A Quick Note having got Belonging chapter back in Second Draft

This week has seen better progress than last week. I will not get chance to work on thesis tomorrow as there is a big do at church to say farewell to our minister as she is leaving including lunch. I will find it exhausting and I have other jobs to tackle such as sorting out the duties for communion for the following week. Anyway I have got the chapter on Belonging into a form which I think my supervisor would prefer. That is I have mixed the theory in with the theorizing. This I hope will go a long way towards making clear what I am arguing and that although separate one is always informing the other.

The other thing that I have done is to add a final section. This was perhaps the most fun part of the writing as it was taking what I had observed and relating it to two wider sets of ideas. This is actually the sort of writing I have done quite a bit when preparing supervisory papers during my doctorate and is in my opinion fun. The two sets of ideas I was dealing with were the pairing of believing and belonging by Grace Davie and the work of James Hopewell on Congregations and how their identity functions. It was a neat tidy point but opened up a whole lot more questions that could be explored outside this study.

I also have updated the style sheet for my proof readers. What I was intrigued was to find there was a rule for whether you capitalise or not the Sacraments of Baptism and Communion. The answer is yes if you are talking of the generic form as there but not if you are talking of a specific event. So if I wanted to say I went to my goddaughter's baptism then the b is in lower case! You learn something new every day.

I have started redrafting the chapter on flows. Intriguingly this time I found I could only start structuring it once I had written the introduction. I do not normally write the introduction until the end. However I will need to go back to the introduction to finesse it and put in an idea of what is covered in this chapter. That means next weekend I am writing four mini articles (about 1,500 essays) on the relationship of four different aspects of fluid dynamics.

Oh and the doll, well she has gone through a fair bit of the thesis with me. Firstly timing interviews so they did not go too far over the hour, secondly timing writing time in a morning and now timing  Pomodoro slots which I concentrate for.

Slower Progress but still progress

Snowdrops and Crocuses at my parents last week

Sorry not to write last weekend, I did intend writing but I just did not manage to find the energy when I got back from my parents on Sunday. It was a week when I concentrated on reading. Indeed for the first time since before starting the thesis I sat down with a book, "Religion since 1945: Believing but Without Belonging" by Grace Davies, and managed to digest most of it in one sitting. I should explain as a teenager I read everything including the noticeboards at school so many times I knew the notices by heart. This high level of reading hid a underlying difficulty although several people were aware that I sometimes wrote badly for my obvious depth of reading. In the early years of this century I developed depression. This severely hampered my ability to concentrate. The difficulty that was underlying now meant I found reading for long spells difficult. I developed techniques for dealing. I found I could often make a very careful reading go a long way. I would therefore spot things others would gloss over.

I was already well on the road to recovery when I started my thesis and I have read widely, if perhaps not as much as I would have liked. The difference last week was that I could do it without getting too distracted and even enjoyed it. I do suspect that Grace Davies' book was relatively straight forward but at the same time I enjoyed it.

However what did not happen last weekend was me clearing my head with a walk. I visited my parents, Saturday evening to Sunday evening and we planned to go walking on the Sunday at Lyme Park. The weather was dry but it was COLD and there was a biting wind so we called it off and went for a coffee and cake at their shop.

However after last weeks decent progress this week has been slowly. Some of this is my fault, I started a migraine on Monday, I know this looking back though I was in work, Tuesday it declared itself, however there was teaching in work on Wednesday so as it was "reduced" and I hoped going I went in. Then Thursday about four O'Clock I realised that I still had no concentration at all and things were breaking up again. In other words by going in on Wednesday I had simply allowed it to hang around. So I took Friday off to try and recover. It finally worked but it took a good while on Saturday for me to do the reformulation of the chapter I was suppose to do during the week. I did it and wrote one section on Saturday with reshaping a second.

Today was Annual Church Meeting at my home church. I have not been a serving Elder for most of the time I was doing my PhD but I either had to stand for re-election today or this time next year. My congregation is also going into vacancy. I decided that a three month or so overlap was doable, not least because I am also Table Elder One this year and that makes going to Elders meetings pretty essential. The problem was persuading the congregation they had to vote for this. Elders should be re-elected every five years. I served three to four years and then took a sabbatical for a couple of years when the depression was at it worst. I then came back and did about another three years but because I had been on sabbatical I was not re-elected. I think congregation had decided my thesis was another sabbatical and not that I had finished serving my time and therefore was not standing for re-election. After that I finished the second section of the redraft of the belonging chapter.

Last Supervision Poetry, this Month Hiking

Union Election Placards outside the University Library

Another month gone and supervision tackled. The weather was contrasts again, this morning in Sheffield I had sweatshirt, gilet and coat and while walking through the fog to the station I was wondering if I would need to get a scarf while I was out as it was that chilly. I got to Birmingham and it is sunny, warm, very definitely spring and I am peeling layers. I had sent three chapters to my supervisor, hoping to get two into draft and a reworking of the third with ideas for the fourth in outline. Well the two are in draft (Ruth and James expect them soon) although the worship one is still needing reworking. The tradition one has gone through on a single draft. Things are moving on.

However belonging if anything has gone backwards, or rather with other chapters coming into focus, this as lost its focus. The result is that I need to do something pretty strong on restructuring and working through. This is where the walking comes in. The first stage is to get myself into the literature on believing and belonging (Grace Davies). Not that I am talking much about the same thing which is why Grace has not appeared much but she is arguing that people have real problems in belonging. There is therefore space to discuss the way congregations create belonging. There is definitely something going on but at the moment things are separate and the only way to get further is to immerse then create space. I did this a while back by drawing a labyrinth, for a previous one. It was semi effective, this time I think I am going to have to get myself out for a walk. I think given space and time it will be to the Dam Cafe and back, which is the only walk that really starts from my front door. So I am at present holding thumbs that Saturday is a fine day.

The rest of the month, I need to tackle flows, although that was the good news this time. The structure I wrote for the chapter on flows is far better than the structure of the chapter on Belonging. Then I need to do a lot of work on the chapter on Community. The last is really only there because I am not seeing my supervisor until 16th April so definitely have six weeks to work on this. That is not to say the weeks are not busy, there is also St Andrew’s AGM, Sarah’s departure and Easter to fit in. So busy but I think manageable.

A None Writing, Thesis Week

No picture this week, Sorry but I forgot to take them earlier and I have new glasses and am getting used to them at present. The actual progress on writing has been slow this week. Indeed I have probably spent about four hours in total working on it and the word count is zilch. That is because the actual work I have done is on reviewing the chapter on Flows rather than writing anything. It is a much clearer chapter than the one on Belonging was which has the advantage I can see a lot of the junk. The big challenge is to chop down the initial bits which are decent but long winded and get to the core of the chapter quicker.

That said I have not been doing quite a bit of thesis related work. This week the URC held a conference (that was their word for it, a consultation may have been better) on worship called Opening the Gates to Heaven. It was a very typical URC event with worship leaders of all colours there, including trainers, ministers, and lay preachers. Then there was me! The only one who would probably claim that her interest in worship was from the perspective of someone in the pew and not that of an organiser. This contrasts very starkly with the Society for the Study of Liturgy  where the dominant group were the critics of liturgy. Yes the normal Reformed bias also showed. If we get our theology right then our worship will follow. The problem I have is that I suspect that our more ceremonial traditions have it right in that it is "Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi"or that as we pray, so we believe and so live (which is a rough translation). The other thing is that I see not the words per se as determining the belief but the way the person sees themselves through the words. In other words unlike many who use that phrase that think it is enough to get the words right, I actually think it is important to understand how people understand the words. Well that took up two days this week. The conference was very packed full with sessions. I think we got through seven papers and two group sessions plus about five or six worship sessions and two story sessions. That was all fitted in with sleeping and eating into less than thirty hours with sleep and meals but it was two and half hours drive both ways to Northampton.

I was already a day down this weekend, I had taken it earlier in the week but then spent it getting specs. Well I need to be out of the flat and that meant that I could not really work and I needed to do some preparation for the meeting. Not that I did what I should have done, the effort of last weekend left me ill focused. Then I also needed to prepare for my supervision this Tuesday. That actually gave a focus as I needed to review the flows chapter for the supervision. Not that there will be any lack of stuff to talk about. I have sent three chapters this month!