All Is Revealed

On Monday, to the general amazement of all, my assembly at the Infants School had a Christmas theme. I talked about Christmas trees and what you might find on top of them. Remarkably none of the children offered 'a fairy': usually someone does.

'Who comes to visit the shepherds in the story?' I asked, only to have a voice shout out from the left among the Reception children 'An alien!' I blinked a bit, ignored that and picked someone else who gave the correct or at least expected response of a corporeal but non-physical intelligence whose existence is devoted to glorifying and communicating the will of God, i.e. an angel. 

This morning I discovered that one of the other local schools is doing a nativity play in which aliens in a broken-down spaceship do indeed visit Bethlehem, so the intervention on Monday is probably explained by an elder sibling who is involved in that production. Shame really, a spontaneous reimagining of the Christmas story along extraterrestrial lines would be so much more impressive. 

Wrapped Up

They were desperate for people to help at the Churches Together in Hornington stall at the town Christmas fair last Saturday, so I volunteered to go along for an hour. When I turned up there were in fact plenty of other attendants but I stayed anyway. We were supposed to be spreading the message of ecumenical peace and Christmas cheer by distributing packs of tea and biscuits from a Christian charity, tiny pots of bubble mixture for children, and wrapping shoppers’ presents. The ebullient member of the Roman Catholic congregation who shared my hour with me didn’t realise that most of the customers who visited us with presents to be inexpertly bundled in shiny paper and wreaths of sticky tape were members of other churches – I did – but eventually a few real people came by too. The very last, just as my hour was ending, was a young woman clutching a pink flamingo watering-can she’d selected as her workplace Secret Santa gift (an appalling custom which causes no end of angst and horror). ‘I was listening to a radio programme the other day which was saying how everything to do with flamingos is very popular at the moment’, I told her, a fashion of which she claimed to be unaware, having just grabbed it in a shop along the High Street. I decided that, along with my colleague, having wrapped that, there was nowhere else to go creatively, and I left to go and buy a helium-filled gold star for the nursery nativity service.ymnalHyman

O O O O O O O

Some of the things that bring me satisfaction are perhaps a bit recherché. Last week I was unconscionably pleased to have done something I’ve been thinking about for at least two years. Just to fill you in in case you don’t know, the Great O Antiphons are little liturgical texts used in Advent. Antiphons are refrains used around psalms and canticles during the Office or Morning and Evening Prayer, often said but intended to be sung; they vary according to the season or the occasion. Uniquely, some time during the 8^th century the custom developed of having a different antiphon framing the Magnificat at Evening Prayer every day in the run-up to Christmas Eve, based around the prophetic titles of the coming Messiah, each prefixed with the exclamation O – ‘O Wisdom’, ‘O Key of David’, and so on: hence ‘the Great O Antiphons’. In the medieval English Sarum Rite an eighth antiphon was added to the original seven, addressing the Virgin Mary – ‘O Virgo Virginum’ – but the modern rites are more Roman than Sarum, so miss that out and stick to the basic list.

The antiphons are sung to a single chant, but as they are prose texts and not verse the pattern is irregular and each one has to be separately scored and adapted to the chant. Now, the English Hymnal compiled by Percy Dearmer in the early 1900s provides a trad-language English text and arrangement for the Antiphons (and, as it follows the Sarum Rite, includes O Virgo Virginum): this may predate the Hymnal and go back to the revival of plainchant in the Church of England in the 19^th century, but I’m not sure. What doesn’t exist, at least in any easily-accessible form, is an adaptation of the modern-language text of the O Antiphons, as included in Common Worship, to the old chant.

So that’s what I did. Surprisingly it only took a couple of hours plonking it all out on the piano, writing, scanning and typing, and here it is. As I say, I’m not sure my sense of achievement is completely legitimate given its tiny scope, but it’s comforting to have managed something, even if it’s only in the field of liturgy (the refuge of the idle, I sometimes suspect).

Prodigal Daughters

Debbie, our ordinand, now knows where she’s going to go to serve her curacy, and she and I had a meeting to catch up last week. She told me how she’d help to facilitate a meditation session with a group from Al-Anon, the network supporting people who care for those with alcohol problems, working with a secular facilitator. Obviously this wasn’t about religion in any way, but Debbie suggested they retell the story of the Prodigal Son using an all-female ‘cast’ to think about issues of betrayal and forgiveness. They’d agreed they would stop at the point the errant child comes home, but the other facilitator ran ahead and, not actually being aware of how the story was supposed to end, as the parent welcomed the child and offered forgiveness.

When Debbie asked her about it, she said she’d been overtaken by some phrases she’d remembered and couldn’t get out of her mind: ‘Love is patient, love is kind, love bears all things, suffers all things’. She couldn’t remember where she’d heard them (my guess is at a wedding). ‘It comes from the Bible,’ Debbie gently offered, beginning a conversation about the Bible, about Jesus and about forgiveness.

This Wicked Tongue Says

This probably follows on rather well from last time.

It only takes a moment to say something stupid. Last night it was nothing to do with church, but a Christmas card from someone I know whose bland message for some reason prompted a mean, snide comment from me I probably wouldn’t have made had Ms Formerly Aldgate not been there, but merely thought.

It seems as though somewhere in me is a spring of scorn and cruelty that isn’t directed against anyone in particular, but which can emerge at moments when my guard is down. It’s happened before, rarely but mortifyingly when I remember the occasions. A lot of the time I can forget that it’s there at all.

I sit down with the Bible this morning as usual and read in Psalm 106,

      They angered the Lord at the waters of Meribah,

      and it went ill with Moses on their account;

      for they made his spirit bitter,

      and he spoke words that were rash.

I don’t know what it may have been that made some part of my spirit bitter, a long while ago. But it hardly matters: every time that spirit pokes through to the surface I pour a little bit of evil into the world around me. I can only thank God that this time only Ms FA was there and she sees the worst of me anyway and that, perhaps, I’m prepared against it happening again, at least for a little while. But sometimes it seems that I am no kinder or calmer than I was thirty years ago. 

That Was a Lovely Sermon

This will probably come across as immensely ungrateful, but I’m thinking today about the business of a clergyperson being praised. A lot of the time you get thanked for doing nothing more than being there, and can mentally brush this off very easily as you know very well it’s nothing to do with you, really. You are God’s presence in that situation in the way anyone could be. But there are also compliments you get for something you have put some effort into and that feels more ambiguous. 

Today was the Family Service at Swanvale Halt, non-eucharistic and aimed at being more informal with elements of interaction and occasionally game-playing in the sermon slot. I had to arrange a projector and screen, discovered I’d left my notes at home with ten minutes to go, and was already feeling under-prepared and ill at ease. It all passed off OK, and people said very nice things, to which I reply as I always do, ‘I’m glad it all worked all right’. Anything which isn’t the Mass and involves unscripted speaking – Family Services, Messy Church, Church Club, school assemblies – I tend to find immensely stressful, even after ten years of leading them and even though nothing I do is really that demanding, and mostly I’m just relieved to have got through whatever it is.

I’m fairly indifferent to what people think of what I’ve done, as I know when it’s been good and when it hasn’t been. This morning, for instance, I covered ground I’m sure I’ve been over before and covered better, and it was far from cohesive. But what do I really want? Would it really feel better if nobody complimented me at all? Marion our curate usually gets a scathing and entirely unreasonable critique from her teenage son and that doesn’t sound comforting. What should I say in response, anyway? I remember advice from ages ago that when being complimented you should put the attention back onto Jesus, but it’s a challenge to do that without being weird. I have sometimes said ‘I just say what the Lord gives me to say’ but find myself putting a slightly sardonic edge on the statement because I don’t exactly receive my words by telepathy. Perhaps praise for the service as a whole is better, but that has an ambiguity about it too: what we ‘enjoy’ may not be what God wants us to take to heart at all.

Of course anyone engaged in any creative activity faces this. Only this morning on the wireless Adam Gopnik was reflecting on Bob Dylan, ‘a man who has known nothing but unimaginable adulation since he was absurdly young [and yet] who adopts a tone of aggrieved ill-will in almost every circumstance’ and concluding that ‘to idolise the indifferent puts us in touch with the first springs of love and religion’ and that ‘charisma’ means not the ability to seduce others but rather not caring at all about what they think. You produce some work: unless it communicates it isn’t doing what it’s supposed to: but, if you craft it to what you think people will accept, it will eventually collapse into mental and spiritual comfort-food. Hence the conflicted relationship with praise.

This gives me an opportunity to talk about Polly Harvey again (not that I really need one), another artist famously indifferent to what anyone beyond her immediate circle of family and friends thinks about her output. When she started out back in the early 1990s interviews with her were a journalist’s dream as she gabbled the first thing she thought of. She soon realised how damaging that was and became equally uncooperative.  My favourite example is the 1995 one with an unsuspecting Swedish music journalist who wanted to tackle her about her noted scorn for feminism:

Journo: I’ve just been reading Liz Evans’s Women, Sex and Rock ‘n’ Roll [goes on about it for a while]. Don’t you think any of that is relevant to you?

PJH: I’ve never really felt like a woman, I haven’t had much sex, and I don’t play rock ‘n’ roll. Apart from that, yes.

Or:

Journo: Is it true that you never interact with your fans?

PJH: Never.

Journo: Not even to –

PJH: No.

Journo: You don’t like interviews, do you?

PJH: They mean nothing to me.

Journo: Don’t you even use them to –

PJH: No.

Journo: What’s that written on the back of your hand?

PJH: It says ‘serum’. I’m not going to tell you what that means, either.

Eventually journalists gave up trying to winkle stuff out of her, and she grew less prickly, so by the late 1990s interviews were conducted more along the lines of ‘Do you have any other message for a grateful nation?’ Now she doesn’t do them at all. But unlike Mr Dylan, PJ remains impeccably polite even under insufferable provocation (such as being seated next to David Cameron on Andrew Marr’s TV show), and gracious if reticent in accepting the accolades that come her way: she manages to combine ‘indifference’ to passing opinion with grace, and unsurprisingly that’s what has more influence with me.

Given that I’m very sensitive to the danger of playing to the gallery, are people responding favourably to what I serve up because I am, or because I’m not, due to the 'adulation of indifference'? Having people listen to you, and listen avidly, is somewhat intoxicating and therefore dangerous. I suppose all you can do is keep firmly directed somewhere else (in my case, towards God), in the same way that Polly keeps the focus rigidly on her work rather than on the way it’s received. You can do that without being rude, though, and perhaps what I need to take into account is that what people say to me is a reflection of where they are: of their own receptiveness and grace, more than of anything I have done.

Some Different Music

We celebrated St Catherine's Day last week by heading out to see The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing at the Star in Guildford. Having both seen them before some years ago we knew what we were getting and wondered why they were straying to Guildford to play in the back room of a pub (there couldn't have been more than 60 people there - was it really worth everyone's while?). Still, it had to be done. The said back room, helpfully called 'The Back', is a long, narrow and awkward space for a band, accessed by negotiating the staircases and mezzanines of the Star's appealingly maze-like interior, but it meant we could loiter at the back and still see something. I don't much enjoy stand-up comedy, so I found Andrew O'Neill's warm-up routine only intermittently effective, and neither of us was ever going to respond to all the silly encouragement to the audience to bounce around the limited space, but the set was fun. The Men's lead singer and saw-player Andy Heintz had a tussle with cancer last year and is only just recovered, and has swapped his pith helmet and red military jacket for a bowler and tattered Dickensian urchin coat with a touch of makeup that makes him look rather like the Tiger Lillies' Martyn Jacques after a very late night. The new album, Not Your Typical Victorians, has a more political edge than their previous stuff as well as being more musically interesting, and I rather liked pieces such as 'This House is not Haunted' and 'Third Class Coffin'. I felt like taking Mr O'Neill to task on his lyric insisting 'Jesus was a Cockney (even though he didn't exist)', but I'm glad someone is doing this kind of thing.

PS: I forgot to mention that the audience included remarkably few visibly identifiable Steampunks. 'I thought all that business of sticking goggles on a cheap fancy-dress top hat had finished', opined Ms Formerly Aldgate.  Truth be told, the few folk dressed up looked more like Morris dancers than Steampunks, but it can be a fine line, I suppose.