Storyteller’s World

Some religious news is almost too incredible to believe. Like learning that a saint has been murdered, only when you hear the news that the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury have expressed their sorrow at his death. In front of a congregation of 2500 people at prayer, a Romanian woman (mad? evil?) stabbed him to death. You’d think that after a lifetime of Christian service and sacrifice, and an inspirational ministry of peace and reconciliation, a man might be allowed to die in his own bed. I mean, you can just about understand people who want to assassinate a Pope or a President or Prime Minister. But Brother Roger? Some words of Catherine of Siena come to mind: “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, it’s not surprising you have so few of them.”

Alison’s got a project now, with the prospect of studying on the ministry training course, and is already blissfully buying theology books - more recent than any on my shelves - and doing preparatory reading for her course.

One of the books she has bought is one that, in a moment of frivolity, I dubbed Alister McGrath’s Bumper Book of Theology. Sadly this is probably how it will be known in our household from now on and for ever after.

I’m not very good at being a Christian on holiday. I’m not like some worthy colleagues (a former Archdeacon among them) who pack the pocket version of Celebrating Common Prayer among their t-shirts - and use it, on the beach or wherever. When I’m on holiday, the occasional arrow prayer is the most God hears from me, or maybe lighting a candle in some quiet church or cathedral space. But the Bible - though I will have one with me - tends not to be opened except to check a literary reference or a crossword clue.

We do make a point of going to church, usually more than once on a Sunday. But again, I’m not very good at this. No doubt there are some clergy on holiday who sit there making mental notes of good ideas they will use when they get home. I’m one of those who sits at the back thinking, What on earth are they up to now? Why are they doing it like this? What’s happened to the Confession? Collect? Old Testament reading? (or whatever else is left out.) Or, why are they putting that in?

One of the problems, for me, is that worship is so much something I do rather than suffer, that I don’t suffer it gladly. When I am responsible for it, or taking part in some quite active way, it takes up a lot of concentration and mental or spiritual energy. There isn’t much space for the critical faculty; and a good thing too, given what a moaner I am.

And here in our new home, the church is a wee bit too Evangelical for me, so there are all sorts of other distractions. (I recognise them, because I have been there.) There’s a kind of directiveness about it, because the worship leader will give you instructions about the frame of mind to have when joining in the next hymn or prayer. There’s an obsession with novelty and variety, so that they will usually use one of the permitted alternatives (any one of them!) rather than the form which is familiar - or would be, if you ever got to use it. I feel manipulated by the form of worship, rather than freed by it to seek, or be sought by, God. The (dear) rector blesses us, and also all those we love, and those for whom we pray, and at any moment I expect, old uncle Tom Cobley, and all. Which feels a lot like over-egging the cherry.

(Though in this respect, aren’t they only following the trend of Common Worship in general? which annoyingly has extended every single Collect way beyond its useful cut-off point, with “who lives and reigns, with you and the Holy Spirit, old uncle Tom Cobley and all, one God, now and for ever”. The spare simplicity of the BCP words has been baroqued.)

But apart from these, which are obviously (mostly) just rants and niggles and matters of taste, there are the more serious criticisms of some aspects of Evangelical worship: that it is Christocentric rather than Trinitarian (last Sunday we were called to worship with the words that we were coming together to worship Jesus); pietistic (emphasis on personal faith to cope with life’s problems), individualistic rather than corporate (hymns and intercessions cast in the form “I pray / give glory / etc.”, rather than “we.”)

Enough of this carping. The truth is, it’s a thriving, welcoming, nurturing congregation. So am I just envious?

Shut up, God, I can’t hear you when you shout like that.

The preacher was talking about how we should have the kind of persistence in prayer, that badgers God until he gives what we ask for. In the way you have of drifting in and out of the sound of the words of sermons, what I heard her talking about was Badger’s God, and immediately went off into a fantasy about what sort of God this might be.

Does Badger worship some unbadger-like figure, like the Moon, or a Man? Or has Badger understood that God has made him in God’s own image, so that Badger’s God looks uncommonly like Badger? Then of course a sophisticated theologian, like John T. Brockinson, will no doubt have published a sensational popular paperback revealing that Badger’s God is, of course, not to be thought of as literally anything like a grey-backed furry animal with strong teeth, and a white face with black stripes, sitting somewhere up in the sky. But is, rather, the Ground of our Being, in whom we live and move and have our sets.

I felt much more edified by all this, than by the actual sermon.

I’m supposed to have been having a relaxing evening at home before conducting the wedding that I came home from holiday for. (I know, I don’t do this - but there are so few weddings this year, I don’t want to forget how to do them.)

Instead, I find myself downloading and installing the Amazon Media Manager plugin for WordPress, from Sozu Web Design, Accessibility and Media. Thanks to bsag for the tip!

I haven’t got it the way it should be yet; there’s more to do in the sidebar template; not knowing any PHP doesn’t exactly help. But what else is there to do, when you’re waiting to conduct a wedding?

This is a book that has been waiting most of my life for me to read it. It was first published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in 1952. When I was in my teens, I was in love with the idea of literature and reading, but woefully unresourced and unsupported. We had few books at home, and such classics as the school introduced us to were just what school reading has always been: boring because you had to read them at the pace of the rest of the class, and unappealing because teachers required you to read them. But I remember seeing a list of books recommended for young people who loved reading, and to encourage them in that love. Top of the list was H. F. M. Prescott’s Man On A Donkey. But I had no idea how to get hold of it, and it never came my way.

It’s been in and out of print, though you can get it from Amazon. Rowan Williams gave a Good Friday service of meditation based on it, at one of the other churches in the deanery, shortly after he had been made Bishop of Monmouth. I didn’t hear the addresses - I was doing my own in the parish here - but I heard all about it, as you can imagine, from the vicar. (Who became vicar of that parish not long after the book was first published.)

Then, a few years ago, I found a copy of the book, in two volumes, in the Castle Bookshop at Hay-on-Wye, and bought it for £15. I suppose at that price it should be a first edition. It has stood on the shelf in our quiet room ever since; until this year, just before coming on holiday, Alison asked me to find Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible for her to read on holiday, and next to it was The Man On A Donkey. Calling out to me to become my holiday reading for this year.

It’s a historical novel set in the 1530s, when Henry VIII was re-inventing himself from statesman and securer of the English State, into monstrous paranoid tyrant, and despoiler of the Church. The chronicle follows the lives of five principal characters, through the years of the divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the marriages to Anne Boleyn and later Jane Seymour. It culminates with an account of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a popular uprising in the North which was a protest against the dissolution of the monasteries and the destruction of the Old Religion.

It is that rare thing: a Christian novel that is not unbearably sentimental, or mawkishly pious, or theologically trivial. (Nowadays what claims to be a “Christian novel” is usually intended to convert the reader, or else is about the End of the World - interpreted, naturally, solely on the basis of a fundamentalist reading of biblical apocalyptic.) The Man On The Donkey is Christian because it doesn’t try to preach or manipulate: it simply tells the truth. Its characters inhabit an age of faith. Not that they are any better or worse than us secular men and women: Christian orthodoxy and -praxis are just something they take for granted. Yet Faith is also what shapes their whole world of thinking and action, no matter what side they take in the political conflicts of the day.

It portrays in convincing detail the agonies of conscience of those who are torn apart by their loyalty to God or (mistakenly) to the King. Robert Aske, the gentleman and lawyer who finds himself driven by God and circumstance to be the leader of the uprising, reminds you of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: forced into rebellion out of obedience to God, even though he knows it will probably cost him his life, and may well be counted as sin.

In his faith, obedience and suffering, Aske becomes a figure of the Christ. Eventually betrayed by the King and his counsellors, the clergy, the nobility, his former fellow Pilgrims, even his own family, Aske is sentenced to be hanged in chains: a lingering form of death taking over a week. And here he experiences the utter desolation of a man, dying in extreme agony, whose life work has come to nothing.

And as his eye told him of the sickening depth below his body, and as his mind foreknew the lagging endlessness of torment before him, so, as if the lightning had brought an inner illumination also, he knew the greater gulf of despair above which his spirit hung, helpless and aghast.

God did not now, nor would in any furthest future, prevail. Once He had come, and died. If He came again, again He would die, and again, and so for ever, by His own will rendered powerless against the free and evil wills of men.

Then Aske met the full assault of darkness without reprieve of hoped for light, for God ultimately vanquished was no God at all. But yet, though God was not God, as the head of the dumb worm turns, so his spirit turned, blindly, gropingly, hopelessly loyal, towards that good, that holy, that merciful, which though not God, though vanquished, was still the last dear love of a vanquished and tortured man.

This is one of the most moving meditations I have ever come across, on Jesus’ words from the cross: “My God, my God; why hast thou forsaken me?”

Here’s a book which, if you can find a copy, is still well worth reading.

Today we explored some of North Shropshire that we haven’t explored before: Ellesmere, with a tour of the town and a walk round the Mere, and the Mosses, an area of wilderness peat bogs some miles further east.

North Shropshire is a foreign country, with weird and wonderful place names: Wem, Cockshutt, Stanwardine in the Wood, Stanwardine in the Fields, Little Ness, Great Ness, Preston Gubbals, Myddle, Sleap Airfield, Fitz, Pepperstreet, Prees, Ruyton XI Towns, Ightfield, Cheswardine, Child’s Ercall, Bolas Magna, Stanton-upon-Hine-Heath, Preston on the Weald Moors, Eyton on the Weald Moors, High Ercall.

And just over on the other side of the Mosses is - Wales!

Every Friday when the Church Times arrives, I scan the obituaries and sum the ages of the defunct clergy listed there. Most weeks are very good weeks: the average age is somewhere between 80 and 95. I congratulate myself on being a member of a long-lived profession, with the prospects of fruitful and stress-free living for years to come. Sometimes the figure is in the 70s; sometimes, shockingly, the early death of a clergyperson still in harness reduces the average age to something in the 60s.

So the news of Robin Cook’s death at the premature age of 59 (3 years older than me) left me feeling queasy, especially as hill-walking around our Church Stretton home reminds me just how unfit I am. Puffing my way up Townbrook Valley, or any number of the other breathless ascents around here, I like to think it’s doing me some good. It is, as long as my arteries haven’t become furred up without my knowing, and an unexpected blood clot doesn’t form and suddenly cause a part of the heart muscle to die. Even the precaution of having a mobile phone with me, and better still a companion, may not be enough to save life in that situation.

There were many times I didn’t like Robin Cook. I hated his betrayal of his first wife, and still have grave doubts about whether you can or should trust a politician who breaks his marriage vows - how can he (usually, he) be trusted about anything else he says or promises?

But his principled resignation from the Government over the Iraq War did a lot to restore my good opinion of him.

He said, “We would have achieved much more against terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine, instead of war to Iraq.” We know he was right, and I believe history will prove him more so.

I have never lived there, though it has been my parents’ home for 20 years. They moved there from London when they had not long retired, and a place in the country was an ideal prospect for the years of health and leisure that lay ahead of them.

It’s a large white bungalow, with a footprint like you can only get in the middle of Wales, where the nearest neighbour - barring sheep and cattle - lives a quarter of a mile away. It has a big living room with windows looking out south and west, and four bedrooms leading off a long passage.

We spent many happy summer holidays there, when the children were small. Sometimes we could afford one week in a rented cottage somewhere else, and would go to Mum and Dad’s for the second week. Occasionally, when we were too poor even for that, we would stay there for a whole fortnight. Sometimes we would go and house-sit while they were away on holiday themselves. And always there were the post-Christmas or -Easter breaks when we could flee the parish at no expense.

Now it is becoming unfamiliar, a place where old people, not my parents, live. It still has lots of things that I recognise. The walls are covered with photographs of the people we all used to be. Somewhere hidden away in cupboards or in the attic, are books I loved as a child. But more and more it is the changes that we notice whenever we are there. The greenhouse that used to be Dad’s pride and joy, where he grew sweet fresh tomatoes, is overgrown with weeds now, in a chaos of rank vegetation, and in the midst of it one indignant gladiolus. The toolbox lies dusty and untouched in the “cupboard under the stairs” - as it’s always been called, in spite of its being a bungalow. Light bulbs get changed only when a visitor with long arms or willing to stand on a chair gets enlisted to do it.

It’s a fascinating, loveable, terrifying, prospect of life to come for all of us. And it reminds you that, of all people, children and the young (and here I cast myself as one of these) are those who least desire change. At least where it concerns their parents or home. And yet, at the last, these are the things of our life that will change the most and most rapidly. Until suddenly you wake up and find you, yes you, have become the older generation. Transfixed, I watch it coming; it is near, though not yet.

Some things there are that can’t be blogged about, until you know the outcome. One such has been Alison’s recent Selection Conference, to discern the mind of the Church about whether God is calling her to non-stipendiary ministry. I wasn’t too happy about getting the results of this while we were on holiday. Confident as we were that it was right, the thought that other people might not be so sure didn’t bear thinking about: the prospect of holiday spoilt by disappointment and all the accompanying agony about whether it was just us who had misunderstood God - which is worse: just us? or just the selectors?

In the event, the DDO (Diocesan Director of Ordinands) phoned this evening to tell us that the men and women from MinDiv - they say YES! Bless her, for letting us know as soon as she could, and not leaving it till she’s back in the office on Monday.

Relief and joy all round.

Meeting new people, making new friends, is one of life’s pleasures even for the chronically shy and introverted like me. It didn’t seem possible to be near Aberystwyth for a morning, and not at least try to meet up with Sharon (of Early Modern Notes) whom I’ve got to know through her blog. After sitting for half an hour looking at the telephone, picking it up and putting it down again, I dialled the number for the only person with that name and initial listed in the phonebook, wondering how I was going to explain if I ended up speaking to some crusty old colonel or fragile widow. But it was OK - Aberystwyth is a small town, after all - and we arranged to meet at a popular coffee house rendezvous.

Turning up ten minutes early, I realised I hadn’t arranged a signal for recognising one another: “I’ll be wearing a green carnation and reading a copy of the Daily Sport - and when you ask if I have read page 3, I’ll answer, Yes, it looks unseasonably cool in the Urals.” Sharon hasn’t adorned her web-site with a picture, so she has the advantage of me there. But again, in the event there was no mistaking her. Out of the several people who entered around the arranged time, there was only one who looked like her blog and her telephone voice.

Alison stayed for a few minutes to say hello, before going off to look around the shops, leaving us talking about blogs, computer OS and software, blogging acquaintances, academic life and storytelling. It’s a special thing to be able to put a face, and a real live person, to an Internet friend.

Sharon once described me (somewhere) as her favourite Anglican priest. Of course, it’s highly possible she doesn’t know that many, but it made me feel good, anyway. I wonder if she still thinks so, after having met me? (No need to answer that, Sharon …)

First day on holiday. My birthday. Weeks of sleep to catch up. And the door bell rings at 10 to 7. It’s the postman with my birthday present, which Tom ordered from Amazon and had despatched to the Flat. How come we in Oxford have had our postal service “reformed” or “modernised” or whatever the expression is, so that if we’re lucky the first post comes at 11 a.m., while here in Shropshire it still comes at a proper time - even when you don’t want it to?

Later I phoned Tom to thank him. He said, “I don’t know why they did this: they’re sending the second part of the shipment separately, it should be there tomorrow.”

Fortunately tomorrow the postman didn’t come till 20 past 7. So I got a lie-in.