Weekly Reflection 11th - 17th October 2009
October 9, 2009
I wanna tell you a story…
It is not often Max Bygraves intrudes into my waking thoughts (though his version of Deck of Cards was the soundtrack to many a nightmare). However, lately I keep hearing in my mind’s ear his catchphrase, I wanna tell you a story. It began when I got into a discussion about Christianity’s persistence in our culture and imagination, rooted, someone thought, in the stories the tradition preserves. Even if we don’t go to church, or believe a word of what the preacher preaches, we know the story of the Good Samaritan, the Flood, the Creation, the Nativity, and as long as they are current, something of our culture’s Christian character endures. All religions have their stories, especially those which originated in oral culture, and even in ours, in which Scripture is primary, stories precede texts. The Gospels, for example, preserve material that was in circulation before anything was written down - stories about Jesus and his teachings - and scholars have shown that far from being unreliable, like Chinese Whispers, this material was very carefully passed from person to person and community to community. Perhaps what makes a good story, its power to lodge itself and endure in the memory, individual and collective.
Mindful of this, an Anglican priest in the United States developed a system for teaching children the essentials of the Bible and of the Christian faith through storytelling. It developed into what we today call Godly Play, and it has been so successful both in the US and in the UK that we have resolved to start using it here. Instead of a sermon, children and young people (and it is fascinating to see how compelling adults find it too) gather around a rug on which a storyteller uses a few props and an artfully constructed narrative to tell a story from the Bible. It sounds like nothing special, but when you see it done properly it is extraordinarily effective, capturing the children’s attention in a way sermons or addresses can’t, offering a way into Christian faith that is refreshingly different from the old Sunday School methods that many of us endured when we were young. Our Family Service, at nine on Sunday mornings, has been growing, bringing the next generation of Christians into the Church. We want to do everything we can to encourage their growth and nurture, so today, Sunday October 11th, Godly Play comes to Knightsbridge. We do hope you will come along to the Family Service when you can find out what the story is all about.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
Weekly Relection 4th-10th October 2009
October 2, 2009
All is safely gathered in…
In spite of a delayed departure from Izmir and a frantic rush through Istanbul Airport to make the connection to London, I can say with pride that I counted all our Parish Pilgrims out and I counted them all in. Actually, in fairness, the Pastoral Assistant did, he having a better head for figures than me, and besides I was too busy queue-jumping in Duty Free to give my undivided attention to the flock (mea culpa). Anyway, we all made it safely back to London, but I wonder how many, like me, unpacked their bags with a slightly deflated feeling. I often get it after being away, not because of post-holiday (or post-pilgrimage) blues, but because of the disappointment I feel when I discover that the souvenirs of my trip, arranged on the dining table, don’t quite measure up to my expectations.
I’ve learned to be more disciplined about this since touring in pop bands, when you would often find yourself in airports with fistfuls of unspent per diems in nine different currencies, and nothing to buy but appalling local delicacies and dolls in national costume. We were once detained by the usually liberal Customs regime at RAF Northolt on our return from - I can’t remember where - who confiscated from our luggage vodka which might very easily have fuelled our flight home, gourmet bonnes-bouches made from endangered species protected in four continents, and decommissioned military hardware.
I try to be more careful souvenir shopping now, but in spite of that, on Sunday night as I pulled from its bubble wrap an Iznik tile I’d bought in Istanbul, I felt that disappointment rise again. It had looked so good in the shade of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, and the Armenian lady (I think she was a lady) who sold it to me was liberal with the apple tea and tireless in negotiation. In the end I rushed it, more anxious to get away than to acquire the tile, and it sits now in the kitchen while I think what to do with it. It is certainly a handsome piece, with peacocks and pomegranates in lovely Iznik blues and reds, but it doesn’t really go with anything else. I was drawn to it because it reminded me of a tile I’d seen in the harem of the Topkapi Palace; but the Curate’s flat is not provided with a harem, and the utility room is hardly its match in glamour. What on earth will I do with it? I can’t really sneak it in with the Harvest Offerings… hang on… Eureka! The Parish Jumble Sale, Saturday October 24th from 9.30 in the Parish Hall, 77 Kinnerton Street (the early bird catches the worm…)
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
Weekly Reflection 20th - 26th September 2009
October 2, 2009
From St Paul’s Second Missionary Journey
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE! Our delightful and tireless guide, Goscen, summons us as insistently as the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to prayer (although we get an hour longer in bed). And we’re off, through the streets and courtyards and bazaars of Istanbul, a city so cosmpolitan it makes the Eurovision Song Contest look like a Gang Show. The birthplace of Byzantine Christianity is today a sort of picturesque collision of Islamic, Orthodox and Jewish traditions, contained, just, by Ataturk’s secular state. The tensions are obvious in Agia Sofia. Once the greatest church in Christendom, it became a mosque under the Ottomans and a museum under Ataturk. If you look up into its gloomy domes you see Islamic calligraphy sitting alongside Byzantine mosaics, in competitio still for the attention, if not the devotion, of the crowds and crowds of tourists below. What was once the centre of the Christian world lies now beyond its horizon and the spirits of St John Chrysostom and Constantine seem pretty elusive. But, bizarrely, l was browsing in a second hand bookshop near the Pera Palace and found there the 1844 Pickering reprint of Edwards VI’s Prayer Book. Odd to find the first Book of Common Prayer in a city which fell to Sultan Mehmet II a century before Cranmer wrote his first Collect. It probably came from the Anglican church in Istanbul, Christchurch, recently reopened after a fifty-year furlough and thriving when we visited it on Sunday morning (we spotted the historian Norman Stone among the communicants). The sense of stepping into Christian history really began once we’d left the capital for the the towns around Izmir, on the south west coast, where St Paul spent twenty years founding the churches remembered in the New Testament - Smyrna, Ephesus, Laodicea, Pergamon, and so on - some of them today just a pile of rubble in a nondescript town centre, but some of them almost as spectaular in ruins as they were in their golden age. Pergamon, which has stood at the top of a mountain since long before the time of Christ is breathtaking, a city of streets and agoras and forums and theatres and citadels which emerged from the ground when an enterprising German archaeoloist arrived thousands of years after they were built. He sent the best bits to the Pergmaon Museum in Berlin (which does to the Turks what our acquisition of the Elgin Marbles does to the Greeks). Even stripped of so many of its assets, when you walk along its colonnaded street you walk where St Paul walked, and where the Constantine’s emissaries were later to arrive to buy the ‘parchment’ (derived from the city’s name) which was used to make the great 4th century bibles he commissined for the Empire. One of them, Codex Sinaiticus, can be seen today in the British Library, which means a little bit of Pergamon resides in the shadow of St Pancras Station. But I think my favourite place was Laodicea, a street of white marble going nowhere and some marble columns supporting nothing on top of a hill thronged by swallows. After you’ve read the guide and heard the commentary and checked the New Testament references you’re left with nothing but silence and the view and white marble glittering against the deep blue sky.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
P.S. Any resentment felt by the Turkish nation for the looting of its treasures by western Europe should be assuaged by the amount spent by St Paul’s pilgrims in the leather shop outside Ephesus this afternoon (and Mrs Tytherleigh’s going to just love the bumbag).
Weekly Reflection 13th - 19th September
October 2, 2009
Thanne longen folk…
April is traditionally the time thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, or at least they did in Chaucer’s day. In this parish September is favoured (my dear, the discount) and this year, like last, a party from St Paul’s will be following the pilgrim trail not to Canterbury but to Asia Minor. We will visit the Seven Churches of the Revelation, whose names you will instantly recall: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea (I’m sure there’s a mnemonic, but I’ve forgotten it). Today these are, rather less romantically, Selçuk, Ýzmir, Akhisar, Sart, Alasehir, Bergama and Denizli; but perhaps this stretch of coast is nowadays best known for Bodrum, a sort of Turkish Blackpool.
In the First Century it was the scene of a very different kind of tourism, as St Paul and his companions pioneered the spread of Christianity around the Mediterranean. Part of the reason why we longen to goon on pilgrimages is indeed to follow in the footsteps of those pioneers; but how often, when we arrive at a site of great antiquity, we feel an obscure sense of anticlimax. This is not simply about finding a bus station occupying the site where Patriarch Anatolius convened the Council of Chalcedon in 459; I think it may also have something to do with the way we ‘do’ history.
I visited Shakespeare’s birthplace last year and would have been quite happy to make my own way round, but instead we were treated to an historical recreation of Stratford towards the end of the sixteenth century. A man, in improbable hose, announced himself as Shakespeare’s father, and delivered a folksy monologue on civics in Renaissance England. Alas, the spell he tried so artfully to weave was frayed somewhat by having The Archers on in the background. I suppose they were trying to make history come alive, but the point of history is that it is not ‘alive’, and while the illusion of escape into it may be diverting for a moment or two, its usefulness lies in its power to makes us think differently about the present.
That stretch of coast where Paul and his companions preached the Gospel is today dominated by a different issue, the tension between the secularism imposed by the Turkish Constitution, and Islam, which has experienced a great revival in those parts. So maybe that’s where our pilgrimage will take us, into a consideration of the conflicting claims of religion and secularism? No less a personage than Tony Blair has described this as the defining issue of our time; the irony is that it was, in a different way, the defining issue of Paul’s time too.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate