Chris Hansen’s blog

I see from that Fr. Andrew Greeley, the towering figure in American Catholicism of the latter half of the 20th Century, has been gravely injured in an accident. His activities as an opinion researcher, novelist, and writer on social trends in American Roman Catholicism made him a burr under the saddles of American Roman Catholic bishops, which can only be thought of as a Good Thing. Prayers for his speedy recovery are winging their way from the Elephant and Castle.

• 08:26 @fonsus : mememememe! Blog more! Pictures! #
• 08:27 morning all! I shall be spending most of my birthday at Diocesan Synod…such fun! Passing the budget! Just what the GP ordered for birthday #
• 16:24 @soveren : yes, been back since monday. not much use until today as i stayed up for the election results tuesday. see you next time?? #
• 16:26 back from diocesan synod. i hate it when you’re in line to ask a question and the person in front of you asks the question you wanted to ask #
• 23:19 @MrPandaBehr : thanks man… #
• 23:22 @chrys : thanks! i appreciate it, especially as i start pushing 60. #
• 23:27 @chrys : well, someday i’ll be running out of birthdays 🙁 #
• 23:45 @chrys : nov. 8ths will come and go, i suppose… #
• 23:46 anyway, good night, tweeters mine. off to the land of nod, i hope. #

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• 06:41 @tug : Would that be “W00t!”? #
• 06:43 morning tweeters all and sundry. up since 3:30 am again. my body stubbornly refuses to realise that it’s not in Singapore anymore. #
• 11:18 @BrianHeys : enjoyed it. will finish blogging it with pictures sometime soon, i hope. #
• 11:18 @tug : I see. i think the US spelling is taking over, just as it is with words like “humour”. #
• 11:19 about to go out, get my newspaper, and go to lunch. then someplace on the tube to collect my travelcard on my oyster… #

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In the United Kingdom the Sunday closest to November 11th is kept as Remembrance Sunday, like Memorial Day in the United States. We remember those who have served in the Armed Forces, those who died and those who survived. It is my privilege to preach at St. John’s tomorrow on this day. I will put my sermon behind a cut.

November 9, 2008 Remembrance Sunday
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
Readings: II Sam 1:17-27; Ps 23; Rev 21:1-8; Mt 5:1-12

In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.

November 9th, 1938 as much as December 7th, 1941, is a day that will live ina infamy. For on that day, 70 years ago today, the most evil action of the twentieth century began: the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.

Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, turned the persecution of the Jews from a merely legal and social one to a physical persecution that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews and, in total, the death of 34 million soldiers and sailors and 16 million civilians during World War Two.

Many of you will vividly remember World War II. My father and my uncles fought in that war. My father volunteered for the United States Navy and served in the South Pacific as an airplane mechanic on the aircraft carrier USS John Hancock. He came under fire at the battle of Guadalcanal. My uncles served in the Army and the Navy in various places, including England, where my great-uncle met and married my great-aunt, who was from Birmingham.

Southwark suffered quite a bit during the war. There is a plaque on the side of the library on the Walworth Road commemmorating those who died in the bombardment of the borough. You, or your parents or grandparents, will have been part of the civilian populace here who had to take shelter in bomb shelters night after night, trying to escape the bombs that rained down from the skies.

War has been part of human history for as long as we are aware of human history. Strong men struggled for control of resources and people removed from their own spheres of influence. In the reading from Second Samuel, we hear David lamenting over King Saul and his son Jonathan, both slain in battle. In the verses just before the reading we have heard, we hear that David

When I was a mere undergraduate at Columbia, I regularly attended St. John the Divine Cathedral on Sundays. The most thrilling part of the service, to me, was when the ceremonial trumpets of the pipe organ sounded at the Offertory.

The organ was seriously damaged by the fire in December 2001 that gutted the transept. Well, the building is almost restored, and so is the pipe organ. If you have a chance, and you’re in New York on a Sunday, do go to St. John the Divine to hear the instrument that so thrilled me in 1972.

• 20:39 @soveren : if you’re in London give me a shout…dinner? drinks? with my husband? #

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As someone who votes in California but who is not able to vote on state offices or questions, I wasn’t able to vote against Proposition 8. However, I feel its passage keenly. My friends in California have had a right granted by their Constitution removed from them, and have become, yet again, separate but equal. I cannot tell you how this makes me feel. As you might imagine, this move is profoundly un-American, mean spirited, bigoted, and just plain wrong.

While this battle has been lost, I hope to live to see the day where every person, everywhere, has the right to marry whomever they love deeply. Our own Civil Partnership should be a marriage, is called a marriage by most people, and IS a marriage, as far as I am concerned. HWMBO and I are very lucky indeed. Every person, no matter their sexuality, should be so lucky.

I truly believe that this vote will come to be seen as shameful and wrong by a majority of Californians, and I look forward to the day when Prop 8 is repealed.

I do hope that some effect on the tax-exempt status of churches that agitated for Prop. 8 might occur.

I think I had seen this somewhere, but had forgotten it. Senator Obama is a fellow alumnus of Columbia College, class of 1983. He is the first Columbia alumnus (of any school) to be elected President of the United States. The Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin Delano) attended Columbia Law School but never graduated. And, of course, before he was President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of Columbia University.

As President Bollinger says in the press release, Columbiua alumni signed the Declaration of Independence, and have served as Mayors of New York and Governors of New York (as well as many other cities and states). But, this one is special.

I am still horribly jet-lagged, and yesterday lay down at 6:30pm and slept until 9:30pm. Then was wide awake until 11:30pm, and went to bed again, joining a very sleepy HWMBO.

At 1:30am, the inner doorbell rang. We have two: one at the front door of the block of flats to let people in, and one next to the door of our flat, to tell us that someone is ready to be let in. That inner doorbell is very raucous. I started up from a deep sleep, and then not only was the doorbell going, but someone was pounding on the door.

I got my shirt on and my glasses on, and went downstairs, peered through the peephole, and asked, “Who is it?”

“Police!” came the reply.

I opened the door and the officer said, “Sorry to bother you, but we’ve had a call that someone in this flat has slit their wrists.”

By this time, HWMBO was downstairs too and we showed him our wrists. “It’s not us.” I pointed out that there were people with mental health issues in this block and suggested that they might want to pound on a few more doors, but they declined and left, with a cheery, “Sorry to have woken you up; goodnight.”

I hope this is not someone’s idea of a prank, akin to ordering a pizza (or pizzas!) to go to another address.

I had trouble sleeping after that. Up now at 5:30am, somewhat woozy but unable to sleep or stay in bed any longer. I do hope that no one else in the block slit their wrists and the police got the flat number wrong.

• 04:01 CNN calls it: Obama is elected President of the United States. #
• 04:02 So why am I crying? #
• 09:14 @MrPandaBehr : the hologram reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s writings on Solaria and how they lived without physical presence thru holograms #
• 09:15 i am now up again, fuelled by coffee, still very exhiliarated. sad about prop 8 tho… #
• 22:34 nighty-night tweeters. Prop 8 is the law of California, but the Yes on 8 people do not know what they have sown. Yet. #

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WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – Here is the text of President-elect Barack Obama

Senator Barack Obama has been elected President of the United States. My happiness knows no bounds.

• 03:01 @chrys : i presume something hit a bridge, rather than people had some industrial action. #
• 05:44 Gosh, I hope that as Dixville Notch goes, so goes the nation… #
• 10:57 one of my credit cards got my bank sort code wrong and has been merrily taking money from someone else to pay my bills. #
• 10:58 nhs wants to screen me for diabetic retinopathy when I’m under the care of the eye clinic at Tommy’s already for it. Wasted cash! #

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• 21:52 finally home after travelling all day. all hell has broken loose with the post: too many things arrived with deadlines during the holiday #

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• 03:55 am back in singapore…cambodia was awesome and everyone should go and see angkor wat and spend some money helping alleviate poverty there. #
• 10:31 had lunch with HWMBO and Choo Beng and Petrus (my brother-in-law) Teochew dim sum…yummy to the max! #
• 12:43 @danvesma you can take my turn at cliff jumping…i’ll let you do that, gladly… #
• 15:42 @chrys welcome to tate membership, i’ve been a member for more than 10 years now and it’s really good. #
• 15:43 night-night tweeters. off to bed, after having packed etc. will have to unpack my shaving kit 2morrow but everything seems to fit in the bag #

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I should start packing shortly for the trip back to London. Every time I am about to leave Singapore, I always feel very sad. I do not feel sad when leaving Marblehead, for some reason or other. But I really like Singapore, and I treasure all my friends here. The thought that I’ll be 8 time zones away from them for another year or so (unless some visit London, which of course would fill me with joy) makes me very sad indeed.

I hope that all my Singaporean live journal friends do well in the coming year, and I hope that I can visit again next year and stay a while.

I will blog about the last day in Cambodia and the last full day in Singapore when I get back to London, I think. I’m really tired now and don’t have the energy so to do. I will say that I enjoyed coffee with before he went off to Johor Bahru, lunch with HWMBO and Choo Beng, then coffee with them and Petrus, my brother-in-law. Dinner was a spicy Mos cheeseburger with fries and a large Diet Coke. I then walked around Junction 8 for the last time this trip and bought a cheesy bank in the shape of a yellow transparent bear. Why did I buy it? I don’t know. A hazelnut coffee later, I was back on the bus. We passed a bad accident just before I alighted here–a bus going towards Junction 8 was rear-ended by a car. There was at least one injury as someone was being ladled into an ambulance as we passed. I hope they’ll be OK.

I will be incognito starting late tomorrow morning (Monday). Tuesday I’ll be at a diocesan meeting at noon and them napping so that I can stay up and watch the US presidential election results. Hopefully my man Obama will make history on Tuesday.

Be good while I’m away. Farewell, Singapore and all my Live Journal friends here. Oh, and –have fun next Saturday at the BBQ. I wish I could be here to attend and enjoy, especially since November 8 is my birthday. Raise a glass of something to me that day in the hope that I’ll be able to return next year.

If in a restaurant where the menu is translated from a foreign language, make sure you ask what it is you’re ordering. this woman didn’t, and got a surprise.

And, yet again, you are the same age as me for one week.

I enjoy this immensely.

If you need to use a public convenience, you at least should be assured of a clean and dry place to sit. Well, this particular guy wasn’t, and was very embarrassed when he didn’t look before he sat.