AKMA’s Random Thoughts

The Ash Wednesday service last night went well, I think. Certainly we achieved a truly impressive success in ash/oil mixture for clear, bold forehead crosses; I’ve never seen the like in all my years of ordained ministry. My homily will be below the ‘More’ fold.

This morning’s run — 2°, thank you very much — was a good pace, a good time. Rolling average declines to 19:01 (and next run will probably lower it further, as the fifth time in my average will be bumped out of my rolling window with the next run, and it’s a time that’s a good bit slwer than I’ve been running for the last two weeks). This may be common knowledge among real runners, but it seems to me that I do better to increase the pace of my steps rather than the length of my stride. Sometimes my stride opens up more than others, but pushing my stride further seems to have less benefit than making myself stride more often.

Coffee and fruit, cleaning up and dressing for Morning Prayer, bus to Oxford, tutorials morning and afternoon, then home to my sweetheart and her dogs. Continue reading “Last Night, This Morning, and Afternoon”

Non-timed (good) run, coffee and hot breakfast, cleaned up and went to Morning Prayer (St Helen’s Wharf barricaded because of a gas leak; that’ll be unwelcome for the 10:30 service), splendid meeting with an adult baptisand, then helped Margaret restore her data to her new phone, wandered to R&R because I left my folio there. Now to mark an essay or two, edit my Ash Wednesday homily, and come home to relax.

‘When the revolution happened I realised how much everybody hated me and I started to wonder why. Then I thought, would you rather have a country governed by the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity and social justice or one governed by an amoral, self-serving, tax-avoiding, privately educated elite?’
— Marie Antoinette, in I’m An Aristocrat, Get Me Out Of Here! by Mark Dawson; Gonzo
Moose Theatre Company @ Pegasus Theatre, Oxford, December 2013.

I don’t know what happened yesterday, but it looked from this side like a spam attack. I tried to login several times, but couldn’t break through. I did run gently yesterday, -1° thank you, non-timed, and hit a pretty good pace for much of the run. I had a lot of emailing and editing and writing to do for the parish, and ran out of steam late afternoon. That was frustrating, since I wanted to send back some marking.

This morning I took a timed run in a relatively balmy 0°, another good pace (though at first it felt unlikely — legs and lungs both warming up slowly), bringing my rolling average to 19:08. Don’t get excited — it’s hard for me to imagine my time will keep improving at this pace.If I do well, I’ll be slogging along in the mid-18s for a long time.

Coffee, fruit, Shower, Morning Prayer (and I’ve been forewarned that there’ll be a pastoral matter for my attention after MP), marking and work on Ash Wednesday sermon, and I mean technically it should be a day mostly off, the idea of which will taunt me from the sidelines till I just give up at the end of the day.

A second -1° day in a row, and my run felt disappointing. I didn’t feel strong or limber at the start, and I ran out of gas in the last third of a mile; it was all I could do to keep running all the way to our door. At the time, I thought that this was the point of an average; there are highs and lows, and this would be a high time to balance out recent lows. Much to my amazement, when I hit the timer when I got home, I had reached a personal best by a significant margin. As a result, my running rolling average crept down to 19:19 (the cumulative average since I started timing in January is still 20:28, so…).

Mattins with homily at St Nicolas’s at 11:15, then hurriedly to the Parish Centre to lead the Faith Forum on ‘Incarnation.’ When I get home after that, I’ll collapse in a heap — though I’m preaching at the Ash Wednesday service at St Michael’s, so no slacking off.

I ran into a new (to me) inaccurate citation this morning: the one about plato claiming that empathy is the highest form of knowledge. No, wrong, incorrect. It caught my ear because I felt confident that it was both not the way Plato thought about knowledge and not the way he’d have said that if indeed he had thought it. In order to pass it along that way — without attribution to a specific source — you would have to have no ear for Plato at all. Someone just liked a pop-psychological slogan, and the attribution to Plato made it seem more profound, more ancient, and more authoritative. It turns out, though, to just make you look like someone who knows neither about Plato nor about web slogans without a cited source.

Unless you can find a cited version of an alleged quotation, your overriding assessment of it must be that it’s false. The Web is just too big and too shallow (alas!) to trust unsourced quotations at all.

I took an untimed morning run today; just as well, because my right knee was irritable and my whole body felt resentful about the bitter -1° weather. Hot breakfast, coffee and another coffee, and working on both a homily for tomorrow (on Moses’s face, not on Paul’s ill-conceived metaphor based on Moses’s face) and my parish presentation on Incarnation. Doing the background work for the Incarnation talk gets me excited and voluble, so I have to steel myself to focus on tomorrow’s homily.

Whose idea is this return to cold weather? I know, ‘March comes in like a lion…’, but honestly, when I checked the weather app before my morning run, the temps in my morning running time were consistently below 5°. It’s blessedly good to have longer days, but it would soothe my spirit to have a bit more warmth concomitant with the light.

This was a timed-run morning (that’s another ‘Whose idea was that?’), so I put my head down, gasped and wheezed through two miles, and made it home in a good time; the rolling average stands at 19:24 now. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up and dressed for Morning Prayer, I’ll have a meet with our training LLM, then home for the rest of the day (sermon prep, putting together my presentation on the Incarnation for Sunday’s Faith Forum). Today’s New Testament Seminar will be held online, saving me the three hours or more getting into and back from Oxford. Hey, I might even indulge in some pleasure reading.

I took a non-timed morning jog/walk (we had a spell of rain exactly in the middle of my run, so I sheltered under an overhang for a while); home to coffee and fruit, shower and dress for Morning Prayer, then to Oxford for three tutorials and a talk by Jarel Robinson-Brown. Then, home at last.

I took a non-timed run yesterday morning after not running at all on Sunday (rain and inanition, if I recall correctly). It was just as well — I felt as though I were running in treacle. Then on Monday: coffee and fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, home for coffee and a Teams meeting, sermon work, marking, afternoon Communion service at Old Station House, some groceries at Waitrose, and home for the day.

Yesterday, as I say, I ran, then coffee and fruit, cleaned up, hurried to church for Morning Prayer, then to Oxford for a Paul tutorial, lunch, then home to tackle some backed-up emails and edit the sermon for today’s morning service, research modern healing liturgies.

This morning my legs and breathing seemed truly sluggish, but it turns out I managed a sub-20:00 run that brought my rolling average to 19:36 (!). It wasn’t pleasant, but making that sort of progress is the reason I returned to timed running, so there we are. Coffee and fruit, cleaned up, Morning Prayer, midweek Communion, then staff meeting, then home.

I slept till 7:00 (unthinkable for me) and it was rainy when I woke, so no run today. Coffee, fruit, morning Prayer, home for more coffee and toast, then marking and work on Holy Week service booklets.

(Quick in writing, not quick running, which I didn’t do.)