WELL OF COURSE I’ll tell you what I’ve been reading all day on this grey, drizzly, English Bank Holiday Easter Monday. Be glad to. You know that! It’s just that, hang on a minute, what was I saying, oh, yeah, reading. Of course I’d like to tell you. It’s just that, for the life of me, I can’t remember.
HURTLING PAST the Trafford Centre at night produced this blurred image that illustrates for me what our too-rushed human view of things looks like for many of us much of the time. We need a better focus. And that, I think, sums up the life and ministry on earth, and the continuing life in God and in us, of Jesus of Nazareth.
In good company with many another wise teacher Jesus has always called humankind to slow down. Look. Consider. Love. Forgive. Be thankful. I wonder if we’re really any keener on heeding his way of salvation than were the people of his day here in earth? Does the faith in us allow for deeper trust in all that makes for the peaceful, healthful reign of God on earth? Wouldn’t such a faith make for passion giving way to resurrection?
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THE HISTORY BOYS at Keswick’s wonderful Theatre By The Lake makes for a night for sore eyes. Showcasing some fabulous new talent making first professional appearances, the passionate yearning of a schoolmaster to “pass the parcel, pass it on boys” is a positively soul-prising encounter.
Alan Bennett asks through schoolmaster Hector, and through a class of boys rising to the joys and challenges of their own (Oxbridge?) springtime, “what is history and how should it be taught? What is the true purpose of education?”
It’s a question not dissimilar to that asked by Theodore Zeldin introducing his method and aim in An Intimate History of Humanity
The fact that the world has become fuller than ever of complexity of every kind may suggest at first that it is harder to find a way out of dilemmas, but in reality the more complexities, the more crevices there are through which we can crawl. I’m searching for the gaps people have not spotted, for the clues they may have missed.
I start with the present and work backwards, just as I start with the personal and move to the universal. Whenever I have come across an impasse in present-day ambitions, as revealed in the case studies of people I have met, I have sought a way out by placing them against the background of all human experience in all centuries, asking how they might have behaved if, instead of relying only on their own memories, they had been able to use those of the whole of humanity.
This comes very close to the question I’m constantly asking about the life and teaching of the Church: who, what, where, why, when? Is the (hugely complex and far from unified) “memory” of the Christian Church the only thing worth having in this world? Or will the future life of humankind – Church included – benefit immeasurably from a continued “testing”, a pushing out of boundaries? “The school gives them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it” says Hector.
By education most have been misled;
So they believe, because so they were bred.
The priest continues where the nurse began,
And thus the child imposes on the man -mused John Dryden in The Hind and The Panther (1687)
“What if we were able to use the memory of the whole of humanity?” asks Zeldin. “Lift up your eyes” said Jesus. Remember, forgive, be prepared to lose your life – adapt and build upon all you’ve learned thus far – and thereby gain vast oceans of redeeming possibility. The more complexities, the more crevices there are through which we can crawl.
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ONE YOUNG ADULT, one dear member of our young church, and one babe in arms (fast asleep) were baptised in Bramhall this morning, a joyful occasion for all involved, and one of hundreds of such events taking place today all over the world. Church is changing today as she has changed and changed again across 2000 years since the advent on earth of Jesus of Nazareth but, come what may, still there are millions who answer the call to “shine as lights in the world”. I suspect that Jesus would be less inclined to call these people “Christians” and more inclined to celebrate their being “fully human”. And that flags up an invitation to all of us – to celebrate light shining in the world wherever it is found, in “fully human” persons of whatever gender, nationality, religious persuasion or lack thereof. Such celebrations are invariably Really Good News.
I CAN GET LOST walking to the post box at the end of the road, so the maze of a large modern hospital disorientates me before I’ve even stepped out of the car – a bit of a trial for a parish priest who’s a frequent hospital visitor but who cannot distinguish one hospital corridor from the next no matter how often they’ve been traversed before! So it’s time for a hat tip to the nation’s hospital volunteers, without whom …
Today, at Wythenshawe, my kind guide asked me to let her know whether her (absolutely) accurate instructions had been a help. “We don’t like to lose people, Sir”. And I fully intended to say thanks and tell her that she really had helped. I saw the right patient, in the right place, at the right time. Trouble is that, by the time I was done, my friend, my friend’s door, reception desk, friendly colleague, stairs and corridor had all been moved … somewhere. So I hope she reads blogs sometimes. Thank you for your help. And please thank your fellow hospital volunteers. Maybe you could ask the chief exec why he keeps moving the corridors around though?
ANOTHER GLORIOUS MORNING. I read somewhere last week that though the UK Met Office bungled their “barbecue summer” forecast last year, and have shyly become more circumspect, a newer forecasting agency, whose name now escapes me, has predicted one of the longest and hottest summers on record. Maybe we won’t have to emigrate this year then?
St Mark, Claughton, Birkenhead: photo/ the late Miss Joan Gray, circa 1972
REMEMBERING WHERE WE’VE COME FROM – reflection – informs where we’re going. I’ve been so grateful recently to old friends David & Irene Lee (Irene was my Sunday School teacher!) who have become involved in helping to facilitate the installation of an 1892 “Father” Henry Willis Organ in the Cathedral at Leiden in the Netherlands. Grateful because they and a sizeable number of their friends, myself included, think of that organ in some sense as “ours”, its having been built for, and housed until 1991, in the Church, St Mark, Claughton, Birkenhead, that mothered us in the Christian faith. It has been lovely to share memories with friends. Some treasured photographs made by several people have been drawn together here.
I remember the grief I felt when, holding my then very young middle child Rachel’s hand, I gazed upon the demolished ruins of this house of prayer I’d loved long and well. And the grief came back to me a hundredfold as I worked, years later, as Vicar of another community who had to face up to the closure of their long-loved parish church. And on both occasions I recalled the grief of a whole nation – a whole religious culture – upon the loss, twice over, of the Temple in Jerusalem. Such grief and attendant tears cause wincing even today. But the day will come, please God, when Leiden Cathedral will be blessed with the magisterial music heard once upon a time in St Mark’s Birkenhead. Some things live on. The Divine is greater by far than the form of bricks and stones. There is, indeed, (and I’m heartily grateful to the C of E’s Common Worship for reminding us) such a thing as “the silent music of his praise”. God wills that yesterday, today and tomorrow are to be all of a piece.
Not long before I left Salisbury & Wells Theological College (of equally blessed memory!) in 1982, my then group tutor, the Reverend Bryan Pettifer, wrote to me:
I have valued the honour in which you hold those who have mothered you in the faith.
I do. We should.
God be praised for the life, ministry and music of the priests and people of St Mark, Claughton, Birkenhead.
WALTER BRUEGGEMANN wrote of the Bible:
I believe that this is how the church must live in response to the text; the church, in its deepest moments of trusting faith, is addressed by the revelatory text – not in predictable ways but in ways that surprise and subvert and enliven. But, then, that is what one must expect from a text that bears witness to the God who judges and restores Israel, who shows up as Friday absence and as Sunday newness.
The church, when it answers to this text, is indeed called to an alternative life in the world. The world around us – with its immense power and knowledge – intends none of the vulnerability of Friday. With its capacity for control and prediction, it intends none of the surprise of Sunday. But the church, when it responds in alternative imagination, is exactly a practice of vulnerability and surprise that keeps our common life human. That is the passion that propels my exposition.
And this is just in his Introduction to Redescribing Reality – What we do when we read the Bible, (pxxiii). This is good material for the coming Advent. Who came, who’s come, who’s coming? And who, if any, is intended by God to “control”?
Vulnerability will be a good keyword for Advent.
WAITING FOR HOLIDAYS this year seemed to take forever. Steve and Katie’s wedding today at 1pm. Car packed and ready for our departure whilst the happy couple were being photographed. Touchingly their guests waved and cheered us on our way down to Folkestone at just after 2pm. I’m 50 years old and still as excited about setting out for summer holidays as I was at 5! Eurotunnel this evening followed by a leisured dinner at Coquelles … and the weather forecast is great for tomorrow’s 500 mile amble down to southern Brittany. Happy as a sandboy, alongside a smiling sandgirl! À Bientôt …
first potatoes
THERE’S NOTHING QUITE LIKE IT. The first of the season’s potatoes for tonight, with leisure to dig them up, and eat, mark and inwardly digest them! At the same time we observe a delightful and extremely friendly young rabbit with an eye on the broccoli. To chase or not to chase? Ah. Jilly’s decided on the latter.
