Flag and crown

 

It is claimed that the proliferation of national flags is a spontaneous expression of patriotism, and not a nurtured meme creating a hostile space.   

A reasoned debate about this is probably not possible.  The sudden growth or extensive deployment of national flags normally only takes place in contested space, although there are examples (the USA is the obvious one) where it is simply normative.

But there is a subtle aspect of this which I haven’t seen commented upon.  The proliferation of national flags is actually in part about the Americanisation of our culture, as our culture unconsciously evolves under the effects of media representations.

I’ve observed before the way that school balls are now called ‘proms’, schedule is often pronounced ‘skedule’, and bridesmaids often walk ahead of brides.  It is what we have heard and seen, and what we’ve allowed to colonise our language and habits.

So, in this context, it is important to recognise that the flag actually performs a very similar function in the USA to that of the crown in our own culture.

When loyalty is sworn formally, it is to the flag in one place and to the crown in the other.  The contrasting National Anthems focus on the star spangled banner and on the King.  The British can be puzzled by American flag etiquette, Americans when they see Britains bow to the monarch.

Which doesn’t mean the Union Flag and the American Head of State are not highly visible and don’t have significant respect shown to them.  It is subtley more important to realise that they haven’t ever really performed the same function as their equivalents on the other side of the Atlantic.

So the desire to have a flag on every drive now is, in part, an unconscious desire to be more like the Americans, a simply norm which has been absorbed from them. 

As well as being, for some, far from an unconscious wish to replicate aspects of current American political opinion – such as aligning with the way the American Head of State and Deputy Head of State call out what they identify as our approach to free speech.

Which leaves aside the issue of the universal display of the Head of State's portrait which is often an indication that a dictator is in power.  

And leaves aside the what those of us who fly the national flag from church towers know: even the best quality flag is eventually blown to pieces.  Cheap material only really works for the display of a flag during, say, the brief period of a football tournament. 

St Aidan's and St Michael's Days

My licence to minister half-time in the Grimsby Minster parish (originally 'for a year or until a new Vicar is appointed, whichever is the shorter', since extended to last eighteen months) comes to an end on Sunday, St Aidan's Day as it happens. I believe there will be cake and kind words after the 10.30 a.m. service. The new full-time Vicar will indeed come into post a few weeks later.

 

Meanwhile, my 40th anniversary of being ordained priest comes up less than a month later (on Michaelmas Day, Monday 29 September), and I've kindly been given the opportunity to mark that by presiding at the 12.30 daily said Eucharist in Lincoln Cathedral that day. 

 

I'll probably preach about St Aidan's feeling that fresh mission preaching should not be too harsh or demanding at the former service, and (very briefly given the context) about Jacob's ladder being pitched on deeply compromised ground at the latter.

An unvaccinated generation?

 

Both my local parish church and the one where I work have new young adult attenders.  Thing in our Mission Action Plans isn’t what has attracted them.  They have simply pitching up.  In some cases, at least for now, some of them are staying.

I am sure we can overhype it, not least because we’d dearly love to replace the narrative of terminal decline with that of what is being called ‘a quiet revival’, but something low key is going on.  It is a phenomenon being noticed and commented upon elsewhere. 

Post Covid, some of those in a serious generation explore on-line.  It appears that some of them are then seeking out places where they might expect to find a deep tradition being lived out. 

The Bible Society has done some research.  A fresh thought came to me listening in on one of their webinars.  My thought isn’t either a serious analysis nor a theory based on such.  It is more like a parable.

I used too frequently to make a poor joke.  It was about things like the Sunday School and school collective worship work to which I and others were giving significant time.  ‘It is like a vaccination,’ I would say, ‘a small harmless dose given to children now, designed to prevent them catching the real thing later in life’.

This seriously undervalued and insulted the dedication and the quality of work of many.  It also  ignored those whose Christian life was to develop and grow from such beginnings.  But any joke (however bad) depends on there being a tiny element of truth which people recognise.

My fresh thought is now this.  Young adults come from an unvaccinated generation, or at least from places where the level of vaccination has fallen sufficiently low for there to be a danger of pockets where the disease does break out.

The church has existed where the Christian disease is infectious and endemic.  It has also existed where wide spread vaccination has domesticated it to a relatively harmless level.  What we hadn’t expected to see is outbreaks among a new unvaccinated generation.

It isn’t that many people had ceased to enquire.  Everything from the Catholic Rite for the Christian Initiation of Adults to the evangelical Alpha Course have been honed and made instantly available in response to this.  Middle of the road Anglican enquirers material does of course exist as well.

But I certainly don’t remember in forty years the steady trickle of such explorers simply turning up, perhaps even expecting us to be more articulate about and more transformed by the Gospel than we sometimes are.

I found a rather good (print size, notes, lay out) copy of St Matthew’s Gospel which I gave to one of them who asked for a Bible the other day.  He wasn’t sure that I’d understood his request because even school Religious Education  had not equipped him to recognise this to be (an accessible) part of the Bible.

Meanwhile, I’ve just noticed the two FP plaques (one on a house in Newport and one on a house in Danesgate).  They are obviously a pair, and there may be others around Lincoln.  They mark the distance to a Fire Plug – literally a bung in a hole in what was then a new water main. 

Presumably the main text (FP, Ft, In) is wrought, while the figures giving the actual distance in feet and inches had been less surely attached and had now fallen off

A new stage of life

 

Each Blog post obviously simply involves selecting an image and preparing a text.  Not in itself the most demanding thing in the middle of full-time work.  Something I did on average a couple of times a week over sixteen years. 

But it has proved surprisingly difficult to fit it into the ‘time off’ from a half-time job over the last eighteen months.  So much so that productivity has ceased. 

I’ve missed thinking through some of the things which strike me.  Even more, I have missed being able to return to the record of them.  This has always been more a notebook for myself than a newsletter for any others who might happen to look over my shoulder.

What is now my eighteen month licence as a priest supporting Grimsby Minster parish lasts until the end of this month, and the newly appointed full-time Vicar will come into post in the next few weeks.  It remains to be seen whether the old blogging pattern will resume after that. 

This actual post only comes because yesterday evening the impending storm led to the cancellation of my train north.  I now have three clear days when I was to be away to visit friends in Northumberland.

The carefully managed dislocation between thirty-seven years of stipendiary ministry and whatever priestly ministry was to follow was well aided by a compulsory gap of six months without a licence or any permission to officiate at all.

I thought I saw the point that those of us whose only experience of church membership over many years had been to have a measure of control, even when the ‘control’ is that of promoting collaboration.  We needed to get used to having no role at all before something quite different and supportive could have any chance of emerging.

Being called back for eighteen months into a role involving a level of strategic leadership has rather wrecked that, and I suspect that the dislocation will be harder a second time around.

I think I am beginning to see a deeper point.  Habitual delivery of ministry can be at the cost of the development of personal discipleship.  However much one guards against it, the obvious example is too often asking not so much ‘how do this Sunday’s readings cut into me?’ as ‘what shall I say about them?’. 

This isn’t just personal.  I’ve long been aware of the dangers involved in having to focus on the viability and growth of the church (business plan, fabric financing, mission statement, essential safeguarding) at the cost of, well, kingdom-seeking.  This just seems so much acute in the modern church.

The weighed down pilgrim is from John Bunyan’s grave visited last month.  The burden (which wasn't the reason to choose the image) did fall off.