I’ve just added a note to the Angulimala page of this site about the forthcoming Prison Service Chaplaincy Conference in April. Unlike the last two conferences, for this one I am not part of the organising committee. I was probably not much use but I did come up with some good ideas and I’m pleased to see that two of them that weren’t used when I was on the committee have been taken up this time. The first is the venue. I complained strongly that the NEC was not a good place for a conference of this kind and said more than once that somewhere like Warwick University would be much better. This time it’s at Warwick University. The second is that there are to be short presentations about the various principal faiths. I often said that when I attended a couple of the old style Christian Chaplaincy Conferences years ago the most interesting bit had been a sort of forum with chaplains from overseas. Admittedly they were all Christian but of different kinds and it had been very interesting to see and to hear them. So, I had suggested something that would inform delegates about faiths other than their own. That too was never taken up but I have just received an email asking me to prepare and lead a twenty minute session on Buddhism. I’ve also been asked to offer a two minute reflection. The only trouble is that everything including these presentations has somehow to relate to the conference theme of a journey. The title of the conference is Trusting the Journey.

Thinking about this has brought flooding into my mind memories of New York in late 1965. I was an actor then and there for a couple of productions that never quite happened and while flat hunting I bumped into the wife or girlfriend of an actor called Walter McGinn and we became friends. Walter was then on Broadway in a dreadful epic called The Subject was Roses. He got me tickets and took me to meet his co-stars, Chester Morris and Maureen O’Sullivan and then I had to sit through a matinee with his wife. Well, because she was with me I couldn’t leave and so I had to endure the whole wretched thing, including the supremely cringe-making moment when poor Walter had to utter the line that contained the words ‘the subject was roses’ and a frisson went round the auditorium as the New York matrons whispered excitedly to each other that that was the title, that was the title of the play!

If anyone thinks that at the Prison Service Chaplaincy Conference in either of my presentations I’m going to include a line that has ‘trusting the journey’ in it, they’re going to have to think again!