GALLICAN ANGLICAN

Epilogue

2012-01-26T15:07:00.009+13:00

Well now, this is going to be my very last entry on this blog since I can no longer call myself a Gallican Anglican, or even an Anglican at all. Last Saturday evening His Eminence Metropolitan Paul Saliba, the Antiochian Orthodox Archbishop of Australia and New Zealand ordained (reordered?) me to the priesthood of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch and All the East in Sydney, so that I could be (at their request) the Parish Priest of St Michael's Orthodox Church, Fingall Street, in South Dunedin.

If you are surprised, just imagine how I feel!

Last November, as a long-time friend and supporter of St Michael's I was invited to the celebrations surrounding the centenary of the building of the church, and at the lunch after the Divine Liturgy they put the question, so to speak, and following a few days of thought and prayer I could see no reason (apart from my health, and my many faults and failings) to say no.

The following Sunday I went to St Peter's at the end of the Solemn Eucharist to try and explain that I was in no sense rejecting my Anglican past or my ministry in Caversham. However, I need not have worried, wonderful people that they are they are, they all burst into applause! And ever since then all those I have told have been wonderfully encouraging.

So there you are!

PS I am think thinking of starting another blog - so watch this space!

Getting Rebranded

2011-05-25T15:15:00.015+12:00

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

2011-05-10T17:03:00.004+12:00

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

2011-03-03T15:01:00.015+13:00

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

2011-02-24T19:42:00.014+13:00

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

2011-02-14T19:53:00.017+13:00

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.

Ave et vale - well, sort of

2010-12-06T17:28:00.005+13:00

I have been a very bad blogger again, I'm afraid. As my excuse I offer the fact that I shall be retiring near the end of next month, and the business of doing so is very time-consuming, to put it mildly. With the exception of my first year in England, I have never had to worry about housing myself - and even then I found a bedsit easily enough in Holland Park within a week of my arrival.

But selling one house (from my late father's estate) and buying another (with the proceeds) I found to be a somewhat daunting prospect. However, I had the wonderful experience of walking into a house in order simply to speak to the estate agent and realising immediately that this was The One. First seen on Sunday afternoon, and purchased by the following Thursday evening. But not paid for - not until the other house was sold. If you have ever been in this position (and I understand many have) you will know it has a certain anxiety associated with it!

However, the other house did sell (just in the nick of time) and now I can look forward to living in a wonderful wooden house (good in earthquakes, I think) with a proper galvinised iron roof (so you can hear the rain) and a splendid view over the city. It even has polished (and insulated) wooden floors throughout. What more could you want?

In such a satisfactory setting, I may even become a better and more reliable blogger as well. However, only time will tell, I fear.

Vive la difference

2010-10-26T23:20:00.004+13:00

Yesterday English Roman Catholics observed the feast of Saints Cuthbert Mayne, John Houghton, Edmund Campion, Richard Gwynn and Thirty-Six Companions, aka the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Now as it happens, I am very distantly related to the first of these, although I suspect that fact would have brought the blessed Cuthbert little joy had he known of it. He wasn't too keen on Anglican clergymen, even though he had been one himself for a brief period before he saw the light and took himself off to Flanders for the real thing. The unreal thing - his Anglican orders - he referred to at a later time as the Mark of the Beast. Not terribly ecumenical, as I am sure you will agree.

During my first week in Oxford, the principal of St Stephen's House thought it would be good for all of us if we spent a few days learning about the importance of community - a fashion which has taken off in no uncertain terms as you will be aware. To this end Fr Allen invited representatives from a number of particular communities to spend some time with us and tell us all about it. One of these was a remarkably handsome young man in jeans and a woollen sweater who turned out to be The Very Rev'd Fergus Kerr, Prior of Blackfriars, the Dominican House of Studies in Oxford, whom I remember from this time because the representative of the Prostitutes' Collective (yes, really) took him to task at lunch for being so attractive and so unavailable at the same time. And it wasn't even a question of the money.

I remember Fr Kerr for a rather more important reason, however, because we saw him again (this time in his dominican habit) at a service in the conventual church at Blackfriars during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and at which I was greatly struck by his observation that we had no business taking our denominational differences lightly, since better men and women than we were had seen fit to endure torture and death for them.

I don't think I am much of a believer in ecumenism, at least not in the type which expects what Ronald Knox (his tongue firmly in his cheek) called Reunion all Round. Perfect unity seems to me as attainable in this world as perfect charity, or perfect kindness, or any other perfection. And a mere majority will most certainly not do. While one believer remains outside the fold, the Body of Christ is as divided as if it were a billion. Mob rule is not a part of the Gospel, not now, not ever.

Furthermore, it seems to me that the real goal is to accept those who do not belong to our group, and who do not share our opinions. Like a good Anglican, I want to have my cake and eat it. Of course apostolic succession is an expression of the divine will for the Church, along with the doctrine of the real presence, prayer for the departed, and so on. But that does not mean to say that those who do not share these beliefs are not part of the Church. (They are wrong, of course, but that is not quite the same thing.) However, don't expect them to change their views soon - such as any time before the rapture.

'All colours agree in the dark,' said the seventeenth century Calvinist Francis Bacon, and I can't help but agree.

Ad Limina

2010-10-06T20:20:00.010+13:00

I watched with some interest Pope Benedict's recent visit to the United Kingdom. And with some mystification as well. Just why did it have to be a state visit? While it is true that Vatican City and its outlying territories (the Lateran Basilica and its palace, the summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, etc) you could hardly say that the papal state is in any real sense a people or a nation, anymore than the similarly sovereign Knights of Malta are, who also have patch of Rome on which to raise a flag.

However, beyond the cost to the British taxpayer of His Holiness' ad limina visit to The Protestant Island, there was a detail which I found rather more important. Apart from praising (and indeed beatifying) Cardinal Newman for a miracle he probably didn't perform, and for views which he apparently didn't hold, the Holy Father's tone was generally very negative.

Now, there are lots of things to be negative about, and the pope has been duly negative about most of them. But is that enough? Can you lead people to Christ without showing them why it would be a good, joyful, and life-affirming thing that they should be so led? I rather doubt it.

If I remember rightly, St Francis de Sales had something to say about a spoonful of honey being rather more attractive than a barrelful of vinegar. But what is it that is attractive about Christ - and how can it be effectively conveyed to our contemporaries?

A small doubt

2010-09-13T23:13:00.003+12:00

Austrian religion had a very considerable effect on me, as must be fairly obvious from previous postings. But after thinking long and hard about it, I can't help wondering if it was all to the good. The problem is that everything I experienced seemed so successful. Much of it seemed like a Christian version of This is your Day with Benny Hinn. Or at least it did to me. I'm not used to such successful piety. Nor, for that matter, to such beautiful, elegant, and prosperous piety. No doubt my responses are due, at least in part, to an upbringing in a very distant and different society from that of the heirs to the Holy Roman Empire. But it still gives me pause. In this case, was the good the enemy of the best?

Holy to the Lord

2010-07-28T09:57:00.009+12:00

Well, I have moaned and groaned about Austrian Masses (or at least the manner thereof) for long enough, so now for something just a little bit different. Last Sunday we went to the Stift Heiligenkreuz, otherwise the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Cross in the Vienna Woods.

Heiligenkreuz was founded in 1133 by the Margrave of Austria, later canonised as St Leopold, and alone among Cistercian monasteries has been in continuous existence from that day to this. It is also the largest religious community in Austria, and is stuffed full of healthy-looking young monks, something which you wouldn't naturally expect these days, I do believe.

The Abbey Church itself is one of the wonders of the German-speaking world, and is acknowledged as such. After a high and narrow romanesque nave with its transept, comes a most magnificent gothic Hallenchor, as wide as the transept itself, and filled with the most beautiful thirteenth-century stained glass.

On our way into the Church one of the afore-mentioned healthy-looking young monks, nicely turned out in the full white cistercian choir habit gave each of us a bilingual service booklet (Latin and German) together with a "Gruess Gott" and a beaming smile. With Tim and Pip, and Tim's mother Elaine, I tottered rather precariously (helped however by my new walking stick) to our pew near the front of the nave, and just in front of the baroque choir stalls inhabited (no pun intended) by the monks. Beyond them was the altar in the beautiful Hallenchor.

The priest in his green chasuble, assisted by two minsters in albs, arrived and stood before three low seats in front of (but not too close to) the altar which itself sits under a rather magnificent neo-gothic baldachino raised on a couple of shallow steps above the level of the sanctuary floor and the seats of the sacred ministers.

The readings, sermon, and intercessions were (quite properly) in German, but the rest of the mass was in Latin - I'm delighted to tell you. Most of the liturgy was chanted very beautifully indeed - the monks of Heiligenkreuz have made a best-selling CD, which I was actually given last Christmas. Their singing sounds even better in situ.

The service was celebrated quite simply. At the offertory the sacred ministers stood behind the altar, facing the people. This was the only time at which incense was used. The celebrant chanted the canon (in German they call it the Hochgebet - the Great Prayer) as he did the introductory rite (which included the the asperges) the collect, the prayer over the gifts, the post communion prayer, the blessing and the dismissal.

Everything was done with great gravity and serenity. There were no cheery welcomes, the monks themselves read the lessons and the intercessions, and the only music was the unaccompanied singing of the celebrant and the monks - assisted in the responses by the people in the pews.

There was however, something of an exception to the gravity and serenity of it all, and that was the celebrant's sermon. It lasted for about fifteen minutes and was based on the gospel of the day, which featured (if that is the right word) the giving of the Lord's Prayer to the disciples. I was tremendously impressed. My German is not good enough to follow most of what was said, but it was clearly a very able, and at times quite passionate exposition of the meaning and significance of the Our Father, preached without notes.

The Church was almost full, including, of course, the usual young people, one young couple with their baby, the latter mercifully mute.

Even now, some four days later, a sense of the holiness of the occasion and of the place itself remains quite vividly with me. It doesn't happen often enough.

Introibo

2010-07-20T22:11:00.008+12:00

As you may have noted (how could you not?) I have complained somewhat about the goings-on of the clergy at Austrian altars. In my defence, I would have to say that this is partly because in other respects, the way masses are celebrated here is so much better than I am used to elsewhere, and the participation of the people, their singing of the music, and the music itself, it seems to me, deserve better. But this is not because the clergy are in any way careless or off-hand in what they do - quite the contrary. It has to do with the way in which they do it - with their style of celebration, if I can call it that.

Firstly, there is the matter of concelebration. I realise haw splendidly authentic and primitive this practice is, but the way it is now done in the west seems remarkably elitist. In the Byzantine Rite the priests gather about the altar, where for much of the time they are virtually invisible to the congregation. They are clearly concentrating on the altar, and that somehow reinforces the impression that they are thereby concentrating on God.

A few years ago the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, came to Dunedin to consecrate the altar in the Coptic church which they had acquired from a pentecostal congregation - the church, that is, not the altar. The service was something of an oriental shambles, but it made no difference. The pope and his bishops were clearly away with the Lord and despite the outward awfulness of it all, it was a most inspiring service. God was present because he was the absolute centre of the concelebrants' attention, and thus of the congregation's attention as well. I call this real spiritual leadership.

But in the Stephansdom, the messages are very mixed. The clergy speak and act as though the service were about the people, and that they (the clergy) were there to welcome them to their - the clergy's - house, rather than God's. I'm sure that this is not what they intend, but that is what it looks like. Even the way the principal celebrant conducts himself gives the same impression. The little welcomes, introductions, explanations and the like, make you feel you are the new kid at school. The teachers are very nice, of course, but they are very much the ones up front.

Then there is the body language of the principal celebrant. During the collect, the prayer over the gifts, the High Prayer (as they call the Canon or Great Thanksgiving here) the principal celebrant's arms are spread really wide, embracing us all, it seems. But it's the Everlasting Arms we need, not Herr Pfarrer's. And when he is saying (or singing) the words he often seems to be looking at us as though we were the ones being addressed. The good intentions are without reproach, but in their desire to make us all feel at home, they have in some ways made the new mass more clerical than the old.

I like the old mass very much, and I am very glad the present pope has made it possible again. But I have no doubt that the so-called new mass promulgated by Paul VI is (if you will forgive me) the way to go - at least for the greater part of western Christendom. And that includes celebration 'versus populum', the vernacular, the new calendar and lectionary and so on. But it is still the Most Holy Mystery of our religion, and we always need to remind ourselves of the fact. It's not just a case of doing things well (as the clergy of the Stephansdom most certainly do) it's about our understanding of what exactly it is that we are doing well. If I recall correctly, the 39 Articles tell us that "The Supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather is a Sacrament of our Redemption by Christ's death."

Please note the "but rather."

Ups and a Down

2010-07-20T10:18:00.008+12:00

Since my last post I have not just been sitting around. Tim and Pip Snell have a very attractive apartment only some 20-25 minutes by tram from the centre of Vienna. So just about every day I have taken the No.43 from Dornbacherstrasse to the Schottentor which is on the Ring, the main road which circles the inner city and on which many of its main buildings can be found, such as the opera, the parliament, the Votivkirche, the Kunsthistorisches (art history) Museum, and the Burgtheater.

I arrive at the Schottentor (opposite the Votivkirche) at about 11.30am and walk past the Schottenstift (abbey of the Scots, founded in the middle ages by Irish monks - which sounds a bit Irish!), through Am Hof, the courtyard in which the imperial heralds used to proclaim the emperors, and where, in August 1806, to their everlasting shame, they announced the dissolution of the the Holy Roman Empire (otherwise the first Reich).

Then I walk through the Graben, a large square (actually oblong) filled with posh shops and rather expensive restaurants and outdoor cafes, until I reach the Stephansplatz and enter St Stephen's Cathedral (the most beautiful in the world, as Johannes Giesen, pupil of Walter Gieseking, once told me at Otago Boys' High School. He was probably right.) The wonderful Rieger organ is always played even at said masses, and we sing our way through beautiful chorales and mass settings while (I, at least) do my best to ignore the clergy giving us their much amplified best at the altar. You know the sort of thing - warm welcomes and fuzzy sermonettes.

Then it's time for a spot of lunch, and heavens do the Viennese like unhealthy food! You never saw so much whipped cream in all your life. However, it would seem that some of the latest research has revealed that green vegetables are only of questionable value in the human diet, coming a good way behind chocolate in that regard.

I had the great pleasure of lunching with Matthew Smith (son of my friends Merv and Barbara) who lives in Vienna when work does not take him elsewhere. I was delighted to see him again, and he took me to a restaurant run by a most charming woman in a lovely little square. However, I must confess that although I admire Matthew's principles with respect to our animal brethren, I don't believe I will ever make a truly trustworthy vegan. Vegetarian would be good, but vegan - I need cow's milk in my coffee and tea, and I'm grateful to say that the most charming woman running the show kindly took pity on me and gave me cafe au lait - and the right sort of lait at that!

After lunch it's off to the sights. So far I have seen the wonderful treasury of the Deutschorden (the Teutonic knights), and the fascinating (and moving) Jewish museum where I bought a large black yarmulka (skullcap) because the Canon Law of the Church of England of 1603 says that priests of the Established Church may wear black skullcaps in church when it is cold. I believe it looks very fetching. Even the mirror thinks so.

I have also 'done' (the right word, I think) the imperial apartments in the Hofburg. These are uniformly depressing, because they have been left as reminders of Kaiser Franz Joseph and his wife, Kaiserin Elisabeth, otherwise known as Sisi. Sisi was the Austro-Hungarian predecessor of Princess Di. Indeed, she was much worse, extraordinarily self-centred and vain, which was not true of Diana, I think, but like Diana she has (even now) a continuing cult whose devotees see her as the Tragic Beauty imprisoned in Castle Gloom. Or something. Who cares - not me I assure you, except when I have to trudge through the son et lumiere of the Sisi Museum in order to get to more interesting things. One of which just has to be the Schatzkammer, the imperial treasury with the wonderful and very ancient Reichskrone of the Holy Empire, (which those wicked Heralds so carelessly tossed aside in 1806) along with the Holy Lance. It also has the beautiful seventeenth century House Crown of the Habsburgs (from 1806 the Austrian Imperial Crown) made for the mildly mad Kaiser Rudolf II in Prague.

The imperial collections, artistic and otherwise, are largely to be found in the so-called imperial precinct which Franz Joseph and his successor, (the Blessed) Kaiser Karl, never quite completed. It includes the two great court museums of art history and natural history, which face one another across the Maria Theresien Platz, along with the so-called New Hofburg beside them. I had not expected to like these enormous buildings at all - late nineteenth century architectural pomposity is not quite my thing - but all three of them are simply magnificent, particularly on the inside, which surprised and delighted me a good deal. So much better than the rather shabby looking baroque apartments elsewhere in the Hofburg - let alone the perfectly abominable chapel in which the Vienna Boys' Choir do their Sunday stuff. Not only is it small and cramped, it has been so 'restored' and 'improved' over the years that Kaikorai Presbyterian Church would be preferable. Likewise the Augustinerkirche (the Court Church) which was a magnificent and very beautiful Gothic Hallenkirche, is now but a shadow of its former self, the interior largely covered in grey paint, if you please.

Speaking of paint, I’m afraid I do not quite come up the highest standards where great canvases are concerned – or rather the originals thereof. For years I have thought Vermeer’s canvas of the artist painting the girl with the wreath on her head (The Artist in His Studio, I think) just wonderful. But to me its reproduction in an elegantly produced book looks a lot better than the real thing behind glass (in the frame itself!) in a rather pokey corner of a museum. Sorry. However, you should see the exhibition of Historical Musical Instruments and the exhibition of Armour and Arms in the Neue Burg - especially the armour. Absolutely wonderful. And I touched a piano which Brahms himself used to play!

Ten days ago or so, we went to Mariazell, the main place of pilgrimage in Austria, perhaps in Central Europe itself, since (rather extraordinarily to my mind) Our Lady of Mariazell is probably the principal shrine of the Hungarians as well. It is in a very attractive town in the hills and the Church itself is most interesting and beautiful. The Image of the Virgin and Child, originally mediaeval, is dressed and crowned as is usual in such shrines, and sits above an altar, surrounded by the most incredible silver screen originally given by Maria Theresia and her husband the Holy Roman Emperor Franz Stephan. Lo, and behold, as we entered the Basilica, a mass was just beginning, and the splendid eighteenth century organ accompanied our singing. I was impressed by the fact that both at Mariazell and in the Stephansdom in Vienna, everybody seemed to know whatever mass setting was being used, none of which were the sort of would-be up-to-date trash to which we are usually accustomed in our own dear Anglican Church. These Austrian settings are actually musical.

Then, just a few days ago, on Saturday, we decided to go to Salzburg and stop off at the most picturesque town of Steyr on the way. As usual, it was very hot (about 35 degrees) and we found an outdoor restaurant in the main street for lunch. The restaurant was on a kind of wooden platform from which you descended by a couple of shallow steps to the footpath. But I didn't. I have always been rather unsteady on my feet due to my carelessness in catching polio when I was two years old, and the situation has not improved with the years, especially the last few years. I fell really rather badly, broke my left wrist, damaged my left foot, and sprained and bruised quite enough of the rest of me as well. But I am truly grateful to God in that my back was not affected.

I few years ago now, I fell over in St Peter's while trying to change the aumbry light, and was surprised to find that it was a most unpleasant experience, even on a nice new carpet. I was badly shaken. It was not at all as such falls had been when I was young, and the after-effects were all too like those described by many of the elderly people whom I have visited for years in rest homes.

The fall in Steyr was a good deal worse than the fall in St Peter's. Not only was it painful, but I was also in some kind of shock. Everybody was most kind and helpful, and eventually Tim and Pip decided it might be a good idea if I sat for a while in the church very nearby. Here, however, things seemed to get much worse. I was hyperventilating, I couldn’t move my fingers, and I felt sure I would either throw-up or faint or both.

The ambulance arrived and I was taken to the local hospital. Eventually the state of shock wore off, and I could move my fingers again and I felt a good deal better. Various tests were done and the doctors expressed the opinion that it would probably be better if I stayed in overnight. The ambulance men, the doctors and nurses at Steyr were just wonderful, and in a way, the most memorable part of our experience there. However, we decided to return to Vienna. All seemed OK for a while, but I could hardly walk at all without the risk of another fall, and after Tim had got me to my room, the shock and so on returned and another ambulance was called to take me to what I am told is the university hospital in Vienna, where x-rays showed up the broken wrist and the damaged foot. My left arm was put in plaster and my left foot bandaged up, and after all the tests, an ambulance finally took me home at 1.30am.

But I should like my dear parishioners to know that when the clock in the hospital showed half-past midnight, I joined in prayer with them as they celebrated the Solemn Eucharist at 10.30am on the other side of the world. Naturally, I shall be putting my prices up in consequence.

The upshot of all this is that I have had to stay on in Vienna, and cancel my intended ten days or so in England. I am of course sorry about that, but I am grateful to be here with Tim and Pip at a time when I really could not travel, let alone on my own two feet.

Well, that is clearly more than enough for now. I won't be able to read your comments until I return to Dunedin halfway through August, but there may well be another post just as soon as I have thrown myself down an elevator shaft.

Or not, as the case may be.

Mit Schlagobers

2010-07-08T09:25:00.014+12:00

So here I am in Vienna, having arrived in Austria on Saturday morning after a relatively painless flight (actually flights) from Dunedin. There the weather was cold, here it is quite remarkably hot, which is only right at this time of year.

Naturally, I dragged my poor hosts, Tim and Pip Snell, off to mass at the Stephansdom (the cathedral) the day after my arrival. But not until 6pm - I needed to catch up on my sleep! Ever since I first entered this wonderful building a good few years ago now, I have always thought the Stephansdom to be the most beautiful church I have ever seen, and it is always a joy to attend a service there. But not an unalloyed joy, I fear.

Calvin would have been most gratified at the emphasis now placed on edification in the modern Roman mass. In the Stephansdom the celebrant treats us to spontaneous exhortations before the confession, at the offertory, before the Pater Noster, and after the Communion - not to mention the sermon itself. And in my rather limited experience this practice is not at all uncommon. But it leaves me wanting to shout, "Get on with it, Father, for heaven's sake, just get on with it!" And one day I might well do it.

I realise that this is the age of information technology, but unfortunately the Still Small Voice becomes largely inaudible with electronic amplification.

However, Vienna in the summer is wonderful all the same, and I'm most grateful to be here.

Sauce for the Goose

2010-06-20T15:10:00.032+12:00

A few days ago I watched a documentary film called Constantine's Sword, featuring James Carroll, an American author and journalist who had been a Roman Catholic priest, but who had subsequently left the priesthood, married and had children. He himself was the son of a United States airforce general, who had not been at all pleased to hear his son and heir denounce the Vietnam war almost as soon as he got into the pulpit.

To my mind, Carroll's most striking statement in the whole film came when he observed that had the American airforce been dropping condoms on Vietnamese villages, all the Catholic bishops in America would have risen up to denounce such wickedness and to demand that it cease forthwith. But as the airforce was only dropping napalm on the Vietnamese themselves, the response from the hierarchy was restrained, to say the least.

We seem to see something similar whan it comes to homosexuality in Africa - just to take one example. Bishops north of the South African Republic appear to be enthusiasically endorsing the most draconian punishments for homosexuals, supporting the idea that the attempt to decriminalise their behaviour would be criminal in itself, and making no protest against government plans to punish those who fail to dob in their gay friends and relations. And all for Jesus.

When it comes to God's Word Written, I cannot help noticing a certain subjectivity shown by many bible readers. The matter of divorce is just one example. Luke and Mark refuse to consider it, and Matthew permits it in one situation only, as does St Paul - although he chooses a different situation. The apparent contradiction here should be enough to give us pause, but it seems not.

In the Anglican Church here in New Zealand we happily remarry devorcees virtually on demand, irrespective of whether their previous spouses have been unfaithful (Matthew) unbelievers (Paul) or neither. And despite the damage to the family and society which this rather relaxed attitude to divorce and remarriage can hardly be said to help, only the Roman Catholic Church tries to obey the clear words of scripture, and then only with the safety net of annulment for those with the time and money required.

But if we are going to be so particular about faithful and lifelong same-sex partnerships, shouldn't we be a bit more particular about the remarriage of the divorced too - or have I missed something here?

Perhaps you have already seen the following response to Dr Laura Schlesinger, an observant Orthodox Jew, who said in her radio show that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and cannot be condoned under any circumstance. The response came as an open letter to Dr Schlesinger which was posted on the Internet.

Dear Dr Laura,

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God's Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.

1. I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of God's Laws and how to follow them. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

2. I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

3. I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her period of Menstrual uncleanliness. The problem is how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

4. When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord - Leviticus 1:9. The problem is my neighbors. They claim the odor is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

5. I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

6. A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Leviticus 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don't agree. Can you settle this? Are there 'degrees' of abomination?

7. Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

8. Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27. How should they die?

9. I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

10. My uncle has a farm. He violates Leviticus 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town together to stone them? Couldn't we just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws?

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy considerable expertise in such matters, so I'm confident you can help.

Thank you again for reminding us that God's word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan,

James M. Kauffman, Ed.D.
Professor Emeritus, Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education at the University of Virginia.

Tooth Fairies

2010-05-25T16:25:00.007+12:00

Just a few days ago, travelling along Portsmouth Drive, I was startled to come across some $40,000 worth of petrified human dentition. Four very large molars, chiselled out of Oamaru stone, now hog what used to be a very attractive view down the harbour. And we paid for them.

Now why did we do that? Well, we did that because we believe in art, indeed we believe in public art. When I say we, I do not, of course, include myself, or anyone else that I know, for that matter. If a partial in Oamaru stone @ $10,000 per fake tooth is art, then, I'm afraid, this particular emperor has no teeth. And someone should bite those who thought otherwise - and did so at our expense.

Alas, this is not an isolated example - far from it. How about the thousands of dollars in prize money which went to the "artist" who simply told the judges to take a waste paper basket and throw its contents on to the floor of the art gallery. Not to mention other prize exhibits in the nation's collections such as the image at Te Papa of Our Blessed Lady inside a condom. As it happens, there is a cathedral city in France called Condom, which no doubt has its own vierge noire called Notre Dame de Condom, but that is hardly the same thing, as you will no doubt agree.

Some years ago the Australian critic and historian Robert Hughes fronted a television series on modern art. One of the more memorable scenes showed him climbing a long flight of stairs to a very large room at the top of a New York apartment block. In the room was a remarkable work of art - a very large amount of earth from somebody's back garden which had been lugged up all those stairs and deposited (fairly evenly) on the floor to a depth of some two or three feet. And that was it. That was the Work of Art.

Along with the famous (and very expensive) line of bricks on the floor of the Tate Modern in London, and Damian Hirst's pickled sheep and calves, it is all rather bewildering - or do I mean infuriating? What on earth do these "artists" think they are doing? Well let me tell you what they are doing. They are preaching. Art is about meaning, don't you know, it's about The Author's Message. It's supposed to tell you something, to disturb your complacency, to challenge and to provoke.

But if we look a little more deeply, I think we find that it's all smoke and mirrors. Many artists now strike these attitudes precisely because they have nothing worth saying. Throwing waste paper on the floor is just an empty gesture made no better by the portentious suggestion that it is expressing (a) the emptiness of life, or (b) the artist's brave freedom from conventional conceptions about art, or (c) the artist's well-founded suspicion that the luvvies of the art world will be silly enough to let him get away with highway robbery - and then thank him for it!

But perhaps he and his colleagues might not have invaded the pulpit if those already in it knew what to say and how to say it.

God's First Love

2010-05-24T23:00:00.008+12:00

God willing, in August I shall be in Bayreuth at a performance of Die Meistersinger. And it won't be the first time that I have graced the Festspielhaus with my presence. Some ten years ago I was there for The Ring, Tristan, and Parsifal, all due to the influence and kindness of my friend Martin who makes a living on the operatic stage, and will be doing so at Bayreuth again this year.

Bayreuth is a very attractive town, especially in summer, and Wagner's custom-built theatre is most impressive - despite the hard seats and the complete lack of air conditioning at what is after all the hottest time of the year. But I have to confess that there is something just a little bit unnerving about it all. And you know why, don't you? The Wagners - Wieland and Wolfgang and their mother Winifred (nee Williams) - had a dear friend and devoted supporter who did his very best to destroy the world. And they loved him for it, especially the former Miss Williams of Bognor Regis.

When I was last in Bayreuth walking about the place (including the Festspielhaus) with Martin, I couldn't help seeing little notices here and there signed by Wolfgang (now just off to Valhalla himself) and sitting in the theatre itself I was always aware of the ghosts of his late mother and her special friend hovering somewhere in the Circle behind me. And when the conductors named Barenboim and Levine were in the orchestral pit I couldn't help thinking of those millions of other ghosts who had had surnames not unlike theirs.

All of which has not been helped by a television documentary which I saw a few days ago about the contribution of medical science to the war effort of the Third Reich. All those SS doctors were the frontline troops in the only war which really mattered - the protection and improvement of the breeding stock. Even Charles Darwin's son asserted that something should be done to make sure the gene pool was not polluted by the Untermenschen.

The special friend of the former Miss Williams (sometime of Bognor Regis) was just the one to deal with the problem. And deal with it he did. Even when the tide was going badly against Germany as the war drew to a close, the transports full of Untermenschen kept rolling towards the death camps, soaking up the men and resources which were desperately needed for the defence of the Reich itself. But it was the enemy within which really mattered most it seems, not the Allied armies advancing over the Rhine on one side and into East Prussia on the other.

How extraordinary that is, and yet somehow part of a terrible pattern, and one with which the Church is inextricably involved. Here is Luther in full cry about God's chosen people: "Venomous beasts, vipers, disgusting scum, canders, devils incarnate. Their private houses must be destroyed and devastated, they should be lodged in stables. Let the magistrates burn their synagogues and let whatever escapes be covered with sand and mud. Let them be forced to work, and if this avails nothing, we will be compelled to expel them like dogs in order not to expose ourselves to incurring divine wrath and eternal damnation from the Jews and their lies."

And Luther most certainly wasn't the only one. John Chrysostom was just as bad, and he was joined by Ephraim the Syrian, Augustine, Cyprian, and Cyril of Alexandria among many others, from the patristic period onwards. For a more up to date example you have only to consider the response of the Slovakian archbishop Karol Kmetko to a Jewish plea for assistance in March 1942: "You shall not merely be deported. You shall be killed. And this will be your punishment for killing our saviour."

There is a most remarkable film called God on Trial which stars (if that is the right word) Sir Anthony Sher. The film is based on what appears to be a true account of something which happened in Auschwitz: the Rabbis in residence decided to try God for the crime of breaking his covenant with his chosen people.

During the course of the trial all the expected charges were laid, but nevertheless (in the film at least) the judges were about to acquit The Accused when a very distinguished Rabbi, who had so far said nothing, began to speak. He pointed out how God had bereaved the innocent mothers of Egypt, commanded the Israelites to slaughter the helpless Amalekites, and generally shown himself to be anything but kind and just. And why, he asked, is this so? Because, he said, "God is not good, he is not good - he is just strong." And now he had chosen a new people, and entered into a new covenant - with the very Germans who were hell-bent on exterminating the members of the old one.

At this point in the proceedings, Dr Mengele arrives to choose some more victims for the crematoria. One of these is a young man who has had little or no time for the faith of his fathers. Weeping in desperation, he throws himself at the Rabbi's feet crying, "What do we do now?" "Now," the Rabbi says, "now we pray." Holding their hands over their heads in the absence of skullcaps and shawls, they begin chanting, "You have been our refuge from age to age."

Even stripped naked in the gas chamber, they still hold their hands over their heads as they sing to the God who has not saved them, but in whom (somehow) they still hope and believe.

I find it fascinating that the Jews, more perhaps than any other people, have been the ones to carry the cross of Christ for the last two thousand years or so. And Christianity itself has been the hard and cruel cross which they have carried. I must confess that I do not see the divine (let alone ethical) imperative of zionism, but it does seem to me that the history of God's chosen people in the last two millenia makes presents a most profound mystery to do with suffering and faith of which the adherents of Christianity are hardly aware.

Richard Wagner himself was an appalling antisemite, especially in print, which is one of the reasons that Hitler was so devoted to the family, which in turn helps to explain why, after the war, only Winifred Wagner (late of Bognor Regis) was one of the very few still prepared to sing his praises. I'm afraid I did a little bit of singing myself at Bayreuth. Only the music of Wagner himself is ever permitted to be heard in the Festspielhaus. But I showed them. When no-one was looking I sat in the conductor's seat in the orchestral pit and sang a few bars of Mozart. And the roof stayed where it was.

Off the Wall

2010-05-02T16:30:00.017+12:00

A little while ago I attended a Eucharist at which Bishop Richard Randerson was the preacher, whose beliefs (or lack of them) inspired me a couple of years ago to send an article enshrining my fair, balanced and entirely admirable opinion of the said beliefs (or lack of them) to Anglican Taonga in the hope that they would print it. They didn't. Well, they made a mistake, didn't they? But I am the forgiving type, and anyway, why should you be deprived in consequence? So here follows the article:-

It seems that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men have at last managed to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, since clearly he is alive and well in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland he told Alice firmly, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less," an approach demonstrated in the article, A Randerson Sampler in the [then] latest edition of Anglican Taonga, in which Bishop Richard Randerson’s use of the word God shows that to him it means little more than a beautiful feeling, since to suggest that God is a person or a supernatural being, he says, “goes too far.”

Whatever that is, it certainly isn’t the Christian faith which Bishop Randerson promised to uphold and proclaim when he was ordained, and pretty words do not make it otherwise. He remarks that he “finds it very sad that other members of the church could really doubt the Christian integrity and commitment of someone else in the church,” and laments “the lack of respect for the conscientiously-held views of others.” I for one have every respect for his views, I just wish he would have some respect for them as well, rather than misrepresenting them as those of a believing Christian. Humpty Dumpty could hardly do it better.

Unfortunately none of this is too surprising. For years we have pandered to the local Zeitgeist terrified of seeming out of date or irrelevant. We are, after all, the Church of the chattering classes, and we like the latter to think well of us. We (the Pakeha bit, that is) are nice, well-educated, well-intentioned people with just that touch of bourgeois guilt to convince us that we really care. And care we do. There are few fashionable causes which we do not enthusiastically espouse. Take the greatest of them all, the very heart and centre of Anglicanism in this country – biculturalism. If you think I am exaggerating, just imagine what would have happened if Bishop Randerson had cast doubts on the Treaty of Waitangi instead of on the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Would his peers have been quite so understanding and supportive, do you think? I doubt it.

But even our enthusiasms are not all they should be, biculturalism itself being the principal example. You only have to look at our official logo, the Flax Cross, to see that it has no reference whatsoever to the British Isles, and thus to the Church of Alban, Bede, Patrick, Margaret of Scotland, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Cranmer, Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, William Wilberforce and a host of others. Our sacred past has been chopped off at the knees, and in its place we have a chauvinist monoculturalism with the occasional patronising (and in the Maori case, somewhat unwilling) nod towards the immediate north. Inclusive language, ecological footprints, social justice, sustainable living, cultural safety, all these and more are what really matter – with Maori as the new Latin.

These are the cuckoos which have thrown transcendence, the sacred, the sense of holiness, and the glories of heaven out of the Anglican nest – and for what? A comfortable, politically correct agnosticism, mere unbelief masquerading as rich diversity, a lack of integrity parading as courageous honesty, and the denial of the creed presenting itself as the means by which the Church might survive – as if it would have any reason to.

Whatever happened to the astonishing glories of the Christian faith? Where is the God who loved his creation so much that he allowed his creatures to torture and slaughter him, and then showed that not even our wickedness could overcome his goodness? Whatever happened to the conviction that the whole purpose of human beings is that they are to be changed from glory into glory throughout eternity? How is it that everything from the virgin birth to the physical resurrection of our Lord has to be airbrushed out of the creed as merely mythological, simply because we no longer have any conception of the greatness, the wonder, and the sheer extraordinariness of God. Clearly it would all be so much better if God could just be nice and tidy and (in a word) manageable.

Our New Zealand Prayer Book is a perfect mirror of this, replete with phrases like “Teach us to care creatively for [the earth’s] resources,” or “Strengthen us as we share in making people whole,” and (my favourite) “that we may use your gifts responsibly,” all of which sound as though they were written by rather earnest schoolgirls from one of our better suburbs. Such texts go perfectly with most of the hymns and songs in Alleluia Aotearoa! with their high-minded, almost Victorian emphasis on self-improvement; but like them they too seem largely unreal. Lex orandi, lex credendi – as you pray, so you believe – thus it often seems that our prayers are little more than the expression of our good intentions, designed to reassure us that we still have something to offer.

From the first century to the present day it has been for the love of the Lord Jesus Christ and for the hope of heaven that the saints and martyrs have lived and died. Or were Perpetua and her companions thrown to the lions for ecology and cultural safety? If you are despairing and dying, will inclusive language and social justice see you right? When you are desperate to find a meaning and a purpose to life, will sustainable living and biculturalism provide the answer? I rather doubt it. But we are not despairing or desperate. We are just a little too pleased with ourselves for that, despite the fact that we have a certain adolescent anxiety about our identity which (along with the need for some rather unconvincing self-congratulation) has been part of our national make-up for as long as I can remember.

And so we have made the Good the enemy of the Best. We have put some of our nicest and most politically correct idols with their lovely feet of clay into the place of the Living God, without really facing up to what we have done. Perhaps that is because we have used words not as a means of telling the truth, but as a figleaf for our evasions.

Surely it’s about time that Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall for good.

Giving Thanks

2010-04-19T21:25:00.007+12:00

Yesterday we kept our Harvest Festival, as we usually do on the first Sunday after the Easter Octave. Here in Dunedin it has a rather different feel to it than it did twenty-five years ago in my previous parish in Wallasey, on the other side of the Mersey from Liverpool, where I had the uneasy feeling that the occasional pentangle or pointed hat would not have seemed out of place. I was always a little taken aback by the rather tribal, indeed totemic, aspects of the observance there. People whom I had never seen before, either in or out of the pews, made their annual appearance at Evensong before mysteriously disappearing for another year.

At All Saints Margaret Street, on the other hand, Harvest Festival was entirely forbidden as some kind of nonconformist rite appropriate to Congregationalists or Methodists - although I always thought that (to those not familiar with it) Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament must have looked a little bit like the New Testament equivalent of the Wave Offering.

Here in New Zealand, however, Harvest Festival seems to be little more than an edible form of ecclesiastical interior decoration.

However, I note that in the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (and perhaps elsewhere as well) Harvest Festival is called Thanksgiving for Harvest, and this strikes me as a very important difference. After all, the very centre of Christian observance in every season, autumnal or not, is the Eucharist, a name which itself speaks of thanksgiving before all else.

So what is the principal focus of our worship? Surely it must be thanksgiving, thanksgiving for our creation, our redemption, the beauty of the world, the joys of love and friendship, knowledge, discovery, and a limitless host of blessings which come to us from the hands of our Creator. And then of course, there is the staggering hope, indeed the expectation, of overwhelming, unending bliss. I rather think that a mere hour or so once a week is not too much time spent in returning thanks together for what has been granted to us in time and eternity.

But, with all the talk of evangelism, does the general population think the Church has much to do with joyful thanksgiving to a God worth thanking? Do we ourselves? Meister Eckhart said that if the only prayer you ever said was Thankyou, it would be enough. Perhaps we should ask ourselves what he meant.

Light from further East

2010-04-13T17:12:00.024+12:00

Monday was the feast of St Isaac the Syrian, sometimes called Isaac of Nineveh because he was briefly bishop of that city in the sixth century before going off into the mountains of what is now Iraq to be a hermit and to become, according to Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, "one of the most widely read spiritual writers on Mount Athos. His name is known to every monk in Russia and he is venerated as a saint in the Russian Church. [And] we have seen ordinary believers, neither monks nor theologians, who know entire passages of Isaac by heart and are able to quote long passages from his discourses."

"[...] Word of St Isaac has crossed not only time but also confessional barriers. As early as the ninth century he was read by the Byzantine and Syrian Orthodox Churches, as well as by [Isaac's own] Church of the East; each group produced its own recension of his writings. In the fifteenth century Isaac broke into the Roman Catholic world while remaining at the same time one of the most popular ascetical writers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. In our day his writings continue to draw the attention of Christians who belong to various traditions but share a common faith in Jesus and are engaged in the quest for salvation. During one scholarly conference, after I had delivered a paper on the practice of prayer in St Isaac, three people came up to me, one after another: a cistercian nun, a protestant layman, and a buddhist monk. All three were wondering how much of Isaac's teaching of prayer, which I had expounded, was consonant with their own tradition. Then a franciscan friar informed me of the existence of St Isaac of Nineveh's retreat house in New Zealand: the house is run by both Catholics and Anglicans."

Not bad, I think, for an obscure mountain solitary who belonged to a church (often now called the Assyrian Church) which has been out of communion with with everyone else since the fifth century - and usually derided as heretical as well. St Isaac's writings are important because they are clearly based on his (and his tradition's) actual experience of God, and not just on academic speculation. Helpful though the latter can often be, it's the music the matters, not the score.

And at those Feet

2010-03-11T14:54:00.010+13:00

A good few years ago now I sat at the feet of the Dalai Lama in the Town Hall during what I think must have been his first visit to Dunedin. Like most of the other people who virtually filled the hall, I don't think I followed His Holiness' line of thought as closely as I perhaps should have done, but one thing was as clear as a bell. According to the Dharma, all sentient beings would eventual reach eternal bliss.

I couldn't help contrasting this with the Gospel (as commonly received) according to which only human sentient beings would be putting in an appearance beyond the grave, and most of them would immediately find themselves in a place of unbearable and unending torment for reasons of which they were entirely unaware before their arrival. It made me wonder just which is the Good News, the Dharma or the Gospel? According to the latter only cats and dogs, it seems, can face the future with confidence. At least their sufferings will be ending rather than just beginning.

Ah yes, but what about freewill? Surely God is just respecting our freedom. Well, I'm not so sure. Were any of us asked whether we wanted to come into existence in the first place, and thus run the appalling risk of eternal damnation? Speaking personally, I don't remember receiving a questionnaire on the subject myself. And nor do I expect to have any say as to whether I survive my death or not. I'm just going to have to carry on whether I like it or not, in whatever state I find myself, and that state might be rather on the hot side for my eternal comfort.

I would have thought that if God has already made the fundamental choices about my existence for me, then he should be responsible for seeing me right in the end as well. I certainly hope so.

The Remnant

2010-03-04T15:38:00.032+13:00

I have just been listening to the wonderful New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell playing the music of Chopin and Brahms on CDs recently remastered from old Pye records. Farrell was killed on the roads of Sussex in 1958 at the age of 31. I don't remember hearing of his death (I was only eleven at the time, and anyway I thought the pipe organ the only instrument worth listening to) but I certainly feel a sense of loss now. And I can imagine the cries of anguish and despair when the news reached his native land.

And no doubt there would have been the inevitable question, "Why?" Farrell came from a good Catholic family and was educated in good Catholic schools. Given his affiliations (not to mention his talents) why was God careless to the point of criminal negligence? Why didn't he give Farrell a reasonable, indeed normal, span of life like everyone else?

These are very understandable questions, of course, but do they really accord with the evidence of our experience? What exactly is a normal life-span? I take normal here to mean usual. And in this matter usual can mean vanishingly short. Consider all those miscarriages, abortions, and infant deaths since recorded history began, then add all the young lives cut short by disease, famine, war and violence of every kind. I wouldn't be surprised if only a minority survived to celebrate their first quarter-century - if that.

So what are we to make of it all? I rather imagine that our Calvinist brethren would explain matters by blaming the devil. And of course, the Letter to the Hebrews describes the latter as the one having the power of death. But in Christ, God has defeated death - so what sense can we make of the continuing mayhem? How can God's purposes still be achieved despite the death and destruction which always surrounds us in this world?

Well, I have A Little Theory. So sorry. But here we go. When I was about fifteen I had a remarkable experience. All I remember of it is the way it ended: the Light (note the capital letter) which filled the room moved away through the ceiling and the ceiling itself, together with the walls, the floor and the contents of the room reappeared to view. And I was filled with the most absolute feelings of love, joy, peace and all the other good things for the next half-hour or so, after which things slowly returned to normal.

This was during the summer holidays and I was working in the University Library when it was still in the Tower Block. I remember a day or two later standing beside a stack of books (including, if I remember rightly) that all-time best-seller, 'Homing Tendencies in Migrating Turtles') and surprising myself by thinking that if Christ and this Light were one and the same, well and good. If not, I would stick with the Light.

Somewhat unusually for me, I told no one of my experience. It needed no confirmation. It didn't even need an explanation. Whatever the Light was, it was the final reality, and the final authority. It was totally self-authenticating. It had no face, it said nothing, and it gave itself no name - none of which mattered in the slightest. I had (and have) no doubt that this Light was what human life was for, indeed all life of whatever kind. It was obvious to me that we came into existence by the will and power of the Light and that it was the purpose of our existence to return the Light. And I knew that death was an essential part of that process, and therefore not to be feared.

I also knew immediately that the Old Gentleman on top of Mt Sinai with a long beard and a short fuse simply didn't exist - and never had. No wrath, no rage, no thunderbolts, no plagues, nothing but love, mercy and forgiveness. And truth, of course. I'm not suggesting that the Light is filtered through rose-tinted lenses, but I am saying that Master Calvin should have read St Isaac the Syrian before rushing into print.

It wasn't until I was ordained and in my first parish that I came across 'Life after Life' by Dr Raymond Moody, with its accounts of many Near Death Experiences, and recognised their extraordinary similarity to my own experience. And it wasn't until many years after that that I encountered the Eastern Orthodox teaching generally known as Palamism, according to which God can be (and often is) seen as light, as on the Damascus Road. Since then I have come across many people (some of them here in Dunedin) who have had the same experience as I did, likewise without being anywhere near death. And just as it permanently transformed my life, and my understanding of the meaning and purpose of life, so it did the same for them.

Now, one of the distinguishing characteristics of this kind of thing is the way in which people find, firstly, that while it is happening, their consciousness is somehow expanded and enlarged, and secondly, they appear to enter into a kind of telepathic communication between themselves and others, based not so much on words and language but on simple shared awareness.

Thus we come (at long last!) to My Little Theory, which works like this. It seems likely to me that beyond the grave we shall all participate in a kind of shared consciousness to which we shall each contribute our own individual awareness, our memories and our experiences. This would mean that those who died before they could acquire such memories and experiences would not be deprived of their reality, and it would also mean that what appears now to us to be the pointless and useless suffering of (say) the inmates of Auschwitz might well be a most profound gift to the rest of us, after the model of the passion of Christ when it is seen from the Garden of the Resurrection. But it all depends on the reality of human destiny. And on a remnant (very biblical, you will note) which has undergone the experience of life in this world long enough to be able to take it into the world to come.

So that's it - at least for the moment. Outraged responses on a postcard, please. Or not.

Culture Wars

2010-03-02T14:33:00.016+13:00

Last Saturday Kelvin Wright was ordained and installed (i.e. consecrated and enthroned) as the ninth Bishop of Dunedin of the Anglican Persuasion. It was a wonderful occasion if only because it achieved the right result, and because the new bishop's splendid new gear (made by his sister who should do this kind of thing for a living) didn't make him look like the Imperial Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

But I wish I could say the same for his fellow bishops. They were all clad in something called a chole. Yes, a chole. And what do you suppose that is? Why, it's a combination chasuble cum stole of course. Except that it isn't. It's actually a sandwich-board designed to encourage racial harmony and cultural diversity (and to help us rather insecure New Zealanders feel a bit more confident about our identity). You can tell that by the fact that it has flax crosses prominently displayed front and back.

You don't have to be a member of the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia for long to realise that the significance of the flax cross is cultural rather than Christian. Thus we seem to have made the good the enemy of the best, and I'm not sure that that would appeal to the One whose kingdom is not of this world.

Having it both ways

2010-02-25T22:52:00.010+13:00

Today is the anniversary of the papal bull Regnans in excelsis published in 1570 announcing Pope St Pius V's deposition of Queen Elizabeth I from her royal throne and his call to her subjects to abandon both their sovereign and the spiritual leadership of the 'lewd preachers and ministers of impiety' whom she had planted in the Lord's Vineyard.

You might therefore have thought that Pius was no friend of the Anglican Church in any shape or form. But apparently not, if the following endorsement by an American Episcopalian culled from the internet is anything to go by.

Today is a very special day, the Feast of St Pius V. As one of my patrons (I took Pius as my confirmation name) I'll be serving at the Holy Sacrifice today from his Missal (but in English, alas). If you are able, do join us today at noon at Grace and St Peter's to celebrate this illustrious Pope and Confessor and great friend of the Church of England.

With friends like this . . .

Crown and Mitre

2010-02-09T23:30:00.017+13:00

On 30th January we Anglicans observed the feast of the blessed St Charles, King and Martyr. And we did so with hearts overflowing with gratitude for his courageous defence of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Faith - even unto death. We did, didn't we? Well I certainly did, but some of you might have been just a little too squeamish to do the same, I fear.

Perhaps you were put off by Professor J.P. Kenyon's remarks on the matter, 'His [Charles the First's] was never a masculine character, and his femine delicacy of feature, his tristesse, that Pre-Raphaelite droop so attractive to the old ladies of Anglo-Catholicism, had a limited appeal to contemporaries.' As a put-down (two put-downs, in fact) this is simply superb, but is it true? And is it enough to account for the reality of the king's part in the life of the church, or the reality of the church's life following his death?

Here's the opinion of another distinguished historian of the period, C.V. Wedgewood, 'His church policy was the outcome not of calculation but of conviction; he was ready to die for it.' And what in the end was the church policy Charles was prepared to die for? According to Mandell Creighton, bishop of London at the turn of the twentieth century and a noted ecclesiastical historian, 'Had Charles been willing to abandon the church and give up episcopacy, he might have saved his throne and his life. But on this point Charles stood firm: for this he died, and by dying saved it for the future.'

And these are some of the Royal Martyr's own words on the matter, 'I conceive that episcopal government is most consonant with the Word of God, and of apostolical institution, as it appears by the Scripture to have been practised by the apostles themselves, and by them committed and derived to particular persons as their substitutes or successors therein, and have ever since to these last times been exercised by bishops, and therefore I cannot in conscience consent to abolish the said government.'

But perhaps your sympathies lie with a later (and somewhat Presbyterian) sovereign. At a garden party for Anglican bishops Oueen Victoria remarked to her lady in waiting, "A very ugly party. I do not like bishops." When Lady Lyttelton expressed some disquiet at this pronouncement from the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, the queen said, "I like the man - not the bishop." I'm sorry to say that a good many Anglo-Catholics since then would have happily reversed her reply, and may even have had good reason to do so.

No doubt there have been (and will continue to be) objections to episcopacy from our more protestant brethren, but I'm afraid I find them entirely unconvincing. Perhaps there was a period of uncertainty about the ministry in the early Church (though you might like to take a cursory look at From Synagogue to Church by James Tunstead Burtchaell, CUP 1992, before you make up your mind). For myself I find the universal practice of the churches which have any claim to antiquity (some of which, like the Assyrian Church of the East, have been in a world of their own from very early on) to be most persuasive. Despite enormous differences in their histories, liturgies, and even in their canons of scripture, these churches have all held fast to the doctrine of apostolic succession and to the consequent three-fold ministry as being essential to the Catholic Church.

I mention the scriptural canon because even where the New Testament is concerned, there have been notable differences. The Syriac churches, for example, did not accept 2 Peter, Jude, 2 and 3 John, and the Book of Revelation until very late in the day, and even now the latter is not read at the public services of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Only tradition tells me that there are four Gospels and not three or thirty. Likewise tradition tells me that in some vital sense bishops have succeeded the apostles in the governance of the People of God. Perhaps some bishops have been no good. But then, the gospel of John has been used to promote antisemitism, and I have yet to hear of a plan to remove it from the bible as a result. Episcopacy was established in the church before the canon, and has ever since been a foundation of the church's life. No doubt the church could get by without St John's gospel, just as some denominations get by without bishops - but it would be an impoverishment, and a statement that Christianity was on the wrong path for fifteen hundred years, which (in this instance, at least) makes very little sense to me.

However, there is an exception. There is always an exception! And the exception in this case (you will be surprised to learn) is the Roman Catholic Church. Should you consult Principles of Sacramental Theology by Father Bernard Leeming SJ (published in London by Longmans Green in 1956) you will be interested to discover that bishops are largely surplus to requirements, since the Roman Pontiff can give permission (and presumably power) to simple priests to ordain to the priesthood and the diaconate, and perhaps even to the episcopate. At least three popes have done so, and Father Leeming rather reluctantly acknowledges the fact.

But we shouldn't be too surprised. Remember those missals which we all had (well, some of us) before the Second Vatican Council, with an imprimatur from none other than one L. Suenens, working his way up to the archbishopric of Malines and a galero (a cardinal's red hat)? In the helpful introduction to these missals we are told that 'There are three major Orders or consecrations,' and that they are those of subdeacon, deacon, and priest. And just in case a bishop should feel left out, he is assured that he possesses 'the fulness of the priesthood.' Furthermore there are (or at least have been) reputable dogmatic manuals (so-called) used in seminaries which maintain that ordination to the episcopate is not a sacramental act.

Since Vatican Two, of course, all is changed. But let's not forget that until the pope says sorry, the Roman Church is officially Presbyterian. So, given a rather obvious 'defect of intention' where the episcopate is concerned, do they really have valid orders like us?

To be or not to be

2010-01-29T22:44:00.010+13:00

Ever since I was a small boy I have been fascinated by matters which I have not had the slightest possibility of understanding. Although I have found this particularly helpful in forming my opinions, and essential in expressing them, it has been a drawback all the same. But please note that modern science backs me up. Take, for example, Werner Heisenberg and his uncertainty principle. Even the name has a certain quality of reassurance for those of us who would like to understand such things as mathematics and physics, but who have always had difficulty in being entirely certain that two and two make four. (When I was at primary school the headmaster informed me that if I couldn't do arithmetic I would never amount to anything. He was quite right - I couldn't and I haven't.)

The uncertainty principle tells us that at the quantum level of reality it is just not possible to be sure about the behaviour of atoms, let alone their constituent parts such as electrons and quarks. And given the fact that atoms are themselves more than ninety-nine per cent empty space, and that the tiny fraction which is something rather than nothing can be described as 'a blur' I can't say I feel too bad about my ignorance.

This is especially so as Heisenberg's successors seem to be approaching the great Somers-Edgar principle which is simply this - the universe doesn't actually exist. Even as a eleven or twelve-year old I had my doubts. I can remember standing at the bottom of Pitt Street at the time when I was still attending Arthur Street School and wondering whether the scene before me was actually the way I percieved it, or if it was even there at all. (I might say that at this point in my life I was drinking nothing stronger than milk.) Perhaps the presence of Knox Church to my left unhinged me somewhat, but I had the same doubts even when I was standing inside St Patrick's Basilica. Nowadays, I must confess, inside all too many churches this is not so much a doubt as a hope.

Clearly something exists in some way or other, but it is not at all clear just what that way might happen to be - especially, it seems, to physicists. Which makes the pious (or impious) certainties of Richard Dawkins and his friends hard to credit. With empty atoms, string theory, the possibility of eleven dimensions (at the last count), imaginary time, quantum mechanics and other scientific propositions, not to mention the theory that the universe divides into millions of complete and separate versions of itself in order to accomodate all possible outcomes - by comparison with all this, believing in God is mere child's play.

Doubting Thomas

2010-01-28T15:38:00.012+13:00

Today we have been observing the feast of St Thomas Aquinas, for whom I have a somewhat ill-informed liking, if only for two particular reasons. The first is that as a small child he would apparently ask his elders "What is God?" Not who?, you will note, but what? I entirely realise that he should actually have been asking whether anyone had found his teddy bear, and I thus have some sympathy with his poor elders - but I do think he was on the right track. God has got to be more than a little old man on the top of a middle eastern mountain with a long beard and a short fuse.

I also like Aquinas for his reported answer to his own question at the end of his life, namely, that having actually experienced the Real Thing (please note the capital letters) he understood that there could be no answers, except for the ones that make sense. And where God is concerned, sensible answers often make no sense at all. Thus the Angelic Doctor is said to have refused to finish his great Summa with the statement that what he had already written (and that was an awful lot) was only so much straw.

The contrast between St Thomas and a good many of the Doubting Thomases of our own time (often fully paid-up clergy and theological professors, alas) could hardly be greater.

Taking urgency

2010-01-04T22:17:00.047+13:00

16th December was the anniversary of my baptism in 1951. I can't say that I remember it well, but I do recall looking up at the wooden roof and seeing the sunlight slanting through the windows. This was in St Matthew's Church on the corner of Hope Street (most appropriate!) and the officiating priest was Archdeacon Hamblett, the father-in-law of the painter Colin McCahon. At the time even members of my family would have wanted other people to think that they believed in God - even though most of them didn't, some of them with good reason. The latter included my father and his siblings. The reason for their somewhat determined unbelief was not scientific or philosophical, but much closer to home than that - it was their own dear mother.

Grandma was quite a character, and had had quite a life, not much of it very pleasant or enjoyable. Both her father and his father before him had fallen into debt and had chosen (at different times) to remove themselves from this world as a result, leaving their respective daughter and granddaughter to fend for herself and her children. As a result they all spent at least one winter on the west coast in nothing more than a tent before my great-grandmother was imprisoned for debt (of course!) and her children were sent to the workhouse. Not a very good beginning, I think you will agree, and it didn't improve very much after that either. Grandma grew up to be a beautiful and charming young woman, but not one with the best judgement it would seem, as she went on to marry a well-bred but not entirely useful Englishman who fathered her children but appeared to be largely incapable of supporting them. So Grandma turned to religion, and not just to any religion - she became a Seventh Day Adventist. She also became an absolutely determined advocate for her faith, whether her family or anyone else liked it or not. Hence her children's militant unbelief.

Naturally the failure of her offspring to follow her on the path of righteousness was a considerable disappointment, but Grandma nevertheless remained ever-vigilant against ungodliness. When I was six years old, and my parents were out of the house, she got me to sign the pledge. On their return they insisted on tearing it up and gave Grandma a stern lecture on the evils of manipulating impressionable young minds. I, meanwhile, burst into tears, crying that I would become a gin-soaked alcoholic because Grandma had told me so - as indeed I did, although I had to work at it for some years thereafter. Grandma was not always wrong.

There was also something of a kerfuffle when she gave her eldest son a book about the South Seas. As he already had a copy, his wife took it back to the shop, where the saleswoman examined it to make sure it was resaleable. It wasn't. One of the photographs in the book showed a most attractive Polynesian girl wearing nothing but a grass skirt - and a large piece of black tape which Grandma had placed strategically just below her neck in case my uncle (then in his fifties) was led astray. My aunt, who had no time for religion of any sort - let alone Grandma's - took the book and drove home in something of a rage. On the way a little idea popped into her head. She turned up at Grandma's and announced that at last she had Seen The Light. Grandma was thrilled - until my aunt informed her that she was going to became a Roman Catholic. (She didn't, of course.)

My other grandmother was also religious. She was a Christian Scientist and would tell me when I was sick that my illness was in my head, something which was particularly true whenever I had a cold. On the rare occasions that she and Grandma met you could see that they didn't exactly have a lot in common, but as they were the only members of my family to have some sort of religion, I think I did rather well to remain a mere Anglican, which is rather more than I can say for most of my cousins who (most understandably) remain resolutely indifferent.

And I think I know why. Some years ago, when another of my father's brothers arrived in England for a holiday with his wife, I accompanied them to various historic monuments, including a few churches. In one of the latter my uncle put some money into the offertory box, and when I asked him why he had done so, he replied in two words, "Fire insurance." Naturally I enquired as to whether or not he actually believed that. He didn't. And just to make his reasons clear he said in a quietly mocking voice, "Ah yes - little children dying of cancer, and all to please the God of Love." Merely theological explanations at this point didn't quite seem appropriate. My uncle had caught God out, at least in his own mind, and even now, almost forty years later I'm not at all sure what would have been an adequate reply, or even if such a thing were possible.

So my uncle had found that God was fundamentally heartless, perhaps not so much immoral as amoral, and thus not worthy of his attention, let alone his allegiance. He could simply dismiss him from consideration, backed up, of course, by what he understood of modern science. And how could I have found just the right words in those circumstances to effect the necessary change of mind and heart? He had, after all, heard it many times before.

So why didn't it convince him? That's the sort of question I don't think we ask ourselves often enough. Insofar as I have any kind of answer, I think it has a lot to do with context in which the Gospel is preached. Something must already be part of the experience of your listeners for them to build on. Where the first Christians were concerned their understanding of things already included a belief in what we would (rather loosely) call the supernatural, so more of the same not only made sense, it helped to make sure that the supernatural was on your side and not otherwise. Becoming God's friend (and staying that way) was thus a very good idea.

But nowadays God can seem too unreal (and too unreliable) to bother about. Darwin, Marx and Freud have seen to that. Not to mention celebrated scientists like Richard Dawkins and famous philosophers like Antony Flew. Or at least that's what we thought. But recently, Professor Flew has let the side down badly by becoming a theist (a deist in fact). And why do you suppose that is? Because science (if you please) has convinced him that there must be what he describes as an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Spirit which is both eternal and completely good. Otherwise the universe could never have happened, it could not show the extraordinary order that it does, our genome could never have evolved by chance no matter how many billions of years it had at its disposal, and self-reproducing life just could not arise spontaneously from inanimate matter.

My uncle was able to be an unbeliever without too much trouble. He didn't really have to think about it. God's shaky morality and scientific implausibility gave him the right to dismiss the deity without looking too closely at his opinions and the reasons for them. But it is my belief that those who share those opinions are in for something of a shock in the coming years. Despite, or even because of, the Darwinian fundamentalists, science is beginning to reveal a reality which I am sure is a necessary part of the Gospel - and we should loudly and ostentatiously proclaim it as such.

As the title of Professor Flew's latest book says, There is a God. If we want to make faith in God much more widely possible for our generation we need to investigate closely this new development in the sciences. For if people come to believe that 'an omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Spirit which is both eternal and completely good' and which created and sustains everything including themselves, is not just scientifically plausible but perhaps even scientifically necessary, then the question of their relationship with this reality (or the lack of it) might well become rather more urgent.

Sign of the Times

2009-12-29T11:13:00.007+13:00

Well, Christmas Day has been and gone, and Archdeacon Cardy's sign has been and gone with it. Just as well, too. The latter was of course tasteless, ridiculous, objectionable, unbecoming, lewd, suggestive, indecent, and likely to cause offence. It was also not unexpected. We all love Christmas - most of us anyway. We like carols, and fake snow and Santa and jinglebells and all the other seasonal manifestations of Christianity which have endeared themselves to us from our playpens until now.

But we are not too sure about the real thing. You know what I mean, incarnations, resurrections, ascensions - stuff like that. In fact, we have grown beyond such charmingly mythological stuff. And it's not always that charming either, is it? Think of the wars, the inquisition, the intolerance, the oppression of women. Religion clearly turns good people bad - especially when they actually believe in it.

But fortunately we don't. And now we don't have to. We can have our christmas cake and eat it. And we have Sir Lloyd, Bishops Spong and Randerson, Ian Harris (he of the ODT column Honest to God - if you please) and the good archdeacon to give us permission to bypass the real thing in favour of Christianity-Lite, dogma-free and non-saving. It's just the thing for a guilt-free sacred snack. But shame on the clerical cooks for promoting spiritual anorexia.

Unheavenly Music

2009-12-28T22:40:00.006+13:00

I am a born-again curmudgeon. Like my late father, I take exception to things which a more balanced and mature person would simply take in his stride. It was always a little dangerous to appear in public with my parent in his latter years. Embarrassment was too often an integral part of the experience. Like the occasion when we went into a shop in which muzak was playing. I don't much care for muzak myself, but I was not a little alarmed when my father started shouting at the rather bewildered salesman, "Do you have to play that bloody rubbish in here?" With my hand firmly on his arm, we made a rapid (but I hope not undignified) exit before he got into his stride.

These days I feel more and more like doing something similar - usually when I'm in Church. We seem to have developed a particular kind of Christian muzak, sometimes sung, sometimes said, and of great repellent power (as Queen Victoria said of Tsar Alexander the Third). Here is an example of the spoken variety, through which I gritted my teeth a few years ago: "Our Father who is in us here on earth. Holy is your name. In the hungry who share their bread and their song your kingdom come, a generous land where confidence and truth reign. Let us do your will. Bring a cool breeze for those who sweat. You are giving us our daily bread when we manage to get back our lands or get a fairer wage. Forgive us for keeping silent in the face of injustice and for burying our dreams, etc., etc." Perhaps you recognise it, or then again, perhaps not.

Here's another example from the same service sheet: "O God, we have come to the hills, where heaven and earth meet. Whisper to us sweet things as the breeze stirs through blades of grass. Shout to us marvellous things as the river roars down its bed of stones. And in this centre where the stillness of your whisper answers the thunder of your shout, etc., etc." It has an emetic quality worthy of the vapourings of Patience Strong.

It's not just the fact that such efforts are examples of the sentimental drivel which sometimes seems to engulf us that worries me. It's the fact that this is theological sentimental drivel. It has a message, and it's not one which is compatible with the Christian religion. Why? Because it is centred on us, not on God. All too many hymns and prayers - indeed whole services - seem to be about us, about making us good and useful, ready to usher in the kingdom, save the whales, defeat racism and sexism, and bring about heaven on earth. We have made the good the enemy of the best because it's so much easier to get on in society if you can adopt a cause everyone can applaud you for promoting. As for a transcendent God, that's perhaps just a little too difficult. But if we have lost our nerve (not to mention our faith) then we have no business concealing the fact with sentimental drivel. Christ said to Pilate, "For truth I came into the world." And the whole truth and nothing but the truth is that only God will do.

Neither here nor there

2009-11-26T11:37:00.036+13:00

Allow me to come out of the closet. I am a member of Forward in Faith, an Anglican society the founding purpose of which was to ensure the continuance of the apostolic ministry of bishops, priests and deacons in the Anglican Communion. To this end, FiF has opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate. Now, as it happens, I am not at all sure that women can't or shouldn't be ordained priests and bishops, but I am sure that the convictions of those opposed to such an innovation must be respected and allowed for.

This means (at the very least) that it must be possible for such Anglicans to have - by absolute right - a male bishop consecrated in a direct line from the apostles by an unbroken succession of male bishops. This was solemnly promised by the General Synod of the Church of England some years ago, and thus, to my mind, the abrupt termination in that Church of the so-called Period of Reception in favour of the innovators has been both dishonest and unjust - and much, much too soon. Hence my decision to join those who are now probably just tilting at windmills - at least where Anglicanism in the western world is concerned. But lost causes often have a fine air of tragic inevitability about them.

However, as my copies of New Directions have arrived regularly from FiF headquarters in London, I have begun to suspect that the business of ensuring the apostolic succession against an unacceptable degree of uncertainty is perhaps a stalking horse for another set of aims as well. And so it has proved with the response of the leadership of FiF to Pope Benedict's generous offer of water-wings to those Anglo-Catholics who are now dipping their disaffected toes in the dangerous waters of the Tiber.

This response has been little short of ecstatic. From the Bishop of Fulham (the chairman) on down, editorialists, writers of articles and contributors to the letters column have been falling over themselves to express their gratitude to the Holy Father for his wonderful, gracious, timely, generous (etc.) invitation to bend their knees in the House of Rimmon. (I know, I know, that's just a little extreme, and on mature deliberation I may delete it. Or not.)

For some years now FiF has been straying into areas whose connections with the ordination (or otherwise) of women are not immediately apparent. This is particularly so where the little matter of homosexuality is concerned. Astonishingly enough, they claim they are not for it. Indeed, like the Holy Father himself they are determinedly, almost hysterically opposed to it. On the face of it, their vehemence is somewhat surprising. FiF is almost entirely Anglo-Catholic rather than evangelical. And Anglo-Catholicism - particularly Anglo-Papalism - is somewhat gay. In fact it is very gay indeed. I was trained at St Stephen's House in the mid 1970's and a curate at All Saints' Margaret Street in the early 1980's and I know whereof I speak. And I doubt if things have changed very much since then.

In order to displease almost everyone I have wilfully adopted views on this subject with which few others agree. I have thought that same-sex relationships can be pleasing to God if the intention is that they be lifelong and faithful. Like heterosexual unions, I believe they should be publicly formalised, and hope that one day this will be possible in Church. But although for gay people such a relationship would be the equivalent of marriage, I wouldn't rush to institutionalise such a conclusion just yet. And I would certainly not try to compel the consciences of the faithful by imposing on them priests (let alone bishops) who are in such relationships. And finally, I would not agree that even those in a totally committed relationship have the right to adopt children - but then I don't think anybody has such a right, gay or straight, although its one they can obviously be given.

(At a later date, I will give you a little tour of adelphopoiia, which I believe has a considerable bearing on these matters. It will be something for you to look forward to in an increasingly bleak and desperate time.)

In my years in England I had a good many discussions with gay Anglo-Papalists about homosexuality and found (all too often) that they would not attempt anything like a truly personal same-sex union simply because the Holy Father forbade it. As a consequence they were often quite remarkably (and very impersonally) promiscuous instead. I found it a bewildering combination, but I have learnt since that such is often the case in these matters. Perhaps the present moral crisis of Roman Catholic clergy and religious is of the same order. Be that as it may, I believe Anglo-Papalism to be essentially untruthful, and I'm sorry to say that the members of this faction seem to be calling the shots in the Catholic movement at the present time - at least in the Church of England. But if you accept the papal claims as they were set out in the Apostolic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, and if you consider the pages of The Catechism of the Catholic Church to contain the very truth of the Faith, then - in my opinion - it's time to recite the Creed of Pius IV (as amended) and put on those water-wings.

Odi et amo

2009-11-23T22:43:00.111+13:00

I must have been all of thirteen when I discovered the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church. Quite without any inkling of what it would lead to, I clambered up a steep flight of steps and into St Joseph's Cathedral and began what I can only describe as a kind of love-hate relationship which has lasted for the best part of half a century. My parents were horrified. "What is it that attracts you to those people?" my mother asked in some distress. When I enquired of my father why she should have reacted as she did, he pointed out that Roman Catholics were disloyal, clannish, bred like rabbits, and (worst of all) Irish.

But I didn't care. I appreciated St Joseph's very much. It was so much more alive and interesting than the Anglican cathedral in the Octagon where I sang in the choir. However, according to the prejudices of the time, it was essentially off-limits to a well-bred protestant boy like myself. I went to Otago Boys' High School after all, not to Christian Brothers, so in subsequent visits I had to turn the tops of my school socks down in the hope that my origins would remain undetected, and my treason unreported to family and friends.

Soon I was sneaking off on Saturday evenings to St Patrick's Basilica in South Dunedin for the Novena of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour, followed by Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament celebrated in God's own native Latin, just the way it should be. It was there that I first sang such classics of the hymn-writer's art as Mary from thy Sacred Image with those eyes so sadly sweet, Mother of Perpetual Succour see us kneeling at thy feet. Who wouldn't warm to that?

I was determined to join up. The Roman Catholic Church seemed to be truly religious. People were always in St Joseph's praying, morn, noon and night. All sorts of people: male and female, old and young, rich and poor, black and brown, yellow and pink - you name it, they were there - and they loved it. They were proud to belong to The One True Church. Everything about it, the saints, the rosary, the Redemptorists, the Mater Hospital, the ancient and beautiful liturgy and much more, all testified to the fact that this was something very special which had come down from a glorious and sacred past, and in which many of the ordinary citizens of twentieth century New Zealand could feel right at home.

Then came little Paul VI, a nice, well-meaning little man who was unfortunate enough to succeed John XXIII. The latter was a man both great and good, who valued the sacred past while being able to relate to the present. Little Paul VI could do neither - at least not with any great comprehension of what was involved. He was a would-be egghead [see the Satan's Cuckoo post] who allowed himself to be led astray by liturgical eggheads such as Archbishop Annibale Bugnini, the Robespierre of modern Roman Catholicism, who (with his mates) gutted the Roman Rite and consequently decimated the Latin Church from Cork to Christchurch.

I was not pleased. Like millions of others, I liked the old Roman Rite very much. I greatly valued its timeless quality, its serenity, its transcendence, and its remarkable beauty. Let us not forget that it was for the celebration of this liturgy that Westminster Abbey and the great cathedrals of Europe were built. For this liturgy Rubens, Titian, Raphael and Michelangelo (among many others) painted great masterpieces. For this Liturgy Palestrina, Byrd, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Stravinsky wrote some of their finest music. In its essentials, the Mass of the Tridentine Rite is the service which was known and loved by Benedict, Bede, Patrick, Hilda, Alfred the Great, Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Thomas More, Teresa of Avila, Francis de Sales, Simone Weil, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein and Thomas Merton. Not bad is it? But not good enough, it seems, for little Paul VI, who to all intents and purposes simply threw it away without so much as a by your leave, while at the same time maintaining (against all expectation and advice) the ban on birth control just because his predecessors had.

Of course, little Paul VI didn't leave his devoted (if diminishing) flock without a form of worship. No indeed: he thrust the Rite of the Ruined Remains down the unwilling throats of the faithful, whether they liked it or not. And by and large they most certainly didn't. Hence the increasingly empty pews from that day to this.

Little Paul VI's liturgical bolshevism gave me something of a shock. I was confirmed in my view that Christianity was not at all the same thing as mere ideology - even fashionable theological ideology. I saw the point of Archbishop William Temple's dictum Mankind can be saved by only one thing - worship. Likewise Oscar Wilde's remark We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars, seemed to be remarkably relevant. It appeared, however, that at the new Roman Supper of the Lord Stars are off, Luv.

A few years previously I had received a different kind of shock in St Joseph's Cathedral when I was idly thumbing through a missal which someone else had left behind. In its pages I found a little pamphlet about the Sabbatine Privilege, according to which, Our Blessed Lady will descend to purgatory on the Saturday following the death of a member of the Carmelite Order (or its Confraternity) and will personally liberate him from the flames and conduct him to heaven. I found some difficulty in believing this. Clearly it meant that if you were drowning in your bath, you would be well advised to do so on Friday night, and as you went down for the third and final time, you should make sure that the two little strings joining the front and back of your scapular were to found lying neatly on either side of your neck - just in case. An off-the-shoulder number might not do the trick.

Now of course, we don't believe that sort of thing anymore, do we? O but we did. Despite strenuous scholarly protests, various popes endorsed this splendid heresy, until finally even they started to back off, and reinterpret the matter in a rather more Sea of Faith sort of way. But I was still somewhat shaken to find that they had ever entertained such an idea at all, even just a little. So by the time I entered St Stephen's House in Oxford to train for the priesthood, I had already developed that peculiar kind of semi-detached and highly ambiguous relationship with the Holy Roman Church which has been such a feature of English Anglo-Catholicism ever since the late John Henry Newman and his deplorable friend Richard Hurrell Froude muddied the waters in the nineteenth century.

But more of that in the next post.

Stepping Out

2009-11-18T14:54:00.012+13:00

Further to my last post, you can see the Seises for yourself on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYEaeGjMp3A&feature=related. The music isn't up to much (there seems to be dearth of theorbos and an excess of little girls) but the feathered hats and the footwork make a quite remarkable sight before the High Altar of Seville Cathedral during High Mass. To get the full flavour you will have to go on to Part Two for the sound of the castanets (with long coloured ribbons) which the choirboys cum pirouettists hold in their hands. Perhaps we Anglicans could follow the example of the Spanish and introduce Morris Dancing into the Sacred Mysteries. It would probably be a lot more appropriate than the somewhat unliturgical St Vitus Dance which seems popular in a number of our Churches at the present time.

Backward, Christian Soldiers

2009-10-18T15:39:00.049+13:00

In the last week or so I have been rereading one of my favourite books, A Stranger in Spain by H.V. Morton - he of the In Search of England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales et cetera books. I first came across the account of his Spanish travels (published in 1955) in the school library when I was about thirteen or fourteen. I was quite enchanted by it (and what normal teen-aged boy wouldn't be?) since it was full of wonderful descriptions of black-faced images of Our Blessed Lady wearing bejewelled crowns, and fascinating accounts of things such as the Mozarabic Mass or the dancing of the Seises (complete with castanets) before the altar of Seville Cathedral during high mass on the feast of Corpus Christi. As I say, what normal kiwi boy could resist such delights?

My enthusiasm knew no bounds. Quite soon I was sneaking copies of the Roman Missal and the Book of Common Prayer into the classroom to look at furtively while the masters droned on about such unimportant matters as geography and mathematics. Then one day a certain Mr Skelly (if I remember rightly) wanted to know what I was peering at under my desk. This invasion of my privacy was bad enough, but what followed was as unfortunate as it was extraordinary. When the other boys discovered what I had been looking at, they laughed, not at the teacher, as you might expect, but at me. From that moment on I was a stranger on this earth.

Truthfully however, my enthusiasm was as much to do with history as with religion. I have always been fascinated by the European past, largely because it has been so beautiful. I do not include (of course) the Black Death or the Holy Inquisition as examples of historical loveliness, indeed I am not talking about disasters, man-made or otherwise, at all. I am talking about (to use the most obvious examples I can think of) Chartres Cathedral, Dante's Divina Commedia, Handel's Messiah, Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, and so on ad infinitum. And note, please, that all of these have overtly (indeed essentially) Christian significance.

I loved it all. I remember the day when the music master (one Johannes Giesen) no doubt despairing of knocking an appreciation of sonata form into the heads of a class of resolute philistines, decided to show us a film about Florence under the Medici instead. Almost half a century later I can vividly remember my amazement as I saw the cathedral's belltower and Brunelleschi's dome for the first time. And when school was over for the day I rushed off to the public library to get hold of books on the subject. Illustrated books of course, nothing too taxing. And anyway, who cares what various learned aesthetes have to say about it all? Just look at the pictures, for heaven's sake, look at the pictures.

All this has great importance, not just for me, but for many others as well. We live in a society largely disenchanted with its past. Thus "old" music, "old" prayers, "old" buildings and so on, are often seen as obstacles to faith, rather than (as they have been for so many) the very opposite. Furthermore, our society likes to think of itself as egalitarian. No elitism for us. No organs when we could have guitars, no antiquated vestments when we could have smart and fashionable contemporary dress. And worst of all perhaps, no beautiful liturgical texts drenched in the sanctity of centuries when we could have mere committeespeak instead.

Perhaps in a democratic and egalitarian society we should be content with our much vaunted modernity, but I certainly hope not. Why does our inclusiveness and respect for the rights of the individual leave so many individuals feeling very excluded? Why do I get the impression that we have the liturgical equivalent of two legs good, four legs bad? In the Roman Church at the present time there is a movement sometimes called the Reform of the Reform. Perhaps we Anglicans could do with something similar.

Satan's Cuckoo

2009-09-21T21:13:00.008+12:00

A few weeks ago we celebrated John Calvin's five hundredth birthday in Dunedin. When I say we, I really mean the participants at a conference held in his honour at Knox College. I wouldn't be seen dead celebrating him myself. On the occasions when I have visited my good friend the Master of Knox I have had to walk past a large picture of the birthday boy, and have always felt the same sort of outrage which I imagine I would feel if I visited the German Embassy and found a nice photograph of the late Fuehrer in a place of honour on its walls.

This is not quite as mad as it seems, when you consider that Calvin played Dr Goebbels to Our Hitler in Heaven, a deity of well-nigh infinite sadism, content to create billions of human beings whom he knew would require "irresistable grace" in order to be saved from an eternal Auschwitz - and then quite cheerfully denied it to them. And all for no better reason than his personal pleasure in exercising his sovereign will, utterly uninhibited by any such notions as compassion and mercy.

We are told that the Sage of Geneva has been traditionally misrepresented and that modern historiography has at last started to redress the balance, but still, as Alec Ryrie, the Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University says, "Calvin was an intensely arrogant and argumentative man, who could not abide to be crossed. He could be vicious, especially to his friends. Opponents, including those who rejected or disliked his vertiginous moral standards, were lambasted, driven into exile, or, on one notorious occasion, put to death."

How very Christlike. And this is the man who even today has an enthusiastic following of people who claim to be Christians, and even worse, claim that Calvin has provided the best account of the Christian religion since St Paul - or possibly his great mentor Augustine of Hippo, from who he derived much of his appalling doctrine of grace. Augustine, remember, said that the fact that God saves some people shows his mercy, while the fact that most people are lost shows his justice. And I seem to remember that a seventeeth-century Roman Archbishop of Tuam called Florence Conry wrote a whole book in defence of Augustine's belief that "the very unbaptised babes crawl about the floor of hell." (And just in case you are wondering, Florence was a boy baby himself and not a member of the Movement for the Ordination of Women.)

Eggheads all, and by eggheads I mean people for whom ideas are often more real than reality itself - to the exclusion of irrationalities like empathy and compassion. Witness the more unbending Pharisees' devotion to the Law, not to mention the works of such enthusiastic ideologues as Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot nearer our own time - all driven to murder millions for the sake of their pet theories. How Satan must have loved them (if love is quite the right term to use where the devil is concerned!). And how very pleased he must have been with John Calvin, who so cleverly turned the Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ into the Heavenly Hitler, the Celestial Stalin, with eternal Bergen Belsens, Dachaus and Gulags all ready and waiting to torment the majority of his children beyond endurance just as soon as they throw off this mortal coil.

Clearly Calvin's God is actually Satan's Cuckoo.

Assumption assumptions

2009-08-29T19:44:00.016+12:00

When I posted the last entry, I was not entirely sure that I was saying what I wanted to say as clearly as I wanted to say it. Then I received a comment which asked why I felt the assumption was stretching my capacity for belief too far when I was happy to affirm such things as the resurrection and the transfiguration, particularly as the assumption would be "one of the easier wonders" to perform. This resembles the defence of the Immaculate Conception made by Duns Scotus, the great mediaeval Franciscan philosopher and theologian, when he said: potuit, decuit, ergo fecit (God could do it, it was fitting that he did it, and therefore he did it). But did God agree with Duns Scotus, or was the latter assuming too much? (Pun intended, I fear.)

I believe that the Mother of God reigns in glory, that she appeared to such saints as Seraphim of Sarov, and that by the Holy Spirit (as St Silouan of tne Holy Mountain says) she sees us and hears our prayers. However, I also believe (with Lossky - humbly, I might say!) that the glories of Our Lady are part of the inner mystery of the Church, and not necessarily to be proclaimed from the rooftops. But I should also wish to affirm my belief (gratefully!) in the continuing experience of the Blessed Virgin as the Mother of the Church which has been integral to Catholic Christianity up to the present day.

In Caelum

2009-08-27T15:22:00.016+12:00

Well did she? Did the Mother of God fly into the heavens, body and soul, like the shuttle from Cape Canaveral? Pope Pius the Twelfth said she did and proved it by saying so infallibly in 1950. The Eastern Orthodox on the other hand combine a certain mystical fuzziness about it with a liking for an apocryphal sixth-century farrago on the subject which begins as follows: 'As the all-holy glorious Mother of God and ever-virgin Mary, as was her wont, was going to the holy tomb of our Lord to burn incense, and bending her holy knees, she was importunate that Christ our God who had been born of her should return to her...and while she was praying, it came to pass that the heavens were opened, and the archangel Gabriel came down to her and said: "Hail, thou that didst bring forth Christ our God! Thy prayer having come through to the heavens to Him who was born of thee, has been accepted; and from this time, according to thy request, thou having left the world, shall go to the heavenly places to thy Son, into the true and everlasting life."' A little later in this account we learn that Our Lady asked for the presence of the holy apostles at her passing, and so they were borne on clouds by a whirlwind to witness her departure. Hence the ikons which show them getting a good view of the proceedings from somewhere in mid-air.

Well, scripture says something almost as fantastic about Elijah and perhaps Enoch as well, and I can't help feeling that if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for the Mother of God. But it does, I think, push my capacity for belief just a bit too far. And it makes me fairly indignant as well. Why does every detail have to be rewritten by the (fairly dim) light of human piety? And why does the lily have to be so thoroughly and comprehensively gilded? As the Russian Orthodox theologian Vladimir Lossky observed, 'The authors of the apocryphal writings often alluded imprudently to mysteries about which the Church had maintained a prudent silence...The Mother of God was never a theme of the public preaching of the apostles...While Christ was preached on the housetops in a catechesis addressed to the whole universe, the mystery of the Mother of God was revealed only to those within the Church.'

Even King James the First said that the Blessed Virgin was far above all God's creatures, and the assumption, whether literally true or not, is surely a celebration of that fact. To whatever glory human beings are destined (and that is surely to do with their sharing in the divine nature, as in 2 Peter) Our Lady is already there. St Gregory Palamas described her as the Boundary between the Created and the Uncreated, which seems all right to me. But to quote Lossky again, 'Let us therefore keep silence, and let us not try to dogmatize about the supreme glory of the Mother of God.'

Assumpta est Maria

2009-08-14T20:48:00.019+12:00

On Sunday we will be keeping the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. I realise, of course, that we will be somewhat tardy in our observance of this solemnity, but for years now (with episcopal permission) we have kept most of the major festivals on the Sundays following. The days when Father Roger Taylor could expect a full turnout at 6am in St Peter's for festivals (followed by breakfast in the hall) are long gone, and even the evenings seem to be somewhat occupied ever since they started showing the Forsyte Saga on television with our own, our very own Nyree Dawn Porter over-acting all across the little black-and-white screen. However in our defence, I would remind you of the former practice of 'Sundays in the Octave' - not to mention After-feasts in churches further to the liturgical east.

In my childhood the Assumption did not loom large in New Zealand Anglicanism, indeed it didn't loom in it at all. Not until I arrived in the northern hemisphere in 1969 did I discover it outside the pages of book (the Missale Romanum, I fear). Remarkably, perhaps, this was at All Saints, Margaret Street W1, on a beautiful summer's evening. Remarkable, because exactly ten years later I would be observing the same festival in the same church, but on the other side of the altar rail.

Not long before my ordination (as I wrote in a previous entry) I travelled with a fellow-ordinand (and another of his friends) to what was then the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia. We went by way of Austria, and found ourselves on the eve of the Assumption in a campsite halfway up a mountain overlooking Salzburg. And I hated it. It was early evening, the weather was glorious and the view breathtakingly beautiful. And I hated it. My travelling companions had suggested that we had no need for lunch, afternoon tea, or the merest of snacks, especially since we had a long way to go, "So you won't mind, will you Carl, if we drive on without stopping?" Well yes I did, but as the hearty healthy Kiwi Joker travelling with a couple of effete Poms, of course I agreed.

In my father's family there is something of a history of problems with low blood sugar. So by the time my travelling companions were congratulating themselves at having arrived at Salzburg in time to enjoy the splendid view before the sun went down, I had become not just suicidal but vaguely homicidal as well. And I hated the view. But then there was a miracle! Baked beans cooked on a little primus stove wrought an almost Damascus Road-like conversion in my attitude to life, the universe, and everything - all within twenty minutes or so. And the view improved as well.

Having made a splendid recovery I made my way with the others on the following glossy morning through the pealing of church bells to the beautiful cathedral for High Mass of the feast. As the annual Salzburg Festival was still in full swing, the musical setting was to be (and indeed was) Orazio Benevoli's Mass in fifty-seven parts, a little baroque extravagance requiring four choirs, four chamber orchestras and about eight soloists. Wonderful! We positioned ourselves near the front of the nave (standing room only) and awaited the solemn arrival of the Sacred Ministers and the commencement of the Holy Mysteries.

And here they come! About half-a-dozen rather elderly canons in golden fiddleback chasubles (good), the archbishop of Salzburg himself (splendid), and an extra cardinal (for good luck). But where are they going? Can they not see the beautiful high altar rearing up at the east end of the cathedral? Why are they heading for a mere ironing board in the crossing - and why are my homicidal feelings returning? I have had a good breakfast after all. But I could have thrown it up when the service began with William Cardinal Conway, (titular) archbishop of Armagh, greeting all us Austrian Catholics at some length in the same dialect (if not the same tone of voice) which we have come to associate with that other monument of Irish Christianity, Dr Ian Paisley. It is true that nothing could detract from the unique glory of the Mother of God on the greatest of her festivals, but the clergy certainly gave it their best shot, alas.

However the music was OK. Just.

Preaching in the Pyrenees

2009-07-29T22:45:00.013+12:00

Snooping about on the net recently I was a little suprised to find a youtube video of Rowan Wlliams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, preaching at the shrine of Our Lady at Lourdes. There he was, in the underground basilica of Pius the Tenth (which looks more like a vast carpark) preaching to an enormous congregation which appeared to include members of the French hierarchy. So far so good. Very ecumenical. And we cannot give Our Blessed Lady too much honour. (Well actually we can, but not if we are good Gallican Anglicans.)

The archbishop preached a fine sermon, but every now and again a little phrase popped up which made me feel rather uneasy. He said things like,"When Mary spoke to Bernadette." Did she really? Did she (for example) honestly endorse St Augustine's version of original sin by saying (in fluent Gascon Occitan), "Que soi era Immaculada Concepcion" - I am the Immaculate Conception? I hope not. I am all for the belief that Our Lady was sanctified from the very moment of her conception - even although I'm not quite sure what that could really mean with reference to a small group of cells in her mother's womb. I also believe that she was prepared by grace for a vocation in time and eternity outshining all others except that of her divine son. But like the Eastern Orthodox, I would prefer not to define such things too tidily, and furthermore, I would certainly not want to take St Augustine (genius though he undoubtedly was) as my mentor and guide on matters connected with the doctrine of grace.

So what was Dr Williams doing? I should be surprised to find that he actually believed everything he said in his sermon. We often talk about religious matters in a rather literal way even when we don't actually mean it. Thus we speak about Christ ascending to heaven, when we are pretty sure that our eternal destiny is not to be located somewhere in the Milky Way - unless we are Mormons, that is, who seem to have very strange ideas about this, as about so much else.

And where Lourdes is concerned there is a need for some reserve. Only eleven years before Bernadette's visions began, Our Lady of La Salette had made her appearance near Grenoble to a couple of children, saying to them (among other things), "If my people will not submit, I shall be forced to let fall the arm of my Son. It is so strong, so heavy, that I can no longer withhold it...If I would not have my Son abandon you, I am compelled to pray to him without ceasing; and as to you, you take not heed of it...Six days I have given you to labour, the seventh I had kept for myself; and they will not give it to me. It is this which makes the arm of my Son so heavy. Those who drive the carts cannot swear without introducing the name of my Son. These are the two things which makes the arm of my Son so heavy..." And more of the same. I'm afraid it doesn't sound much like the Christ of the Gospels to me - or his Mother. Devotion to the Blessed Virgin is an important part of the faith, but it's faith - not credulity - which gives honour to God and his Saints.

Queen Victoria, that most reformed of sovereigns (after Edward the Sixth and William of Orange) is said to have been somewhat put out at being upstaged by the Queen of Heaven among her Roman Catholic subjects with their enthusiastic devotion to the Immaculate Conception, and to have consoled herself by standing in front of a mirror and proclaiming, "I am the Diamond Jubilee." Perhaps she did, but I would be surprised if she suddenly found herself up to her ankles in a spring.

Mitteleuropa

2009-07-10T21:35:00.000+12:00

This is the month I should have been have been in sunny Central Europe enjoying the wonderful hospitality and company of my dear friends Tim and his wife Pip, and Tim's opera-singing cousin Martin, all originally from Dunedin. For reasons of health (perhaps a tear-stained entry on the subject at a later date) I have decided to remain at home until various physicians and medical experts have worked out what to do with me. It was my particular desire to go to Prague again, one of the most beautiful cities imaginable, which I last saw more that thirty years ago in the bad old days of Dr Husak's regime. I remember standing beside the monument to Jan Hus and saying to myself, "I would love to see this place again when it's free - but it never will be in my lifetime." But of course, now it is.

I went to what was then the Socialist Republic of Czechoslovakia twice for a holiday, once before I was ordained, and once afterwards. Before the first visit I didn't want to to go to Czechoslovakia at all, but I didn't have a car, and couldn't drive, while Bernard, my fellow ordinand, both did and could. And he had studied in Brno in 1968 during the Prague Spring, and wanted to see the country again. I would have preferred the south of France (hot!) but to Mitteleuropa we went all the same.

Like good little ordinands we kept up the Daily Office, so when we (actually I) got lost in Prague and missed meeting back at the car at the appointed time (which meant in turn that we missed mass at St Andrew's Church at 4pm) I suggested we walk down the road to the Carmelite Church of Our Lady of Victories to say evensong quietly in the back pews. I knew that this Church was also the home of the celebrated image of the Divine Infant of Prague (copied all over the world) but I didn't realise that once inside the building you could cut the atmosphere of prayer and holiness with a knife. I was somewhat overwhelmed.

I was also greatly impressed by the number of young adults pursuing their devotions on their knees. No higher education for them in People's Czechoslovakia, no good well-paying jobs for them to look forward to! No indeed! In fact, later in a small shop in the grounds of the Castle, as soon as the rather handsome-looking middle-aged woman behind the counter realised that we were from what was then "the West" (actually Prague is further west than Vienna) she started almost shouting (in English) that she had been the editor of a metropolitan newspaper, and that her son - who had a PhD in the sciences - was merely a night watchman in the countryside, and that we should tell everyone as soon as we got home. Needless to say, we didn't know how to react to this sudden outburst, and just felt embarrassed and depressed.

But as I say, I had considerable respect for the worshippers in the Carmelite Church. I was also impressed by the ceiling, which had a number of coats of arms painted on it. One of these was that of the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary and Bohemia - the third of these being the present Czech Republic. The last emperor and king was Charles of the House of Austria - which is how John Paul the Second described him when he beatified him only a few years ago in the presence of the members of the Imperial family, including the late sovereign's eldest son and heir the Archduke Otto, aka Dr Otto Habsburg, now aged ninety-five and the longest serving member of the European parliament when he retired a few years ago.

Looking at Kaiser Karl's arms on the Carmelite ceiling I remembered that his widow, Kaiserin Zita, was still alive in exile in Switzerland (she lived until 1989). So during this one woman's lifetime, the citizens of Prague had endured two world wars, one great depression, years of Nazi tyranny, and decades of Soviet dictatorship. I rather think we have been let off lightly by comparison.

Despite the fact that it wasn't advertised on the list of Sunday services at the cathedral, mass began (in incomprehensible Czech) at an altar halfway down the right hand side of the nave, below the shrine of the Divine Infant. Naturally, we presented ourselves (gratefully) for communion. But clearly we would not have made particularly good undercover agents during the cold war which was on at the time, since the priest who said, "The Body of Christ" to everyone else in incomprehensible Czech (all those consonants!) said "Corpus Christi" to us!

After Bernard and I were priested and in our first parishes, we went again to Prague, and on Sunday went to mass in the Carmelite Church once more. This time a wonderful seventeeth-century mass for double choir and orchestra (the organ substituting for the latter) resounded from the choir loft. And, lo and behold, the very same priest who had celebrated on our last visit presided at the high altar.

Since the velvet revolution the Church has been returned to the Discalced Carmelites, and would appear to be doing good business, if I can put it like that. But I was certainly impressed by the witness of the priest and people who kept the faith in the bad old days - and I can't help wondering what they would have thought if they had known that in 1989 President Havel and his government would begin their reign by attending the Cathedral in state for Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Franciscan Salesian

2009-07-06T19:21:00.002+12:00

I have another reason for calling this blog Gallican Anglican. In the remainder of the service following my ordination to the priesthood (a truly life-threatening experience, but more about that later) I found myself thinking two completely unrelated thoughts (along with a great many others, since ordination is not something that you can simply take in your stride). The first was the happy realisation that I would never have to read another book without coloured pictures in it ever again - i.e. no more exams. The second was the regret that I had not taken Francis as an ordination name in honour of St Francis de Sales.

I find some of the canonised saints rather alarming - Pius the Fifth, for example, stoking the inquisitorial fires and encouraging the Spanish Armada. But not Francis de Sales, and this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the example of his extraordinary holiness during what seems to have been a kind of nervous breakdown when he was a young man. For some reason he was convinced of the truth of the Augustinian doctrine of predestination: election to eternal joy for the few, and reprobation to eternal agony for the rest. And he included himself in the rest. But even so he made up his mind to serve the Lord in this life, before he was unable to do so in the fires of hell. That's pretty good, but it gets better. After months of this, in great agony of mind, he found himself in a Parisian Church saying the Memorare (Remember, O most loving Virgin Mary, that it is a thing unheard of that anyone ever had recourse to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thine intercession, and was left forsaken ... ) when he heard the voice of Christ saying to him, "I do not call myself the Damning One, my name is Jesus."

From that moment St Francis was completely restored, and went on to become one of the greatest spiritual teachers and writers of the western Church. He also went on to convert large swathes of Calvinists to a less sadistic deity than the one they had believed in hitherto, and as I noted in my last entry, he had that sane and sensible attitude to the office of the Roman Pontiff which all good Gallicans had, saying to Mother Angelique at Port Royal, "It is the duty of ecumenical councils to reform the head and members: they are above the Pope ... I know this, but prudence forbids my speaking of it, for I can hope for no results if I did speak. We must weep and pray in secret that God will put his hand to what man cannot ..."

As to my life-threatening ordination to the priesthood it took place in St Paul's in London years before the advent of the rather comely nave altar which adorns the cathedral now. However, there was at the time (1976) a temporary altar perched upon what looked like a very large box. There was not a great deal of room on the box, and besides the altar, most of it was occupied by Gerald, Bishop of London, Hewlett, Bishop of Willesden, and a number of others. In the late forties of the last century polio was becoming fashionable again in New Zealand, and I foolishly succumbed. For three or four years thereafter I wore callipers, but even so I have never really been all that steady on my feet, even when sober. Thus kneeling down before a rather large bishop on a very small ledge was somewhat alarming. Would I do an Otto Klemperer and fall backwards off the podium? Would my ordination on the top of a box be the immediate precursor to my funeral inside one? Only quick action by the bishop of Willesden prevented it. But I fear that before long he may well have wondered why he bothered.

What's in a name?

2009-07-04T16:30:00.000+12:00

I've given this blog the rather odd title it has for three (to my mind) good reasons. Firstly, because I thought nobody else would have pinched it already; secondly, because I think it looks rather nice (and even sounds OK when you say it out loud); and thirdly, because it indicates something of the religious position I occupy, clinging to the good ship Canterbury while dipping the occasional toe into the swirling waters of both the Tiber and the Bosphorus, not to mention the rivers of Mesopotamia and further east.

Partly this is due to the fact that the good ship Canterbury needs to go into dry dock before it runs aground, and partly because I really like and appreciate the spiritual and liturgical traditions of the historic Churches of Christendom - both before and after their various splits and schisms. Along with Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor and Edward King, I also appreciate greatly Isaac the Syrian, Philip Neri, Francis de Sales, and Seraphim of Sarov. In other words, somewhat like the Gallicans, I am a conciliarist. I most certainly like and appreciate the spiritual and liturgical traditions of the Church of Rome, but to my mind, Pio Nono and the first Vatican Council should never have happened. Like St Francis de Sales, I believe general councils (real ones) to be superior to popes. In this I tag along gratefully behind the Eastern Churches, even as I appreciate their profound spiritual depth and their suspicion of Augustine. But I need to sit down from time to time, even in Church!

I love the Anglican tradition, indeed, I even love the Book of Common Prayer - a terrible admission for an Anglo-Catholic to make (although I must confess to preferring the Scottish to the English variety). I like the English Missal too, so I could almost paraphrase Noel Coward: 'Despite temptations to belong to other denominations ... ' Anglicans are often accused of being 'wishy-washy' but that seems to me a considerable improvement on small-minded certainty, so a Gallican Anglican I am, and (reasonably) proud of it!

In the beginning ...

2009-07-04T16:13:00.000+12:00

Beginning a blog is something I have thought about for some time, but never quite managed to do. I'm only doing it now because I have been reading other people's blogs and have been shamed into realising that if they can do it, so can I. What's more, being the opinionated type, the opportunity to share my views (not to mention my prejudices) with a wider audience seems too good to miss. So watch this space - through your fingers, if necessary!