Every picture tells its story

1. Brushes With Reality

Continue reading
Posted in History and related subjects | Leave a comment

Ukraine:

Ukraine:The comparisons we most readily might make are those relating to Europe in the 1930s when Dictators in Continental Europe and in Imperial Japan literally made War and decided Peace for much of a decade and a half, untrammelled by International Institutions not least the League of Nations and the norms of international law. A free world freely stood by powerless and too scared by the Great War to contemplate yet another military confrontation. In my own experience I can only think of 1968 and Czechoslovakia. It too was a fast-moving invasion by Warsaw Pact members of one of their member states in order to maintain Soviet hegemony. Hungary a decade earlier I was too young to recall. There are also echoes of Syria from recent times. In all of these military encounters Russia has emerged a victor of sorts. Global Russia the behemoth whose lands and interest span Europe and Asia has historically viewed all those neighbours bordering on her as satellites to be managed. Only once – not a little ironically given recent events – in Afghanistan did its quasi-Imperial ambitions become unstuck. It should hardly come as a surprise to the Western powers that President Putin – a child of the KGB – should share that world view. It should hardly come as a surprise that a man tutored in the corruption of Soviet state should have made one in its image and likeness. In this latest Russian military adventure, the West offers warm words but stands at a safe distance. NATO who entered Kosovo will not enter Ukraine. The UN will be silent because Russia will veto, and China will offer Putin muted support. And ultimately those who control Russia will take from this the same lesson that Stalin and Hitler and Imperial Japan took from Western appeasement – we have the will to make a ruckus but not the stomach for a fight. Kyiv will probably fall today and one way or another the government on Ukraine will topple and Ukraine will end up with a puppet government who will first surrender to Russia and then probably ask for Ukraine to be annexed to Russia alike Crimea. Ultimately the West has reached a point where a line must be drawn in the sand. It should frankly have been drawn in Ukraine to whom we should at least have offered a no-fly zone for safety around Odessa, Lviv and Kyiv. Our collective failure of nerve comes in part from the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Ukraine was neither of these, and it has an army that would fight and is fighting and could do more if it did not have an arm tied behind its back. It is now probably too late to do more. Putin had made a veiled threat to use nuclear force if we dare to intervene. Bluff or not, this threat must not stand. Ultimately Peace has always been a prize worth the fight. Freedom, liberty and democracy can only stand if they’re worth fighting for; tyrants will always rise to threaten the nations who embrace them and test our will generation to generation. There is no life without value but life without values is worthless. This century as in the last, there will be no easy choices. We cannot choose the ground where we will fight. But be assured, a fight is coming, and we must be ready. Ultimately, even if we think Putin is crazy, we still cannot let him dictate terms because he holds nuclear weapons. And he has to know in this we are as serious in determination as he has been in this. Finally, Russia must not be permitted to retain these spoils of war. And ultimately, to ensure that we will need more than sanctions and warm words.

6Glenn Richardson, John Dalton and 4 others1 comment

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Dr Roger Mettam – a personal reminiscence.

Roger and I met on 22nd November 1977. We met in the pub after the Tudor Seminar. After that first meeting, we saw more and more of one another. The summer of 1978 he took me to Aldeburgh and shortly thereafter I moved into Courtlands Avenue. I lived there until 1983. Ours was always a tempestuous partnership. Perhaps I was too young not to feel the allure of gay life in London; he perhaps already too jaded to be dazzled by its limited charms: a tale of January and May.
I learned much about life and culture and music with Roger. He brought me to Benjamin Britten and Richard Strauss. Oddly I brought him to Handel opera and oratorio. We shared a love of Haydn, but he had a loathing for Mozart that like many of his idée fixe was not to be contradicted. He had no television, so we shared radio and played chess and played music. Whilst I lived with him, we also gave dinner or lunch parties, and I met many new acquaintances some of whom became lifelong friends. I think here particularly of Liam Smith (RIP) and Fr Derek Jennings (RIP) and Undine Concannon but there were many more.
Roger was already working at Queen Mary. He was also still writing and for these years he worked on his section of what was to be the complete works of Voltaire – his commentary not only surveying Voltaire’s analysis of recent European history in his writings but also a comparative study of interpretations. The Voltaire project collapsed and sadly Roger’s major discursive survey never was to see print. Afterwards, he was never quite the same about his research. He did begin various major new surveys of architecture as a commentary on both royal and noble rivalries in provincial France.
He had a sharp eye for detail and a voracious appetite for tourism. He loved to travel. But as with most things he loved, travel had to be managed according to a strict timetable for days, places and experiences which if you were his companion whilst always informative and always enlightening could also become a constrictive route march. He found me as difficult as I found him! He assembled reservations for these military style campaigns with the elan of one of Louis XIV’s generals. There was no Internet, and all this had to be done on foot and via an assembling of a cornucopia of leaflets of sailings, flights, buses and always railways timetables. Even days out to Cambridge or weekends to Aldeburgh or Exeter or Leeds or York were managed in this martial fashion. Early to the US, his first visits were before the Twin Towers rose in New York!
Roger brought me to Amsterdam; to Munich; to Morocco in its golden afterglow of its 1960s heyday; and above all to Venice. We had two wonderful holidays there – even if the strains on our relationship were showing, Venice with Roger was a revelation. Without Roger I would never have seen and understood so much of Venice and, indeed, the entire world of music and culture.
Food was another shared passion. I of course cooked and Roger endlessly generous took me out for dinner all over London. He was highly amusing companion – sharp – too sharp many thought – witty and something of a raconteur. He could entrance and make people laugh with him. He was a fountain of gossip, some of which was more reliable than others. He was always a little starstruck by celebrity although he pretended otherwise.
His mother loomed large in his life in those times too and we often spent Saturday lunch or Sunday late afternoons with her in the family home in the Avenue in Bexleyheath. He had a troubled relationship with her when I met him but perhaps, I helped them to mediate a different one which lasted until Phyllis died. We watched the many Borg Wimbledon finals with her. We had many happy times full of laughter.
Our partnership ended and I left Courtlands Avenue for a new life and my own house. It was not an easy parting, and it was not easy to negotiate a continuing friendship. But to Roger’s immense credit any hurt he felt was kept in bounds. When we could not talk of much that wasn’t painful we could still talk history. For the rest of my life in London I saw him at least once a week. We occasionally essayed trips abroad – to Munich – or at home to Aldeburgh or Exeter or some such. We continued to share opera, concerts and increasingly as the years advanced – still ever the teacher to pupil – he drew me into the world of lieder.
Roger had immense consideration for those who were ill. During the AIDS pandemic he visited many dying friends and took them out here and there. He also was assiduous after death came. He was a good at keeping those two precepts of the corporal works of mercy as any Christian I’ve ever met. And he was most emphatically not Christian. Our loudest arguments were bound up with my Catholicism and his Logical Positivism. Although that said, he had his own soft spot for the Latin liturgy I so loved. Indeed, he had quite the collection of Haydn masses when we first met. When it came to my turn to be seriously ill, he was loyal. He was also loyal and patient of me in the aftermath of depression. He even visited Creena in her Home in her small room lonely and alone. As ever he could light up a life with his bustling bonhomie. She always smiled after seeing him.
At its best his garrulous company was brilliant. At its worst he could be rude and sometimes cruel. He knew this and like an aging despot sometimes simply enjoyed playing this capricious game. He loved to shock with inappropriate tales in a grand salon. By now his appearance was always much the same – very tight black jeans, trainers, a check shirt that was a bit too snug and a denim jacket in the summer and a military coat in Winter’s bitter; and Summer, Spring or Fall always with his trademark plastic carrier bags which served various purposes of eccentricities acquired over a lifetime.
He would always be early or feverishly on time. He hated being kept waiting.
Perhaps age was not kind to him. He lived on in Courtlands Avenue as his health declined primarily through personal neglect. His was more hostel than home. He went out for fun – and no matter the weather was a stalwart of walking and public transport and its many interconnections. Long before the London Overground, Roger could take you across London by bus, train and tram with an athlete’s elan.
As health issues became to proliferate, he refused to go to his doctors. He refused to give up smoking. He refused to give up drinking. He refused to give up on the dinners. Once we moved from London, he came here to Benson often for 2 or 3 nights at a time. Even on his last visit just 10 days or so ago, he refused a lift to Reading. He did find immense joy in being driven out for days to visit gardens and houses and churches. He often arrived with a to-do list which had to be done come what may. He also greatly enjoyed the hospitality and company of Father John Osman who as Cambridge Chaplain had known many of same people Roger knew from Peterhouse. These years also brought a golden sunset of academic lunches with Sir Michael Howard, Mark James, Dr Robert Bedard and Father John at the Free Church. Roger greatly appreciated renewing those acquaintances.
Roger could be difficult. Perhaps I too could be difficult. We are all flawed diamonds sparkle as we might. But friendship is a gift that dresses those flaws with its precious metal, so they might mainly remain unseen. He was better to me than often I deserved. I think he might say the same the other way around. And that is ultimately the test of a lifetime of friendship. We love despite the failings we know because we can see the beauty that lies within the heart, and mind and soul of another.
I cried yesterday. I will miss him. Above all I appreciate all the many good things he did for me. He changed my life and shaped it too. We all might be better people than our myriad faults permit. But love and friendship make of us gods and spin gold from the stubble of our humanity.
Roger Mettam was one such. God grant him eternal rest.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I’ve been to a marvellous Party

Inspired by Noel coward and with apologies to the Master:

We’re re-reading Ovid
Because of the Covid
It’s dreadfully dull.
And Rishi next door
Is a terrible bore
a socially distanced oik.
Everyone’s out in the gardens,
With pizzas and bottles of wine
After several carafes
The No 10 staff
Get terribly terribly tight,
So yesterday night
We went to a marvellous party
With Boris and Carrie and Dom
It was in the fresh air
And we went as we were
And we stayed where we were
Which was wrong
Mat Hancock was schmoozing ‘til Midnight
And didn’t stop snogging till four
We knew the excitement was bound to begin
When Carrie got blind on Dubonnet and gin
And pricked Dom’s career with her Cartier pin
I couldn’t have liked it more
I went to a marvellous party
I must say it hardly made sense
We all had to bring
Our own bottles of gin
To the gardens behind No 10
Dear Boris arrived with a platter
Of foie gras, lobster and cheese
As Priti Patel choked on caviar foam
Sweet Carrie converted dear Boris to Rome
And the fun of the thing was we never left home
I couldn’t have liked it more
People’s behaviour
In lockdown Belgravia
Would make you aghast
Too much sobriety
Induces anxiety
Amongst the harassed
If you have any mind at all
Gibbon’s divine Decline and Fall
Seems pretty flimsy
No more than a whimsy
By way of contrast
On Saturday last
I went to a marvellous party
We didn’t start drinking till ten
Young Dominic Raab
Did a stunt in a cab
With a lot of extraordinary men
Dear Bojo arrived in a blindfold
And he couldn’t see their encore
A policeman was dancing a foxtrot with me
When suddenly Laura screamed “Fiddledidee”
And chucked back a jug of Long Island Iced Tea
I couldn’t have liked it more.
I went to a marvellous party
Liz Truss made an entrance with beer
In her Union Jack vest
You’d never have guessed
She wasn’t a real Brexiteer
Grant Shapps got fried on Chianti
And talked about levelling down
Sajid o’er leapt ambitious Nadine
We thought it was all an hilarious dream
Then Carrie demanded martini ice cream
I couldn’t have liked it more.
I went to a marvellous party
We pretended to still be at work
I gave Boris a call
To come to the hall
Where Dom went completely berserk
He talked about how rules were broken
And what if it ever got out
Said Carrie, “it’s a matter of seeming sincere
And if you’re a liar you’ve got nothing to fear
And for an encore shed a glycerine tear.”
I couldn’t have liked it more

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Easter 2021
avatar

The great feast has come and gone, and I’ve survived.

I meant to write something before, but I was either too busy or too tried or maybe both.

This year Easter has been very different for me.  It has been both more physically demanding and more spiritually intense than any of previous memory.  I have never been so directly involved in the liturgies from Palm Sunday to Easter Day.

I suppose Easter begins in my consciousness around the time of my First Holy Communion, I’m about when I was about 7.  It was then I first would have become aware of the Easter duty – the time between Easter and Whitsun when we were meant to go to confession and receive Holy Communion. Amongst my Irish family “have you done your Easter duty yet?” was a common parental enquiry particularly to their adolescent sons and daughters. The past is always a strange land.

Indeed, our remembered pasts are but at best the edited highlights and lowlights of our lives much as the face we offer to the public is only a one-sided affair – a mask that covers the more two-faced nature of human character.  Therefore, memory plays false.

That said memory of my Easters gone are strange and sweet things. The exotic silence of Good Friday when only the bakers opened to sell hot cross buns and bread. Easter days with Easter eggs. The eggs were plain affairs – though family lore has it that as a two-year-old whilst others went off to Mass I discovered where the family Easter eggs had been put and promptly ate them all and was heartily sick. I own no recall of this event, but I own the truth of it for certain.

I recall in my teen years the first time I went to Good Friday service by myself. Mum was often unwell in these years. I also was a “holy” boy, so I was 12 or younger when I started to go to the Mass of Maundy Thursday by myself – at which I recall also serving – and then cajoling mum – dad had gone by this time – to let me go to the Easter Vigil. I had expected the wonder of the candlelight gradually filing the church but the singing of the Exultet came like a bolt out of the blue. It still sends shivers down my spine.  

At University from my second year, I was often in Leeds for Easter. I went to my first Chrism Mass at St Anne’s Cathedral which was by then part of the Paul VI reformed liturgy. Easter Day was memorable for me for Bishop Gordon Wheeler who would process on Easter Day into his cathedral in cappa magna and then vest – including his episcopal gloves – at the altar.  Allusions like these to another ceremonial world were rare – frowned upon in certain circles – part of history. The music at Leeds wasn’t great, but the ceremonial was now a plaintiff echo of a religion I had come to love but it seemed was already lost. The early seventies were a time of struggle for me as I could not stomach the new Mass and its ICEL translations which so disfigured the intent of the Latin – but once I got to London, I could at least go to Mass at the Brompton Oratory.

Really from then on if I could not get to a Latin Mass, I simply did not go.  

I had first discovered the Oratory in my late teens as a friend from school – Rusty who became a Benedictine – took me one Sunday. The music was amazing and although my heart was in the Viennese style masses of Mozart and Haydn at the Oratory, I discovered the radiance of Tomas Victoria, Palestrina, and Jacob Handl, as well as the adventure of the Dvorak Mass in D. I digress.  

My first Easters in London were amazing as I always had friends to go to Mass with – often Philip sometimes Mark, once or twice Ralph, and later Richard would come with me – sometime driving me.

Good Friday at the Oratory was haunting because it was so solemnly austere.  The music always bathed in sad harmonies that edge to dissonance. I always have loved the Passion of St John because – I guess this is true of the entire opus – it is so deeply personal. When it is sung, it is spellbinding. My sense of injustice wells up tearfully as the events unfold. John describes the heroic meekness that embraces violence in order to transfigure it. Its powerfully simple and therefore simply powerful. IN the Beginning was the Word – a book about The Word it is aptly illustrative of the power of words to shape our understanding and expand our horizons.  

In those days, you had to get there early to get a seat for the great Easter services and often I’d go up from Kidbroke, where I was living with Roger, early in the morning for Tenebrae at 10 and then be back in church by two.

In that hour or so would of sitting quietly would be when I’d go to Confession. Despite what you might think, the Oratory was then a wonderful place for Confession. It is often one of life’s revelations that those whom you might think most inflexible and rigid in their public face can have depths of empathy and kindness of which you would never dream.

Somehow these Easters offered a correction to the paths through which I drifted as my London career took off. I’d lie to pretend I was not putting my hopes in that world and the other Easter that had shaped my life was fading with my faded jeans.  

It was the pull of that world that was tugging me away from the world of faith….

The hedonistic eighties were all about the cult of Mammon. Money and power and career success are heady brew, and, in those days, they were intoxicating for good and for ill. For good was champagne all the way.  For ill became a synonym for AIDS. Again, I will not digress, save to say my Easters became increasingly secular and marked clearly now I look back a turning away from all those things I had once loved and cherished.

Church now became largely Christmas and funerals. There were so many funerals. I remained one of those spiritual misfits called lapsed Catholics. There were a lot of us, and it had a camaraderie. Some became more agnostic some were Christmas Christians some drifted into an angry atheism often fuelled by a righteous anger at many negative attitudes and many lies peddled by churchmen over HIV, particularly in Africa and South America.

So, Easter was set aside. It felt it had died. It might have been buried deep. But it was certainly lost. It would never rise again.

Yet Easter was still capable of a resurrection far more glorious than my original Easters.  Nor was it my many crises of poor health that rowed me back to this other shore I’d left with gay abandon. I cannot ever really find words for this. Damascene seems far too outrageously pretentious and it was less flash and bang than a strong steady incessant tug at my heart. I did not hear voices, but something spoke directly to my heart. I was astounded as much as anything.

Love is of course always an affair of the heart. I will not make this about me, because ultimately, I remain entirely underserving of this gift. I am even from this here as puzzled and perplexed by this turn of events as when they came upon me. For the sake of convenient shorthand, it did feel rather like falling in love in a profound sense. And step by step I found myself eventually stepping over the threshold of Westminster Cathedral around 5 one afternoon as Mass began and the choir singing the Introit. I stayed.

It was easy to step back because Westminster Cathedral was so nearby where we lived in Oval and then I began to take that longer pilgrimage each Sunday to the Oratory. I also found myself picking up Mass on my visits to Liam.  By the time I left London I was going to daily Mass like one of those strange figures who populated my childhood memories but who would always be in their same place at Mass on the weekdays I served. I had also discovered the Little Sisters of the Poor in Vauxhall because Liam had gone there.

Easter once more owned me. Standing outside the Oratory in the chill of the night waiting for the great doors to open for the Easter Vigil. I was usually by myself, but it wasn’t long before a group adopted me and kept me a seat. And so, when the time came to leave London, I genuinely believed that I would have to make my Sundays and Easters in a different way. I wondered how this might affect me.

I found my way to St Birinus in Dorchester because I was in the Parish and I had been told by a friend that I’d love as nothing much had changed there since the reign of Mary Tudor.

I had no inkling that this small church set in its glorious place by the Thame would lead to such an apotheosis as this year.

So, as I look back over the last Holy Week and Easter with all the richness of music set within liturgy and of a ceremony on the exquisite scale of a Hilliard miniature in the small Wardell church – I feel I must pinch myself.

I also feel amazed and yet unsettled.  I am immensely grateful. “That God is great we often have by glad experience found.”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

A Benson Carol – the story of a Christmas yet to come….

A

“Charlie, Gracie have you got your coats on?”

Kate could hear her children’s excited stomping – she’d heard them all morning.

It had been Robbie’s idea to take the kids out to do the Bensington Society Christmas Quiz.

Improvisations brought about by the Covid-19 Pandemic had become part of village Christmas – the Star atop the tower of the parish church in Advent – the Bensington Society Christmas Quiz in the bulletin – the take-away Christmas lunches from the Crown and Three Horseshoes….

Kate pulled the Quiz from the Benson Bulletin and put it on the gleaming white kitchen worktop. Where were the Heritage Trail leaflets? Her thoughts were matched by her audible muttering

“Where…where…where…”

She ungraciously yanked open the bottom drawer of the dresser – a family piece that came from Robbie’s grandmother.

“It’s a family heirloom” – her mother-in-law opined as it was squeezed into Kate’s kitchen – as unwanted as most surprise gifts

“You should have kept it for yourself” Kate had said at the time.

It wouldn’t go in my kitchen.” Robbie’s mum had offered airily. “Robbie loves it.” Kate forever found herself bumping into the bits of the dresser that stuck out…into her kitchen…into her marriage…into her life.  Kate hated it.

She retrieved two more Heritage Trail leaflets and with a heavy sigh put them on the worktop. The quiz would keep them out of her way.

Her plan was to get on with some gift wrapping and make the American frosting for the Christmas cake.

The frosting recipe was something of a survival – on yellowing paper cut carefully a 1950s magazine by her grandmother. It was one of a life’s odd survivals long after the rest is lost in memory’s wintry mists. The recipe came with a few careworn decorations – a snowman; a Santa and a wobbly wren that had lost its leg.

Standing up Kate reached over and picked up a tiny battered box from next to the cake stand. Those precious remnants lived from year to year, from cake to cake in that old box.

She fondly caressed each of them in turn.

Kate loved these gems of Christmas past. There were tears in her eyes and she felt a dry lump in her throat. Battered and broken, in her mind’s eye, they shone like that brilliant star she’d once imagined had really led those three wise men to the stable at Bethlehem.  Christmas had been so special then. What was it now?  

In a firework-flash her precious memory was gone.

Gracie and Charlie ran noisily into the kitchen – wearing their signature duffle coats – Gracie’s deep pink and Charlie’s brilliant green.

Robbie ambled into the kitchen after the children. He always looked unhurried and un-hassled. It annoyed Kate. 

“We’ll be an hour or so.”

“Be as long as you like.” 

Her tone was sword-sharp; her words cut. Shamed and surprised, she pretended not to notice but everyone else had.

They left.  It was then she wished she’d said sorry but now it was too late.

Her Christmas preparations were edged with regret.

Kate longed to recatch that perfect memory from only moments earlier. She closed her eyes and willed it back. It had turned its back on her.  It was gone.

The house was quiet.

Suddenly Kate felt profoundly alone – bereft – it was silly. Silly or not she was in a flood of tears.

It had been one of those days – one of those weeks – one of those years. After the pandemic, work wasn’t straightforward; Robbie’s job had gone; money worries plagued their marriage with reproach; home worries came with Charlie’s bout of bad health; and then Kate’s mum had developed dementia.

Squally outbursts of tears were now a part of life, but Kate didn’t share them – neither with Robbie nor with Charlie and Gracie – instead she battled to protect them from her pain. But somehow the more she tried to manage things the more it all just seemed to drive little wedges of distrust between them.

Now, as Christmas loomed all those little things loomed larger.

She cried for a while before she heard a low meow. “Oh, Wi-li” her tears stopped. Wi-li, a blue point Siamese, had returned from his morning constitutional, which often included a bit of random bird slaying or shrew killing. He was empty mouthed. He talked to her in his feline way. Kate gave him some dried food. He purred. He ate. He wailed. It was his way.

Wi-li knew all her problems. With him she could share her loneliness and her worry and the very irrationality of sharing these secrets with a cat somehow put the irrationality of her feelings into some sort of perspective.

“I’ll make the frosting, Wi-li…”

He studied her with his sapphire blue eyes – sphinx-like – it was his way – somehow wise, somehow silent.

“Meow.”

The eggs whites were thickening nicely over a saucepan of warm water when the doorbell rang.

Kate leaned back and strained to see to the glass front door. She could make out the silhouette of a man.

“Just a minute.”

The doorbell rang again.

“Hold-on for heaven’s sake.”

As she walked down the hall a shaft of sunlight pierced the front door’s frosted glass. There were three shadows – not one.

There had been talk of the “Northampton knockers” in the village…. young men apparently selling dishcloths and such but looking for a chance to case a house for valuables.

“I don’t want anything…I don’t buy at the door…I’m busy.”

Having committed herself both to words and action she now found she was, almost ludicrously, stranded sunlit on one side of the front door leaving the three strangers with a clear view.

She wished she’d just stayed mum in the kitchen and then scolded herself for speaking out. Speaking out – it was a family trait – Robbie always said that when they argued.

Recently they’d argued more than ever before.

She opened the door.

They smiled – all three together – synchronised smiles – like Cheshire cats. Kate smiled back.

“Honestly, I really don’t want anything. I’ve enough dish cloths for a year’s washing-up.”

Her last words trailed off because she could see they were not selling anything.

They looked rather – well, rather well dressed…perhaps they were Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses…she could not quite remember which was which any longer. Kate had long left religion behind although she’d been brought up a Catholic…well had gone to a Catholic school in any case.

One of them was very tall and had the most beautiful ebony skin and round brown eyes that almost seemed to sing with joy. The others looked Middle Eastern or maybe Arab – gentle eyes whose soft gaze comprehended more than sight can see – one a little shorter than the other.  Perhaps they were sheiks.

They smiled.

Kate smiled back for what she felt was no good reason.

“We’ve come about the star…”

“The star?”

“Yes, the star”

The black man spoke quietly “Yes, we’ve lost sight of it you see”

The second “and we need your help to find it again.”

“My help?”

The third, “yes, because you caught sight of it a little while ago.”

“Me, I don’t think so.”

“We saw.”

“You saw? How?”

Assuming they meant they saw her in the hall, she added “Oh, I see.”

The first, emphatically “Yes, you saw.”

A silence.

“We are expected you see.”

“I think you’ve the wrong house.”

“Oh no, this is certainly the right house. We knew you’d help. You always help people. We know that too.”

“Who told you?”

Kate was about to close the door and then something came to mind,

“Oh, you must mean the star on the church.”

They didn’t reply.

“You must have come in from Ewelme. Yes, of course.”

She thought to herself they must be coming for the Nativity Play and Carol Concert.

“You just need to carry on straight, down the road…you’ll see the church near the war memorial…”

A crash from the kitchen – a loud meow and cat shriek…

“Wi-li…”

Kate darted quickly back down the hall and into the kitchen and found the floor covered with congealed frosting swimming in a lake of boiling water.

“Wi-li.”

Wily as his name suggested, Wi-li had disappeared.

She began to pick up the pieces when she remembered the three men. Seized by panic…would they be inside her house? She popped her head around the kitchen door and looked back into the hall.

The door was closed.

Cagily, she took a broom – it was the first thing she laid her hand to – and cautiously went through the house – room to room – checking the cupboards – and in the wardrobes – and under the beds – heavens under the beds – had she gone mad? – she thought.

There was no one there. She sat on Charlie’s bed. She’d sat there long lonely nights worrying about her little boy. She closed her eyes embracing both fear and pain.

The doorbell rang.

Kate opened her eyes. The ceiling came into focus.  She was lying on the bed holding a broom in her arms.

The doorbell again.

She got up and then remembered the three strangers. 

She walked back downstairs.

A shadow by the door.

Kate opened it brusquely, armed, and ready to defend her home.

“Robbie.”

“I forgot my key.”

“Mummy, mummy look what we’ve found…look.”

The children burst into the hall and ran towards the kitchen…

“No!” Kate almost screamed.

She rushed towards them and tried to block their way. Gracie and Charlie were already through the door but silent and awestruck.

Robbie, ‘how beautiful, Kate.”

Wi-li was sitting on the dresser washing himself unperturbed by the fracas.

The most perfectly frosted Christmas cake sat on a cake stand in the middle of the kitchen table. It had three wise men on it….

Robbie clicked.

“I must put this on Instagram”

“Mum it is perfect.”

“It’s just lovely mum.” Charlie pulled close to her.

Kate looked in disbelief.: “where did they come from?”

Charlie, “they come from the Orient.”

“That’s very far away you know, mummy.” Gracie added as a grace note.

The afternoon at the church had been a bit chaotic. Everyone was in a bit of a to-do about the crib. Someone had put the three kings in the manger with shepherds and all.

“Who put those in there. The kings don’t arrive until Twelfth Night.”

The Rector was visibly annoyed. “Well, they’ve arrived early.” He winced.

The other problem was they were not the proper kings. “And They’re not our kings” Mrs Price-Leigh continued.

“I don’t care whose kings they are. They’ve got to go.”

The Rector’s mobile phone chimed in. He waved, “see to it will you?” He left communing with higher things.

Mrs Price-Leigh looked after him and tut-tutted.

Mrs Price-Leigh was not for lifting and carrying. She asked Mr Dodds to move the kings. Mr Dodds had asked Mrs Dodds and Mrs Dodds had asked Jane who was serving the teas before the Nativity play.  Jane was busy and forgot.

The kings stayed put.

It had drizzled miserably for most of the afternoon.

“Will there be stars like for the baby Jesus?’ Gracie had asked Kate.

“Stars – no I don’t think so tonight, Gracie. I think that might need a miracle.”

“Won’t the stars come out for Jesus’s birthday, mummy?”

“Yes, they’ll come out, but we may not see them tonight.”

“Will they still be twinkling if we can’t see them?”

“Yes, but they’ll be hiding behind the clouds so maybe we’ll just have to imagine them twinkling instead. We can imagine them together.”

Gracie began singing “Twinkle, twinkle, little star.”

Looking at her daughter entranced by the prospect of stars and Christmas she could not help but recall her own wonder at the story of the star and the wise men. How long ago and how far away that felt from the chill mizzle of this December day.

Charlie stood, dressed for church, in the doorway of the kitchen. He fidgeted.

“Mummy.”

Kate looked up

“Mummy…I’ve done something bad.’

“How do you mean bad?”

“Well….” His voice trailed off.

“Yes.”

She gradually coaxed the truth from him. He told her how had bumped into three men on the road who said they had something for him to give his mum. Charlie was worried because he’d been told not to take things from strangers. He showed them to Kate. They were three tiny, tiny toys. There was an ingot that looked like gold and two small jars. The jars had a strange but sweet exotic perfume.

He put them into Kate’s hands. She stared at them

“What are they mummy?”

“I don’t really know Charlie.’

“That’s funny.”

“Why?”

“Because the tall man said you’d know what they were for…”

Kate, Robbie, Charlie, and Gracie got to church a little late. Mrs Price-Leigh rushed towards them:

“Is there something wrong, Elizabeth?”

“That man…that man I don’t know who he thinks he is. It’s not my fault. I didn’t put them there.”

“Put what, where?”

“Oh, the kings, dears, someone put a set of kings in the crib. The Rector is hopping mad.”

Kate gave her a strange look.

“I’ve not upset you Kate?”

“No. No, I’m fine…it’s just.”

She opened her purse and took out the three small toys Charlie had been given by the strangers. She told Mrs Price-Leigh the story of the day.

“Well, I never…’

“You don’t think…”

They all went into the church together to see the crib.

The three stranger-kings had stood their ground but were empty-handed. They bore no gifts.  

Kate reached into her purse and the gold ingot fitted exactly into the hands of the black prince and the jars fitted exactly into the hands of the others. It was as if they had been especially made for them.

Ever since the pandemic the Davey Consort had sung at the carol concert. The choir was composed of some of the country’s finest musicians who just happened to live nearby. They sang most Sundays at the local Catholic church in Dorchester-on-Thames.

There was an expectant hush.

A fine unaccompanied rich bass sang:

“Three Kings for Persian lands afar……”

The sweet moment lost, shone more brightly than ever in Kate’s heart.  Then she knew she would have the strength to get through.

As they left church after the carol concert. Kate linked arms with Robbie.

The moon shone bright in the clearest of clear skies bedecked by myriad stars that shone like diamonds. “Oh mummy, look at the stars. They’re so beautiful.”

Gracie looked up at her mother “the stars are out mummy, is that a miracle?”

“Well, yes, Gracie, I suppose it is….”

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Lent, a personal reflection

Lent , a personal Reflection

Lents like Christmases come ever faster and the fast they impose is ever harder. As I’ve gotten older I find I often eat little and often and eschew the larger meals of my adolescence onwards. My pick -and-graze-lifestyle, is particularly unsuited to the rigours of a fast!

We live in times little disposed to deny ourselves our multiple petty pleasures.  We have become to believe this is good for us but we carry the weight of this philosophy of consumption on our hips no matter how smart our lips make it sound. In the age of Twitter, FB, WhatsApp, Snapchat and Instagram we share by making the record of the trivial of our passing days from meal to meal and purchase to purchase, party to party, into both a form of communication and a form of art. This form of sharing bestows a flattering light on the petty interiority of our small lives.
The Enlightenment philosophers first identified the pursuit of happiness as one of the Rights of Man. We have interpreted their reasoning as a notion that satisfaction of our immediate desires leads to personal fulfilment. Ever inventive, we made this convenient nostrum the subject of scientific consideration: modern economics has been used to ratify these supposed ideals of secular philosophy and technology by systematising the means of production has made possible our most impossible dreams.

The “we“, in this case, are those born into the nations that gained most from the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions.  For much of the last century it was fashionable to argue that nations of Europe who most benefited and enjoyed the greatest freedoms were the “Protestant” nations.  Then it was also the intellectual fashion to see the English Civil War as a product of a bourgeois revolution. However, for whatever speculative cause, it is certainly true that we lucky few born in the right place at the right time have filled every shopping trolley we can with the objects of this singular passion.

Even now when we have so disproportionately much of all there is in the world, our appetite to have and to hold more does not diminish, rather it increases until we are made slaves of its endless chase. We measure ourselves by possessing the objects of our desire and others by their conspicuous consumption and reserve our pity for those who do not share this bounty.

In all of these things I am no better than any one of us. I am a child of my times as heedless of consequences of my actions as any, save when waxing lyrical over a bottle or two of red wine about the ills of society and the dangers of our exploitation of the world and those who populate it.

The only voice we really pay attention to it that small voice that counsels us to do as we please; that consoles us that there will be no possible harm to anyone in us enjoying ourselves – even to excess. The road to the hangover is paved with good intentions that one glass more will be fine. There are even more dangerous roads on which to travel and I have been a journeyman on enough of them to know how easily one gets totally lost.

As with ourselves, so with the world we oversee. Climate change is a product of that reckless side of our natures. The inequity of real opportunity deprives ambitions of the many and stifles aspiration whilst poverty of aspiration crushes every hope and the grinding poverty of the relatively fewer still undermines the value of every individual. From within our affluent bubble the poor become feckless in our eyes and the unfortunate are a burden.

Lent stands each year as a moment to give us pause. It stands for giving up things – fast – for giving things away – alms – and giving ourselves over to reflection – prayer. Of course, for me as a Christian these stand as sentinels of another series of interlocking and defining relationships: that with my body which is too often my master; that with my neighbour whose needs I too readily overlook; and to my God, to whom I pay too little heed.

All my life my heart has ached for another kind of love to that which I’ve enjoyed. My head knows where it lies and understands it will alone bring me the happiness I seek, but I still seek to keep God safely at a distance from my daily life. He is a bit like a slightly embarrassing friend you don’t really want to admit to your other cooler friends you really like, let alone dare to introduce to them. The good opinion of others often keeps us from being true to ourselves. It hardly says very much of me that I act as if I am ashamed of the most important relationship I have.
Yet, until something goes badly wrong that is rather how I treat God and my religious faith. Naturally, once something goes wrong – and how often has that happened in my life – He is the One to whom I then turn to fix things rather as a child turns to an adult with a broken toy. It does not speak well of me that after all these years I still seek to run with the spiritual hare whilst still hunting with the hounds of hell.

So, this Lent offers me another chance to try to get things right.
We fast not to make ourselves appear better to the world but to free us from the tyranny of feeding our destructive appetites. We give alms to remind us that we are not the centre of our own world let alone of the world where our fellows go hungry and sleep out in the streets and where we too readily turn a blind eye. And we pray to be better people because, despite the whirling dervish our of busy days we all know we actually do not own any tomorrow and  that for us the tomorrow on which we count to put right the wrongs of our today,  may never come but may become our day of judgement.
Mainly my best friends are easy with the social gospel of Christianity. They too believe care of our neighbour is at life’s heart. I understand some are distinctly uneasy with what they see as the obligations of  the religious faith which I have embraced.  Some few may even be more hostile than uneasy. I know my religious conversion disturbs and disquiets. Perhaps some feel I have betrayed a nobler cause of political action or I have become a traitor to the causes of LGTBQ peoples by peddling my Catholic beliefs on Social Media. I think human rights and the causes for which I fought in the past were worth the effort. Fighting for equal rights before secular law is an important part of securing the dignity of each of us. The epidemic we call AIDS saw partners deprived of their homes and tokens of a shared live after enduring terrible personal loss and after the trauma of nursing a dying lover to his end. I am glad I fought to change that. I am very glad that has been changed.

That said, whilst the social gospel may look to the better angels of human nature, the human condition is in my view always inadequate of itself truly to transform life for the better. Noble ends forever exchange principles with ignoble means. The best laid plans for supporting our fellow man in his distress either by interventions by the state better to share our wealth and resources or through personal giving or by a combination of the two, are always worthwhile of themselves but are doomed also never to meet the need. Moreover, in endeavouring to meet need simply on these materialistic terms we tend to treat the profoundest need – above all our shared need to be loved for and valued for ourselves – even if others find us unlovable – as simply material transactions. Ultimately that response will always be inadequate to meet the true dignity of every man and woman.  That relative good is a good and worthy of pursuit but before we change the world, we first must change ourselves.

That is why in the end what we believe matters greatly. If it didn’t, would humankind have slaughtered so many of our fellows because of what they believe? By the way, that impulse is not the prerogative of the religious for those with no religion are as tainted by this vice of nihilist absolutism. Our capacity to make bad from good; to hate when we might love; lies at the heart of our personal and collective dilemma.

Lent reminds that it is never too late to start over. If it does no more in doing that is does us a great service, whether or not we share the same religious convictions.

But those who believe the fiats of the state and the executive orders of the mighty or the platitudes of the nice, are all we need to do forever to change the world are terribly mistaken. The world plays by its own rules; it is always willing to pass by on the other side – albeit with a fair bit of rubber-necking and tut-tutting.

However, for each of us there is a personal epiphany that rewards our soul searching and heals our sorrow. I would not impose my epiphany of anyone. Yet, I have travelled too far to say all answers by all of goodwill are equal. They’re not; and pretending they are is another form of intellectual dishonesty. I want to set aside the pretence because time is now so short. If that makes my friends fewer then so be it.  I must learn to live with that because I live with a heart that is full of joy and love from God who as the poet has it is our home.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home….” William Wordsworth Ode on Intimations of Immortality

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The Credo of Mary I (Tudor)

The Credo of Mary I (Tudor)

Mary Tudor early in her brief reign 1553-1558 - note the famous pearl.

Mary Tudor early in her brief reign 1553-1558 – note the famous pearl.

History remembers Mary I as “Bloody Mary”; “the Spanish Tudor”; the embodiment of everything extreme. Unlike Elizabeth I whose iconic portraiture presents an elaborately confected enigma the picture history paints of Mary I from her portraits is of a narrow-minded religious bigot. It is all a little cartoonish.

In fact, Mary’s educational and spiritual inheritance – for they were at this time one and the same – was progressive and humanist and imbued with the ideals of the Catholic Reform movement. That movement had found lay patronage from the second half of the fifteenth century principally in the lands of ducal Burgundy – the homeland of Erasmus – in the Castile of Queen Isabella and the Aragon of Ferdinand – the homeland of Juan Boscan and Juan de Valdes – and in the city-states of northern Italy and in Rome dominated by the time of Mary’s birth by Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael.

Mary’s parents – Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon- brought together two of these strands of culture and spirituality. In her last years as Queen, Reginald Pole drew the third Italian and Roman strand into her life. However, by then decades of strident debate had unalterably changed some minds whilst leaving the majority unmoved. Yet it is vital not to overlook the fact that the very course of religious debate had modified everyone’s ideas about which aspects of Christian faith truly mattered.

Mary’s grandmother, Elizabeth of York, inherited from her father Edward IV, approbation for all things Burgundian. The manners of the English court borrowed heavily and consciously from the court of Charles the Bold whose only daughter, Mary of Burgundy, later succeeded him and governed the provinces of what then became the Netherlands.  Elizabeth’s second son, the future Henry VIII was much influenced by the courtly culture of his mother’s household. Unlike his elder brother Arthur, young Henry spent much of his early and formative years in the entourage of Elizabeth of York where scholars, poets, musicians and the humanities flourished.

Catherine of Aragon grew up in her mother’s Castilian court where Queen Isabella was a major patron of both the New Learning and the spirituality of the Catholic Reform movement. This was that same movement that was particularly influential in the Reformed Augustinians and therefore also shaped Martin Luther’s spirituality. The Friars Observant and the Reformed Carthusians of whom Isabella had been patron in Spain were both brought to England under Catherine’s patronage.

Mary’s education was informal until the middle 15250’s.  She was precocious particularly in Latin. Much has been made of the influence of Mary Tudor’s principal tutor – the misogynist scholar, Juan Luis Vives.  Born in Valencia in 1493, Vives, like most of the scholars of his time was educated widely in Europe. He attended both the universities of Paris and Padua before settling in Bruges. He was a follower of Erasmus but was regarded in his own right as something of an expert in pedagogy and a champion of the education of aristocratic women and of inductive methods of reasoning based on experiment and exercise rather than metaphysics and intellectual speculation. His choice as Princess Mary’s was significant comment on reforming credentials of both young Mary Tudor’s parents. Her personal spirituality was therefore shaped both by the Humanist educational curriculum and by her parents’ sympathies with Humanism and the Catholic reform movement of which both were patrons.

Mary was much more intellectually apt than is usually credited. She spoke Latin and French with ease and she read and translated Latin with subtle fluency. The extent of her gift can be found in her translation of the Paraphrase of St John’s Gospel by Erasmus which was actually published in 1548 with a note of fulsome praise from Thomas Cranmer amongst others. Mary was modest about her accomplishments, but this was a world where women were expected to be modest particularly about their intellectual abilities. Noblewomen danced and played musical instruments; they acted in masks and recited verse to applause; and they embroidered, but, they did not debate or argue or reason in public.

History has made much of Mary’s mother’s religiosity. Catherine of Aragon was indeed deeply spiritual, and the trauma of the Divorce made her more so. However, public religiosity was also a royal affectation. Like the Henry VIIII, Catherine enjoyed the company of scholars and the culture of the classics.  She gave personal audience to Erasmus too and offered him her patronage. It is true she kept the hours of the Friars Observant when she was in Greenwich rising at the same time as the monks to be at Matins and staying to hear the first Mass of the day. However, Elizabeth of York had kept those same hours in Lent and Advent and Margaret Beaufort’s household was known throughout Europe for its fastidious religious observance. Margaret Beaufort indeed was Bishop John Fisher’s first royal patron.

Like the Cathedrals of Europe, royal courts kept their time by the observance of the hours of religious devotion. All the offices sung in cathedrals were sung in the chapels royal and each day four masses were said in court: the Mass of Apostles after Matins; the Mass of Blessed Virgin after Lauds; the Mass of the Dead after Prime; and the Mass of the day – which was usually attended by both the king and queen when there was full court – after Terce at about nine in the morning.

The universal practice of princely households by the early sixteenth century was for the lesser masses also to be said privately in the oratory situated next to the royal closet which was beside the principal bedroom of the prince. The doors were left ajar, so the prince might “hear Mass” without necessarily coming into the Oratory. As in Cathedrals, when the Sanctus bells were rung everyone knelt until they were rung again after the elevations. Similarly, when the Angelus bell was rung everyone at court observed a brief silence and knelt until the bell was rung again. This was part and parcel of the world in which Mary and the other children of Henry VIII grew up. It was only after 1540 when Henry’s infected ulcerous legs made it impossible for him fully to participate in these ostentations that the English court gradually abandoned their observance.

Despite the trauma of the Divorce and the brief reign of Queen Anne Boleyn, Mary did not show any exceptional spiritual intensity.  Her Privy Purse Expenses show us a young woman unremarkably fond of dancing; performing in masks at court; extremely fond of cards and gambling; and obsessed with clothes and jewellery.   One of her first actions of the death of her father in January 1547 was to obtain access to the Jewel House and to the Wardrobe to fit out her new household.

In those same early months of the reign Mary also cleverly parlayed the pension given her in Henry VIII’s will into land – principally those of the Howard Dukes of Norfolk who had fallen into disgrace in the last weeks of her father’s reign. By the early 1550’s Mary had remade herself into a noble of first rank with an income of £3000 per year and a princely retinue to match and a ready-made affinity from her Howard vassals. She kept her household between the former Howard palace of Kenninghall and her mother’s favourite royal palace of New Hall (Beaulieu).

Edward was barely king four months before Mary was forced to take political sides. Previously she had been of best terms with dowager Queen Katherine Parr, but Mary broke with her over her clandestine marriage to Somerset’s brother, Lord Admiral Thomas Seymour. Her first venture into high politics since the fall of Anne Boleyn demonstrated Mary could play for high stakes. From this point Mary stealthily moved herself into position as the head of the conservative and traditionalist groupings who were looking for leadership. By 1549 she was widely talked of as a Regent in succession to the disgraced Duke of Somerset.

It was only at this stage that Mary’s religious sympathies became public. In 1549 she pointedly refused to have the new Common Prayer Book used in her household. However, her refusal was couched on pragmatic political grounds. She maintained that until the king was of age there could be no change in religion.  Her household publicly observed outlawed ceremonies and her officers began to carry rosary beads and missals as part of their livery. Mary began attending Mass four times a day as her mother once had done at Greenwich. These gestures certainly demonstrated her religious affiliation.  Whether they reveal an unusually intense personal spirituality is another matter.

By the late 1540’s what Christians meant by the Real Presence in the sacramental bread and wine had become the burning issue between Protestant and Catholic. Mary’s public conduct confirmed she, like the majority, firmly held to the traditionalist view: at consecration the bread and wine became Christ’s body and blood. This was certainly still the majority view at Mary’s death in 1558 and, beyond, well into the reign of Elizabeth I.

In the summer of 1549 Lord Protector Somerset gave an undertaking to the Emperor Charles V that Mary, the Emperor’s cousin, might continue to have the Mass in her household. In England’s governing class the matter of Mary’s Mass became a cause celebre for the next three years.  However, after the execution of the Duke of Somerset in January 1552 a peace broke out between Mary and Edward and even whilst the young king pressed ahead with ever more radical reformation of the English church the privy council ceased to huff and puff about what was going on in Mary’s household.

In February 1553 Mary came to court for the first time in over two years. She was received with a great ceremony.  After the meeting Edward made a series of land grants which further enhanced Mary’s status. She was recognised as the most powerful woman since the times of Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII.  Whatever understanding had been reached between Edward and Mary was overtaken by events. The king’s persistent cold morphed into a tubercular infection. Edward VI  died on 6th July 1553 and nine days later Mary by dint of her own efforts was queen.

With the return of Cardinal Pole to England in 1554 there followed a sustained effort to implement the ideals of the Catholic reformers of the early sixteenth century. These were to include funding diocesan seminaries for the education of priests as well as a renewed episcopate and a simplified Sarum Use to be used throughout England together with a restricted Sanctoral Calendar as championed by Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall in London in the 1520’s.  There was a serious effort to ensure the episcopate became more spiritually active and engaged in these dioceses. Unlikely though it seems Bishop Edmund Bonner’s catechism is a model of this sort of episcopal leadership. Amongst the most notable of the Marian appointees are Bishop John White (Winchester) and Bishop Thomas Goldwell (St Asaph). Goldwell later became head of the English college in Rome and was to be the only English bishop to sit at the final session of the Council of Trent.  The program was barely underway when Mary’s health failed. Her early death in November 1558 immediately followed by that of Pole himself doomed the project.

Finally, there must be mention of the political program of religious enforcement which included burning Protestant martyrs and which through Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has become the defining motif of the reign. It has been used to explain the failure to impose a “Spanish Catholicism” on England and to evidence Mary’s extremism. Foxe told only half the story, never discussing, for example, how actively Parliament and the authorities pursued the policy and how that might be explained. After the failed pregnancy of 1555 the chance of Mary and Philip having an heir was remote and that reality governed all. Pragmatically, the only way to ensure the religious policy was maintained politically was to eradicate the heterodox elements. Again, the intense persecutions were over by early 1558. There was no sign then the queen would be dead before everything was settled. If Mary had lived another three or four years there is no reason to assume that her policy would not have succeeded.  Moreover, the chances were good of Mary ensuring her half sister was safely married to a Hapsburg grandee as part of the Peace that was being inaugurated at the time of her death. Perhaps this skirts too near to speculations of the sort historians are best to avoid but it emphasises the settled nature of the queen’s government in the middle of 1558.

Mary’s husband Philip II for example had no “Spanish” army in England. Nor was this Catholicism “Spanish” but, rather, English in sensibility and reformed in use. Inevitably we find it shocking that these executions were carried out by Englishmen on English men and women much as the martyrdoms of Catholics had been in the reign of Henry VIII and would be again in the reign of Elizabeth I. Historians in the past have therefore been tempted by a numbers game comparing the rates of the Marian executions which those of her predecessors and successors. Statistics cannot support an argument so utterly replete with hindsight. There can be little doubt the queen was at the centre of the political endeavour.  And it is to political rather than religious reasons historians should look for some understanding of both the policy and its execution. Here the politics of succession clearly deserve to be given greater weight. There was a logic to Mary’s policy of enforced religious conformity, albeit a brutal one.

This brief overview of Mary’s religious beliefs leaves many questions unanswered. History may only glimpse personal faith through remnant words that happen survive in manuscript. The architecture of interior beliefs remains a puzzle not only because records are so incomplete but also because the conceptual framework which we own as part and parcel of the everyday of our lives and by which we explain ourselves to others was not part of the self-perception of men and women in Tudor England. Before the Enlightenment changed ideas of self-perception all thoughts about the sentient self were enwrapped in religious faith. That places a vast gulf between us and our experience of self and those who lived in through upheavals of Reformation and Counter Reformation

If Tudor historians are certain about anything you might think that it would be about the religious beliefs of Mary I. However, the evidence we have tends to present England’s first Queen Regnant as a traditionalist in the most pragmatic terms rather than the zealot propaganda has painted. It may be hard for us to think there was pragmatism in a politics which executed men and women for their faith. That was Mary I’s world much as it was the world of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Je Suis Catholique
avatar

Je Suis Catholique:

What can I say but this? There can hardly be a more appropriate moment for the awful prayers from the Requiem Mass:
Dies irae, dies illa             ( This day of wrath, this day)
Solvet saeclum in favilla,   ( shall consume the world in ashes)
Teste David cum Sibylla.    (as foretold by David and the Sibyl)
Quantus tremor est futurus, (What trembling there will be)
Quando judex est venturus, ( When the judge shall come)
Cuncta stricte discussurus!   (to weigh everything strictly!)

Father Jacques Hamel died saying Mass. In one most profound sense for a Roman Catholic priest there could be no better death but this violence in a Church in these circumstances has potent echoes of the martyrdom of St Thomas a Becket.

However, this terrible act reminds us all that ISIS is motivated not merely politics. Their terrorism reserves particular hatred for Christians and Christianity. They have systematically murdered Coptic priests and all manner of other Christians all over Syria and Iraq.

We should pray for Father Jacques Hamel but we may also now ask for his intercession for us.

Most importantly, for his sake we should also pray earnestly for his murderers.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Beyond Nice: a personal reflection upon these troubled times
avatar

Nice & Beyond

Nice was in party mood enjoying the end of Bastille Day in a blaze of fireworks. Like the 4th of July – festivals hardly come in more secular garb than Bastille Day with its echoes of Liberté, égalité, fraternité. Before it ended 84 lives were ended.

Not so long ago there was another tranquil beach in Tunisia where death came in waves of gunfire. In an Orlando nightclub a hail of bullets turned dancing the night away into a bloody dance of death. In England an MP was brutally assassinated by a right wing racist. In Dallas and Baton Rouge ex-military black men shot policemen dead for simply being policemen. In Baton Rouge itself and in Michigan and in Los Angeles and in other US cities – black men have been shot by police for no good reason, giving at least the impression that they died just because they were black men.

We blame race; we blame religion; we blame politics; we blame government; we blame refugees; we blame ignorance; we blame poverty; we blame each other. We always fail to blame ourselves because we do not think we act or would ever behave like this but of course in our own small ways we do behave like this and when we excuse our trivial faults we excuse our collective ownership of all this inhumanity.

All the witnesses to all these events will swear it’s their lives that are forever changed. Yet they’re left painfully aware their witness will not even prevent another random act of hate.

It is tempting to despair entirely. What is there to say? What is there to do?

Families are left dispossessed of some son or daughter; some father or mother or brother or sister; some loved friend or beloved spouse or some cherished child. We claim solidarity with the victims yet even when our best eloquence rises to the occasion its words are unmatched by actions.

We choose by inaction to leave the guns in the hands of the misfits; we choose by inaction to let the politics of race go unchallenged; we elect to be blind to inter-generational poverty by electing those to office who refuse to see the ghettos of inequity. Richly endowed with resources we justify our meanness to those made helpless by war. Fearing for our own safety, most often we pass quickly by on the other side rather than being the Good Samaritans we are duty bound to be.

Is it a surprise when we are willing to do so little that we are unable to say anything that brings comfort – unable to hear anything above the din of sirens – unable to feel anything beyond our stomachs clenching – as we wait transfixed before our televisions waiting for another body count?

Body count: the phrase is painfully dehumanising.  More painfully, however, first we must ask ourselves if these deaths were in Africa, or the Philippines or Chile or Istanbul how many more bodies would we need to make them count as much as those lost in Nice or Paris or Madrid; in Orlando or New York or London?

We may not formally own slavery as a culture but through the Media we still license the idea that some lives are indisputably worth more than others. The world is not as our Media seems to see it – since every life is made equally invaluable – but it is certainly how the rest of world perceives our narcissistic preoccupation with our own losses –  measured as they are sometimes in the tens and hundreds and sometimes even in the thousands – whilst theirs have been measured frequently in the hundreds and in the theatres of conflict most often in the thousands, tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands.

The value judgement that purports to make our losses more important is hardly worthy of our purported values. This moral devaluation also informs the values and corrupts the judgements of others, including the perpetrators of these murders

Violence begets violence: it is as true of random acts of terror as it is of domestic abuse or any of the other many forms of aggression including war.  This latest evil in Nice has toppled on us as only the last in a series of horrors.  It turns out not even to be the last word as there have been further shootings in Baton Rouge and a random axe attack in Germany.

The century we have lived in, though near in experience is already far from our reality. It was full of war and replete with violent death. It was besmirched with genocides and rank with seething hatreds based on race, religion and political philosophy. In 1945, upon the plain of utter destruction which had blotted out almost entire civilisations in Europe; in Asia; and around the wider world, we solemnly promised ourselves and each other we would do better for the future and that we would not repeat those terrible failures festering of hate and spawned of fear and nourished by indifferent greed. Perhaps in the permafrost of Cold War although fearfully on the edge of extinction we came to think these other ancient hatreds were truly dead.

Since those dark days we have reassured ourselves with memorials. The more indifferent it seems we are to the dangers of our passive indifference the more memorials we commission and the more we observe our solemn services of remembrance.

It is as if we believe they’re talismans to hold at bay an evil we believe to be outside of us…to keep it at some safe distance from our comfortable lives…to keep it in the Middle East; or in the heartlands of distant Africa; or entangled in the dense forests of Cambodia; or trapped it in the hostile mountains passes of what once briefly was Yugoslavia.

We have created institutions to police our fears and to keep us safe. But there’s no one who polices our hearts or guards us from ourselves and our selfish inwardness.

The enemy we must truly fear is not without. He has he not crept un-noted into our careful citadels walled and secure. Within our nations, where the refugee is unwelcome and the immigrant despised; where the poor are invisible and where petty personal hatreds quickly erect cathedrals of hate, here we find the enemy we must fear. It not somewhere else like a jostling plague that has overrun the next town; or a virus spreading next into our neighbourhoods; or, someone who simply lives next door to us with whom we cannot get along. Rather it is come closer than we dare to admit. It is in us; it is us. And to defeat this enemy within the hardest truth is we must first change ourselves.

In a few short weeks my own small world has become to me a smaller, meaner place. The ideals for which I’ve argued for most of my adult life have it seems been set aside, one by one. The ideal of the EU is merely the most recent to fall. Most of the causes I have pursued are lost. And economic statistics now aid this sense that something is fundamentally amiss. Despite never being a wealthier nation for the first time certainly in living memory a generation of young people are poorer than the generation immediately before them.

It is as if the meter of progress has been set back to nought just as my life’s metered time runs down.  I well know I’m now fast approaching the time when I will be called from this field of endeavour: mourned briefly and quickly forgotten.

My life, however, is not a dead struggle though death had mediated its every turn and twist. It is not a fruitless labour though every harvest falls far short of plenty. My part is part of the unending struggle between life and death. It mediates life’s personal battle between good and evil. It is the war to which we are born to serve our time. It is the war we know from our earliest childish imaginings but it is more terrible than anything we ever might have imagined as children.

It is true it is always waged unequally with time and death. It’s also equally repaid to each of us with a portion of sadness and personal desolation. But the rations of grief do not make each life less a banquet of hope. Rather they bestow upon life its festal character. They make the good times precious to us.

The young are full of resilience and zealous for the fight to make change happen; to make of this world of ours a better place. Then defeats seem but setbacks; setbacks but victories postponed.

But time’s cruel march reverses every ordered scale.  In a blink a lifetime is no more than a bridge of sighs from where we watch an adamantine world unchanging and unmoved. From this well-appointed place, a lifetime seems too brief a span to change anything when, once, from youth’s lost promontory, a life’s time seemed a small eternity.

Who cannot but feel there’s no fight left much less a cause worth fighting for – let alone any reasonable hope of seeing the seeming impossible dream of leaving this world a better for our children and for their children’s children. Will it come to pass before I pass away – perhaps not – but the dream will surely survive my life’s disappointments

From this last outpost I watch the processions of the dead burying their lost causes in an oblivion of grief, unable, or perhaps more truthfully, unwilling to change a single thing for the better.  From this cold perch the scale of ignoble loss dwarfs every noble cause.

The losses of life’s many battles piling up one upon the other induce word-weary despair.  But if I’m a supposed wordsmith then from despair’s anvil I must fashion words to serve the cause.

For it is here in this lonely place where we must always endure. It is here we must hold true to all we believe in and to all the intangible ideas that light our imaginations and enliven the better dreams we share with one another: dreams of a better world for all; of better times for all; and dreams of a better end than we alone deserve.

It is when there seems to be no point in fighting-on that we are called to persist with the struggle. It is in the pointless endeavour to keep life’s flickering light alive for just another second that lies the true point towards which we are oriented. When we feel there’s no point any longer then we rediscover we are truly not alone.

There it is we meet the unashamed power of life itself in all its glorious majesty.

I can give a name to that glorious majesty – it is hope. I can give form to that hope – it is called Love. For many those things will suffice of themselves.

I might leave the rest unsaid and let silence speak for all and hope by saying nothing to cause none offence. I cannot be so mean. I must not be so cowardly.

For me, Hope and Love are but the doorkeepers to another reality which urges admittance to this world of ours and whom we are inclined to keep at arms-length because we are so wearied by our own failures; because we so ashamed of aspects of our true selves; but mostly because we fear to let go of our own sense of our self-importance.  If we dare our conscious-self, it may easily pierce the reality behind that glass which clearly separates life from death. Through that glass we may darkly peer and discover for ourselves the shadow of something much greater than ourselves.

Here in this dark place if we but briefly set aside ourselves and let our ego go, here we may meet such enlightenment. Here we may be transformed. Here the better dreams of our imperfect natures can become something greater than ourselves. Here is where we find ourselves in another greater reality.

It is a personal discovery. It is quickly a tangible reality to us. It is truly alive and truly lives inside us. It is immeasurably good. It is companionable, and gentle and full of warmth and alive with laughter. It is loving. It cares. If we let it, it will change us forever. It wants to know us for ourselves.

 

This is God.

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment