The Laying On of Hands

Major problems with the wirless thingy today so not been able to get on line until now - kinda scary how much time we spend in cyber-space me thinks. Now I am on line i am a little none-plus as to what I want to say. Maybe I should say nothing, nah! what's the point in blogging if you say bugger all?

Just read Alan Bennetts' 'The Laying on of hands'. A really wonderful 'hour on a plane read', and coming from an evangelical charasmatic tradition the title alone did it for me. Mr bennett is a kind of upper class 'Masks and Shadows' Mike Riddell (that book scared the shit out of me!- and Stocki), he sees the sort of stuff you only see when you look with more than your eyes....

Clive dies in Peru and the circumstances make his friends uneasy, at the memorial service questions are finally addressed. Funny, perceptive and very very cheeky. Here's one of my favourite paragraphs....

"The truth was memorial services were a bugger. For all its shortcomings in the way of numbers a regular congregation was in church because it wanted to be or at least felt it ought to be. It's true that looking down from the pulpit on his flock Sunday by Sunday Father Jolliffe sometimes felt that God was not much more than a pastime; that these were churchgoers as some people were pigeon-fanciers or collectors of stamps, gentle, mildly eccentric and hanging onto the end of something. Still, on a scale ranging from fervent piety to mere respectability these regular worshippers were at least like-minded: they had come together to worship God and even with their varying degrees of certainty that there was a God to worship the awkward question of belief seldom arose."

Very insightful and a heavy-weight level 5 question...... one I think I need to sit with for a while