The Difficulties of Leaving

One of yesterday morning’s tasks was to deliver a letter to a parishioner and to drop off a CD played at a funeral a couple of weeks ago at the deceased’s house so their family could pick it up. I trudged along the rainy roads and reached the house, only to realise the CD wasn’t in the case as I thought. It was just about worth while to make the journey back to the church and try again …

While on my progress I saw someone who turned up at the church for a little while and even came to Morning Prayer on a couple of occasions, and then disappeared. They are just one of a vast company of souls in the same kind of situation and who almost certainly outnumber the folk who actually do remain as members of the congregation. Sometimes people turn up on a Sunday morning to dip their toes in the spiritual water, speak very positively about the experience, and you never see them again. Others come for a time: there was a young couple who turned up almost every week at our 8am mass for about 18 months, a period which included the woman being baptised, and then stopped. They never said why, or responded to gentle enquiries about their welfare, so I have no idea whether something bad happened in another aspect of their lives, whether they became dissatisfied with their experience with us, or what. Those occasions are the tougher for a pastor to deal with: you have come to care about these people, and they vanish.

Of course Jesus envisages this situation in the Parable of the Sower, but it doesn’t completely wipe away the frustration and sense of failure. I inevitably think of friends who have disappeared from my own life too, including more than one potential partner who closed the process down with no clear explanation of their thinking, leaving the dump-ee to imagine the worst: if the reason was good, you can’t help feeling, if they felt confident about it, they’d tell you. I suppose it speaks to the difficulty we have in sharing truths we fear may be unwelcome, and we’d rather just avoid the conversation completely; and also to the fact that for most people, I fear, involvement with a church community is a nice add-on to life but not something which it hurts much to leave behind. But leavers may not even be facing the fact that they have left: people tell themselves they are going to come to worship long after they’re practically able to, or determined enough to set aside the time from the many other demands they have. It's all a cause of sadness, and I would rather people were happy. Including me!

D'oh!

What we must now all refer to as Hornington Minster Parish is under-strength at the moment, without an incumbent and short of clergy to look after two of the four churches, so with Il Rettore holding the pass at Swanvale Halt I offered myself to help this Sunday. Given that they do have a reasonable supply of people to preach, I was expecting to be asked to take a communion service somewhere, but no, I was despatched to Hintinghill to do a sermon which anyone, or at least a number of people, might have done. The Minster Parish is one of those kind of outfits that goes in for sermon series based around the enthusiasms of the leadership team rather than the lectionary, so I was given the story of the Feeding of the 5000 from John 6 to speak about to the assembled masses.

This Monday evening I was out at Helgi’s, the rock bar in Hackney, to hear Mr Vadim Kosmos from the Viktor Wyld Museum talk about death-themed cabarets and other morbid entertainments in late 19th-century Paris. The event was originally billed as starting at 8pm; then when I booked a ticket it had moved to 8.45, when I arrived I was told it wouldn’t start until 9, and as is the usual manner of things Mr Kosmos didn’t actually get going until a few minutes after that. 9.05pm is far too late for a midweek lecture to begin if you have a distance to go to get home, and I ended up leaving before even getting to the bit I was actually interested in, as opposed to information about Napoleon III, satirical stereoscopes, and how morgues got their name. Before the talk began I was left with some free time and sat in an alcove opposite a lurid mural of Baphomet and a cascade of skulls to think about what I might say at Hintinghill. I thought of it as claiming the territory (silently). I couldn’t actually remember which of the four versions of the story would be read, and found myself thinking about the differences between them and what conclusions I could draw from that.

At home later in the week, I checked the briefing notes I’d been sent, and these are worth quoting:

The people come in droves to be taught, hanging on Jesus’ every word. It is late and there is no immediately obvious source of food for them all.  … Jesus enacts what will become a familiar pattern, as he takes the bread, gives thanks, breaks it and gives it out. Nothing is wasted and the (twelve) disciples fill twelve baskets with leftovers. The crowds return home satisfied in body, mind and spirit.

Except none of this is actually in John’s account. In that version, there is no preaching, the crowds converge on Jesus as he is with the disciples, and he initiates the events by asking the Twelve to feed them. At the end of the episode, the crowds don’t return home: as a result of the miracle, they identify Jesus as ‘the Prophet’, and he flees out of fear that ‘they were about to come and make him king by force’. The briefing notes aren’t actually based on the reading at all, but on the versions of the story by the other Gospel writers. Curiously this makes John’s point: the crowd is interpreting Jesus according to their own preconceptions of what the Messiah is coming to do, and not paying attention to what he is actually doing. Several of John's stories, I realised, pivot on misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of the significance of Jesus’s acts.

I talked about this, obviously without having a go at the briefing notes. Visiting preachers are always well-regarded unless they’re really awful, and that was the case at Hintinghill this morning. I downed a cup of coffee and a pain-au-chocolat with the good folk there and drove home only to find my William Hartnell fingerless gloves were nowhere to be seen. Back to Hintinghill church – but they’d all left, so I sent the lay reader who was my main contact an email. He later phoned to say he’d been at lunch in the village so popped back into the church but couldn’t find my gloves anywhere. At that very moment I found them in my jacket pocket where for some unaccountable reason my hand had not strayed before that point.

Bel and Yahweh

Given that the Office works on a three-year lectionary cycle, I must surely have read the Book of Bel & the Dragon publicly at Morning Prayer before, but I really can’t remember doing so. In fact I am so shamefully unfamiliar with it I couldn’t even recall what happens. You can see why it’s confined to the Apocrypha: having already been vindicated in his worship of the God of Israel, the prophet Daniel, in Babylon along with the other Jewish exiles, is rather illogically tested again by being called on to do obeisance first to a brazen image and then a hideous beast. At least the text attaches this story, or two stories, to a different Babylonian king, Cyrus rather than Artaxerxes, but it has Daniel being cast into the lions’ den for a second time. This time, not only does the Lord shut the lions’ mouths, but rather charmingly the prophet Habbakuk is magically transported to Babylon with a bowl of stew so Daniel won’t go hungry. Angela Carter once defined a fairy story as ‘one in which a king can call on another king and ask to borrow a cup of sugar’, and Bel & the Dragon clearly falls into the same category, dare I say it.

It's the brazen image which interested me. Every day twelve bushels of flour, forty sheep and fifty gallons of wine are sacrificed to this thing, Bel, and King Cyrus adduces its daily disappearance as evidence that Bel is indeed a god. Daniel naturally scoffs, and persuades Cyrus to test the divinity of Bel by scattering ash around his sanctuary and sealing his temple after the daily sacrifice. Lo and behold, when the door is reopened, the offerings have vanished, but there in the ash are the tell-tale footprints of the priests of Bel and their families who have sneaked in through a secret trapdoor to snaffle the lot. Enraged, Cyrus has them all slaughtered and the temple pulled down forthwith.

Enraged; and one might imagine humiliated, as Cyrus the Mede would have had to have been prenaturally unobservant not to realise this was happening at the Temple of Bel given something similar took place at every other temple in the ancient world, even at the Temple in Jerusalem where it was quite explicit that, apart from the portion of offerings that were burned to a crisp ‘as an odour pleasing to the Lord’, the priests ate the sacrifices. It was standard practice. In this story the great conqueror of much of the ancient world is shown up as the equivalent of a grown-up who still thinks Santa consumes the brandy and mince pie left out on Christmas Eve. Yes, all across the ancient Levant gods were ‘woken up’ in the morning and put to sleep at night in the persons of their statues, but while everyone felt there was some sense in which the deity was connected with their cult image, nobody really thought it was them. Does this tale, then, show that the Jews really thought the pagans did?

My mind goes back to a parallel we talked about some years ago – the non-existent scandal of the mechanical statues of medieval cults mocked and vilified by the 16^th-century Reformers who had never actually seen them move or knew how they had functioned in their contexts. They felt comfortable ridiculing the credulous believers of the past precisely because they were far enough in the past to do so. The writers of these Biblical texts were also sufficiently distant from the worship patterns they described to be able to tell such mocking stories. Nobody was going to say them nay.

But there was some point to it all. The other night I led a discussion about the Exodus story for a group of folk from other parishes on a diocesan course, and we touched on the ways in which the worship of the God of Israel differed from that of pagan deities, and what it meant for the Hebrews to be in relationship with him. I decided not to stray into the hazardous area that had occurred to me when I was preparing that in some ways the whole narrative reads uncomfortably. You can caricature the Lord’s declaration to Israel as ‘You are in a relationship with me; you have entered voluntarily into this relationship; and if you try to leave it, I will hurt you’. Once upon a time this kind of thing might not have raised any concern at all but nowadays we know what to call it. It occurs to me that the Church has to do some work to say why this image of God as an abusive partner is not in fact accurate.

The nature of the pagan gods is I think part of the answer. After all, they are not real. When the ancient Hebrews neglect YHWH and put up images of Baal and Ashtoreth they are not really exchanging like for like, one partner for another, even if that’s the language the scriptures couch it in. The pagan gods are the manufactures of human beings: they are projections of our longings, fears, and failings onto the world around us. A temple of Dagon is a shrine essentially to ourselves. Hence the urgency of God’s objections – when his people wander faithlessly away, they are going somewhere they will find nothing that will help them or improve them. They will find themselves bargaining with aspects of their own natures without knowing, and there is every likelihood that they will spiral downwards into the worst elements of who they are.

Paganism now is different. The pagans I know personally almost invariably regard their worship as a form of meditation and self-improvement, not dealing with deities who are actual personalities. But I wonder whether the danger is not still there. Bel is no more true now than he was when that text was written.