AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I mostly walked this morning. My hips and knees were resistant, stiff and rusty. Shower, another cup of coffee, toast, finish sermon, Mattins at St Nic’s, Faith Forum at the Parish Centre. I’m hoping my legs limber up over the course of the day and work agreeably tomorrow morning.

Good run this morning. With a view to warming up for Monday morning’s run, I broke the two miles into three roughly 2/3 mile segments, with brief walking intervals; I want to keep limber and to keep a good pace for my running intervals, but not to risk too hard a push on any run. I am confident that I can dial up the intensity Monday morning, so I’ve been trying to optimise the non-pushing baseline. We’ll see how that works out. Since I know nearly nothing about athletics and kinesiology, the odds on being generally correct and on being catastrophically wrong are about even.

Yesterday’s conference — the morning half that I attended — was fine. While I was in Oxford, Margaret handed the ladies over for grooming. We’ll try to get a good ‘after’ photo today, so that we can post the contrasting images for the Small Dog Appreciation Society.

We started watching the Jon Hamm vehicle Your Friends & Neighbours, but turned it off after two episodes; it seemed to unselfconsciously smug about the wealthy lifestyle the characters take for granted, and Jon Hamm’s character gave us no trace of a reason to sympathise with him. No, that’s wrong; he’s kind to his sister, and they seem to have come out of a very emotionally-cold parental household. Still, the ‘only the wealthy matter’ worldview that expects us to sympathise with a man who has to subsist on sums that boggle our imagination just wore on us as we watched. Too much shocking presumption, not enough humane core.

Good run, pleasant weather, coffee and fruit, Morning Prayer (followed quickly by phone check at the Parish Centre) and bus journey to Oxford for our annual meet-up with Cambridge Biblical Studies for a day of PG student papers and conversations with our colleagues from the Other Place.

Another good run this morning — I’m suspicious about what this implies about Monday’s Bannister Mile. I anticipate all the most baneful minor afflictions of my running experience. Ah, well, so long as I don}t finish dead last. Coffee and fruit, shower and dress, Morning Prayer, and I think I’ll start my working morning at public office hours at R&R.

Yesterday I had a good run, worked up a homily, hot breakfast, showered and dressed, Morning Prayer, Holy Communion at St Helen’s, Staff Meeting, then slumped home for lunch. Took up email and odds and ends from the meeting, worked on my article for ATR, Margaret made an early dinner, then to the Parish Centre for a wedding consultation (Lovely, sweet couple — I do love the marrying part of this vocation), and a Deanery Meeting at St Helen’s. I got home at 9:30, cleaned the kitchen, and so to bed….

I have two proximate submission deadlines: one for a series of sermon helps for Working Preacher (very glad to be back at it for them again) in June and another for Anglican Theological Review in July. I re-opened the file for the ATR article and added about 300 words this afternoon. There’s life in the old scholar yet!

This morning my legs would not run for the first mile or so, though they relented and permitted me a very leisurely jog the rest of the way home. Coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, off to Morning Prayer and then home to finish marking, et cetera.

Just now on Bluesky, Eric Vanden Eykel mentioned having seen somebody in an airport who squeezed a packet of mayonnaise into a cup of coffee. To that, John Lyons added that he had watched a video about the practice. My reaction was to go downstairs, brush off and wipe down the countertop, and make a cup of black coffee with no possible pollutants in sight.

I think this has something to do with keeping the Torah, but maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading James Kugel….

A frustrating two miles this morning, as I didn’t get any momentum going and paused several times, hoping that the restart would pull the trigger to release limber energy to get me home — but I got home just as stiff as when I left. Frustrating. Along the way I considered dropping the Bannister Mile on Monday week, but realised that the problem isn’t that I can’t run a mile, but that my competitive streak wouldn’t consider it worthwhile if I don’t finish ahead of someone; I realised that a 3K Fun Run might be doable (the presence of ‘Fun’ presumably signifying ‘times don’t matter’) — then understood that if I run next Monday on the ‘fun’ basis, the stress resolves itself and I needn’t get so wound up about myself. Just (as the adverts say) do it.

Then Margaret and I went to the eight o’clock, in order to have a languorous breakfast in town — oh, delicious and indulgent — and home again to relieve the ladies and to tackle marking. I should do a ‘story behind my books’ entry on What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?, perhaps if I clear marking off my desk.

Don’t say anything about the Orioles. Maybe their mediocrity is an aggravating factor in my own disheartening athletic practices.

Good-ish morning run, hot breakfast, second cup of coffee, attended (via BBC) the Holy Father’s obsequies, was concomitantly moved, then lunch, grocery shopping and marking. I was so impressed with the typography/page design of the service booklet that it gave me the idea of launching Updike awards for liturgical printing: perhaps one for regular Sunday services, one for a special event, one for typography in particular, one for layout, and one to three (max) for general merit in specific respects (for children? use of non-roman typography? for creativity? colour? the idea is that some works warrant recognition even though they may not represent a ‘category’ that should be institutionalised for annual recognition), and of course, the coveted Updike for overall Best Liturgical Printing.
‘Our Updike-winning Sunday bulletin…’
‘Once again, the Updike goes to Tipografia Vaticana, for the third year in a row….’
‘This year’s Updike for a Special Service goes to Westminster Abbey, for the service book for the Coronation…’

Think I’ll ask around about this.

Lovely dinner with Oriel theology finalists last night at Majliss — great to see our Majliss friends, too — and to return to Abingdon, and so to bed.

Two functional miles this morning — nothing special. I sense that I should ramp up my pace before the Bannister Mile on 5 May, but the Apostle’s dictum applies here as well; all very well in theory, but the flesh resists pushing. I read a little yesterday; I’ll take communion to Fr Keith this afternoon, and am hoping to refresh my investigation into the hermeneutics of the Church of England between the Reformation (and slightly before) into the eighteenth century. Or I may just throw the whole lot into one article, and skimp on details in order not to leave the later centuries just hanging (perhaps implying that I will write another essay, whereas I would really like to move on from analysis of the topic.

(No disrespect to all the liturgics tutors whom I respect, and too bad for the ones who irk me.)

On the first day, I would begin by asking (even before discussing the syllabus), ‘Why is a family car not shaped like an orb?’ After a while discussing all the myriad of reasons for non-orb family autos, I’d ask ‘All right, why don’t autos have orbs instead of wheels?’

Again, after talking through it for a while, I’d turn the conversation to liturgy. ‘Granted that orbs are good things, and it might be an entertaining diversion to imagine rolling about in orbs like the ones in a Jurassic Park film, we can probably grant that not all good things are good for all purposes. Wheels were invented millennia ago, and we continue to use them, because they are uniquely apt for the jobs we give them. A wheel and a dinner plate may be roughly the same shape, but you can’t simply substitute one for the other. (A hubcap, perhaps, but not a functional wheel. And not a hubcap for very long, I suspect.) Sometimes we hit on something that does its job so well that there’s hardly room for improvement, and it’s not stodginess or traditionalism to stick with wheels on autos — it’s optimal engineering.’

‘Some liturgical forms have been road tested by millions of congregations for hundreds, thousands of years. Acknowledging the distinctive aptness of those forms for liturgical worship needn’t be rebarbative traditionalism; it’s acknowledging that those forms have done something exceptionally well in a vast range of contexts over a staggering span of time. You may have a clever idea that nobody ever thought of before about improving liturgical communication — but that’s vastly less probable than that you will sacrifice a great range of liturgical effects in order to effect one or two deliberate ends that you’ve imagined (without attending to the losses).

‘The pertinent questions about liturgy involve not only “Do you think that your clever idea improves on the whole idea of the automobile?” but also “How does your clever idea integrate with the rest of the liturgy, the contemporary church, the historic church, the ‘chief end of man’, church doctrine in general, the world outwith the church, and so on?” If your idea works brilliantly on its own, but doesn’t engage functionally with the rest of the vehicle, it is (pardon my saying so) a non-starter.’

An optimally functional vehicle comprises a good number of different parts, each of which has to be working well in order for the vehicle to operate. Even more, though, they all have to be working well together for the vehicle to accomplish well its goal of transporting people and goods rapidly and reliably.

Likewise the liturgy: it’s not just a matter of a well-composed collect, or an apposite eucharistic prayer — it’s not a ‘one from column A, one from column B’ affair. In order for the liturgy to achieve its end, all the parts must work well on their own, and must be snugly integrated in a balance and alignment that makes for effective liturgical performance.

After all this, we would study the liturgy, its historic forms, the moments of ‘innovation’ and how they operated or didn’t, and how different liturgical forms belong to different expressions of ecclesial identity (no Solemn High Mass for my beloved brethren of the Kirk, but by the very same token no austerely reformed hymn sandwich for my catholic-minded Anglican congregations). How does it work, how does it fit?