Ilkley Baptist

How nice. I have swine flu. Nikki went down with it at the start of our half-term holiday, and I enjoyed my first symptoms on Tuesday evening. It has progressed from there, giving me one night of horrible, repetitive thoughts, and three days, so far, of sweats and shivers, slowly improving, and a dry, painful cough. Today I have to decide whether to preach tomorrow or not. Not sure, but think I will have a go.

I have bought a telescope, second-hand, in fact damaged, from ebay; but now all is mended and I have it working. On holiday I spent a memorable evening sitting in a chair, staring at the full moon rising over the Lleyn Peninsula. Even through my very small, low-power binoculars, it was a wonderful sight. I tried drawing the features I could see, and since I've been home, I've been learning the names of some of the craters and seas that you can spot. There's Tycho, the big one near the bottom with lines radiating out from it that you can just about see with the naked eye. The dark sea that forms the 'o' mouth of the man in the moon is the Mare Nubium. Through binoculars you can see Aristarchus, high on the left hand side, a bright, white crater, which is white because it's recent and hasn't been blackened by the solar wind. Like a beauty spot on the cheek of the moon is the crater Grimaldi, then there are the craters Kepler and Copernicus, Plato and Aristotle, and numerous other mountain ranges, rilles and plains to learn about.

The telescope gives a wonderful image. When I first got it, the moon was full. As it waned, the edge of darkness has moved across the moon, throwing craters into sharp relief. You can see the small area at the edge (the terminator) very clearly. However, the waning moon rises later and later each night. It won't rise until 1am tonight, and won't get above the houses in Lister Street for another hour or two after that. Mind you, there are too many clouds to see it in any case.

So I may have to concentrate on other things. Jupiter is currently nicely placed in the evening sky to the south, and with the telescope I can see the moons, two on either side when I last looked. Uranus and Neptune are nearby, but much fainter. I haven't yet managed to look at the Andromeda Nebula. That should be a good, when we get a nice, dark, clear and moonless sky.

I often look in charity shops for books or CDs. There's seldom anything I want, but you can't rule out the possibility of a wonderful find if you don't look. Today, in Oxfam in Otley, I hit gold. Along with some piano pieces by Hamish MacCunn, Solfeggietto by CPE, and Brahms' Waltzes, there was Gay but Wistful! How about that?

Not impressed? Gay but Wistful is a piece by Percy Grainger, one of the movements of his In a Nutshell Suite (the others are the wonderfully named, Arrival Platform Humlet, Pastoral, and Gumsuckers March). I didn't know a piano version existed, and certainly haven't seen it for sale. Grainger's music is not easy to find. Here, though, is a charming, halting song in a 'popular London style' such as might be heard at the stage shows of George Grossmith, apparently.

It's typical Grainger. Chords are to be wrenched, certain notes 'to the fore,' others trumpet like or harp like, smooth or detached (assiduously avoiding Italian terms), and there's considerable use to be made of the middle pedal; which I don't have.

The MacCunn is nice; terribly sentimental, but with charm and a genuinely Scottish flavour. The Brahms Waltzes I don't think I've got already - certainly haven't played them in years. Solfeggietto is for Joe to have a go at. Oh, I also found a book version of Feynman's famous physics lectures from Caltech. A pretty good day.

Last night was the first meeting of a small group to offer alternative worship in Ilkley. People from three of the churches (there will be more) met in a home and, before eating together, shared various contributions on the theme of doorways; a quiet meditative, thought-provoking time. There was no leader, but the person who has done more of this sort of thing before gently asked a few questions about why we had chosen what we had chosen, why we had said what we said. It asked for interpretation and for a bit of personal disclosure. There was more debate and discussion about where we were coming from and where we hoped to go as we ate our meal.

I think, looking back, that those are the two things I learnt. The spirit of alternative worship is that you are not told what to think, or how to respond, or what this means; you are left to work out your own answers and to find your own way through the worship. It is a buffet, not a set menu with silver service. But interpretation can be offered. Not saying that this is the one meaning, but that this is what I find in it, and this may provoke others to make their own response.

Which leads on to the other revelation: that worship has to be personal to be worthwhile. Each of us has to find ourself in order to engage in worship, and we are aided in this by others revealing something of themselves, if it is done in the right spirit. This is, of course true in all sorts of worship. Preaching has been described as truth through personality. The great fight for a worship leader is to stop the congregation sitting back into conventionality. Worship must be about the people there, about engagement within and between, if it is to have a chance of touching God.

Last week, a group of Baptist ministers met to do some theology, and were led by Philip Clements-Jewry who read a paper about theological issues raised by detective stories.

You can't do anything much without it suggesting some theological themes, and the detective stories many people read are no different. I was particularly interested by the theme of reading between the lines. Detectives not only amass information, but make intuitive leaps, notice the things that are so obvious as to be hard to see, and pay attention to the gaps. (Isn't there a Sherlock Holmes story about the dog that didn't bark?) The task of interpretation is fundamental to theology and preaching, and it's interesting to think hard about the point where interpretation looks behind the plain meaning.

We had an intriguing discussion afterwards about whether detective fiction is a peculiarly Protestant thing, and why. Something about judgment and sin.