Getting Rebranded

Well, the parousia having come and gone (or not, as the case may be - you will have to consult Mr Harold Camping who is something of an expert in these matters) I had better do as promised in my last posting and try to make something of my recent church-going experience following my retirement towards the end of January.

I have to say that I didn't find it possible to commit myself to another parish as soon as I had left the one of which I had been a part for a quarter of a century. It is, of course, quite right that once you have left the vicarage you cannot occupy a pew in the same church as though nothing had happened. You have to remove yourself altogether unless special circumstances apply, which I'm afraid generally means the funerals of those who were your parishioners. But as for the usual Sunday services, they are out of bounds, certainly for a year or more, and perhaps for good. My successor would not want to hear my mournful sighs from the back pews, nor see the sad shaking of my head when (yet again) he failed to conduct public worship with the propriety and perfection which so notably characterised the preaching and liturgical practice of his immediate predecessor.

For some time before my holiday in Mitteleuropa last year I had felt what I can only call a need to stop and draw breath. There were a number of reasons for this. One was the state of my health which was becoming increasingly complicated, another was the simple fact that twenty-five years in one parish is a rather long time. After preaching to the same community on the same topics yet again as the ecclesiastical year rolls by for the twenty-fifth time, you begin to wonder what more you can say about Christmas, Palm Sunday and Easter Day, not to mention the further reaches of Corpus Christi and the Assumption. I was occasionally driven to remark before a sermon that it would probably be like the old Community Sing at which you followed the bouncing ball on the screen through lyrics which you knew by heart already, having heard them so often before.

To start with I avoided the problems of commitment by attending mass at St Patrick's Basilica. I liked the comparative anonymity, and the fact that nobody was likely to suggest that I concelebrate. To my considerable surprise (as I had discovered in Austria) I just didn't want to be in the pulpit or even (very surprisingly indeed) at the altar. So not going to an Anglican Church helped.

But there were other factors as well; for as you will have detected if you have read earlier postings, I'm not at all sure about Anglicanism in these islands. I am (I think) what used to be called a Prayer Book Catholic - more or less. I realise Benedicition of the Blessed Sacrament is not to be found in the BCP, but then perhaps Archbishop Cranmer just failed to get around to it before the flames got around to him. Be that as it may, given what one clergywoman described to me as 'our rich diversity' - she was commenting on the fact that some of our fellow clergy didn't believe in such theological niceties as the Trinity, life after death, etc. - I felt a little pause for thought was not a bad idea.

However, even if Anglicanism hereabouts sports atheistical bishops such as Richard Randerson, and even if it chooses his writings as the basis for the Lenten studies of New Zealand Anglicans, I still don't find the grass in other fields all that much greener, let alone truly edible. So here I am, a self-appointed Athanasius, and I want to receive the Sacrament when I go to church on Sundays - something I can't do in St Patrick's Basilica in South Dunedin. However, I have discovered a very nice grassy paddock in north Dunedin, the Anglican (of course) Church of All Saints.

But it's still all rather strange. I have greatly appreciated the services I have been to there, and the very warm welcome given me by the vicar and others, but All Saints was the church I went to as a teenager when I discovered that the catholic faith was not confined to the Roman communion. I have often claimed (once indeed in a sermon from the pulpit of All Saints Margaret Street in London) that Fr Charles Harrison, in my youth the vicar of the Dunedin All Saints, was the greatest single influence (humanly speaking) on my religious convictions and my sense of vocation. So now, finding myself back in the same pews I occupied half a century ago is (in some ways) a rather weird experience. My beginning seems to have become my end, and for the moment, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it.

Here we are again

Yes, yes, I know. I have been a very bad blogger indeed. And I'm afraid I'm not all that likely to make a particularly rapid - or permanent - recovery either. Sloth is an incurable condition, I'm afraid. But I hope the same is not true of a certain degree of bewilderment which has also contributed to my reluctance to commit my thoughts (such as they are) to the ether.

Retirement for a parish priest can be really quite bewildering, certainly to start with. Along with the relief at never having to find another sidesman (or woman) for the Solemn Eucharist ever again, and the pure pleasure of living in a delightful house in which dawn never comes before 10am, there is the little problem of what to do on Sundays. In my case, I grateful to say, Tuesdays are OK. On Tuesday mornings I celebrate the Holy Eucharist (and preach, what's more) in the beautiful chapel of an Anglican retirement home not far from where I live. Futhermore, as well as the excellent sermon there is also the excellent liturgy (1928 - more or less!) and I even get to face the east wall during the Prayer of Consecration. What more could you ask?

But there is still the little problem of Sundays. On the first Sunday after my retirement I decided to snoop around a bit. In the church notices in the Saturday edition of the Otago Daily Times I looked for a service which didn't start too early the following morning, and lo and behold! there was a mass at St Patrick's Basilica in South Dunedin which was due to commence at 11am. Perfect! So along I went, rather apprehensively, I must admit. What if they had all been reading this blog, and come across my somewhat less than charitable effusions about the office of the Roman Pontiff? Would they understand that I am really Mr Valiant-for-Truth, or would they publicly rebuke me as an incorrigible heretic?

Surprisingly, however, they did neither. The parish priest (Gerard Ainsley) whom I have known and liked for years (we were police chaplains together) greeted me warmly as I entered, and when I found a place in the back pews I discovered an old family friend sitting next to me, who also welcomed me most kindly, and even seemed pleased to see me.

St Patrick's is most certainly not a small church, but it was fairly full in what was liturgically speaking a fairly unremarkable Sunday. And the congregation included not just young people but what seemed to be a fair number of young families as well, something of an endangered species in many Anglican parishes.

The mass itself closely resembled an Anglican celebration of the Eucharist, as I had found was also the case even in St Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna when I was on holiday in Austria last year. And the sermon, delivered without notes by Fr Gerard was simply excellent, so much so indeed, that I was moved to tell him afterwards that he was very likely the second-best preacher in Otago and Southland - high praise indeed, as I'm sure you will agree.

In my next posting (should there be another one before the parousia) I will have something to say about the thoughts and ideas which my attendance at St Patrick's stimulated and provoked.

Making Up

Just before I go to bed I usually have a look to see if I have any new emails. This is generally fatal for the 'just before' bit, since an hour or more often passes before I can drag myself away from other people's blogs. And what a fascinating collection they are. My favourite is 'Reid and Write' which belongs to Canon Gordon Reid, the Rector of St Clement's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.

Canon Reid is a man after my own heart, a true Gallican Anglican. He presides over the most splendidly Anglo-Catholic Church you can imagine, in which the traditional Roman Rite (in English, with the Gloria et cetera in Latin) holds pride of place. The sacred ministers face east (i.e. God), the music is wonderful, the preaching (to judge by the video I have seen) properly pastoral, and the vestments excessive. But it is the details which count. These include such delights as the gremial veil and the scotula, things which I have never seen outside the pages of a book, not even when I was on the staff of All Saints Margaret Street. And the churchwardens (to judge by their processional clobber) would appear to be Knights of the Garter, or Daughters of the Revolution, or something equally splendid and startling. Looking at it all, you realise that it was for this that Cranmer died - even if he was not entirely aware of the fact at the time.

But Canon Reid has had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous papalists. Some of the comments on his blog take him firmly to task for a perceived lack of devotion to the Roman Pontiff even although he prays for him (somewhat inaudibly, it is true) in the (silent) canon of the mass. This is obviously felt to be inconsistent, although it doesn't seem to me to be half as inconsistent as being a full-blown papalist in the Anglican Church. Canon Reid is merely doing what I believe any good Anglican, Gallican or otherwise, should do. Just because the the papacy needs to be saved from itself it doesn't mean that other parts of the western Church should abandon the liturgical tradition and culture which is the common heritage of us all.

But it does hurt. I love the Book of Common Prayer (as does the Rector of St Clement's) but I also feel at home at mass in a RC Church - hardly surprising since they seem to have become rather Anglican in recent years! I would love to see an agreement between our Churches which would at least allow intercommunion (as with the Old Catholics and the Church of Sweden) and I suppose I get rather impatient because, so far at least, it's not even on the horizon. And that is all their fault, of course.

But perhaps as well as being Anglo-Catholic I should also try to be rather more Anglo-Christian about these matters. After all, Christianity and Catholicism go together, don't they?

Understanding elephants

Anyone living in this country at this time who decides to write about what has happened and is continuing to happen in Christchurch would need to be particularly careful if he intended to make specifically religious observations about the situation.

And yet I cannot see how a Christian could possibly avoid making such observations - if only under his breath in the privacy of his own room. (Or the privacy of his own blog.)

The earthquake in Christchurch is what it is to all of us because it has brought suffering and death. Of course, it has also occasioned the bravery and selflessness of many, and I have no doubt that voices (Christian and otherwise) will be raised in their praise. But that won't be enough to make sense of it all. The elephants of suffering and death will still be in the room.

Very often religion is seen as a form of magic, as a supernatural (and therefore increasingly ineffectual) insurance policy. When there was so little knowledge of the natural world, and even less chance of controlling it, relying on prayers and holy relics to prevent earthquakes was as good a policy as any.

But not now. Which leaves us without a policy at all. And without an explanation. But at least Christianity has had one of those. Earthquakes are visited on hapless sinners by the divine wrath - that's why they happen, and indeed that's why they should happen. Except that they seem a bit morally haphazard (to put it mildly) and the whole business co-exists rather awkwardly with an infinitely kind and loving God.

However, I am relieved to tell you that Christianity has a rather better explanation for elephants than the above, and it concerns us rather than God. I would put it like this. Death is the reason for life. We are born so that we can die. In the earliest strata of the bible I doubt that that is so. There, we are born so that we might live, so that we might be happy, prosperous and well respected, and see our children's children in the midst of a grateful and admiring community. After that there are only the shadows of sheol.

But not in Christianity. Here life is a 'vale of tears,' here we long to depart and be with Christ, here we know that our treasure is in heaven, not on earth.

Except that we don't. There is a story by H. G. Wells (I think) in which a rather grand archbishop ends his bedtime prayers each night by telling the Lord to come and take him to Himself. The archbishop's valet finds his master one morning stiff and cold beside his bed, with a look of indescribable horror on his well-bred features. His prayer had been answered.

It seems to me not just that we are a bit vague about God, but that we have also tended to overlook the true nature of human beings, made in the image of God, who simply cannot cease to exist as conscious persons, even if they wanted to. Death is only the means by which we enter more fully into life. In some ways, this is risky. We need to prepare for it as we would prepare for any great change in our existence and experience. But in the sense in which we commonly mean it, we cannot die - we are just not made that way. And that is an integral and essential part of the Christian faith without which Christianity is no longer Christian.

As for the other elephant, we have overlooked at least one of the most important characteristics of the Christian understanding of God. Put simply, in us He suffers. He demonstrated this fairly conclusively on His Cross some two thousand years ago. This implies (to me at least) that suffering is not meaningless. If God is prepared to share in it, it must have extraordinary worth - even if that worth is largely concealed from us at the present time. But it won't be so for ever. Beyond the grave we shall know as we are known.

I recognise entirely that all this is not the sort of thing you can just shove down the throats of those who are so terribly caught up in suffering and death at the present time. In such circumstances it would sound merely glib and self-serving. But I do believe we should proclaim it clearly in the good times so that it can bring meaning and strength in the bad times, when there are too many elephants in the room.

Crossing the Tiber

It has been some time since my last posting, largely because my mind has been occupied with other things like moving house, packing and unpacking, getting back on line, and trying to find all those things which I had thought had gone missing in the meanwhile. So now, having more or less got through the upheaval, I must try to return to more important matters, such as the recent realignment of John Broadhurst, Keith Newton, and Andrew Burnham, formerly flying bishops in the Church of England, who have now flown the coop altogether, winging their way across the treacherous waters of the Tiber.

I cannot say that I know any of these three gentlemen personally, but I have read some of their more occasional writings, particularly those of Andrew Burnham, which I have found to be both predictable and puzzling. His enthusiasms are not those which I would expect of an Anglican bishop, although having been trained for the priesthood as he was at St Stephen's House, I can't say I am surprised. He seems remarkably keen on the Sacred Heart, the Cure d'Ars, and Our Lady of Lourdes. Perhaps he is just an enthusiastic Francophile (I myself once had a third-class relic of St Margaret Mary Alacoque) but I rather doubt that mere francophilia could be the real reason for his enthusiasms, nor for his frequent and devoted references to the Bishop of Rome, whom he insists on calling the Holy Father, and from whose 'detestable enormities' loyal members of the Established Church in a more theological age prayed devoutly for deliverance - or they did until the rather tactless suffrage was deleted from the English Litany.

Another of Andrew Burnham's great enthusiams is John Henry Cardinal Newman, which is no surprise. Anglican papalists have been sobbing at the latter's somewhat overcrowded grave for years. (The cardinal insisted on being buried with Father Ambrose St John Cong.Orat. you will recall.) I find the papalists' grief highly suspicious, and I rather think the recent beatus would too. Given some of the terms like tyranny which he used in reference to it, Newman would hardly have shared Forward in Faith's unblinking adoration of the papacy. Indeed, if he were alive today, I confidently predict that he would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Movement for the Ordination of Women, and might even have entered into a civil union with Ambrose St John. He wasn't described by a member of the Roman curia as 'the most dangerous man in England' for nothing - and that was after his conversion.

Perhaps the defection of the flying bishops and those like them will be a blessing in the long run. It should certainly help to restore the honesty and integrity of English Anglo-Catholicism. The whole concept of the Two Lost Provinces of the Western Church, torn from the bosom of the Roman Pontiff, and longing to return to it, is an unhistorical fantasy we can well do without.