Stairway to Heaven needs a lick of paint

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Church this morning resembles the last days of empire.

One old woman takes another through a list of absentees, all illness-related.

The gaggle of pensioners who were able to make it, shuffle around the premises in weary resignation.

The ancient organist, whom I last saw several months ago, has undergone a portentous change of hairstyle; tidily combed locks replaced by the ragged fronds of someone who apparently crawled through three hedges to get here. So often have I see this hair-gone-to-hell look on men who turned out to be on life’s final lap, that I’m calling it here and now. I’m giving him a month.

And spare a thought for the old dear in front of me, absent for some time and now keen to compliment a friend who comes over to welcome her back.

“Haven’t you lost some weight?” says the returnee, warmly.

“I know,” says her friend. “It’s cancer…”

Of course, the Christian slant would be to see all this as a departure lounge rather than a culmination. Sometimes, however, it’s a hard sell.

A balding fellow-fiftysomething turns around, three pews in front, and our eyes meet. I see the same vague plea for help in his face that he probably sees in mine.

Harvest moonshine at the Church of England

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We did something remarkable at our church on Sunday. Had a harvest festival with no harvest. No loaves, no fruit; not so much as a tin of beans on a window ledge.

It seems our clergy have been having a re-think. One of them spent his entire sermon trying to sell it to us.

Now, advancing years be damned – I can accept evolution. The harvest isn’t the landmark occasion it was 150 years ago. Mechanisation lulls all of us into thinking that this stuff just happens and food arrives on our table by magic. Gone are the days when I expect to walk into church one September morning and see wheat sheaves piled up everywhere.

All it needed on Sunday was a single table, visible to all as we approached the altar for communion, piled up with food, tinned and fresh, all of it designated for the food bank or other good home once the service was over.

A simple visual prod that would see most of us through for another year, as it always has. No, this does not appear by magic. Yes, we are luckier than we know. So no, we will not waste food in the coming 12 months. We will clear our plates. We will count our blessings.

If you’re going to change all that, it has to involve metamorphosis into something better, more relevant, not just some U-turn up a cassocked rear end. Apparently, this year’s harvest festival, we were to regard as a ‘harvest of hearts’. We were invited to write three personal qualities, for which we’re thankful and which we can use for the good of others, on a paper heart, which we were then to stick onto a naff cardboard wall as we headed for the altar.

I declined. This is my life from now on, I suspect: a series of small ‘up yours’ protests that might be noticeable only to me but which nevertheless make me feel rather better than the nonsense I’m protesting.

I could take the hard line and assume that someone’s vicar just couldn’t be bothered this year, but that would be harsh. He seems hard-working enough to be above that.

No, more likely is that weakness to which too many Anglican clergy are prone. Replace something tangible with an abstract nebula like ‘harvest of hearts’ and they just can’t resist. Something woolly and vague that they can talk about endlessly, from all sorts of tangents, because none of it’s real, so none of it really matters.

It might make them feel lovely inside but its capacity for putting bums on seats, I suspect, is rather more limited.

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Related: An opportunity missed, Church of England

Calling all clergy…

A little sermon fodder for you.

Sunday morning, on my way home after communion, I see a man leaning on the church wall, resting his Lotto card against its pale stonework while he scrubs off the silver panels with the edge of a coin.

There has to be a metaphor in there somewhere. Go to it.

An opportunity missed, Church of England

Pic courtesy of Rondo Estrello

For an organisation whose attendance figures would reduce your average Non-League football club to sympathetic tears, this is Day One of the January sales and Black Friday combined.

Teatime, Christmas Eve. A candlelit carol service and the church building packed like it’s 1829 with a captive audience to die for. Eager kids and attendant parents and grandparents. People who might otherwise not enter a church without pallbearers beneath them but do so because they’re with relatives and don’t want to be seen as the sourpuss. Atheists, agnostics, sceptics and ‘lapsed’; all there because of the pull of family or of childhood echoes that refuse to die.

Once a year, the church gets this chance. Surely to God, between the crib, the candles and endless verses of Little Donkey, there is the chance to take 10 minutes and reach out to those people in earnest from the pulpit? Remind them (or maybe make them aware for the first time ever) that whatever they might make of his mission statement and brand management, this Jesus was no myth, but a real person. That Christmas Day was but a curtain raiser for a message and mission that changed the world.

Ten minutes in which to let everyone know that this ancient building is not just open on Christmas Eve, but on most days of the year, welcoming those who wish to pray, reflect, cry their hearts out, or even the most committed non-believer who just wants to enjoy the music or brief respite from a tumultuous world. To reassure them that there will be no pressure or hard sell on such occasions, just a warm welcome and as much or as little evangelism as each of them seeks.

But you didn’t do it, Reverend. You just trotted out the same old Nativity clichés and Christmas niceties, let the same old carols roll by and then beamed politely as everyone filed out afterwards. Your one moment of gravitas in 60 minutes the health and safety announcement for when it came to us lighting our candles. Another year, another golden opportunity gone begging. I just wish my faith in spiritual osmosis matched your own.

“Excellent”, you beamed at the regulars afterwards. “No-one got burnt.”

Indeed not. Figuratively speaking though, I doubt anyone was set on fire, either.

Christmas worship – it’s a jungle out there…

Intriguing and slightly ominous parentheses when I scanned the Christmas dates in the church notices this morning.

Sat 24 Dec: 11.30 Midnight Mass (NB incense will be used)

Made it sound like tear-gas…

[pic courtesy of Thomas Hawk, via Flickr]

God v Mammon – fight stopped round 3…

Not even a month into the school summer holidays and kids offended by claims that they don’t know what to do with themselves the minute you take their Xbox away, decide to prove that they do.

Condescension to Church shows sad state of Independent

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m sure MPs at least, will be delighted with the Independent‘s recent leader column purporting to send those naughty Christians to their room without any supper.

It used to be left to the Right Honourable Members to reveal their breathtaking ignorance of the Christian faith by trotting out the patronising old canard about the Church of England sticking to preaching the Gospel and leaving politics to the politicians; you know, the experts…

Now the media are doing their job for them.

I knew there might be a secularist backlash when new Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, showed early promise that he could be streets ahead of his predecessor when it came to being in touch with life beyond the cathedral cloisters.

I heard him handle with great aplomb an interrogation about the Wonga embarrassment, the highlight of which was interviewer John Humphrys‘ inability (or refusal) to see that this admittedly hilarious, if inadvertent, gaffe was fixable and posed no fatal threat to Welby’s proposals to provide hard-up people with a better alternative to payday loan firms and their eye-watering interest rates.

The Independent‘s nauseating arrogance and double-speak that same day, mind, makes Humphrys look the very model of perception.

Nick Baines has beautifully eviscerated the person responsible for it on his blog, so I merely pick over the carcass:

• I defy even their greatest critic to read the four Gospels and not see a Man as engaged with the world around Him as He was with the world He claimed is to come, whether you see Him as deluded or not
• If Christianity was indeed a ship sailing nowhere and all about just hiding yourself away and mulling over scripture without ever putting it to work in the world around us, I suspect its membership numbers past and present would be on a par with that of the Tufty Club.
• “His efforts to…make the Church relevant…” Ah, so even you acknowledge that his approach has something going for it.
• “[They] have no business in mainstream politics…” Everyone has business in mainstream politics. This is a democracy, where everyone gets at least a say, not some oligarchy where the only opinions that matter come from a self-regarding elite  in Westminster and the media. How many times, I wonder, have Independent commentators lamented the woeful turn-out at elections, and cried out for more ‘engagement’? Just not Christian engagement, apparently.
• And once again, in a leader on this theme, no mention of the secular hypocrisy at the heart of it. Politicians want the Church of England to stay out of politics, while politicians continue to have a say in whom the Church appoints as its bishops. When it comes to clamouring for the separation of Church and State, atheists may be surprised at just how many Anglicans are egging them on.
• “This is no swipe at religion”. This is like Ron Jeremy holding a postage stamp over his manhood in the hope that he’s covered himself. Of course it’s a swipe at religion. How old do you think your average reader is? Six? You think religion’s stupid, its practitioners belong in a soundproofed cell whose key has gone missing and you only wish you could say so in a national newspaper. You know what? So do I. Your transparent sincerity, at least, I could respect.

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Some people need to think seriously about civil funerals

(Photo credit: _Madolan_)

He was only 40, respected and liked and the last thing I needed as we mourned another loss to cancer was for the moment to be hijacked by someone for whom the word ‘consideration’ apparently extends no further than the end of her nose.

So his family were oblivious to the irony of having the funeral at a church, yet asking that it not be ‘too religious’? Bit like turning up at a barbecue and asking if everyone could keep the carnivorousness down but I let it ride. Many people’s disinterest in religion is a passive thing: they go with the flow without becoming part of it. I understand that. At least they observed the house rules.

Not so the young woman appointed to read out one of the eulogies. Bright and breezy in her opening remarks, I was looking forward to what she had to say.

But not this.

It’s just a terrible business, she declared, in fact it’s what [his widow] would call “a crock of s***…”

She then turned to make a mock apology to the presiding clergyman. Because that made everything just fine, of course.

She’ll dine out on this one, I’m sure. There probably won’t be a soiree goes by from now on without her mentioning the time she swore in a church. She’ll savour the gasps and laughing adulation and then smugly ask if anyone needs his glass filling.

Then again, maybe she’ll get what she deserves; someone smart enough to point out the flip side of the tale she just recounted.

Imagine half-a-dozen Christians turning up to a New Year’s Eve party at the same lady’s house. Without asking, they replace the music with a Gospel CD because they felt the mood was getting a bit trivial. They then insist that everyone spends the last half-hour of the old year and the first of the new in a Bible study session.

I’m guessing she’d have thrown half of them out before it even occurred to her to ask for help. “They come in here,” she’d tell anyone who cared to listen, “impose their ways on the rest of us without so much as a please and we’re just expected to sit back and take it…”

“Bloody Christians,” she’d fume. “Who the hell do they think they are…?”

And you know something, dear reader? I would be right behind her, throwing the coats of my fellow Christians out onto the street after them. Because she would have a perfectly valid point.

Who the hell do such people think they are?

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Of course folk whoop at weddings – it’s in lieu of Tweeting…

Not to take anything away from Mark Palmer but his lament for weddings of dignity and reverence is one of those pieces where the comment section is even more informative than the article itself.

Having touched on this theme from a different angle in the past, I think know where Mr Palmer is coming from. Like me, he seems to regard the ceremony’s reflective restraint as an ideal counterpoint to the moment when the party starts in earnest. Not a sackcloth of po-faced reticence but a moment to savour that enhances the day.

After all, even those audience members who can’t let more than the first four four bars of an X Factor song pass without breaking into that grating American-style whoop, even they probably shut the hell up for just a few seconds at least when confronted by stunning scenery or a beautiful sunset. It is as if our subconscious knows that enjoyment is sometimes best experienced through quiet. Mark Palmer simply extrapolates that idea to social occasions.

As the comments on his article reveal, though, he is travelling on the smaller bus. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at the level of indignation he meets. In this Internet age, where interactivity rules and everyone from Ant and Dec to The White House wants us to Tweet, Like, or hit the red button, sitting quietly on the sidelines while someone else dominates the show may, in time, come to feel as old-fashioned a concept as your ‘Sunday best’.

This is why I fear that the minute’s silence for the dead is now under serious threat, at least at those public gatherings where the propriety of everyone present cannot be vouched for. It was the fear of the ‘lone wolf’ heckler – someone else yet to realise that it’s not all about him – that persuaded football clubs, for example, to replace the traditional minute’s silence with a minute’s applause, an arrangement that is showing every sign of becoming as permanent as it is ghastly.

Because, if you’re clapping, you’re ‘involved’, see? Look at me, everyone; mourning interactively.

Standing around, doing nothing, being moved by the solemnity of silence, on the other hand: what’s all that about?

Some people just have an affinity for din, I suppose and yet for all the suggestions that Mark Palmer may not be quite the life and soul of the party, I’ll take his company over that of anyone who routinely starts a Conga. I always think it bodes well for the conversation when you’re in the presence of those who aren’t uncomfortable with the concept of being able to hear themselves think.

Easter – the story’s the same, so why not the date?

Sunday (Photo credit: ex.libris)

It was a calamity waiting to happen. Align an Easter weekend falling in late March with snow showers more akin to February and I may not be the only one who forgets all about switching to British Summer Time.

So it was that on the biggest Sunday in the Christian calendar, I am running my shower at the very time I should be heading down the aisle with the rest of the choir. Were I Catholic, the guilt would probably last until Advent.

It’s not the most convincing stab at atonement, watching the televised Easter service from Paisley Abbey while sat in my underpants, munching disgruntedly at a bowl of cereal but needs must. At least this Sunday the family can comment openly about the odd-bods in the congregation, instead of keeping our own counsel until lunchtime.

But really – if I might paraphrase from Fiddler on the Roof…

Lord who made the lion and the lamb

You decreed I should be what I am

But would it spoil some vast, eternal plan

If Easter were always on the second Sunday in April…?

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