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
Weekly Reflection - 26 July - 1 August 2009
July 26, 2009
Coughs and sneezes…
On Monday afternoon I attended a briefing at Westminster City Hall about the local strategy and response to the current Swine Flu Pandemic. Flu Pandemics seem to happen, on average, every forty years or so. Some of you may recall the Asian Flu of the 1950s which killed millions; fewer now will have any direct memory of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic which is estimated to have killed up to 100 million people. The good news for those over 52 years old is that if they had Asian Flu in the 1950s they may well have some level of immunity to the present virus. The bad news is that the virus has now got a real grip and many have already experienced a short sharp burst of high temperatures, aches, pains, coughs and sneezes - usually over in 48 hours, thankfully. Antiviral drugs may help a little if taken in time, but may also have unwelcome side effects.
Towards the end of the week, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York issued guidance to the National Church about what constitutes ‘good practice’ in these uncharted days. Cleanliness and sensible basic hygiene seems to be the order of the day - and though we are always scrupulous about these things at St Paul’s, it may be worth just reassuring our congregation that hands are always carefully washed before holy vessels and holy things are handled. One specific piece of guidance was the discontinuation, for a while, of the sharing of the chalice at Communion, and we will, for the time being, observe this. Again, it is worth reminding members of the congregation that to receive Communion ‘in one kind’ (i.e. the bread only) is nonetheless fully to make your communion - though the practice of sharing both bread and cup is obviously preferable. We will resume our normal practice as soon as we reasonably can.
However, amidst all of this anxiety about the spread of infection and the need for self-preservation, it may also be worth reminding one another of one other piece of ‘good practice’! Our calling as Christians is to servanthood in a religion that places love and service of neighbour on a par with love of God. So, lest we become totally consumed with selfish anxiety about our own wellbeing, it is worth remembering that one opportunity this pandemic may present us with is the chance to attend to the needs of the sick, to keep an eye open for our neighbours, to support those who are in need and to reach out to the frail and the needy. If the clergy or the parish office staff can help in any way, please don’t hesitate to be in touch.
Fr Alan Gyle, Vicar
Weekly Reflection - 19-25 July 2009
July 19, 2009
“We are family: new thinking for the twenty first century”
I shall be speeding through Leicester (or past it) on my way to Yorkshire this weekend to preach at the Ryedale Festival, but had I time to stop en route it would have been interesting to eavesdrop on the annual conference of QUEST, a group of gay British Roman Catholics. Not always noted for being either affirming of ‘alternative’ lifestyles, nor in the vanguard of progressive social change, parts of the Catholic church are responding - at least at a national level - creatively to changing social norms in our day. The title of the conference is “We are family: new thinking for the twenty first century”.
Had I had time to stop on my way to hear our former Director of Music, Justin Doyle, directing the music at Malton Priory at the Annual Festival Service (…with distinguished guest preacher, blah blah…), I would have enjoyed listening to Terry Prendergast the Chief Executive of Catholic Marriage Care tell the assembled delegates (in a heavily trailed speech - but you read it here first!) that “the Church has often built up a romantic image of a golden age of the nuclear family which has not found expression in reality, often with unwelcome consequences for those who “do not fit.” These include single parent families and also co-habiting and same-sex families. He says that often “those individuals… want to live good lives according to the precepts of the Gospels. They are an advert for the Church, an advert that the Church often ignores, or consigns to the waste bin.” He will say that in all relationships, the institutional aspects are less important than the sacramental qualities: “The presence of God mediated through commitment, consent and covenant. The move from the institutional to companionship, choosing for love, has been marked, possibly more deeply, in co-habiting and same-sex couples.”
I think that - while wanting as we do here to continue to affirm those who chose to live, and do successfully live, in ‘conventional’ relationships - there is a lot of truth and good sense in that. It is, after all, not a question of either/or. And it is the sort of honesty we perhaps need in a week in which the attempt of the American Episcopal Church to say something similar at their General Convention has been met by cries for schism and the breaking of our communion with them. There may well be institutional anxieties about the manner in which they have chosen to advance the agenda (poor Rowan Williams, who would have his job, this week especially?!), but I suspect that ECUSA is simply slightly ahead of the game in saying something most sensible and thoughtful people are thinking, and one day we will look back on Anglicanism’s reactionary outbursts with not a little shame.
Fr Alan Gyle, Vicar
Weekly Reflection - 12-18 July 2009
July 11, 2009
ALMA Sunday
Sometimes people wonder why the Church spends so much time and so many resources on its relations with the developing world. Bang on from the pulpit too often about organisations like ALMA, our Diocesan link project in Mozambique and Angola, which we support with our Lent Appeal, and you can see congregations stiffen slightly and compose themselves into the appearance of polite attentiveness while silently working out Sudoku puzzles in their heads. This is, in part, because we feel that issues closer to home might be more profitably addressed, or we may have acquired a measure of forgivable scepticism about the usefulness of intervening in the politics and economics of poorer countries, or we may simply be bored. But I think also there’s something unsettling about being confronted, in our relative prosperity and comfort, with harsher realities. Look at the effect John the Baptist, unkempt and unmannerly, had on the court of King Herod, and what it cost him.
But that image of John the Baptist, of the prophet Amos, and of Jesus himself, appearing like irritating anomalies amid the luxury and self-regard of courts and palaces and Temples, is at the heart of Christian witness. If we wish to be faithful to Christ and his teaching and his example then we must stand alongside, and among, the poor. This is so fundamental to what we do, and so deeply rooted in our tradition and the Jewish tradition it arises from, that we perhaps take it for granted; perhaps we have lost sight of just how radical an idea this is. Why does our Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth, every Maundy Thursday, hand out purses of money to the ‘deserving poor’, to use the antique phrase? Why does the Archbishop of Canterbury, at that same service, wash their feet? Even when these rituals have been abstracted by ceremonial there is still something strikingly odd about people of majesty and power putting themselves among the poor to serve their needs. Far more frequently the majestic and powerful seem to strive to distance themselves from the poor, for fear that they may lose their lustre?
Choosing to be among the poor, even if it is on unilateral terms, is a sign that who we are, at the deepest level, is not decided by our achievements, our standing in the world, our place at the top table, but by our common humanity, a humanity which only makes sense when we begin to understand it as bearing the likeness of Jesus Christ himself.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
Weekly Reflection - 5-11 July 2009
July 4, 2009
Tu es Petrus (ii)
The instructive example of St Peter came to mind again last Monday, as I stood, sweltering, in our neighbouring church in Eaton Square, a church under the patronage of Peter, and thus a most appropriate venue for the ordination of five new priests. As Gareth, Mark, Annie, Ed and Pete faced the congregation, vested for the first time in their priestly stoles, a burst of applause broke out. It was an expression of affection for the five, from families, friends and parishioners, and also an acknowledgment, I guess, of the journey each has made to priesthood. Nevertheless, I winced slightly, not simply because applause is not in the rubrics, but because it suggests that being ordained priest is somehow a personal accomplishment, like passing your A levels or driving test.
The example of Peter reminds us that Christ chooses those whom he chooses not for our accomplishments, but in order to accomplish his work in us. Our job, if that’s the word, is not to get in the way too much; so theology degrees, liturgical expertise and familiarity with the historic formularies of the Church of England, while useful and necessary, are not ends in themselves, but the means to realise ends which are not ours at all.
And yet… there is something irreducibly personal about priesthood too. Priests are not mannequins but people, with character and individuality, in whom strength and weakness and confusion and insight contend (as if anyone needed reminding). Ordination does not relieve the priest of the baggage he or she has acquired on life’s journey any more than it cancels out personality. Jolly people make jolly priests, sarcastic people make sarcastic priests, angry people make angry priests and so on; and the Grace of Orders, by which we are empowered to discharge the duties that ordination lays upon us, works not around these things but through them. I sometimes think it’s a little like an orchestra, in which strings and woodwind and brass and percussion combine, in all their rasping, vibrating, sawing, clunky individuality. The net effect, however, is not cacophony, but harmony and pattern and meaning, the individual strands woven into a song which is greater than its peculiar parts. As an audience, sometimes we get too close and rather than harmony all we can hear is the mechanics of sound production. Maybe, like audiences, we need to stand back a bit, find perspective and distance, before we can really hear the music.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate
Weekly Reflection - 28th June - 5th July 2009
June 26, 2009
Tu es Petrus
Petertide, that season of the Church’s year in which we celebrate the life of the Apostle Peter, is traditionally the time for the ordination of priests and deacons. There is much to encourage them in his example. You are Peter, says Christ according to Matthew 16: 18, and upon this rock I will build my Church; but only five verses later, at 16: 23, the tone has changed, Get thee behind me, Satan!, which not only suggests that Jesus knew a thing or two about clergy, but also offers a realistic model for those clergy to aspire to. Christian ministry, depending as it does on the frail earthen vessels of Christian ministers, is often a slow progress, although you might not think so at the sight of those men and women this week emerging from theological colleges and training courses in their shiny new collars and stainless cassocks (among them Gillian Straine, late of this parish).
This year, however, some of them will be left behind on the starting line, because we seem to be producing more curates than we have jobs for. This is, in one sense, marvelous news, with more and more candidates, of very high calibre, offering themselves for ordained ministry, a statistic which bucks the downward trends we so often observe and gives us hope for the future of the Church. Last year London Diocese, for example, produced two dozen new curates, to serve in churches high and low from Cockfosters to Twickenham. This year the problem seems to be that some of the evangelical colleges, which have experienced a modest surge in numbers, simply can’t find enough suitable jobs for the Class of 2009.
Suitable jobs? It seems that some of their more hardline graduates are particularly picky over where they go. Career-minded conservative Evangelicals, like career-minded conservative Catholics, identify certain parishes as powerhouses, energetic in mission, rigorous in doctrine, the kinds of places where a bright young thing gets noticed. For them the prospect of spending three years in the Cambridgeshire fens doing BCP eight o’ clocks and Christingles is simply unthinkable, and definitely not part of the career-plan; so they hold out for a better offer.
I wonder if they’re not missing something here? It’s not their mission after all, but Christ’s; and dilatoriness in answering His call, or seeking to negotiate the package, seems rather nearer to Matthew 16: 23 than 16: 18.
Fr Richard Coles, Curate