My Excellent Neighbour.

I was asked to do a bit for the local paper.  Here's what I submitted.


It is perhaps a guilty pleasure of mine that I like the Bill and Ted films of the late eighties and early nineties. The films show a utopian view of a future society which is founded on Bill and Ted’s music, and where the underpinning mantra is “be excellent to each other.”

In Matthew’s gospel , chapter 22, after being told that we must love our God, Jesus told us to “love our neighbour as ourself.” These are the two most important commandments, which all the other laws hang on. These days, the person that is our neighbour may not live in the same street, town or country as ourselves. Through social media, our neighbours could be anywhere in the world, and may not share our faith or our ideas on how society should be run. Hard as it may sometimes seem, we are all neighbours, and we need to love each other.

If we want to make the world the best it can be, then we need to spend less time sharing gossip and rumours about our neighbours and instead, reach out to them with a love as great as the love we have for ourselves. So get out there, and whatever you do, be excellent to each other!

In Tribute

Something I have managed to avoid in the course of my placements is funerals.  Or more to the point, people seem to stop dying when I'm around.  While this is good for the congregational roll, it's not that good for my training.  In fact, on my second placement, I'm sure I went on holiday and there were two funerals in my absence.  This is my fourth placing with a church, and I have only had involvement in two funerals. 

The other month a man in the parish died.  I went along with my supervisor to meet his family and had a pleasant chat about his life and times.  He had lived a full life, and was well known in the community.  While my supervisor talked, I took notes and afterwards tried to create a tribute.  While I wasn't going to be delivering the tribute, I wanted the practice under real conditions.

Well it sucked.  I wrote something that described his life, but it just didn't have a lot of feeling to it.  I got the important details right, like family names.  This was made all the more interesting by the fact that everyone in the family had James as their given name, so Jim, Jimmy etc.    I think my first problem was that I just didn't have time afterwards to write the tribute up immediately.  It was later in the evening that I had the time to sit and write.  The next time I will go straight home and write while things are fresh.  But it also demonstrated that I just haven't had the practice.

My plan for the next wee while is to just write tributes, whether or not the person is dead, just to get into the practice of writing a 400 word biography.  While I might base this on biographical interviews from Youtube, if we have a conversation and I'm taking notes under the table...