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I have moderate hearing loss and sometimes find it hard to follow what's being said in church: when the building echoes, when there's a lot of noise (from the kids, the musicians or the ministers!), when the sound system isn't working or isn't adjusted right or simply doesn't exist. Then I try to find other ways of engaging with what's going on.  So yesterday morning, as the Chapel Centre in Billesdon began a new sermon series on the book of Proverbs and I couldn't quite follow it all, I started looking through the opening chapters first myself. Two things struck me. The whole book is in poetry (like so much of the rest of the Bible), a fact which we don't give nearly enough attention. And in English translation many of the lines seem to fall out as near tetrameters, mostly iambic:  Listen, my sons, to a father's instructions ... Let the wise listen and add to their learning ... Thus you will walk in the ways of the just ... I open my lip...

This, some days, is how I feel.  I was ordained nearly thirty years ago, and was training for ministry for three years before that. In the last millennium. Most vicars still wore frocks in church, even though they were all men then. Most churches still had their own vicar. Lots of churches still used the Prayer Book brought in under Henry VIII and his kids. Some churches were considered avant garde because, alongside the pipe organ and robed choir, they also had a guitar. The real pioneers were embracing the new technology: Roneo duplicators, OHPs, Amstrad word processors, faxes and a pager for the vicar. Now, in the age of Zoom church, surfing church, Insta influencing, TikTok, online worship, cafe church, forest church, new monasticism, vision and strategy, minster communities and more, all that stuff I started with looks so quaint and archaic. I still wear a frock and like a good liturgy, and I feel like a dinosaur.  So am I against all the new ways, wishing I c...

Yeah, I know, it's a terrible photo. It was taken this evening in the dark, on my phone. The road is white, not because it's over-exposed (although that's also true) but because it's covered in ice. This has been my scooter commute all week - very entertaining! I'm an all weather, all year round rider, so over the last few years I've learned a few things about riding on ice. The most important, of course, is don't do it unless you have to . But I often do have to, so here's the lowdown.  Stay focused. There's a visible difference between dark dry tarmac, dark wet tarmac and black ice, but you need to be alert to tell one from the other. Ride in the middle of the road (on country lanes) when you can; it's where the gravel collects - good for grip - and the cars haven't packed down the ice. In the evening the north side of hills and the southern edge of east-west roads will be icier, as they've had more shade, but in the morning...

This is what prayer looks like, kinda. I was sat in Chapel last night looking at my tattered prayer book. I bought it new when I arrived at Launde, as I'd transferred from Wales to the Church of England and they use a different service here. But this is how it looks now.  We have three Chapel services every day from Monday to Saturday, and one every Sunday morning; the clergy attend them all, taking turns to lead. That's 19 services a week, more than 80 a month or around 1,000 a year. I've been here for more than a decade now, so that comes to over 10,000 gatherings for prayer in that time (about 3,500 communion services and 6,509 services of Morning, Midday or Evening Prayer). I'm not at all of them, of course, but my work pattern means I've probably taken part in something like 8,000 of those, amounting to about 5,000 hours of prayer.  That's why the book looks like it does: like a pair of comfortable slippers which you've hung on to for years....

I've had a delightfully varied diet of church during the last few days. Sally and I went to Gilfillan Memorial Church for a Christmas Eve carol service, then Central Baptist in Dundee for some lively carols led by the (loud!) worship band on Christmas morning. We then went to St Paul's Cathedral, Dundee , for the Sunday after Christmas for a beautiful mass (ah, the fragrance of incense!) and I was back in Launde Abbey by the end of the week enjoying our quiet, contemplative services. Then this morning we went to the service at Billesdon Baptist Chapel where our friend Brian Boley led an enthusiastic service of praise and communion to start the year. And during an idle moment my eyes landed on the inscription under one of the windows: "In memory of Ann Swift who died August 13 / 85 also John her husband many years Deacon & Super in this Chapel died 1893". "Super" is shorthand, of course, for Superintendent. But I really enjoyed that phrase...

Well, I had in mind a movie about my Vespa ride through Europe last summer. I imagined Chris Hemsworth playing me as a kind of superheroic pilgrim boldly going where no cassock-wearing scooter-riding priest had gone before ... It turns out the movie kinda sorta exists already: The Pope's Exorcist . It's a horror flick, not about a pilgrimage, and it stars a somewhat portly Russell Crowe. But he does ride around in his cassock on a scooter (a Lambretta, if you're interested) in Italy. So, you know, cool, right?  And a fun fact? In the early 2000s I was the convenor of the Church in Wales national group of Bishops' deliverance ministry advisors (the new name for exorcists). But trust me, that sounds way more sensational than it was in reality. It's just nothing like in the movie ... except for the scooter. If you're interested, the movie's coming to Netflix on January 19.