Weekly Reflection 30th August - 5th September 2009
August 28, 2009
Oremus…
Have you been on the London Eye? Embarking and disembarking is particularly thrilling because the wheel never actually stops, turning so slowly that all but the egregiously lame and halt have sufficient time to step on and off when their pod reaches the bottom of the cycle. I expect Health and Safety will outlaw this in due course, and we’ll have to be loaded on in crash helmets and knee pads to the wailing of klaxons, but until then, bon voyage. It reminds me of those Paternoster lifts which you still occasionally find in old buildings. Paternosters were a chain of open compartments that moved slowly in a loop up and down inside a building without stopping. Passengers could step on or off whenever they liked, pretty smartish, for the compartments continued on their daily round indifferent to their athleticism or lack thereof. They were called Paternosters for they recalled the continual cycle of Our Fathers offered when the faithful prayed the Rosary, another unbroken cycle that has continued for centuries. For us, on the man-ward side of God, the power of prayer lies in its unbroken rhythm, a rhythm sustained by those doing the praying without regard for mood, or season, or the price of eggs. But this traditional view of prayer grows more and more obscure in a culture which thinks praying is an add-on, something to do while walking the dog, or driving to work, rather than an activity which merits our complete and undivided attention for itself alone. Also, our assumption that authentic communication means giving voice to our individual emotions with as much sincerity as we can muster has crowded out prayer’s objective character. I think this only dawned on me at theological college when every morning and every evening, come rain or shine, we met to offer the prayer of the Church to God (with, admittedly, an opportunity for improvising towards the end: Father, we know how much you are pained by people hogging the Marmite at breakfast…) Much of the prayer we offered was in plainsong, Gregorian Chant (named after St Gregory the Great), and sung by monks and nuns for well over a thousand years. I can’t think of anything which better focuses our hearts and minds on the things of God, and which better realizes our obligation to pray unceasingly, than its austere beauty. The monk who led plainsong at my college was more pragmatic about it: offering prayer, he said, should be like stepping on and off the bus (rather like the London Eye). Gregory’s feast falls this week, and to mark it we are offering a beginner’s course in plainsong at the Wednesday Evening Service at 6.45 p.m. on September 2nd. Do come along if you can - you won’t be made to do anything embarrassing - and there’ll be refreshments of superior quality afterwards. Deo Gracias!
Fr Richard Coles, Curate.
Weekly Reflection 23rd - 29th August 2009
August 28, 2009
De profundis…
One Friday afternoon, twenty years ago, I returned home from Sainsbury’s to find the bath had overflowed. Water had dripped right through the house, through three floors, eventually ending up on my piano, whereon I had left a pile of music manuscript, the score I was writing for a theatre show that was due to premiere in a fortnight. It was ruined, the ink had run, the pages had stuck together, and I realised I was going to have to do the whole thing again - hours and hours of work. So I cancelled my arrangements for the weekend and went to my parents’ house to write the score out again. I was particularly annoyed because I’d been invited to a party on the Saturday night to celebrate the birthday of an extravagant friend, and it promised to be a spectacular occasion. I arrived at my parents’ in the country and dutifully set to work. On Sunday morning I put on the television to catch the lunchtime news and saw a friend of mine, normally impeccably turned out, looking bedraggled and shocked, interviewed by journalists. He’d gone to the party I’d missed: on board the Marchioness.
Fifty-one people died in the disaster, and the weeks following I remember as kind of blur, of sitting with people in shock, who couldn’t stop talking, of having to track down a friend, travelling in Thailand, to tell her that her flatmate had drowned, and of weeks and weeks of funerals. I recalled those funerals again on Thursday, when we met at Southwark Cathedral for a special Choral Evensong to mark the twentieth anniversary of the disaster. The names of the dead were read out, and looking round the congregation, half recognising people I hadn’t seen for years, I couldn’t stop wondering how those who had died, most of them under thirty, would have turned out. It was a sociable, cheerful, energetic scene twenty years ago, and despite having grown heavier and greyer, the congregation seemed not to have lost that brio. It felt almost like a college reunion until the reading out of the names, when it became obvious that for some the grief was still overwhelming.
Most of them, then and now, have no connection to the Church, and I wondered if they found the prayers and readings and music mystifying. What could be more mystifying than preaching God’s benevolence to a congregation who had lost their children, their brothers and sisters, their lovers and friends just as they were starting out in life? I talked to someone afterwards, a survivor of the accident who is not religious at all, and asked him what he’d made of it. He said he had been profoundly moved. What by? By hearing words and music, he said, that were here before we were here and will be here after we’re gone. It made me think even this can be transcended, and that gives me peace.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate.
Weekly Reflection 16th - 22nd August 2009
August 28, 2009
Heal thyself…
I was visiting a church in the City the other day one lunchtime and I got talking to a man who turned out to work for the Financial Services Authority. If he joined in the words of the General Confession with more heartfelt sincerity than the rest of us, I couldn’t tell, but it cannot have been an easy time for people like him since the credit crunch crunched. Regulators, while not exactly vilified like bankers, are unlikely to be nominated for Pride of Britain Awards any time soon. How could they have allowed the banks to get us into this mess? And what are they going to do about it, I wondered?
He was pretty philosophical about it, acknowledging that the FSA had not always delivered what we expected it to deliver (although its successes, unlike its failures, are invisible); but he reminded me that it can only work within its powers. The issue that enrages most people - bonus culture - is not one the FSA can settle. If bankers wish to pay themselves huge bonuses that’s a matter for them and their boards and their shareholders, and the FSA can no more regulate that than Premiership transfer fees. He was also argued that they have to tread very carefully lest the City‘s wealth creators, as jumpy and volatile as racehorses, bolt for easier pastures. If London were to lose its preeminence as a financial centre the rest of the economy, and in due course the whole country, would really feel the difference.
I’m not sure that the choice is a simple one, between, on the one hand, regulation so light it would be as pointless as an Italian speed limit, or, on the other, as rigorous as a Stalinist Five Year Plan. But talking to him reminded me of another conversation I’d had at the BBC last week with a producer who, like many of his colleagues, is utterly fed-up with working in the new culture of compliance and regulation that the Hutton Enquiry and, some say, the Daily Mail, has ushered in. There’s a story going round that an editor interrupted the recording of a radio programme when the presenter read out a letter on air. “Is that the actual letter?”, he was asked. “No, it’s a copy,” he replied. “Then you can’t read it out. You have to read out the original, not the copy”. I have an awful feeling it might even be true.
I told the man from the FSA that story and he laughed. We walked together to the tube and he said that he was retiring in six months and wouldn’t be sorry to go. He and his wife are going to spend their time going round the country offering their experience and expertise helping churches sort out their finances. “What brought this on?”, I asked. He said that he had come to believe that the only really effective regulation is not light-touch or heavy-touch, or even imposed by an authority. It has to come from within. “The real issue”, he said, “is how we regulate ourselves”.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate.
Weekly Reflection 9th - 15th August 2009
August 9, 2009
Never look a gift-dog…
I remember when I passed my driving test, aged thirty, my instructor telling me to forget everything I’d learned if I actually wanted to get anywhere in a car. During the course of our long relationship his hair went white - unusual in a man of thirty - and he may simply have been trying to finally get me out of his Maestro, but it was advice I recalled when I was ordained. Much of what is taught at Theological College should be forgotten the day you leave, and I have to say that the hours spent studying something called ‘pastoral theology’ are among the most wasted of my life. The best advice I ever got while I was an ordinand was from an old and experienced priest from the Diocese of Durham who said, One: get a good confessor - and Two: do your Christmas cards in November. Of course, in this profession, like so many others, most of one’s learning is ‘on the job’; and this week I’ve learned something really useful.
It is a common experience for a cleric in a dog collar to walk down the most crowded thoroughfare and see it part before you like the Red Sea before Moses. I don’t think it is because people feel particularly hostile towards us - or not many - it is just that Vicars and Curates seem to provoke obscure feelings of guilt or awkwardness in a crowd. Sometimes this can work to your advantage. An elderly Monsignor I used to know said he could always guarantee a compartment to himself on the train simply by beckoning to other passengers to join him. More often, however, it is frustrating; but I think have discovered the solution.
I have acquired a puppy, Daisy, a fourteen-week old miniature long-haired, blue-eyed, piebald dachshund. She is so pretty shaven-headed men with spiders’ webs tattooed on their faces have broken down in tears at the mere sight of her and queues of cooing ladies-who-lunch have formed in Motcomb Street to pet her on our midday constitutional. Please feel free to behave as extravagantly as you like to her for the puppy-trainer advises that getting her socialized to as many people and places as quickly as possible is best.
Naturally, I am already hopelessly in love with her, but she wouldn’t be here if it had been down to me. I’ve had dachshunds before but not for some years now, and I’d begun to think that it was simply impractical to have a dog. I mentioned this casually to a friend - actually someone I’ve only just met - and three weeks later he gave me Daisy, a gift not only of sumptuous generosity but extraordinary thoughtfulness.
We can all think of a hundred reasons not to do something - we don’t have the time, it will inconvenience us, it may not be practical - but sometimes being inconvenienced is exactly what we need.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate.
Weekly Reflection 2nd - 8th August 2009
August 9, 2009
Poetic truth?
The death of the world’s oldest man, Henry Allingham, at the age of 113 ends the nation’s living link with combatants of the First World War (Henry saw the battle of Jutland in 1916). His funeral with full military honours this last week was both a local and a national event.
To mark the occasion the new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem, ‘Last Post’, which was broadcast on the Today programme on Radio 4 on the morning of the funeral and has subsequently been printed in a number of national newspapers. For all the popularizing of poetry achieved by her predecessor, his actual poems for national days were - I felt - in the main a little disappointing (but then the wedding of a minor royal or the arbitrariness of the Millennium celebrations were scarcely inspiring subjects!). So it was with low expectations that I turned up the wireless and listened to the first example of the craft of the new Laureate. But ‘Last Post’ was stunning - a perfect example of what poetry for national events can be and do: capturing the essence of the moment, and around it weaving history, ideas, echoes and allusions so that the present is transformed and given new depth. Google ‘Carol Ann Duffy and Last Post’ and see what I mean.
‘Last Post’ plays with an idea from the writings of World War One victim Wilfred Owen whose most famous poem laments the fate of the fallen and protests against both the inhumanity of war and the perpetuation of the ‘old lie’ that ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori‘. In her poem, the nameless poet (Owen?) - through the power of poetry - ‘tells it backwards’ and rewinds the terrible events so that the millions of the fallen find themselves avoiding annihilation in the trenches and return to the possibilities of lives redeemed: “crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food /You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile. / If poetry could truly tell it backwards,/then it would.”
A good poem has a ‘sacramental’ quality - but even the most powerful poem can only reshape perceptions and play with ideas. That which is truly sacramental does much more: it both informs our perceptions of past and present but also serves as guarantor that the future is shaped by the purposes of a loving God and assures us that redemption is not simply a poetic idea, but - in Christ - a promise.
Fr Alan Gyle, Vicar