Storyteller’s World

I don’t know quite what I was expecting.

So many people had said to me over the last week, “We’d love to be at your celebration, but we’re going to be away”, that I started thinking there wouldn’t be many there.

In the event I shouldn’t have worried. The congregation at the Eucharist would have been a respectable number for many a Sunday morning - certainly the most we’ve had for a mid-week saint’s day ever.

I spoke about my vocation, which was originally about being a preacher of the Word, and how unexpected it was therefore, at the end of my deacon year, to find that being priested was such a special and moving event. I spoke about some of the people who had helped me over the years, whom I might have wanted to invite to this celebration, but who have been “promoted to glory”. About the ordination charge, and how reading it year by year continues to daunt and inspire. About the priesthood of all believers, which the ordained priesthood exists to serve and enable. About teaching and above all encouraging, which seems to me to be the most important part of any ministry but above all of priestly ministry. So many Christians, and even clergy, spend their time carping and criticising and judging their colleagues, their congregations, the Church in general. There’s enough discouragement in the world, and the Church’s present situation. We need saints who will encourage us.

And then I did all the special priestly things: absolved, celebrated and administered the Eucharist, blessed in God’s name.

And we all piled over to the church hall for the feast. Not the vicarage garden, in view of the thunderstorms and torrential downpours of earlier; but we were able to sit out on the patio and enjoy the cool.

At some point in the evening, Churchwarden Geoff (who has been known to read this blog - caveat auctor!) made a speech which (nearly!) reduced me to speechlessness and handed over a very generous and unexpected gift and a card which everyone had signed.

It’s an amazing, humbling, thing to have a job which gives you a place in a community, and the privilege of sharing people’s lives - and sharing your life with them - to such an extent that you can be on the receiving end of this love and affection. It feels quite undeserved; but love doesn’t think about deserving or not deserving; but when you love or are loved you want to try to be worthy of it or deserve it more.

I certainly felt encouraged by this congregation. It was like being bathed in a warm pool of affirmation and acceptance. I think this is probably the best job in the Church of England, and I’m staying in it.

(So I must remember all this the next time the job gets me down, or I feel unloved or futile. Every clergyperson should have a file labelled “Encouragement” containing all the thank you letters and appreciations you ever get. Put it away at the back of a drawer - it wouldn’t do you any good to be looking at it every day. But make sure you know where it is, and can pull it out and read it, when life gets depressing.)

We trust that long ago you began to weigh and ponder all this, and that you are fully determined, by the grace of God, to give yourselves wholly to his service and devote to him your best powers of mind and spirit, so that, as you daily follow the rule and teaching of our Lord, with the heavenly assistance of his Holy Spirit, you may grow up into his likeness, and sanctify the lives of all with whom you have to do.

Scary words the Bishop addresses in the Ordinal to those about to be ordained as priests. Judging by my carefree look all those years ago, I may have thought I had weighed and pondered these things, but I didn’t have much idea.

(My, how those styles come back to haunt you.)

Li’s 24th birthday passes eventfully and ends dramatically. We spent a good hour and a half this morning at the bike shop, getting estimates for the replacement of burnt bikes and buying one for her, as she uses hers every day to get to work.

(Bicycles burnt at high temperatures lose not only their rubber tyres but also their aluminium rims, so that only a sunburst of spokes remains, radiating out from the hub. Like so much else in the aftermath of the fire, they look like something imaginatively Britart-y.)

Then she went out with her Xander, drinking bubbly with strawberries in Christ Church Meadow, before we all went out for an evening meal at the Mitre. No sooner there than the heavens opened in the promised thunderstorm, and we enjoyed the added free entertainment of watching overflowing gutters, and drenched passers-by, in the High. By the time we went home it was only moderately pouring.

24 years ago, Li was born during Sunday Evensong, in the second year of my curacy. Thanks to her, the boss gave me the evening off (and possibly the following week too).

Some of the neighbours who were away at the time of our garage fire have returned home and paid the obligatory visit to hear the story and commiserate. Among the post on their doormat, they found a number of leaflets warning local residents to be vigilant against arsonists, fit smoke alarms, report abandoned vehicles, etc. This confirms what someone else had told us: that the fire service or police or someone had leafletted nearby homes in this way.

But not us.

We received none of this.

Whether this is some kind of official sensitivity or not, I don’t know. Maybe they think if we get warned about arsonists just after having been (possibly) arsonised, it will annoy or upset us.

What’s more upsetting to me is not having been contacted by anyone. If it’s true that the fire investigators or police have any suspicions or are investigating the fire, I’d like to know about it, actually. Instead of which, if anyone has been around, they never knocked at the door or made any attempt to talk to us about how we were feeling, or our thoughts about the incident.

I don’t suppose I was expecting any follow-up - that’s why I hardly thought about it before now. But if things are rumbling on somewhere, it would be quite nice, as a victim, to know about it.

Having part of your home totally destroyed is not a common experience; I don’t know what to expect from it. It really is an area where a bit of information about what’s going on would be welcome.

No really, you don’t have to look at these unless you’re interested.

A page of wedding pictures.

This is where you can see Tom looks more like his mum than me. It’s the same mouth.

(The stole I’m wearing is the one Alison made me for my ordination. At that time it was touch and go whether ‘we evangelicals’ were going to ‘make a stand’ and insist on being ordained in scarf and hood. But I thought: Blow this! Why shouldn’t we look as pretty as the others?)

We’re discovering loads more reasons why it’s a good idea not to have your car totalled by fire.

Alison had only just paid for a year’s motor vehicle licence at the beginning of the month. That cost is not (surprise!) part of what your insurer includes in the market value of the vehicle. You have to reclaim it direct from DVLA.

You can only reclaim the licence fee from DVLA if you return the tax disc with the application form.

If you haven’t got the tax disc (which, being paper, probably burned a few minutes before the plastic, paint, upholstery, tyres, glass, and large parts of the metalwork) you have to present yourself at the DVLA office and first apply for a replacement tax disc. This costs you about 40 minutes’ wait and £7.

Then you can return the tax disc to DVLA and apply for a refund of the licence fee.

I’m not sure whether bureaucracy is so intricately beautiful that it could only have been created by evolutionary Nature working overtime, or so baroquely random that it could only have been written by that infinite number of monkeys tapping away at computer keyboards, or so malignly mindless that it could only have been thought up by the Prince of Darkness the morning after his missus had locked him out because he came home drunk. Or maybe we have no need of any of these hypotheses? Perhaps the British bureaucrat alone is responsible for all this masterpiece?

With all of the excitement of the past week or so, I missed this report about a typically British kind of protest: Farmers demand a ban on the term ‘couch potato’ - Sunday Times, until Deep Meaning (my anonymous source at the OED) mentioned it this morning. The Oxford branch of the protest, outside the offices of the OED, was “peaceful and good-humoured”.

But who knows what might happen if the Government and the OED continue to take no action about their grievances? It really is too bad that these healthy, image-conscious vegetables have been given a bad name by lazy, slobbish, layabout (mostly male) human beings. If things don’t change, and pretty quickly, we may have Maris Pipers armed to the teeth with potato peelers, hijacking the Clapham omnibus and holding passengers hostage. Or King Edwards with bandoliers of grenades strapped under their jackets, carrying out suicide attacks on fish and chip shops.

In order to protect the public, it’s imperative that the Home Secretary introduce ID cards for all vegetables as a matter of urgency.

At the end of a long day looking after the sheep and the goats, Isaac used to come back to the tent where his beloved Rebecca had prepared the evening meal. Then, when they had eaten, he would spend some time with his twin boys, before they went to sleep. Often he would tell them stories, about the family, its history, travels and adventures. “What story would you like me to tell you tonight, boys?” he would ask. And how often Esau and Jacob would answer, “Abba, Daddy: tell us about the time Granddad was going to kill you and offer you as a burnt offering to God.”

The rest of this morning’s sermon.

Earlier this week I picked up Alberto Manguel’s Reading Diary. I love reading about other people reading: what and how and where and why they like to read. It’s one of the reasons I loved Ann Fadiman’s collection of essays on books and reading, Ex Libris. It’s the greater part of the attraction of all the bookish blogs out there. When a keen reader writes about their reading, they are opening a window into their soul, and inviting you to step inside and share a holy thing.

In 2002-3, Alberto Manguel decided to reread twelve of his favourite books, one a month, and keep a diary about his conversation with those books, with other authors, and with current events in the world around. Among other things he describes the nauseating feeling of incoherence as he watches fragments of TV news about the inevitable build-up towards the Gulf War. The nausea comes not from the lack of meaning in the fragments themselves, but because they belong to an incoherent whole.

It brings back a vivid sense of that time when the world was drifting towards a war that no one wanted, except the US and British Governments, and which the people of those (supposedly democratic) countries were powerless to stop. It’s an interesting thought to reflect on how much of our responses to reading are coloured by the context of the events taking place around us.

I’m impressed by the cosmopolitan character of cultured people in other parts of the world. My reading, like that of so many other English speakers, is so parochial. I don’t read foreign novels translated into English. I don’t even read much English-language material from other English speaking countries, apart from the US. Yet Manguel’s favourite reading includes not only English works but also Argentinian, German, French and Spanish, all of which I expect he has read in the original languages.

I’m envious of someone who is able to make a living as a reader-writer. On the one hand it seems to be pretty hand to mouth - at one point he’s having to nag a publisher to pay up a delayed payment of £100 - while on the other he travels round the world to exotic places (OK, Canada - but other places, too) and stays in hotels. How do you get a job like that?

If I were to keep a reading diary like this, what would my twelve favourite books be? At the moment the list would probably look like this:

Odyssey; Huckleberry Finn; Little, Big; Screwtape Letters; Kim; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; and something by: Robertson Davies; Jane Austen; Ursula Le Guin; Patrick O’Brian; Dorothy Sayers. That still leaves one place on the list. Or two, or three, if I change my mind about any of the others. By the time I get around to doing it, I probably will have done.

Ban arms sales to Africa - nothing else is required, urges Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe at openDemocracy. (Thanks to Daniel for the link.)

It cannot be stated too strongly that it is the African genocide-state that is the current bane of African social existence. This - not “debt”, “poverty”, HIV/Aids (or other diseases) and the myriad of socio-economic indices reeled off in many a commentary - is the emergency that threatens Africans’ very survival.

There must be thousands of wonderful Einstein anecdotes. Here are two I’ve come across recently.

Paul Valéry, the French poet, once asked Einstein if he kept a note book to write down all his ideas. Einstein looked at him in surprise for several moments before replying, “Oh, that’s not necessary. It’s so seldom I have one.”

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p.162

Obviously not a Moleskine man, then.

But my favourite one is this:

Einstein once visited his physicist colleague Niels Bohr at Bohr’s summer house on the Danish coast. He was astonished to see, above the house door, a horseshoe, commonly supposed by locals to bring good fortune to the occupants of the house.

“Niels,” said Einstein, “surely you, as a physicist, don’t believe that such a horseshoe does any good, or that it might alter the course of events?”

“Of course not,” Bohr answered. “But I have heard that it also works if you do not believe in it.”

Wil Derkse, The Rule of Benedict for Beginners, p. x

I’ve often thought we could do worse than market Christianity in the same terms: it works, even if you don’t believe in it.

Time for another plug for FreeWestPapua.org - For a Free & Independent West Papua

On Monday July 4, the Revd Socratez Sofyan Yoman, President of the Union of Baptist Churches of West Papua, will be speaking at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on “Genocide in Paradise”. Time: 4.00-5.30 p.m.

If you’re anywhere nearby, come along. If not, be sure to visit the website.

Take a look at The Raising of the Wreck of the Ally, today’s adventure in the garage fire saga.

The whole thing provides wonderful opportunities to tell the story. One friend this evening apologised for asking - “You must get tired of telling it to everyone.” Ha! Does a junkie get tired of people offering him his drug of choice?

At Anglican Communion News Service, the text of Rowan Williams’ opening address. It’s a depressing thought that not even having a saint and genius as Archbishop of Canterbury can stop the bishops tearing the church apart. But as Rowan says, only God can save us and the Church. Still, he’s pretty direct about urging people not to break away under any circumstances.

But what an idea: the suggestion that we might hold on to our friendship in Christ, even if we can’t manage full sacramental communion! If that’s the case, I say we are taking Sacraments too seriously. “I’ll be your friend, but I’m not going to eat with you.” Pardon me, but what possible meaning can the word friend have in that sentence?

Here’s the online book group discussing Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

One of the key factors in my coming to faith, was being given a New Testament when I ‘graduated’ from junior Sunday School at the age of 10. (The way to this man’s heart and soul is always through a book.) It was a small blue volume of the King James Version, distributed by the Pocket Testament League. I’ve no doubt at all that God honoured my 10-year old commitment in filling in the ‘decision page’ at the back of that book, and though nothing more came of it for years, God found me and brought me back ten years later.

Some time in the intervening years, that little blue book has gone missing. When I eventually wondered if PTL was still producing them, I found that although the organisation still exists by that name in the States, over here it uses the working title bridge-builders. For old time’s sake I sent them a donation, and ever since I’ve been on their mailing list, in spite of the fact that their favoured style of open-air evangelism (you might have seen it) and preference for single gospel leaflets rather than the whole NT, are not at all my cup of tea.

Their latest newsletter tells about this year’s Outreach to Fatima by a small team:

“During the week,” said Graham Woolgar, “we talked to visitors to the shrine from all over the world. I spent some time with an American couple who were there as part of a tour. The husband told me he had been brought up in the Catholic faith. As he looked at the people crawling down the marble walkway he told me he was not sure that he had the faith to do what these pilgrims were doing. This led to a long discussion about whether or not such actions were necessary.”

‘Necessary’ somehow misses the point. It’s a bit like saying it’s not necessary to buy flowers for the woman you love: it looks like trying to buy her favours, or earn them, when the important thing about love is that it’s completely free, undeserved, unconditional. But it’s one thing me being a tightwad. It’s something else again to start trying to prevent other men buying flowers for their beloveds, accusing them of not really being in love if they buy them flowers, and trying to make them as miserly as I am.

As if there weren’t enough people in the world with no knowledge of God at all, you’ve got these “Evangelicals” (isn’t that word supposed to have something to do with Good News?) trying to make Catholics think just as meanly of God as they do.

Bridge-builders, they call themselves?

When our children were much younger, we had a number of wonderful family holidays at Mabledon, a country house near Tonbridge that was owned by the Church Pastoral Aid Society, and run as a conference centre and rest home for knackered clergy. For some weeks each year, there were special subsidised holidays for clergy families, with full board, at knock-down prices. Our children just loved it, and we were able to tour Kent and East Sussex and visit some great sites.

Over the fireplace there was a large English landscape painting of the Constable sort of era and style, called The Tree Fellers. This gave rise to what is still one of our favourite family jokes. Every time we arrived at Mabledon and went into the lounge, the first one in would say, “Look, there’s The Tree Fellers.” And the response (Irish accent obligatory) was, “Sure, it looks more like four fellers to me.”

Well, the tree men came this morning - and there really were three of them - to make sure our well-roasted trees that stood by the ex-garage were safe, and not about to fall on passing traffic or spontaneously reignite. They cut away the dead wood, the ivy, the Russian vine, leaving a nearly naked yew and Scots pine, which may well survive and regenerate. Let’s keep a watch on this astonishing, resurrectional power of nature.

BBC NEWS | UK | Royals cost Britain £36m a year

Mr Reid [keeper of the Privy Purse, so a really independent commentator] said: “We believe this represents a value-for-money monarchy.

“We’re not looking to provide the cheapest monarchy. We’re looking at one of good value and good quality.”

My family and I will be more than happy to do the job for a mere £30 million: a saving to the tax payer of 17%!!

Alternatively you could think about two other questions: Why does it cost us anything, considering how rich they are? And, Why do we need a monarchy at all?

Being one of the principal characters isn’t conducive to being able to take lots of pictures, so the results from my digital camera (not of the best quality anyway) are disappointing; and the APS film hasn’t been processed yet. So we’re grateful to family and friends who have forwarded some of their results. These are from artist brother-in-law Owen Williams.

Standing behind: Sun, Alison, Storyteller; my Mum, my Dad, Alison’s mum.
Kneeling / sitting in front: Li, Annie, Tom, Tui.

Some people say Tom looks very like me. I’m flattered by this, though he may be less so. It’s true he looks more like me than he used to - as a toddler he favoured his mother’s side - but he’s taller, bigger, handsomer than me, better at all sorts of games and much more socially ept. If that’s a word. He’s also not bad at public speaking, as people said after his groom’s speech. Mind you, he’s had an excellent model Sunday by Sunday during all his growing years.

Tom and Annie outside church, under photographer’s orders, still smiling!

I’m wondering if it’s possible to make a wedding happen nowadays, without mobile telephones. Or maybe what I’m wondering is, how people ever managed to make weddings happen without them. Certainly the day of Tom’s wedding will have kept Orange and Vodaphone shareholders smiling for many months to come.

The one person we most needed to have a mobile, was of course the one who didn’t. This is my mother-in-law, travelling by train from Dorset to Cardiff on a train that was already 90 minutes late when she boarded it, because of points failure further down the line (the wrong kind of heat). By the time the train reached Cardiff I’d been driving between the station and the hotel in Cathedral Road for much of the day. I shall know this route again. (Though I do wonder if this was to keep me from pacing up and down with nerves.) We were just at the point where Alison was phoning me and saying, “Look, you’ve got to get back here, it’s time we were leaving for the church”, when the Portsmouth train finally pulled in with a hot and tired mother-in-law on board. And we got to the church in time, just as the groom was arriving.

What else can go wrong, if you’ve managed to get all the guests there? Well, if you’re a Church of England vicar taking a wedding in the Church in Wales, it’s a minefield. The service is very similar to the one you’re familiar with, and use all the time - but not identical. So there are a number of opportunities to embarrass yourself or confuse the couple by getting the words wrong and realising you’ve got them wrong and trying to correct yourself in mid-breath. The fact that half the wedding guests remember Four Weddings and A Funeral and keep mentioning Rowan Atkinson and talking about the Holy Goat or the Holy Spigot doesn’t help matters either.

Yet when the Trumpet Voluntary has ended, and I’m standing in front of the congregation in that borrowed cope, I somehow slip into professional mode and put everyone at ease and sail through it without a glitch; and it’s only occasionally that I think “This is my son; this is my new daughter” and emotion wells up for a split second before I stop and don’t go there because they’ve trusted me with a job to do for them. And they look at each other with such joy, and such love, and they are husband and wife.

Without a shade of bias, I can honestly say they are the most perfect couple I have ever married. Until the daughters come to stand in the same place, when they will be equally perfect.

Here Tom, with Annie and his old schoolfriend Ali, is doing just what I spent much of my own wedding day doing: playing with a wedding ring that he’s not used to wearing.

There’s something irresistible about other people’s misfortunes. A hidden benefit of our fire is that it’s already provided enormous entertainment for the parish: not only those who come to church - where it was the main topic of conversation yesterday - but also for many others. You could sit here all day watching the cars slow down as they drive past, while their occupants take a good look at our disaster site. I’m thinking of setting up a booth on the front lawn, so that passers-by can actually do what they’re longing to do: hear all about it while they look. I’d have a tin with a sign saying, “Guided tours of the disaster site, and all the story, £5 (proceeds to Building Fund).”

The Diocesan Surveyor says, “That’s what I like about this job. You never know whether the next call is going to be about a tap washer that needs replacing, or a garage burned down.”

Rebuilding the garage can (and will) wait. But there are some immediate and what you might call emergency issues. Restoring full power to the house is one of them. Two of the trip switches in our fuse box cannot be switched back on again because the power to the ex-garage was linked to those circuits (why?) and until that supply is isolated there’s a short circuit. So there’s no power in the study, which means I’m unable to work until it’s mended. And even worse, there’s no broadband signal because that is filtered through the alarm system, and that’s also down. Broadband is one of those things like (fill in your own example, for goodness’ sake) which, once you’ve got used to it, you can’t live without.

And then there’s safety. One of the firemen attending the fire broke his leg when part of the wall fell on him, and what’s left of the walls looks far from stable. In fact, when the Surveyor came he leaned on it a little to improve safety by rendering it more level with the ground.

And then comes the lunchtime TV news, with footage of the flash floods in North Yorkshire. I’m already sensitive and emotional, but tears come to my eyes as I watch whole houses and communities destroyed by water, and people’s treasured possessions - all their memories - wiped out by vile smelling mud. And the film of a couple in their 70s being rescued by passers-by from a sinking car (another Nissan Micra), which within moments disappears under the water. The heroism and readiness to risk life and limb of ordinary people is quite astonishing. (That’s Geordies for you.) I’m left saying to Alison, “We’re so lucky: it was only our garage that burned down.”

The Wedding was fantastic; and I may even blog about it some time in the near future.

And in the mean time, we return home to the news that last night our garage burned down with Alison’s beloved Nissan Micra inside. Our first thought, when one of our neighbours phoned this morning to prepare us for this, was that it must be arson. But according to the fire officers, there were no signs of foul play. It’s just an unexplained accidental fire. This is a frightening kind of verdict. If something like that can happen when you’re away from home, why not when you’re there, and fast asleep in your bed?

Alison spoke to her car insurers. Naturally they are not quite the nice people they make out on the TV adverts with the little red telephone on wheels: that stuff only happens if you have the next higher grade of insurance to the one you’ve actually got. They will have to send an assessor to decide whether or not the car is a write-off.

Well, naturally you need to be an expert to decide that kind of thing.

This was a great post moaning about having sung “All things bright and beautiful” at three funerals in the last two days; but on reflection I think it breaks my Rules for Blog Posting. I would be unhappy for it to be seen by any of the families involved in those funerals.

If any of my blog friends would like to read the original version, please e-mail me, or leave a comment, and I’ll send you the text in the e-mail equivalent a plain brown wrapper.

Sun is looking forward to her big brother’s wedding. She may complain about hardly ever meeting her new sister without her parents being there - I’ve never met my new daughter without her husband-to-be being there! And as for going out for a drink with her…

The last couple of days I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails containing viruses. No doubt someone who uses Windows, and has me in their address book, has been infected by what looks like W32.Mytob.ES@mm. These e-mails claim to come from myself (there isn’t anyone else who’s the administrator at my domain name) telling me my e-mail has been suspended, or my password reinstated, or some such nonsense, and all I have to do is click on the attached file to sort it all out.

These are the moments when Mac users feel strangely smug. But also frustrated that there doesn’t seem to be any way of finding out which of my friends and contacts has been practising unsafe e-mail, and warning them that they need to take their computer to the ITD (Internet Transmitted Disease) clinic.

Just back from a sweet time of prayer at Elsfield. I had planned to do our bit towards being part of the Quiet Spaces Still Places network by having a series of evenings of quiet, ‘contemplative’ prayer there, using the Jesus Prayer. In the summer, naturally, when you don’t get lost in the dark on your way there, or frozen to the pew once you are there.

Having arranged the dates, I didn’t have much sense of who might come, and being short in the faith department, was quite prepared for the possibility of being on my own. But in fact, there were a dozen of us, to enjoy an hour of true stillness in that holy place.

So much of normal church life seems noisy and hearty, and it’s easy to start thinking that’s what people want, so that the ones who really want something more inward can easily be neglected. Must remember to cater for them too - especially as that’s the kind of prayer I prefer. (And am therefore all the more likely not to offer - such is the old Puritan in me still.)