term relationship with the community of Lilliput St Gulliver with Laputa St Lindalino.
I’m still mulling on this…..
Posted by husband October 30 2009 | Tags: Leuven, saints | | In my previous post I mentioned it had been an odd week, this half term. VIT in college, me with the kids. The second half of VIT’s week has less in the timetable, so my week has sort of returned to normal – i.e. I’m away from home. In fact I am writing this heading home on board a National Express Train which takes longer to do less distance than the Eurostar I took early this evening from Brussels. In the meantime I’ve been to Hendon and Leuven.
 Leuven was interesting since it was just two weeks since the Pope has turned Father Damien, a Leuven boy, into a saint. His wish had been to be buried in Hawaii where he had lived and worked with lepers. And indeed this happened. Butin1935 the Belgian government asked for him back, and so his remains were moved to Leuven. In 1995 he was beatified, and at this point what was left of his right hand was sent back to Hawaii. There’s a picture of him here looking not unlike VIT’s grandfather.
Anyway, all up and down the streets in Leuven are billboard size photos connected with Fr Damian. There are photos of his gravestone, his body’s return to Leuven, all kinds of things associated with his life proudly displayed in the street, to celebrate his canonization.
I wonder who will remember our VITs when they’re gone.
Posted by husband October 27 2009 | Tags: family | | I shared a room at school with someone who introduced me to the delights of Pink Floyd. It was around about the time they released “Wish you were here“. One of the songs is called Welcome to the Machine:
“Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.
What did you dream?
It’s alright we told you what to dream.”
It feels a bit like we’re on that machine this week: oldest VKIT is back from a school trip, exhausted. Middle one is seeing his friends and watching Japanese Anime cartoons on the internet and youngest (being of an “EP” Myers-Briggs disposition) wants friends around, and new experiences all the time. Meanwhile, college continues as if the world outside were a separate place.
VIT is feeling strangely displaced: normally she’d have done her day and a half at work in half term week, and then would have been largely free to be with the kids for the rest of the week. In fact her college timetable is heavily loaded towards the same days that she used to work, so in some ways not much has changed. But there is no let up in the obligation to eat 8 meals a week, attend 5 morning chapel services, Tuesday evening service, lead Evensong, preach on Sunday (twice), and the Bishop coming in so you have to be there, and so on.
Meanwhile if VHIT doesn’t go to work, he doesn’t earn any money. So I am going away at the end of the week, to coincide with VIT’s less obliged time. What with some very nice time with friends over the weekend, together with Sunday lunch at the placement vicar’s house (will youngest VKIT eat any food, will the two VKITs manage not to fight each other, will the youngest one get savaged by the vicar’s large dog or vice-versa) and taking the chance to see the family of one of the VKITs home for half term, VIT and I are feeling rather deprived of time together.
Time even to sort out how we negotiate the next few weeks of juggling, let alone remember why we got married in the first place.
The first line of “Welcome to the Machine” seems very apt. The next blog will be about the second line.
Posted by husband October 26 2009 | Tags: women bishops | | Just a short one this morning. Excellent article in yesterday’s Observer on the noises emanating from the Vatican re disaffected Anglicans.
Posted by husband October 21 2009 | Tags: sexism, women bishops | | Today, VIT posted a note on her Facebook status expressing dismay at the Statement by the Bishops of Ebbsfleet & Richborough on the Apostolic Constitution on a Personal Ordinariate for former Anglicans. This, of course, is about  Women Bishops and the battle royal that appears to be raging in the Church of England over whether or not women should become bishops and what should happen to the men (and it is mostly men) who disagree with this move.
Bishops are essentially the Regional General Managers of the Church of England. They meet together as the “House of Bishops” – one of the few remaining all boys clubs still in existence. At present, the majority of the church agrees that women should be allowed to be Regional General Managers. In fact the church’s General Synod has voted consistently on both theological and practical grounds to allow women to be Regional General Managers. However a small vocal minority (in fact divided into two smaller minorities who hold the same view but for entirely different reasons) disagree. The church is doing its best to come up with a compromise. The last time it did this over women priests it got an expensive mess where women were discriminated against, the dissenters got a pay off and the in-betweens who stayed got their own Regional General Managers – or Flying Bishops.
I can’t help thinking this attempt to compromise over Bishops is doomed to failure. Most people think women should be Regional General Managers, rather fewer don’t. Those who don’t are threatening to leave if those who do decide to go ahead. This is where the problem gets more complicated because the question is where would the leavers go to. Until this week it was pretty unclear, but it appears that the said Bishops of Ebbsfleet and Richborough have been freelancing in Rome, trying to undo a few hundred years of history. The results of the freelancing appears to be open arms from the Pope to all would-be defectors. Not just clergy, but possibly even whole parishes who have been consistently taught by their priests and Flying Bishops that the world will end and their communion won’t be proper if it’s been tainted by a woman.
Bringing this firmly back home, my other half is, as you know, a VIT, and female one at that. At present she is training for what must be the only job in the land where the ceiling for women is not glass, but made of purple cloth and is at present entirely impenetrable. There is a point beyond which, at present, she may not proceed. Others, on the same training course, with more or less qualifications, will be able to be promoted, simply because there was more testosterone in their mother’s wombs and they ended up with a penis. (What would the church do with a transsexual bloke I wonder – could he be a Bishop?)
How can we invite people to join our church when they see women who are Prime Ministers, frontline fighter pilots, leaders of multi-billion-pound organisations, headteachers, chief executives of charities – you name it. Women can do anything except this. How can we answer the question “why have you joined this institutionally sexist organisation?”
The answer, of course is simple. Ordain women as bishops and the problem is solved. But what about the dissenters? Well, organisations change. Anyone who’s worked in the public or private sector any length of time knows this. In the NHS people’s jobs have changed over and over again; the NHS looks nothing like the organisation they joined 20 years ago. I think one of the problems is that the church is too ready to ordain people who have had no secular experience. They have nothing against which to calibrate “normal behaviour.” They join the church and think it will never change. God will never change, but the frail expression of his love outworked in the church is only as good as the sinners inside it.
I do feel genuine sympathy for those whose ethics, morals, philosophy or other convictions are hugely challenged by the idea of ordaining women as bishops. It’s a horrible thing to find that an organisation you joined has changed to the point where you know longer feel comfortable. I know – I’ve been there. The answer is simple: you put up and shut up, or you leave. Quietly. Without fuss. Without trying to take your whole department (or parish and school) with you, or trying to create a department within a department where only your rules apply and some other staff and customers are only allowed on certain conditions.. You take your skills elsewhere, wherever they are valued. That way you retain your dignity and everyone’s respect and affection. You don’t try to bring down the very organisation to which you’ve given many years of dedicated service.
Maybe the two Flying Bishops have done us all a service by asking the Pope to make it easier for those who can’t stay to move with dignity. But my earlier observation still remains: do it quietly, not in public.
The shortest verse in the Bible, supposedly is: Jesus wept. I fear he’s weeping now.
P.S. My dictating software transcribed Ebbsfleet and Richborough as “a bus fleet and rich brown” which I rather liked.
Posted by husband October 9 2009 | Tags: college food, essays | | I had a surreal experience last night.
We went for tea (that’s an evening meal to anyone southern reading this) in Coverdale Hall. A pretty decent mass produced steak and ale pie with some very oddly textured mashed potato (I think there was wallpaper paste in it) followed by some kind of pudding with warm lumpy custard. The latter landed like a brick in my stomach about five minutes after leaving the dining room. But hey, it was food and none of us had to buy it, cook it or do the washing up.
That wasn’t the surreal experience though.
I sat there with VIT and one of her colleagues, a former air traffic controller with some great stories to tell, judging by the “737 nearly lands on a Chinook” one. Opposite was my 15 year old VKIT and next to me, wriggling almost continually except when he was running up and down the dining room, was the 7 year old one.
Now, I am used to VKIT talking about essays she has to write, deadlines she mustn’t miss, deadlines she nearly missed, deadlines she has missed (exceptionally rarely) and so on. She sometimes comes home with her friends, and like any GCSE student, discusses schoolwork with her friends.
What was surreal about last night was that my wife was doing this. She and ATC person were discussing the mission essay, when it had to be in, how long it was, which books they had to read and so on. THIS IS NOT NORMAL. THIS IS WHAT SCHOOLCHILDREN AND STUDENTS DO. Ah yes, but my wife is a VIT and therefore this is normal.
Weird though, because I last heard her saying these kinds of things more than 20 years ago, and that was when she had a notice above her desk that said “Have you done your Greek today”…
Posted by husband October 7 2009 | Tags: sickness | | Poor VIT. She spent last night preparing some really very creative prayers for this evening’s weekly big college communion service. So I’m somewhat surprised to get an email from her just before the service begins. She’s at home with the bi-annual (every other year) migraine, the older VKIT is having a rough time having had the first of two sets of braces fitted yesterday and I’m on the Eurostar doing 180 miles an hour in a direction away from home.
The challenge is how we and she can integrate into the college, with its mixture of single people (or partners away from their spouses and grown up children), and married people who have VWITs who are very much there for their VITs, despite in some cases the very real demands of small children. I’m feeling very “not there” for her.
On the bright side, the college tutor wants to meet us, and we can even muster 4 out of the 5 humans in the house to do so. The other one will be in Iceland.
And I missed the coffee morning. I was discussing challenging clients with my colleagues in London, and now I’m writing this from Belgium…
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