At the start of the month I married the local scoutmaster's son to, well, somebody else. The scoutmaster asked whether I would like to come to the Cubs' camp in a few weeks' time and bless their new flags. So Saturday saw me drive into the Surrey wilds armed with the Book of Blessings, my tat and a very dubiously related reading (Isaiah 11.6-10, which mentions God's 'banner' being raised for the nations right at the end, that was the best I could manage). It was all rather charming. Not very many Cubs, it has to be said, and some very un-Scout-like polythene tents, but lovely weather and a reflective mood. I blessed the flags, they were raised and saluted, we had a cup of tea and I left. Curiously mums and dads were also present with the lads, whereas I'd've thought half the fun, if fun is to be had, would be to escape your parents for a couple of days. Still, I suppose in the modern world this is not to be permitted.
I was never part of any paramilitary uniformed organisation in my youth, but looking on at this relaxed, cheerful event I couldn't help thinking that something of the kind (and to be fair perhaps the Scouts were not like this thirty-odd years ago) would have done me good. Astronomy, playing with rafts, and controlled channelling of natural pyromania actually sounds rather appealing.
Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Friday, 20 August 2010
It's Nigh
So Mad Trevor phones me up to try to persuade me that I should be setting up a 'conference on prophecy' and 'preparing people for the End Times'. He's been watching the God Channel and 'real Christians' who have prophecies about the end of the world. I tell him quite calmly what I think of the God Channel, and that I know the end of the world is coming because that's a basic assumption of Christianity, but am not sure that setting up a conference on prophecy is the right way of preparing ourselves. He shouts at me that I and the rest of the Church are blind and ignorant and that he can see that the End is imminent, and hangs up.
Of course no matter how I calm I am about this it still upsets me. I regularly have dreams which hint at, if not the Apocalypse itself, a horrible world-encompassing event whose nature is never quite defined. But thinking about it, I'm not convinced that, even if I knew for certain that the Day of Judgement was tomorrow, or in a week, or a month, or whatever, I would be doing anything differently. I don't believe people are saved by this or that act, so frantic attempts to produce demonstrastions of faith in unbelievers are beside the point, nor do I think walking the streets proclaiming the imminence of the End would be the way to do so. If there is anything I'm doing which is contrary to God's will, or something I'm not doing which I should be, that's true regardless of how near or far away the Eschaton is; the imminence of the End might sharpen the attention, but that's all. It's coming and that's all we need to know.
And living in expectation of the End is always suggested as something fearful. But for Jesus the nearness of the Kingdom (both experientially and eschatogically) is precisely Good News - 'the time is fulfilled, the kingdom is near'. How could the triumph of justice and love, the healing of wounds, the wiping of tears and the vindication of Christ's poor, be anything other than a promise, not a threat?
I walked up the hill from church towards the Rectory and I didn't imagine the houses and people along the road burning and consumed with fire, but burning with light - transfigured into what they are at their very best. Perhaps I just need to pour more of the Eschaton into what I do.
Of course no matter how I calm I am about this it still upsets me. I regularly have dreams which hint at, if not the Apocalypse itself, a horrible world-encompassing event whose nature is never quite defined. But thinking about it, I'm not convinced that, even if I knew for certain that the Day of Judgement was tomorrow, or in a week, or a month, or whatever, I would be doing anything differently. I don't believe people are saved by this or that act, so frantic attempts to produce demonstrastions of faith in unbelievers are beside the point, nor do I think walking the streets proclaiming the imminence of the End would be the way to do so. If there is anything I'm doing which is contrary to God's will, or something I'm not doing which I should be, that's true regardless of how near or far away the Eschaton is; the imminence of the End might sharpen the attention, but that's all. It's coming and that's all we need to know.
And living in expectation of the End is always suggested as something fearful. But for Jesus the nearness of the Kingdom (both experientially and eschatogically) is precisely Good News - 'the time is fulfilled, the kingdom is near'. How could the triumph of justice and love, the healing of wounds, the wiping of tears and the vindication of Christ's poor, be anything other than a promise, not a threat?
I walked up the hill from church towards the Rectory and I didn't imagine the houses and people along the road burning and consumed with fire, but burning with light - transfigured into what they are at their very best. Perhaps I just need to pour more of the Eschaton into what I do.
Friday, 13 August 2010
Cutting Edge
The life of a modern clergyman. At least this one, at least today. Baking. I feel compelled to point out that makes one-third of the total of cakes.
'Psychopomps'
A couple of views of this grim and beautiful display of Polly Morgan's work at the Haunch of Venison gallery in Piccadilly, which I went to see with Cylene the Goth. Only four sculptures - but what sculptures. The show's on until September 25th.
Tuesday, 10 August 2010
Wishful History
I was half-listening to Great Lives on Radio 4 this afternoon, as Matthew Parris and Bettany Hughes discussed the great Sappho. Given her passion for young women, was she, they wondered, particularly a problem for later Christian writers? Perhaps in the West, said Ms Hughes, but not apparently in the East. 'But then the Eastern Orthodox Church used to carry out same-sex marriages, so they might have had less of an issue with her', she went on.
Hang on. Let's rewind a minute. The Orthodox Church used to carry out same-sex marriages? Really? The same Orthodox Church which insists all its clergy grow enormous beards to demonstrate their sound, healthy maleness? If this was so, it would at the very least cast an interesting light on current debates regarding Christianity and same-sex relationships. Wouldn't it?
In fact it didn't take a great deal of Googling (one term, in fact, to wit 'same sex marriages Byzantine') to discover the source of this particular bit of pseudo-history. It's John Boswell's The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex unions in Premodern Europe, published back in 1994 and subject to an AWFUL lot of criticism then and since; not a work I was otherwise familiar with. Boswell's case was, to summarise, that the Orthodox rite of 'brother-making' or adelphopoiesis was, in effect, a sanctioning of same-sex relationships. Even though he was careful to point out that such relationships were not 'marriages', his using the modern phrase 'same-sex union' to describe them implied that they were in all but name. It doesn't take much thought to work out that this was certainly not what the liturgists intended the adelphopoiesis for. John Boswell was both gay and a devout Roman Catholic, and it isn't a calumny to suggest that may have had some effect on how he interpreted his evidence. The most we can say, rather as Alan Tulchin argues about the rite of affrerement current in medieval France, was that a legal and religious condition intended for entirely other purposes may have been used by men who loved each other for a different one. I find that far more nuanced and believable.
But look at how it translates into popular consciousness: 'Orthodox Church carried out same-sex marriages'. Of course it didn't. Yet, because Bettany Hughes is 'a historian', anything she says about 'history' runs the risk of going unchallenged no matter how far it lies outside her own range of knowledge and experience. There's an awful lot of history, and (not being too rude), Ms Hughes's 2:1 and apparently incomplete post-doc doesn't equip her to know about all of it.
This isn't the first time I've encountered liberal Christians overstating historical evidence out of enthusiasm (to put it at its kindest). I remember being excited over hints that there were women bishops in earlier Christian centuries, only to discover the more sober truth that the title 'episcopissa' or 'episcopa' meant a bishop's wife or a mitred abbess. My own moment of temptation came over St Lide, the hermit and bishop who dwelt in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Scilly Isles, and whose feast, as bishop, is mentioned in the Calendar of Tavistock Abbey. But Leland, the great 16th-century traveller and shrine-sampler, refers to Lide as female. A female bishop in 10th-century Scilly? One might like to believe such a thing, and so one is so very, very tempted to go further than the facts really justify. It's the Gladiator Girl syndrome. And the less said about that, the better.
Hang on. Let's rewind a minute. The Orthodox Church used to carry out same-sex marriages? Really? The same Orthodox Church which insists all its clergy grow enormous beards to demonstrate their sound, healthy maleness? If this was so, it would at the very least cast an interesting light on current debates regarding Christianity and same-sex relationships. Wouldn't it?
In fact it didn't take a great deal of Googling (one term, in fact, to wit 'same sex marriages Byzantine') to discover the source of this particular bit of pseudo-history. It's John Boswell's The Marriage of Likeness: Same-sex unions in Premodern Europe, published back in 1994 and subject to an AWFUL lot of criticism then and since; not a work I was otherwise familiar with. Boswell's case was, to summarise, that the Orthodox rite of 'brother-making' or adelphopoiesis was, in effect, a sanctioning of same-sex relationships. Even though he was careful to point out that such relationships were not 'marriages', his using the modern phrase 'same-sex union' to describe them implied that they were in all but name. It doesn't take much thought to work out that this was certainly not what the liturgists intended the adelphopoiesis for. John Boswell was both gay and a devout Roman Catholic, and it isn't a calumny to suggest that may have had some effect on how he interpreted his evidence. The most we can say, rather as Alan Tulchin argues about the rite of affrerement current in medieval France, was that a legal and religious condition intended for entirely other purposes may have been used by men who loved each other for a different one. I find that far more nuanced and believable.
But look at how it translates into popular consciousness: 'Orthodox Church carried out same-sex marriages'. Of course it didn't. Yet, because Bettany Hughes is 'a historian', anything she says about 'history' runs the risk of going unchallenged no matter how far it lies outside her own range of knowledge and experience. There's an awful lot of history, and (not being too rude), Ms Hughes's 2:1 and apparently incomplete post-doc doesn't equip her to know about all of it.
This isn't the first time I've encountered liberal Christians overstating historical evidence out of enthusiasm (to put it at its kindest). I remember being excited over hints that there were women bishops in earlier Christian centuries, only to discover the more sober truth that the title 'episcopissa' or 'episcopa' meant a bishop's wife or a mitred abbess. My own moment of temptation came over St Lide, the hermit and bishop who dwelt in the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Scilly Isles, and whose feast, as bishop, is mentioned in the Calendar of Tavistock Abbey. But Leland, the great 16th-century traveller and shrine-sampler, refers to Lide as female. A female bishop in 10th-century Scilly? One might like to believe such a thing, and so one is so very, very tempted to go further than the facts really justify. It's the Gladiator Girl syndrome. And the less said about that, the better.
Saturday, 31 July 2010
I Do Like to Be ...
Five coachloads of more mature people from the parishes of Swanvale Halt and Hornington set off last Wednesday to Worthing on the annual Day Out. Thankfully my experience of the Day Out in Poplar, where I was on placement, wasn't repeated - being on the coach on that occasion was like being trapped in an episode of Eastenders. Did they actually sing 'Roll Out the Barrel'? It felt like it. Anyway. There was none of that this time.
After we all dispersed, I headed off to find a church to light a candle in on behalf of a friend. I found what I assumed was the old church in the middle of the town, a grand Classical portico behind which the 'St Paul's Centre' now shelters, a café and a music venue. It must have been quite a place at one time:
... but no candles (there is a 'chapel' at the west end, consisting of a semicircle of chairs facing a wall behind a glass partition, very spiritual, but I didn't know that then), so off I traipsed. I thought 'Church Walk' might be the location of a church, and indeed it was - St George's - but that was full of children on a holiday club. At that point I decided to go and talk to the Lord on the seafront, and had I not been accosted for a forty-minute conversation by a drunk it would have been ideal.
Later I went past St Paul's again and noticed another church a few hundred yards away at the other end of the street. This turned out to be Christ Church, built, as its history leaflet tells the visitor, 'to meet the spiritual needs of the lower classes'. It's a vast Victorian flint-covered barn of a place with an old-fashioned Low Church tradition, which means that Prayer Book Mattins (to me possibly the dullest act of worship to emerge from the centuries of Christian history) is still the main service on Sunday morning. I met a gentleman who was repairing the front door. He was trying to encourage people to come into the building, he said, and thought of having a candle stand. With the agreement of the Vicar and Wardens, this was arranged - and then removed after two members of the congregation denounced it as 'Popish'. How quaint to think such places still exist.
After we all dispersed, I headed off to find a church to light a candle in on behalf of a friend. I found what I assumed was the old church in the middle of the town, a grand Classical portico behind which the 'St Paul's Centre' now shelters, a café and a music venue. It must have been quite a place at one time:
... but no candles (there is a 'chapel' at the west end, consisting of a semicircle of chairs facing a wall behind a glass partition, very spiritual, but I didn't know that then), so off I traipsed. I thought 'Church Walk' might be the location of a church, and indeed it was - St George's - but that was full of children on a holiday club. At that point I decided to go and talk to the Lord on the seafront, and had I not been accosted for a forty-minute conversation by a drunk it would have been ideal.
Later I went past St Paul's again and noticed another church a few hundred yards away at the other end of the street. This turned out to be Christ Church, built, as its history leaflet tells the visitor, 'to meet the spiritual needs of the lower classes'. It's a vast Victorian flint-covered barn of a place with an old-fashioned Low Church tradition, which means that Prayer Book Mattins (to me possibly the dullest act of worship to emerge from the centuries of Christian history) is still the main service on Sunday morning. I met a gentleman who was repairing the front door. He was trying to encourage people to come into the building, he said, and thought of having a candle stand. With the agreement of the Vicar and Wardens, this was arranged - and then removed after two members of the congregation denounced it as 'Popish'. How quaint to think such places still exist.
Tuesday, 27 July 2010
Lilly Through the Dark
At the suggestion of Dr Bones, I went last week to see Lilly Through the Dark at the Farnham Maltings. To my surprise the performance was not in the Maltings itself but in a tent in the grounds: I'm not sure quite why, but it was part of Something Bigger, and I spotted not only a Mayoral-type person but also an unshaven cove with no tie who I have my strong suspicions was Jeremy Hunt MP, having a quick visit to a local arts event before, I presume, abolishing the quango that promoted it.
The show is one of the works of The River People, a company of young actors and puppetteers which has been going for about three years, and tells the story of a young girl coming to terms with the death of her father by searching for him through the land of the dead, and the mysterious and sometimes threatening characters she meets there. The set, if you can call it that, is a pile of tattered books from which the players emerge via a variety of apertures, and the conceit of being just what they are - a group of travelling storytellers - allows them to develop the narrative through whatever lies at hand: piles of more books, an umbrella that becomes a tree, a paper lantern moon. I thought at first the show would turn out darker than it did, but although it is essentially a charming fairytale there are enough touches of humour and macabre menace to spice the whimsy. And fairytales can be pretty Gothic when they try. This is inventive, enjoyable, and has a gentle heart.
The show is one of the works of The River People, a company of young actors and puppetteers which has been going for about three years, and tells the story of a young girl coming to terms with the death of her father by searching for him through the land of the dead, and the mysterious and sometimes threatening characters she meets there. The set, if you can call it that, is a pile of tattered books from which the players emerge via a variety of apertures, and the conceit of being just what they are - a group of travelling storytellers - allows them to develop the narrative through whatever lies at hand: piles of more books, an umbrella that becomes a tree, a paper lantern moon. I thought at first the show would turn out darker than it did, but although it is essentially a charming fairytale there are enough touches of humour and macabre menace to spice the whimsy. And fairytales can be pretty Gothic when they try. This is inventive, enjoyable, and has a gentle heart.
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