A very polite telling off....

'C' staircase felt like a change. So this morning found us attending Morning Prayer not in the usual location of our Common Room but in King's College Chapel. You can see us walking there in the photo. Along the way we encountered Star Radio's Coleman the Patrolman, a roving traffic reporter who roves Cambridge on a bike instead of a helicopter. Being on foot I lacked a car horn so I greeted him with a verbal 'honk', which he returned with a blast from his handheld squeezy hooter. The japes these mature students get up to!!

Back to the plot. We arrived at King's with a few minutes to spare. The staff there looked a little astonished as 16 of us trooped in and down the main aisle in search of the service. As I was at the back of the group I got a ringside seat for a conversation with the college Chaplain, along the lines of:

Chaplain: 'Hello, there do seem to be rather a lot of you, I'm afraid we might not have enough seats for you all'

Us: 'That's alright, we can stand'

C: 'But the chapel is quite small'

U: 'Oh, don't worry, we can squeeze quite small' (strange, it looks quite big from outside...)

C: 'It would have been useful if we had known you were coming'

U: 'Ah, yes, we, err...couldn't find your e-mail address' (but it's a publicly advertised service?)

C: 'I don't think we'll have enough service books.....'

U: 'It's OK' (producing our own Common Worship books from our pockets with a flourish)

And so we proceed to the Chapel, feeling like we've been told off firmly but very politely. We discover that the reason for his concern is that King's College Huge Christmas Carol Service Chapel also has a number of small side chapels, and it's in one of these, the Memorial Chapel, that Morning Prayer takes place. I think the fact that it was Monday morning accounts for the fact that King's students had - cough - 'forgotten' about Morning Prayer, which was today attended by their Chaplain, 13 Ridley students and 3 Ridley staff! A very intimate and quite special time together. I suspect the Chaplain was actually quite glad to have company.

Afterwards we slowly made our way out, gawping at the architecture, the spectacular ceiling and 360 degree stained glass - we would normally have to pay just to get in, but attending services is free! You can get a feel of it by visiting the chapel website but it's no substitute for seeing it with your own eyes.

A full English breakfast in a local cafe followed, before the reality of the day's lectures intervened.

The results are in...

....the votes have been counted and verified and we can now announce the results live on air. Please do not swear...... OK, so I'm not Davina. I've been watching too much Big Brother.

But I do have some results! The essays I handed in before Christmas have been marked, put before the exam board and the results issued.

I got 68% in New Testament and 67% in Church History. Given that you only need 70% for a First Class degree I'm pretty impressed, especially as there's much more thinking and writing in this course than in my Electronics degree of many years past (in which I got a 2.1 - same sort of percentages). There was a joint birthday party at Ridley last night (see here for pictures) and having these marks made it even more of a celebration.

So thanks to all those who encouraged me and have been supporting me from afar! I just handed in my latest effort, and now have time to work out when the next thing is due. I have a feeling that it might be a Greek test.

The Great Blessing

It's been a funny old week.

This week's intensive course was 'Race Awareness'. It was a good course, aimed at making us aware of the issues facing ethnic minorities in this country. And it did that. It's just a pity it took 2.5 days to do so.

With that out of the way I could now focus on 2 things - firstly Greek (our teacher Mark was pleased to recall a conversation with a startled member of staff who was surprised that we'd all passed our pre-Christmas test and there had been no dropouts all term!).

Secondly my 'Life and Service' essay on 'the Dulles Model of Church'. I'm convinced there's a spelling mistake and there should be an extra 't' on the end of that second word. Some guy called Dulles analysed loads of churches and decided that a good church has a balance of 5 elements. I've got to analyse a church I am familiar with against this model and given that I'm not intimately familiar with that many churches I've picked on one in Ferndown. Against some definitions I have to decide to what extent does it identify as an institution (partial tick), as a mystical communion (partial tick), as a sacrament (tick), as a servant (tick), as a herald (tick). 1000 words written this afternoon, another 1000 needed before Thursday.

And on Thursday afternoon a regular meeting of the students where the most exciting things we could find to talk about was whether it was OK to wear academic robes in college. Passions rose high but I couldn't get excited about it. It's like those meetings we used to have at work where some executive had travelled halfway across the world to talk to us about the state of the business and somebody would ask a question about the repainting of the bike sheds....

Back to the title. Tuesday night was Federation Worship, and this week it was the turn of the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies (IOCS) to lead. IOCS are the only people who seem to be quite distinctive about the style of worship that they share with us - all other houses of the Federation seem to dumb down their distinctiveness for public consumption, but IOCS doesn't hold back. 55 minutes of incense, recited and intoned liturgy, choral led responses, and much sprinkling of water, as we celebrated the Great Blessing of the Waters (i.e. Jesus' baptism).

It was one of those occasions which I'll remember for a long time as it was so different from my normal experience, but I'm quite happy for it to remain an occasional experience - it's a bit too late for me to defect, and I can't chant well enough.

Getting Intense

No, not an article in anticipation of this summer's camping trip - it is a couple of degrees too cold to even think about that - but an interesting and informative insight into why we go back to college almost two weeks before the rest of Cambridge.

The early part of January is the one chance that the colleges of the Cambridge Theological Federation (see here) get to offer their students in-depth training on topics that interest us - a choice of 2 from 12. Trouble is I wanted to do most of those on offer, but as I only get to do 4 of them while I'm here, and 2 are compulsory I had to choose carefully. I've chosen Bereavement, which I had this week, and next week I'll be studying Race Awareness (that's a compulsory one).

Here's the list I had to choose from:

• HIV/AIDS:Issues and responses in the Church
• Prayer
• Storytelling Skills in Ministry
• Storytelling Advanced
• Sexuality and the Pastoral Encounter
• Bereavement
• Godly Play
• Jewish Christian Relations
• Race Awareness
• Christian Responses to Islam
• Christian Responses to Eastern Faiths
• Science, Religion and the Environment

Now there are a couple on there that you would expect to be covering anyway - and you're right - we do. I will emerge equipped to deal with bereavement and funerals, whether or not I chose to do this particular intensive course, but I'm sure when the timetabled teaching comes around I will be an annoying 'expert' on the topic, having studied it in depth already. There is inevitably some duplication when teaching happens for different qualifications at different times - my peers who started at the same time as me on the Cambridge University qualification already know a lot more than me about ethics, which I won't study until next year. They know about the Reformation, but I know about the Early Church (pre 1000AD) which they have no idea about yet...swings and roundabouts. And along the line a topic will grab each persons attention and we are all free to follow up anything which grabs our interest, in our own time.

The courses are 2.5 days long, which doesn't seem like much, but it's equivalent to the 2 hours a week we get in other term-long courses. However, concentrating so much in such a short time makes you very tired - I've gone to bed earlier this week than I have for a very long time.

So what is there to find out in 2.5 days of Bereavement training? Quite a lot.
We had to imagine a situation in which we had been knocked down by a bus and killed. How would your family find out, what would happen next, who would gather at your house, what would your funeral be like and how would your nearest and dearest know what you want at it, how would they cope financially?
We looked at loss, grief, the differences between expected and unexpected death (e.g. terminal illnesses vs accidents), how different people cope, how WE cope when we are dealing with death so frequently, the ongoing process of grief for individuals, the implications for us as vicars when a disaster happens in our town (the press and experts arrive and deal with the immediate aftermath, but what is our role as a community leader?)

Tears flowed frequently, as we were brought to face the inevitability of death, and the consequences for those left behind. It would be easy to be depressed by this all, but we didn't forget the hope we have in Heaven. And that will form the subject of a future article. Watch this space as I look at the place where we will go....