Although it was my day off, all I had to do was click the Zoom link and sit and listen to Rowan Williams talk about ‘The Catholic understanding of mission’ as part of a series organised by the diocese, so I thought it would be churlish not to. Of course the venerable ex-Archbishop has a useful ability to summarise complex matters in simple, or simplish, formulations: he pointed us away from any definition of Catholicism that stressed universality – the straightforward meaning we might be familiar with – but what he described as a more Orthodox conception, qualitative rather than quantitative: ‘that form of Christian life which intends its members to live a risen life’, ‘to receive and give more radically than in any other form of human living’. +Rowan went on to discuss what tradition does and doesn’t mean (‘always a way of praying, not something passed on by a Masonic elite but a steady regularity of reading and reflecting’), the sacramental life as our response to God’s promises, the conviction that God is at work in the world and so our action must not be based on anxiety, and the belief that the Church is something God has made, not us.
Friday 26 April 2024
An Hour With +Rowan
Thursday 18 April 2024
Disgusted Of
'Never read the comments' is of course sound advice in almost any corner of the Internet (not here as all the comments are informative and kind). So I can't recall what led me to take note of some letter to the Telegraph lately in which a gentleman in where else but Tunbridge Wells opined in the following terms:
SIR – Although there are social and demographic reasons for the Church
of England’s decline, a major contributory factor must be finance. The wasteful pursuit of woke causes by both the central Church and
dioceses, as well as the unnecessarily large number of bishops, are putting
huge burdens on the parishes. ... It is not clear to me why there are nearly twice as many now as there were 200
years ago, and four times as many bishops, while the number of parish clergy
has fallen by three quarters.
Friday 12 April 2024
Leave Miscellanea
Although I'm not really posting about things that don't relate to the church, my post-Easter leave this week did take me to Dorset and St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which I found still a bit forlorn as its west window remains boarded up awaiting repair by English Heritage. For the first time in about twenty years there was no votive deposit at all apart from a few candle stubs and a bundle of dry flowers and the prayer I left on a scrap of paper was the sole offering.
On Tuesday I had a trip to Rochester having not seen the Cathedral since I left the area in 1997. Not a single image of St Catherine there: in fact there are very few female saints represented at all, and most of the holy figures are military, fitting in with the martial tone of much of the cathedral. I walked along the road to Chatham, checking the house where I used to live (which looks exactly the same) and St John's Church where I once worshipped. When I left the town the congregation was on the brink of decamping to Emmaus, the United Reform Church on the right side of the ring road which had left the poor Anglican church isolated from the town centre, and St John's spent a while derelict before the Diocese of Rochester decided they wanted to reopen it. Now apparently the congregation is moving out to Emmaus yet again - but only temporarily, while the church is refurbished.
Yesterday I was in London and found another tiny St Catherine hiding on some Netherlandish stained glass in Sir John Soane's Museum. I doubt anyone else has ever noticed her!
I was in town to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome with Lady Wildwood before we both went to hear Bettany Hughes speak about the Seven Wonders of the World, but strangely what caught my interest most was her incidental remark about Karahan Tepe in Turkey, 'a city in a time and place where there shouldn't be one'. She's overstating slightly it being a 'city', but it certainly does seem to be a permanent settlement with sophisticated monuments (including a ritual chamber of gigantic penis pillars) dating back over 11,000 years and possibly more. The carvings show lots of people with six fingers on their hands, and the whole site was deliberately buried after a couple of millennia. I'm mortified I had never heard of this!
More about Karahan Tepe here.
Friday 5 April 2024
Easter 2024
This was how it all worked. I decided to do a healing
mass on Monday evening, Compline and Benediction on Tuesday, and Tenebrae on
Wednesday, as ever, low-key services which brought the expected handful of
faithful souls (not quite the same handful on each evening, but nearly). The
bigger Triduum observances of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday had lower gates
than the unusually high numbers of last year, but it wasn’t bad to get 23 at the
dawn mass on the Sunday the clocks went forward (most of the conversation in
the vestry beforehand orbited around how little we’d slept and how we couldn’t
remember which of our timepieces would automatically update), 18 at 8am and 100
at 10am for the first time since 2018.
For the first time in some years I remembered to order a garland for the Paschal Candle from the local florists: if only I’d also remembered that I had to carry on watering it after the great excitement was past, the daisies would have survived longer than they did.
Tuesday 26 March 2024
Heathen Rights
Il Rettore is due to take the funeral of an old
friend – but not as a clergyman, just as a friend, as the gentleman was a determined
atheist. ‘We knew each other well enough to argue about it’, he told me over
coffee.
I mentioned that a little while ago a couple I know well
asked whether the funeral of their son, who’d died suddenly in his 30s, could
be held in the church. They aren’t Christians, and for a few hours I didn’t
realise they were asking for a funeral service in their own tradition. There is
no chance of this happening: canon law says specifically that any act of
worship in a church must not ‘be contrary to, nor indicative of any departure
from, the doctrine of the Church of England in any essential matter’, and an
act of non-Christian worship clearly is that. Thankfully I know the people well
enough for them not to take my refusal personally, and they’d already been
warned by a knowledgeable friend this would probably be the case.
At almost the same time someone I know posted on LiberFaciorum
a link to the funeral of Stuart Brogan, who ran the Wyrdraven Viking shop in
Glastonbury. This took place in Glastonbury parish church and was led jointly
by Revd Diana Greenfield, the ‘Avalon Pioneer Minister’ who worked (she’s moved
on very recently) with alternative communities in and around Glastonbury, and a
pagan officiant. Revd Diana said at the start that the service would ‘reflect
Stu’s respect for a variety of faiths’, but while the pagan officiant mentioned
pagan deities and ideas, there was no specifically Christian content to the
service at all as far as I could see or hear. Local media referred to the service
as a ‘heathen funeral’, which didn’t seem unfair.
Without delving into the specifics of Mr Brogan’s funeral
and why it came about in the way it did, I don’t think I could have taken part with
any integrity. A church isn’t a neutral space as a crematorium properly is, and
the presence of a Christian minister isn’t neutral either. I want to welcome
everyone, but I also want to welcome them to something – to Christ’s presence,
and to the place where he has promised to be. I don't think I can do that unless he is
named.
Friday 22 March 2024
Extra Solemn
But without someone to assist me and foot the ladder, veiling two large paintings and one wall-mounted mosaic panel presents a disagreeable prospect to someone who gets vertiginous even standing on a chair to change a light bulb. So last Saturday I moved very carefully, shifting the ladder laboriously and sensibly (or what I thought was sensibly) and not overreaching.
I realised I'd missed a Pollyday and hadn't listened to Let England Shake on its anniversary, February 14th, as I should, so did the veiling to the accompaniment of the maestra on headphones. Shimmering music of war and death, and the terrible destructiveness of human folly, alongside this act of preparation for the symbolic violence of the Passion. Neither alone has ever felt quite the same before.
Monday 18 March 2024
Sham Rock
"St Patrick's Day - a very very bizarre celebration indeed. A
British and Roman priest
That’s the last accurate statement in the passage.
"who attempted to annihilate the Druids,
There’s no evidence of anything approaching this. All the
evidence (as opposed to later mythologising) suggests that Patrick’s mission
was relatively limited. His Confessio makes it clear that he was highly dependent on the goodwill of the powerful in Irish society, and instead (very, very rarely
among Christian missionaries) he says ‘towards the pagan people too among whom
I live, I have lived in good faith, and will continue to do so. God knows that
I have not been devious with even one of them, nor do I think of doing so, for
the sake of God and his church. I would not want to arouse persecution of them
and of all of us’.
"conducted exorcisms to banish the great Irish faery deity
Ainé, who told lies about the faery,
The only information we have about pre-Christian Irish
deities come from later sources produced within a Christian context, such as
the Book of Invasions. But Ainé doesn’t appear there: she occurs in the 11th-century
The Fitness of Names. There, she isn’t treated as a goddess, and isn’t a
supernatural personality, just a powerful woman. In Limerick folklore, she
becomes ‘an old woman who was in with the Good People’, not ‘Queen of the Fairies’
as old-style mythologists such as Charles Squire in Celtic Myth and Legend (1919) claimed, or the ‘goddess of summer, wealth, and sovereignty’ as she is now described. There is nothing that links St Patrick with any supposed worship of
Aine and his own writings do not mention her.
"who claimed he threw Pagan women who would not convert into
the ocean
He doesn’t. We have all the words Patrick wrote about
himself in his Confessio and Letter to Coroticus, and that story isn’t in them.
"and they became
mermaids,
This statement sounds like it might have come from later
hagiography of Patrick, but it seems to be derived from a garbled amalgam of folk
stories. I tried to chase it down. In Legends and Superstitions of the Sea
(1885), FS Bassett refers to a legend of people who dwelt under the sea (not
strictly mermaids) in Wales because their ancestors had refused to believe St
Patrick and so had sunk beneath the water, but that’s the closest I can get to
any old source for this story. It’s not Irish, and it doesn’t have anything to
do with the historical Patrick. I came across references to ‘old women being
thrown into the sea on St Patrick’s Day and becoming mermaids’, but they’re all
from modern sources.
"who "drove out the snakes" (the Pagan ways)
Indeed an older generation of writers accounted for this
legend, which doesn’t date any earlier than the 11th century, by claiming it
referred to Patrick exterminating paganism, and therefore by extension pagans
themselves. You come across more elaborate versions such as the claims that the
Druids had snake tattoos, or revered snakes because they represented the circle
of life (that seems especially odd, as snakes don’t naturally curl into circles, and the Druids couldn't have revered animals that weren't around in the first place).
There is no evidence for any of it. Today most commentators accept that it’s a ‘just-so’
story concocted to explain the fact that Ireland has no snakes, in the same way
that by the 6th century there was a legend circulating that St Hilary had
driven the snakes from the island of Gallinara in Italy. The snakes in the story
aren’t druids, or even paganism more generally: they’re just snakes.
"and attempted to turn
the great bright god Lugh into Lugh-chromain (Little stooping Lugh)
Apart from Lugh being a genuine deity who appears in the
Book of Invasions and versions of whom are attested in Britain and Gaul,
similar remarks apply to him as to Ainé. There’s no record of St Patrick having
any dealings relating to him, and there’s no evidence that the holy mountain
eventually called Croagh Patrick was a sanctuary of Lugh.
"which would become
"lephrecaun".
Etymologists now derive leprechaun from the pagan Roman
feast of the Lupercalia, so this name for Irish fairy people dates from well into
the Christian era of monkish writers who knew what Lupercalia was. It’s nothing
to do with Lugh.
"I adore the Irish. I revere Ireland. I have that old blood
singing within my veins. But this day is a day to celebrate the survival of the
Old Ways despite what this "Saint" represented and the cruel action
he took. Today, I wear the green, for the fae, for the Old Ways, for the
shining ones and the deep love of the land. Blessings to you all my friends. A
blessing on the survival of the old ways, and of the Truth emerging from the
distortions of history."
One despairs at people's willingness to take garbled misunderstandings, utterly ahistorical garbage, and other guesses and falsehoods, which could all be corrected with a modicum of curiosity, and call them 'Truth'. At least thoughtful pagans aren't taken in.