Month: August 2017

Visiting Lichfield

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On the spur of the moment, booking just the day before, we decided to visit Lichfield for a couple of nights. We may have driven through it or round it once before, but I don’t remember ever stopping or doing a proper visit. So, as a pilot for the project: Visiting Cathedral Cities We Don’t Know, we went to Lichfield. It’s only 90 miles from home, and apart from the usual unpleasantness of driving on the M42 round Birmingham, it only took a little over an hour and a half.

We stayed in the Cathedral Hotel in Beacon Street: a bit cheap and cheerful, and our room on the top floor looked out on the street and was a bit noisy, but the breakfast was good, with all the components of a Full English freshly cooked, the bacon especially nicely done. So it was good value for money.

The Cathedral is spectacular, built of red sandstone and the only three-spired medieval cathedral in the UK. It was built on the site of the tomb and first church of St Chad, the apostle and first bishop of the kingdom of Mercia. In the Civil War it suffered severe damage when Royalist troops fortified it against the attacking Parliamentary forces. I don’t know of many cathedrals which have been battlefields as well as holy places…

George Fox the Quaker was famously prompted by God to stand barefoot in the market place in front of St Michael’s Church and cry out, “Woe to the bloody city of Lichfield!” One version of the story tells that the bemused townspeople, far from being offended, were filled with compassion, “George, where hast thou left thy shoes?” Asked to give an account of the reasons for his protest (other than, God told me to do it) he said it was because of a great massacre of Christians in the city in the time of the Emperor Domitian. Certainly there had been much more recent bloody martyrdoms. Two plaques in Market Street record:

The following martyrs were burnt at the stake in this market place during the reign of Queen Mary: Thomas Hayward Sept. 1655 John Goreway Sept. 1655 Joyce Lewis of Mancetter 18th Dec. 1557

and

Edward Wightman of Burton-on-Trent was burnt at the stake in this market place for heresy 11th April 1612 being the last person in England so to die.

Lichfield was the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, and the museum in the house in Market Street, where he was born, is definitely not to be missed. Boswell’s Life is one of the big books on my To Be Read list that I may get around to OOTD… Quite a lot of places in Lichfield decorate their walls with pithy Johnson quotes. I particularly liked “You can never be wise unless you love reading.”

The other museum you should, absolutely should, visit, is the Erasmus Darwin House. Here you can learn about the polymath doctor, scientist, inventor, poet, who was the grandfather and forerunner of Charles Darwin, anticipating the development of the theory of evolution by a good 50 years, and a member of the Lunar Society of scientists and thinkers who drove forward many of the new discoveries of the Industrial Revolution. They were regarded by Church and State as dangerous freethinkers, and especially at the time of the French Revolution, several of them came under attack from violent mobs because of their views. Stirred up, I suppose, by the 18th century equivalents of the Daily Mail and Express. All to the shame of Church, State and popular opinion. It’s fascinating that Erasmus Darwin’s poems, which are probably unreadable nowadays, and included such titles as The Botanic Garden, setting out in rhyming couplets the results of his research. Coleridge was greatly impressed and acclaimed Darwin as one of the greatest poets of his age. Other Romantic poets including Blake, Goethe and Wordsworth were influenced by him, and his theories of galvanism were part of the inspiration that led Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

St Chad’s church is also worth a visit. It’s thought to be the site of Chad’s first oratory in the city, and when you enter the present church building (always open during the day) there is a real ‘good feeling’. It’s a place that is loved and cared for, and provides a good worship space for its congregation. They have produced a helpful little prayer guide for some of the places around the church that suggest scenes from the saint’s life.

Places to eat

We specially loved The Olive Tree, an award-winning independent restaurant, which was reasonably priced, pleasantly small and intimate, and serving excellent food. Good for lunches or teas was Chapters, the Cathedral cafe in the Close. Lots of these Cathedral refectory kind of places are very good value, offering fresh home-cooked dishes for very reasonable prices, in pleasant and peaceful settings. Chapters was specially nice because it wasn’t ridiculously crowded the times we were there.

Lichfield is definitely worth a visit.

Retirement Joy

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And on the other hand…

Retirement is also fantastic, joy day after day like being on holiday for ever. Lots of times since ending those ’37 years of parish ministry’ I keep banging on about, I’ve found myself thinking, “This, at last, is the life I was born for!”

After you’ve stopped being a vicar, you no longer have to go to all those meetings: Parochial Church Councils, deanery synods, chapter meetings, diocesan synods if you’re unfortunate enough that it’s ‘your turn’, parish sub-committees on finance, buildings, stewardship, tiny charity meetings… and on and on. I was singularly blessed that most of those meetings were with lovely gifted faithful altruistic people, many of whom I counted as dear friends. But there were all kinds of things I would rather have been spending my time doing: like drinking in the pub with those friends, instead of sitting round a table in a draughty church hall, looking at balance sheets and wondering what to do. Some vicars must like meetings (else why would they make so many of them?), and I’ve even wondered if they prefer the ones that turn into bitter interpersonal wars, on the grounds that this makes them more interesting. But if this is the case, they must be a funny kind of vicar.

After you’ve stopped being a vicar, you no longer get all the stuff from the diocese that sometimes feels like people making work for parish clergy in order to justify their own salary… Gosh, that sounds appalling, doesn’t it? And it’s quite wrong. The lovely people who work in Church Houses up and down the land are lovely servants of the Church, without whom we would not be able to function. It’s just that sometimes you wonder: Why does that lovely person’s job of faithful service to the Church involve making more work for me in the parish? Counting beans and filing reports, when I might be visiting or pastoring or studying or even just passing an hour in quiet contemplation, spending time with God? When you’re in the thick of it, you feel guilty even asking the question. But someone ought to be asking it.

And after you’ve stopped being a vicar, you don’t have to be there every week. You can actually go away for something called A Weekend, like normal people do. You can go to a different church for a change: something that as a vicar you don’t like to encourage people to do, but actually you find it mightn’t be all bad. (It might even make them appreciate what they have in their home church, though normal clergy paranoia always makes you fear this is unlikely…)

And, after you’ve stopped being a vicar, much as I loved sharing people’s lives at the life-turning-point moments of births, marriages and deaths, you can take a break from doing that too. Taking these ‘occasional offices’ is a wonderful privilege that makes the job worth doing more than almost anything else, but sometimes I found myself thinking, Do I have to start another year’s round of publishing banns of marriage, marriage preparation, rehearsals and managing the day itself? Like lots of clergy, I often found funerals more ‘enjoyable’ (or fulfilling? or worthwhile?) than weddings.

And, of course, retirement joy is more than just all the things you no longer have to do. Much more, much better, are all the things you can now do that you didn’t have time to do before. Visit children and grandchildren. Take holidays. Read the books you’ve never got around to reading, or have long wanted to reread. Study and learn new things. Walk. Life being what it is, you don’t get around to doing half as much as you could do or would like to do. There are still constraints like whether you have the time or the money. And then, we’ve not yet been doing this Retirement Thing for a whole year. We’re still learning, still a bit stunned by it.

But one of the things that came to me when I was out for a walk one day, not particularly praying or being holy, was a new watchword, mantra, daily prayer, whatever you like to call it.

IT’S GREAT TO BE ALIVE.

Of course it is. But when you’re working full-time, you don’t always have the time or the space or the energy to remember it. Being retired means you don’t have that excuse. So, day by day, day by day: It’s great to be alive.

Retirement Angst

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Is it normal for retired people to look back over their working life and ask themselves, What was it all for, anyway? What did I actually achieve? Was it all worth it, after all?

Or is it just retired clergy who have that kind of problem? Perhaps it’s something to do with vicaring being the kind of calling where it’s very difficult to see and measure results. Some clergy can say, When I came to this parish there were only two old ladies and a cat, but now the Sunday attendance is over 800! But not many, I suspect. For most of us, it’s more like: I tried to love and minister faithfully to these people for 25 years, but really attendances declined over the years as people grew old and died and were not replaced… many people in the area knew and loved me, and valued me taking their family weddings or funerals, but mostly they had other things they preferred to do on Sundays, and indeed on every other day of the week, than have much to do with God.

And meanwhile… When you raise your eyes from the furrow you’ve been ploughing, and look around at the wider landscape1…

It suddenly seemed to me, as I reflected on that landscape at the weekend, that the Christianity which seems to be being believed by large numbers of people in the world, and the one that is perceived by many more, isn’t the religion that i believe in. It’s not that I’ve abandoned Christianity, but that what passes for Christianity has abandoned me. It’s become something dogmatic, bigoted, judgmental, death-dealing, joyless, trivial, irrelevant, narrow, exclusive. Not what I signed up for at all. So here I have been, toiling away for 37 years in the parish, trying to make the world a better place, and I look around and the world is a much much worse place than when I started. And ‘Christianity’ (please do note the inverted commas) must bear quite a bit of the blame, along with most other religions.

And here’s one of the really dismaying things: there are ‘Christians’ in some places who are happy that the world is a much worse place. Because it means that we really are in the kind of end times they wish for. When things have got bad enough, it’ll be the end of the world, and Jesus will return to make everything right.

It looks like it’s time for me to take a healthy dose of letting go and having faith (not in the Church any more, but in God) and trusting that everything will be all right. Where’s that Dame Julian when you need her? “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

  1. Yes I know this doesn’t work: if you want to plough a straight furrow you don’t look at the furrow, but the far end of the field that you’re making for. Just bear with me, I’m only a townie. ↩

Bear with

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WordPress has changed since I last used it, so the new blog and its control panels are taking some getting used to. I think the stats panel is showing me that people have read some of my posts, and two have even commented. But the process of approving comments, and making sure they don’t get thrown into Spam, is still opaque to me. So if you comment, and it hasn’t appeared after what seems like a reasonable time, don’t be afraid to contact me some other way and ask me what’s happening.

I live in hopes of understanding what’s going on; though it does look like another case of technology getting so clever that it increasingly leaves behind people who were previously more than confident about working it.

Children’s worship songs (2)

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And then there’s that Hillsong Kids worship song I mentioned in my last post. Alison came home complaining about having the words and tune stuck in her head, so like any loving husband, instead of saying “Don’t expletive well give it to me, then!” I googled it.

These, it turns out, are the lyrics:

He’s the one who makes the sun shine
He’s the one who puts the moon in the sky
He’s the one who hung the stars
One by one

He’s the one who makes the birds sing
He’s the one who makes your dreams so high
He’s the one who makes me smile
Day by day

Jesus you’re my superhero
You’re my star, my best friend
Jesus you’re my superhero
You’re my star, my best friend

Better than Spiderman Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Better than Superman Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Better than Batman Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Better than anyone Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Jesus you’re my superhero
You’re my star, my best friend
Jesus you’re my superhero
You’re my star, my best friend

Better than Yu Gi Yo Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Better than Barbie Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Better than Action Man Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah
Better than anyone Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

You can listen to it here on YouTube, if you dare: Jesus you’re my superhero.

Now, I don’t have a problem (at least, not more than any other grumpy old man) with the cultural effect this may be having on our grandchildren’s generation… though it does seem inferior in quality to a lot of what’s available on CBeebies. What I wonder about, is the spiritual effect it may be having. Are we really wanting our children to get the idea that Christianity is a Christo-Unitarian faith, without Father or Holy Spirit, in which Jesus alone is the Creator God? And as if giving them a false idea of what the faith is, isn’t bad enough — what effect will it have on the likelihood of them believing at all? Will they grow up thinking, That Jesus is so cool, I’m really going to be a Christian? Or will they more likely pretty soon reach the conclusion, That was so patronising and juvenile, there’s no way that as a teenager, still less an adult, I’m going to carry on believing what those people were trying to sell us?

One of the curious things is, that while Christian children’s evangelism, or teaching, or holiday childcare (whatever this counts as) is dumbing down the message, many of the actual superhero comics and films are tackling really deep, important themes: good and evil, sin and guilt, retribution or redemption, how people or the world can be ‘saved’, and such. It’s as if, when popular contemporary Christianity is trying to turn itself into some emotional-sensual form of entertainment, popular entertainment is stepping up to fill the gap by exploring spiritual issues of eternal importance.

Maybe I’ll stop going to church, and start watching X-men, Spider-Man and Batman instead.

Children’s worship songs (1)

Tony2 Comments

I recently came across a song from Hillsong Kids, which was being sung at a local Christian holiday club for children. I was concerned enough about what it might be doing to the spiritual development of the children (more about this in the next post) to reflect on one of the first hymns I remember from primary school, Percy Dearmer’s Jesus, good above all other. My love for this, which persists to this day, is a product of both the simple yet deep words, and the simple, ancient tune to which it’s sung, Quem Pastores.

Jesus, good above all other,
Gentle child of gentle mother,
In a stable born our brother,
Give us grace to persevere.

Jesus, cradled in a manger,
For us facing every danger,
Living as a homeless stranger,
Make we Thee our King most dear.

Jesus, for Thy people dying,
Risen Master, death defying,
Lord in Heav’n, Thy grace supplying,
Keep us by Thine altar near.

Jesus, who our sorrows bearest,
All our thoughts and hopes Thou sharest,
Thou to man the truth declarest;
Help us all Thy truth to hear.

Lord, in all our doings guide us;
Pride and hate shall ne’er divide us;
We’ll go on with Thee beside us,
And with joy we’ll persevere!

I notice a number of things as I reflect on this. First, in spite of my recent rants about the almost absolute Jesus-centredness of much contemporary Christian worship – amounting almost to a Christo-Unitarianism – Dearmer’s hymn is also addressed to Jesus. But this is a very incarnate Jesus: the emphasis is on his stable birth, his refugee status, his death and resurrection, his human suffering as he bears the sorrows of the world. His human example, and his disciples’ imperative to learn from it. There’s none of the Cosmic Christ who seems almost to make the Father and the Spirit redundant, that we see in some current songs.

Secondly, although the language is simple, it doesn’t offer any hostages to modern usage among primary school children. They tend to be even less familiar with ‘thee’ and ‘thine’ than we were in the 1950s, to their loss. There are quite a few ‘poetic’ changes to normal word order, which would keep a child on their toes. And what about that strange word persevere? Who uses that?

I conducted a little experiment with two of my granddaughters. First I asked Tilly (almost 5 and about to start school), “Do you know what ‘persevere’ means?” She didn’t. Then I asked Libby (aged 7, just finished infants), and she gave me a pretty good definition: “It means trying and trying until you do it.” Apparently Perseverance is one of the school values they’ve learned. So it’s a word that children need to learn (like all the rest) but well within primary school capabilities.

Thirdly, although it’s obviously a hymn written with younger Christians in mind, there’s enough substance, or spiritual meat, there, to nourish a person into late adulthood, as it has me.

All of that seems like a pretty good recommendation for a children’s worship song, I think.