Must read some of these guys, one day. I’ve got three of these little volumes on my shelves - the two volumes of Homer’s Iliad, and a volume of Plato’s dialogues, but never got around to reading them. And there are so many more, that I covet whenever I’m in the Classics department at Blackwells, a little haven of peaceful scholarship on the floor above the chattering mayhem of the coffee shop.
One day …
I never like reading or thinking about pensions (AKA, how much more hard up will I be when I stop work?). It makes me, like lots of other people, run headlong into head-in-the-sand mode. But I did think I’d better look at some of the C of E’s current proposals, which may add another £18 to 36 million per annum to the costs of the Church. All to be found from the dioceses. i.e. From the giving of church members, who are already pretty stretched to meet the demands of the diocesan budget.
There I read: (Pensions Update | Church of England)
3. Parochial clergy are currently paid an annual stipend of around £19,000, with some variance between dioceses, and in addition have the use of a house provided by the Church. The current (defined benefit) pension, payable at 65 to those with 37 years’ full time service is £11,686. A lump sum of three times the pension is also payable on retirement. In retirement, members have the responsibility for accommodating themselves, though the Pensions Board does provide some assistance for those with limited resources.
I wonder how much less than that you need to have, to qualify as having “limited resources”? Maybe there was a time you could buy a house for £35K. But I can’t remember it.
A ghastly, revelatory moment. I read the headline on the BBC website, Spiral and Michael voted off show, and knew that it was about Big Brother. I have never watched BB. I have never wittingly kept up with the news about it. I hold it in extremest abhorrence. Yet somehow I know this headline refers to it.
I feel just like Sarah in one of my favourite films, who discovers she knows the name of the Arsenal striker, and exclaims, “My God, it’s like being colonised.”
From time to time I’ll eat a croissant, to remind myself just how much I hate the darn things.
They are surely the most overrated confection ever. I mean, I thought French cuisine was supposed to be the finest in the world? Surely someone at quality control was napping, the day the croissant was invented. How did the rumour that they were in any sense desirable or delicious ever become established? Or is it all some gigantic confidence trick they have managed to play on those stupid perfidious anglais?
Croissants are greasy, sickly, crumby, tasteless, impossible to eat with anything like ease or decorum. They are disgusting.
I hate croissants.
… as I realise I’m going to have to make two speeches at Sun’s wedding: not just the sermon in church, but the Father of the Bride’s speech. I’ve never done this before. It’s a completely different idiom. And accustomed as you are to public speaking in one mode, a different mode altogether suddenly becomes terrifying.
Aargh!
Alison’s away this week for the summer school of her ministry training course. They’re learning about Liturgy. She says, “One of the things I’ve been realising is just how good you are at all this.” Obviously this is exactly the kind of course every spouse should attend. Even better: every member of the congregation.
This was how the Oxford Mail reported Li’s exciting day: Fifty evacuated as fire rages
So Li and a colleague / friend / neighbour who had also been evacuated came to stay the night. It was one of those typical situations in which no one in authority knows what’s going on. When they phoned the police this morning to try and find out when they could go home, the police referred them to the fire service; when they phoned the fire station, they were told to phone the police. Everything pretty normal, then.
In the end it was 3.30 p.m. before they told her she could go back in in about 15 minutes. By the time I dropped her back up to Headington, it seemed that most of the neighbours had already crept back through the police cordon and let themselves into their homes, some time during the morning. That’s the trouble with doing as you’re told.
Here’s one of history’s incredible, stranger-than-fiction stories, as told by Wikipedia. The story of an African slave who was brought to Russia from the court of the Ottoman Emperor, who won the favour of Peter the Great, and became a general and military theorist, and was Pushkin’s great-grandfather.
There’s also a new biography of him by Hugh Barnes.
Like many parents who breathe a sigh of relief when their children leave the nest, having arrived (moderately) safely at an age of independence, I’ve never been too keen to hear the head-shaking advice of older parents: “You never stop worrying about your children, you know.”
We’ve had that kind of day with Li, who phoned mid-afternoon from her flat to share with us that
A couple of hours later she phones again to say she and all the neighbours have been evacuated with no idea of when, or whether, they’re going to be allowed back into their homes. Can she come round and stay the night, if necessary? (she still can’t move the car, so will need picking up, only the London Road is closed because of the fire).
Oh, and if she comes, she wants to be here in time to watch Casualty. Seems like you can’t get too much a good (?) thing.
And another thing: they have Marmite in the dining room, so you can spread it on your toast for breakfast. (Nice change from the muesli and All Bran with prunes.)
The only problem is, they place the jar on a saucer, with a teaspoon to get the Marmite out. Every true aficionado knows you need a knife blade to gauge just how much you want: a teaspoon doesn’t hack it. Presumably someone thinks it saves the contents of the jar from getting crumby or buttery if people dig their knives in. But listen folks, just LICK YOUR KNIFE before you stick it in the jar, like you do at home, and what’s the problem?
“How do I go about becoming a vicar?” asks a reader.
There’s a good page about vocation on the Church of England website. The beginning of the process is (should be) God calling you, and certainly you won’t get very far without talking to other Christians you respect, and to your vicar. Who hopefully is also in that class of people.
The Bishops’ Advisory Panel is getting on towards the end of the process, almost the last hurdle before you begin actual training. At a Panel, held in one of those semi-secret locations mentioned earlier, there will usually be 16 candidates, and two teams of advisers, each team being responsible for assessing 8 candidates. In each team there’s a Vocations Adviser, a Pastoral Adviser (that’s what I am) and an Educational Adviser.
The candidates are present for 48 hours, from Monday teatime to Wednesday teatime. During those hours, they have a number of written exercises to do (a “Personal Inventory” consisting of a questionnaire on several different areas, and a Pastoral Exercise, usually in the form of writing a letter addressing a particular pastoral problem). They also have to give a presentation on a topic of their choice that they have prepared beforehand, and lead a group discussion on the topic of their presentation. This is about a million times better than the old group exercise, where they simply drew a random subject from the pile, and led the discussion more or less off the cuff. Nowadays the presentations and discussions are of a high quality. Candidates also have an interview with each adviser.
Come Wednesday teatime, and the candidates depart, leaving the advisers to remain for another 24 hours or more to deliberate, make their decision, and write their reports. This typically involves sitting up until midnight or later tapping away at your laptop, followed by meetings to moderate the reports, followed by redrafting, until everyone is agreed. Every decision is supposed to be unanimous. And what people outside the process often don’t realise, is that the candidates you recommend are the easy ones. It’s the ones you feel you cannot recommend who cause the heartache and hard labour. Because you know how disappointed they will be, and you need to take special care over their report, to explain the decision, why they are not recommended, and help them to discover what God is calling them to do.
Because all that stuff that may sound like mere guff and theory is actually the exact and whole truth. The process really is about recognising that every one of God’s people has a vocation. It is about trying to discern what form that vocation takes, and how best each one may serve God. It’s a process soaked in prayer before, during, and after the meeting of the Panel.
And sure, advisers and panels can make mistakes. They’re only human. But in my estimation there’s an enormous seriousness and integrity about the whole process. It really does try to do what it says on the tin. In an imperfect world, it may be one of the procedures that is most fit for purpose of any that has been devised.
And like I said before, it is just such a great privilege to be a part of it.
I’m home from the BAP: one of the most intensive 72-hour periods of work in my life, certainly since the last time I did one. I’m absolutely zonked; when I went along to church to say Evening Prayer I just burst into tears - I hadn’t been aware how much I had been like a whalebone corset all day, holding myself and my emotions together, and stopping everything from spilling out.
I took a book to read if I had a spare 5 minutes before going to sleep, and didn’t even open it: the only volume I looked at (repeatedly) was the advisers’ manual, every time I needed reminding about how I was supposed to be doing the job.
And of course the most important things are entirely confidential, so you will never hear about them - unless you happen to know one of the candidates who was there. But if you do I will have to delete all posts relating to the event.
So it’s only the trivia that can possibly be blogged about. Like finding the stairs.
The Church of England holds its BAPs in two main places, at Ely and at Shallowford House in Staffordshire. Shallowford House is the Lichfield Diocesan Retreat House. It was given to the diocese in 1938 by its previous owner (how nice, to be so wealthy you can give your house to the diocese). It’s a lovely peaceful place, a huge asset to the church. Its only disadvantage is, it’s so difficult to get out of the upper storey. Instead of a broad open space leading to the stairs down the ground floor, the entrance to the stairs is hidden away behind an ordinary door - of which there are any number opening off the hall and corridors. So the first several times you try it, you’re hunting around looking for the right door.
I had nightmare visions of myself reduced to loitering about in the hall, pretending to be studying a reproduction of The Hay Wain until someone less spatially challenged than myself happened along. Fortunately it never came to this, as I worked out a mnemonic to help me remember which door the stairs were hidden behind: the one marked FIRE EXIT.
(Well, come on, it’s an understandable confusion. I was looking for stairs, not a rope ladder.)
Like carbon-dating, or estimating the age of a tree by counting the rings in the trunk, you can get some idea of the age of a clergyperson, by what s/he calls the selection conference s/he had to attend, before being admitted for training for ordination.
In the very very olden times, they were called something like CACTM. Then (and I am such a dinosaur that this is what mine was) they went by the name of ACCM. More recently they were called ABM. For some reason I never fathomed, they always sound like something Gollum might have been muttering to himself about, don’t they, My Preciouss?
But now the Church has been brought thoroughly out of Middle Earth into the 21st century, by their re-christening as BAPs (”No smirking, there in the back row!”) which stands for Bishops’ Advisory Panels. Full title: Bishops’ Advisory Panel on Selection for Training for Ordained and Accredited Lay Ministry; so it’s just possible that someone thought BAP sounded less silly than BAPSTOALM.
One of the most surprising developments in my recent ministry was being nominated by the Bishop as a Pastoral Adviser for these selection conferences. You don’t get called for this jury service very often, ’cause it’s quite a lot of work, but I’m getting another go at it next week. Just as previously, I feel almost overwhelmed by the privilege of being allowed to meet these people, who are answering the call of God to serve him in the Church, and seeking to discern with them what form that service should take.
About a fortnight before the BAP begins, you get a great wodge of confidential papers about each of the eight candidates you and your colleagues will be considering, and you have to read and annotate them according to the three out of nine criteria you are responsible for. You’re supposed to allow up to an hour for each one, though I find it usually takes half as long again.
One reason for this is the high consumption of tissues. I weep buckets as I read about people’s beautiful lives. The older candidates have experienced so much, and often through great suffering and sacrifice have discovered they already have powerful ministries that it would be crazy for the Church not to recognise. The younger ones (there are all too few of them) have such enthusiasm and eagerness, so much potential we can only guess at and try to channel aright.
I want to recommend all of them for training! In the old days of ACCM and the like, there was sometimes the feeling that the selectors, like a gentlemen’s club full of crusty old colonels, were trying to “catch people out” and find reasons for them not to be ordained. But I really really want them all to be able to go forward.
Apart from anything else, their faithfulness encourages and inspires me afresh about my own ministry - apart from when it’s making me feel they are all so much better than I and my contemporaries were…
So if Storyteller’s World goes quiet for the next few days, it will be because I’m away Somewhere in England, about the Church’s (and hopefully, God’s) private and confidential business of holy discernment.
Orate pro nobis.
Tony (not myself under an assumed name but a different person altogether) describes in a comment furtively reading books by the Archbishop of Canterbury. This conjured up strange imaginations of what one might find an Archbishop furtively reading. And this in turn brought to memory - in the odd way that the mind does - the following anecdote from the Doctrine Commission’s report Believing In The Church (1981).
At the opening of the Dublin Exhibition (1853), a certain Judge Fitzgerald noticed that the Archbishop of Dublin was paying very close attention to the inside of his hat. At first he took this (as one would) for devout listening to the many speeches by the great and the good, but on closer examination he realised that the Archbishop was reading something. So great was his attention, that the Judge was prompted to look into the archiepiscopal hat, where he found the Archbishop had George Eliot’s Middlemarch there laid open.
Tui phones up from her holiday in Minorca to tell us Dave has asked her to marry him, and she has said Yes.
What a relief. Dave came to see me five weeks ago to ask for my permission, and I’ve been sitting on this secret ever since, terrified that I might accidentally blurt it out in conversation. (I did share it with Alison - it would have been difficult to explain otherwise why my daughter’s boyfriend wanted to come and see me on his own “to ask me something”. “Well, my dear, he was anxious for some help in clearing up the uncertainty he was feeling about the filioque and one or two other matters…”)
What’s quite exciting and thrilling is that all our children actually want to get married, even though they don’t need to - there are other ways of getting away from the parental home. Somehow or other, in spite of everything, Alison and I haven’t managed by our example to put them off the idea for ever.
Here’s a depressing kind of déja lu from today’s Old Testament reading at Morning Prayer: Judges 15.
We’re told that Samson, the great hero and judge of Israel, went down to visit his Philistine wife, only to find her father had given her to another man. Swearing extravagant retribution, Samson torches the Philistines’ crops, vineyards and olive groves. So the Philistines vow revenge, and burn the woman and her father. Samson says, “If this is what you do, I swear I will not stop until I have taken revenge on you.” And he strikes them hip and thigh with very great slaughter.
The Philistines, attacked by Israel in this way, send a task force to kidnap this one man. The men of Lehi agree not to harm Samson themselves, just tie him up and hand him over. But as soon as he’s in the Philistines’ hands, the Spirit of the Lord rushes on him, his bonds melt like flax, he snatches up the jawbone of an ass and kills a thousand of the Philistines.
Disproportionate retaliation by Israel against her neighbours, all in the name of defence or justice, is nothing new. It’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s there in Judges, something like 3000 years ago. Is it really likely to end any time soon, God help us?
As for you, Palestinians and Lebanese or whoever you are: don’t even think about it. For every one Israeli you capture or kill, they’re going to kill 1000 of you. Blow up your power stations, bomb your roads and airports, shell your beaches, burn your cities. They’ve got biblical warrant for it.
What I can’t understand is why Israel hasn’t got any friends who will make them stop it. Suggest that maybe it’s international political suicide to alienate the entire world. Oh yes - that’s why they haven’t got any friends. Even those of us who would like to be, are just too appalled by their policies.
40 Years Ago
July 11, 1966: I skipped my English homework to watch England’s first World Cup match against Uruguay. It ended in a goal-less draw, which I thought unfair as England had played the better game. Ah, but then as now, the beautiful game needs not just superb ballet, but balls in the back of the net.
Or maybe, that’s what we did wrong this year? Perhaps we need a 0-0 result in our first match, in order to win the Final? Nah, not a safe tactic.
