Peter Mullins' Blog

Renew

2012-03-05T11:22:00.001Z

The new Bishop of Lincoln is taking two initiatives. One is to review the central services and costs of the diocese; I’d first heard about this from a couple of people on the diocesan staff concerned about their jobs, and it has now been formally announced in the most recent mailing to clergy. The other is to have a programme to deepen discipleship, for which there will be major ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ events in the Cathedral; I’d first heard this referred to by a couple of people active at deanery level, and I’m sure an announcement and programme will be coming to us in due course.

The Bishop spoke about these two things at the Cathedral Council last week. He is aware of good heart and faithfulness in the diocese, but also of a rate of decline in attendance and a rate of financial giving which do not compare well with other dioceses. Part of the result of his review may be to liberate some money to be spent in parishes rather than at the centre. Part of the result of the discipleship initiative may be things ranging from increased giving to more vocation.

This all seems very worthwhile, although I wonder whether these things take sufficient notice of what I think of as the demographic unravelling of our present patterns of operation; the decline which is becoming increasingly visible is not so much people ceasing to attend and give as the coming home to roost of the sharply different rates of recruitment and Christian formation of the people born in the 1920s-50s compared with those born in the 1960s-90s, something about which I have posted before.

On the surface a review of central services and costs makes a lot of sense. The 2012 diocesan budget indicates that just short of 40% of expenditure (£3.8 million) is in these areas while just over 60% (£5.9 million) is in the local deployment of parish priests. But it is not quite as simple as that. Over a third of central expenditure (£1.4 million) is on deploying Curates in training posts in parishes and in deploying ‘sector ministers’ such as Industrial Chaplains in local areas. And a further £0.8 million is our payments to meet fixed national costs, over half of which is for training clergy. If the review was to result in a cut of one third in the remaining £1.6 million of central expenditure that would only free up enough money to deploy 0.75 of an extra clergy post in this deanery (whose budget meets 6% of central costs), which would be welcome but actually quite marginal in a process which has halved the number of filled posts within ten years from about 16 to 8.

And on the surface a systematic readdressing of our discipleship would also be very fruitful; a Catholic member of the Cathedral Council spoke about the impact of the Renew programme when she lived in the diocese of Arundel and Brighton a number of years ago. I am reminded of the Recovering Confidence and Missionary Congregation ideas which were fresh when I was on the diocesan staff fifteen years ago and about which I’ve posted from time to time: taking one’s eyes off the immediate planning and retrenchment to focus on deepening our Christian distinctiveness and engagement. This level of faithfulness and renewal of dependance on God is probably the only way to open up new confidence, mission and possibilities, but perhaps not if in our heart of hearts we go into it simply hoping it will be a magic wand to preserve our present failing structures.

The pile of shopping at the back of St Michael’s yesterday was an impressive response by people in our churches to an appeal the previous Sunday to help restock the North East Lincolnshire churches' Community Larder which had been emptied by the distribution of 79 different gifts to those in emergency need during January and February.

Village websites

2012-02-27T14:56:00.001Z

Bradley village has a new website established by the Parish Council. It is at http://www.bradleyvillage.co.uk/ and quite apart from anything else, opens with a beautiful photo of St George’s. It has put up historic information based mainly on the material I put together for it and posted here a short while ago. It has also put up some news from the church for February for which I am grateful. It did put up information about activities at Bradley pitches on the edge of the village, but has now taken this down again, I guess because members of the Parish Council are very unhappy about the way this facility has been allowed to develop and be used and therefore don’t want to give it publicity. I’ve tried at various times to encourage those in the village who take different sides in this dispute to be generous in relating to those with whom they disagree so sharply, but I’m not sure such intervention has been welcome, and it is sad that this dispute has also led to different people leaving the Parish Council at different stages. Personally I shall also be sad if the new website doesn’t become home to open information about all activities in or on the edge of the village whether originating from church, Parish Council, pitches or anywhere else, but I will have to be sensitive with those who don’t agree with me about that.

There is another Parish Council at the other end of our ecclesiatical parish, and the Great Coates Village Council also has a well established website at http://www.greatcoatespc.com/ (through which information about St Nicolas’ can be accessed by clicking on the electronic version of the village newsletter). Sadly, exactly the same pattern of internal disputes, and excatly the same pattern of some members leaving the Village Council, is going on here; the issue is whether or not the Council should take a substantial loan to build a new Village Hall. I haven’t been able to engage here because I’d look like an interested party since the proposal does spike the guns a bit of our ambition to develop St Nicolas’ to meet some of the relevant needs. The opening page of the website has a link to the results of a formal Parish Poll in which 40% of the registered voters turned out to vote 87 to 377 against the proposal; there is what could be misunderstood as a disingenuous reference to the turn out at the last parliamentary election (63%) rather than local authority election (33% in the relevant Ward).

I took the photo this morning in Great Coates churchyard. The crosses mark the graves of Canon Quirk (further away) and Canon Barber (nearer) who between them were Rectors of Great Coates between 1892 and 1954. Quirk’s immediate predecessors were non-resident, and Barber’s immediate successors were also incumbents of Aylesby, so their sixty-two years was a brief high point in the ideal of committed long-term residence in a single small community. They were both highly respected and probably much better than me at judging how to help villagers relate to each other well, although last week I did visit a parishioner who is more than a hundred years old who recalled Mrs Quirk’s negative reaction to being refused a little girl’s curtsey at some point in the 1920s.

Half Term walk

2012-02-20T09:49:00.000Z

Hermit Crab Poetry

2012-02-13T10:18:00.000Z

Poetry translation requires taking forward not just the content but also the form of the original - in the same way that the body of many a creature is just a lot of rotting mush if it does not have its exoskeleton.

This was the case put by the poet Ian Crockatt in a lecture at Nottingham University which I went over for last week. He is working at a much more professional level than me on the poems of Earl Rognvald in the Orkenyinga Saga, and he shared some striking examples of versions which he has produced which reproduced the same skaldic form as the originals (right down to the place and nature of rhymes and half-rhymes in alternate lines); I'll be glad when some are in the public domain to explore further here.

Nevertheless, it was hermit crabs I thought about on my way home. This may just be a defensive reaction, a self justification for the more amateur attempts I have made to give the poems both new words (not the Icelandic originals) and new structures (not the skaldic originals, which I admit would have been a much more difficult task). It seemed to me that to take new language and to borrow a structure / shell from somewhere else might be equally legitimate things to do.

The first of Rognvald’s poems in the Saga is the Grimsby poem which was the first I attempted to translate (and which I posted on 11th September):

We’d wasted five weeks waiting,
our feet festering in filth.
mired in mud in the middle
of Grimsby, grimly grounded.

Now, let loose, we laugh aloud
on the gulls’ moor’s mounds, mounted
on elk-back, bounding breakers,
our bow’s beak set on Bergen.

This has seven beats to each of the eight lines (rather than the skaldic six beats), and where there are internal rhymes they are accidental products of a very English verse approach to alliteration (rather than any deliberate use of the skaldic pattern). And none of the three later poems I posted on 29th December follow even this form - only one even has eight lines - so are several steps further away from the skaldic form.

He has made me think. Perhaps the very elusive quality for which I look is not content (although a quite accurate correspondence to the original seems important), nor form (although a poetic structure which means the poem can be proclaimed aloud seems important), but character (catching something of what the original might have been meant to make one feel).

In this case, the original has the word megingrimmar (which the critical edition gives as mightily grim) in the second line and meginkaliga (mightily merry) in the sixth, so I’d venture that one essential feature of any new version must be the transition from being depressingly stuck to being joyfully free. If so, even a quite prosaic translation which captures this might be a good poetic translation. And even a skilled skaldic form which doesn’t convey this (perhaps because the search for rhyming words has allowed different pictures to infiltrate) might not be. At least, that is where I’ve got to at the moment.

Advert appears

2012-02-06T09:26:00.002Z

The absurdity of many adverts for clergy posts was pointed out to me a long while ago by someone who suggested the simple stratagem of mentally reversing the redundant phrases to reveal things like lazy priest, with a poor track record, a tentative hold on faith, and an marked indifference to both young and old, sought for a contracting and unsupportive parish in an unattractive part of the country.

We had hoped that our own suggestion of The parish is waiting to explore with appropriate applicants the gifts and vocation they can bring that will complement and surprise its well established ‘Shared Ministry Team’ would strike a different note, not rule out a good candidate who didn’t happen to fit a detailed person spec we'd prepared, and place us and any candidate in a genuinely vocational discernment process.

But necessary and important consultative processes meant that, somewhere between the Bishop’s desk, the diocesan communication department and the Hospice’s HR department, this got turned into The well established Shared Ministry Team in West Grimsby collaboratively serves a number of diverse communities... a Team Ministry open to compliment and be surprised by the gifts and vocation which the person appointed will bring which, among other things, manages to edit out the discernment idea.

We were offered this on a ‘take it or leave it’ basis (‘the advert is about to appear but we could pull it altogether if you don’t like it’) and the only response a Churchwarden was able to slip in included pointing out the spelling mistake. Meanwhile, the diocesan communication department (which, it turned out, hadn’t seen the advert earlier either) did suggest the advert be pulled, and offered a rewrite (rightly retaining the Hospice’s preferred style) for consultation.

This appeared to give us an opportunity to respond, which included me pointing out again the spelling mistake and championing our own choice of words about what we would like to explore with candidates. The re-drafted advert then appeared on Friday exactly in the form in which it had been sent out for consultation without a single amendment. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

My wife encouraged me to do the first but conjuring up a picture of affirmation-starved candidates coming forward on the basis that we had promised to compliment them on their gifts. But I’m afraid I did the second faced with the truth that things have moved in the diocese to the point where a Team Rector can have no influence over the accuracy of, or wording about the parish in, an advert for a colleague. I am only grateful that I stood back from being Rural Dean eighteen months ago so only now having to encounter this sort of truth on a more occasional basis.

Anyway, the advert is out there, and, as the Bishop pointed out to one of our Churchwardens, those attracted by the Hospice half of the post will learn where the parish is coming from in relation to the other half when they receive the background papers about the job. No potential applicant worth his or her salt (to return to my opening paragraph) should take the exact wording of any advert too seriously - and so perhaps I should be more relaxed about it as well.

Meanwhile, I took the picture last week in the open porch at the front of the empty Vicarage concerned.

The undeserving poor

2012-01-30T14:06:00.000Z

Clergy have strikingly more liberal views about the causes of poverty than members of their congregations. And the views of churchgoers don’t differ markedly from those of non-churchgoers.

The national British Social Attitudes Survey gathered information from 3500 people, 500 of whom identified themselves as at least monthly churchgoers. The Church Urban Fund and Church Action on Poverty then asked identical questions of 209 clergy at their periodic deanery ‘chapter’ meetings - and last week they sent out spam to our e-mail addresses to tell us about this.

Three quarters of the clergy (74%) thought poverty was attributable to injustice in society, but only a fifth of churchgoers (22%) did so, not that much different from non-churchgoers (20%). 1% of clergy (that would be two of those at the meetings) agreed that laziness or lack of willpower was a cause, something a quarter of churchgoers (23%) and non-churchgoers (27%) thought it was.

Clergy were half as likely (16%) as either churchgoers or non-churchgoers (both 38%) to say poverty was an inevitable part of modern life. Clergy were twice as likely (78%) to think there was ‘quite a lot of child poverty’ (the Government's own figures suggest four million children) than churchgoers (37%), whose perception is very similar to non-churchgoers (38%).

So what should I type?

This vindicates the policy of having parish priests living in each community and having their antennae out among the most vulnerable around them. But it is pretty damning about the ways in which we share insights with and help the Gospel form the consciences of those in our congregations.

Or

This challenges the policy of having stipendiary clergy who don’t have to earn a living and become detached from the objective realities which are self evident to their congregations and parishioners doing business in the real world. And it is good that our naivety washes over most of those to whom we preach.

Or

I’d better not let me kid myself into being self congratulatory: far from my beliefs, values and behaviour about most things being so much more Gospel-sourced than even those in our congregations, most of what I think and do is almost indistinguishable from the norms in the community around me.

Or

A sample of 209, especially collected in a context in which peers were present, is a very poor base from which to draw any conclusions.

Meanwhile, North East Lincolnshire Council is working along local roads pruning back the trees, as these two pictures at the gateway to St Michael’s (taken two days apart last week) show.

Obvious ploys

2012-01-23T12:37:00.000Z

Radio Humberside’s presenters doesn’t appear to be happy if their interviews fail to include a little twist - it can certainly makes them more interesting but I suspect they sometimes deceive themselves into thinking it demonstrates more journalistic insight and probing than it really does.

Last time I appeared on its Sunday morning programme it was to talk about the appeal for a new heating system in St Nicolas’. I’d got across the few prepared sentences to carry the message I wanted (they aren’t the only ones who labour their way through the predictable ploys in these interviews) when the presenter finished by asking me what I was giving myself. He obviously thought this was the killer question, and I don’t think he had the first idea what a proportion of the regular and special giving particularly in some small churches actually comes from the hidden pledges and gifts by clergy and their families which they do not trumpet.

So, yesterday, I wasn’t surprised when an interview about the previous day's celebration of the ‘faith in action’ of the North East Lincolnshire churches finished with what the interviewer may have thought was an equally incisive question but which probably showed that he didn’t think listeners would really believe the churches display faith in action. He asked ‘But how easy is that relationship between church and community to keep the church up to date with what is going on, to keep it in touch with the community and what it needs?’. ‘Doesn’t everything I’ve just said answer that question?’ was the answer I’m grateful to have had the restraint not to give.

The annual Week of Prayer for Christian Unity event was a whole market inside Grimsby Minster with at least a dozen stalls each supplied by one of the church-sponsored organisations in Grimsby or near by which is responding to the needs of the community around us. From Harbour Place (the initiative of one Catholic nun years ago still feeding at least thirty homeless people every day) to the Rock Foundation (the initiative of an independent church recently to provide worthwhile activities and work for those with learning difficulties) it would appear there is quite a lot of evidence that we do have our fingers on the pulse of the changing and pressing needs of the community.

To be fair, those of us on the Executive of Churches Together put on the event because we were not sure people in our churches fully appreciated the cumulative impact on our community numerous such organisations are making. We invited along the new Bishop of Lincoln and the new Chairman of the Methodist District, along with one of the Catholic Vicars General and a senior independent church representative, to give messages of encouragement (and to be impressed by what we are doing - our ploy and motivation being as transparent as that of any Radio presenter), and the picture is of the Bishop speaking at the event.

St Nicolas' South Aisle

2012-01-16T12:52:00.001Z

This is the extent to which the south aisle of St Nicolas’ (on the right) has moved away from the tower (on the left) made visible again last week when the recent failed repair was scrapped out by an investigating engineer. We don’t know how much of this movement is recent - he could detect at least two earlier in-fill repairs which might indicate that this is a very old and/or a very gradual shift, but he has placed lots of measuring points round the area to monitor whether there is any movement over the next few months. The outward angle of the south wall, and evidence of vertical cracking at the naturally weak point roughly level with the bottom of the windows (again, some of which show signs of earlier repair), are also indications of the shift which has been going on over some time.

Meanwhile his attempt to dig down to foundation level to see if there is anything going on there failed when it hit this concrete apron round the building (a twentieth century drainage channel - we can't work out why it continues underground here). He’d like to get a digger in to do more investigation if his monitoring does show continued recent movement. In these circumstances he would also like to investigate inside where the south aisle roof beams meet the main body of the church to make sure they haven’t been pulled out so far that they might cease to provide support. Our hope is that neither of these further investigations will prove necessary.

A new Team Vicar?

2012-01-09T14:46:00.000Z

We don’t know what we are looking for in a new colleague. This is a deliberate step. Being too sure of what we want may limit who will apply. Apart from anything else, this is likely to be dangerous as there are not usually many applicants for jobs in this area. We’d quite like a surprise, and pray that it will be a God-given one.

So the Bishop may be about to advertise the post (half Chaplain at the local Hospice and half Vicar in this Team Ministry) left vacant when the Revd Terrie Stott left last year.

The draft text of an advert which may appear soon says:

The parish is waiting to explore with appropriate applicants the gifts and vocation they can bring that will complement and surprise its well established ‘Shared Ministry Team’.

The draft text of the background papers for applicants says:

We’ve carefully decided to take the risk of not to over define what we are looking for but wait to see where God may be moving. We’d like to find out what potential applicants for the half-time Hospice post have to offer, and how these might add to or complement what we already have. The gifts and vocation of the person appointed will determine the post.

Meanwhile, the accidentally artistic photo was really an attempt to capture something of the red sun falling through a plain window in St Nicolas’ last week.

Looking both ways

2012-01-02T12:38:00.001Z

Pictures of Janus inspired the small group which gathered in St Michael's for the Last Saturday Thing on New Year's Eve to produce our own images of looking both back and forward, and in the dim lighting for our prayers at the end the processional cross appeared to be doing its best to join in. By then I'd adapted my trite title for the evening ('Old Year Sorrow, New Year Hope') for us to have mixed views and mixed prayers about both past and future.

Poetry progress

2011-12-29T10:46:00.001Z

David Overton, a local musician, has set my words from the Orumulum (posted here on 6th January 2010) as an anthem, which the choir at Grimsby Minister sang for the first time at a mid-week Evensong before Christmas. It has a lovely mediaeval feeling lilt to it. David’s father was Organist at St Michael’s for many years and I remember visiting him in his Abbeyfield House room soon after I arrived here. David’s own credits include arranging music for James Galway, and he is himself a member of the Minster’s choir.

Meanwhile, I have got about half way through my project of re-telling the three dozen or so poems of Earl Rognvaldr from the Orkneyinga Saga (begun with the Grimsby poem posted here on 11th September 2011).

For example, Prof Judith Jesch’s literal “Here I’ve raised a high cairn to a strong minded ghost in dark Dollsteinshola; in this way I look for rings - I do not know who among the pushers of wave-skis [a kenning for sailors] will go later the long and ugly way, the route across the broad lake” has become

We pile up stones to mask our fear

and keep the cave’s strong ghouls away
who in the deep of Doll’s dark hole
maintain their grip on rings of gold.

We pile up stones to mark our feat:
perhaps some men will skim the sea
and then on this our awful route
will find our cairn already built.

Her “I hang a snake of the bridge of the hawk [a kenning for arm-ring built on a kenning for arm] made round by the hammer on the gallows of the tongs [another kenning for arm]; we reveal the drink of Grimnir of hanged ones [a kenning for poetry built on a kenning for Odin] - The fir-tree of the gleaming-voice of the Gautar of the cave [a kenning for women built on a kenning for gold built in turn on a kenning for giants] has gladdened me so much that I play with my hollows of the backward-bending feller of the lagoon [a kenning for oar built on a kenning for hand]” has become

Hands which swung felled-trees through water
stroke the gold that snakes in loops
where the hunter’s hawk last rested,
stroke the gold once executed
by such hammer wielding hands.

Drink with me, great God of all fate,
sing of one tree-tall-slender,
sing of her bright treasure-bearing,
delight with me at all her splendour,
sing, and to her beauty drink.

And her “Einarr said that he wished to entertain none of the followers of Rognvald except the jarl himself; the roaring sea of Gauter [a kenning for poetry] comes to my palate – I know that [the one] not amiable to men overturned his promises; I went in where the fires of Yggr [a kenning for swords] burned late in the evening” has become

In my speech the storm surge sings
of Einar set to lure me in
at whose farm the forge fire flames
with burning swords and twisting claims.

History of Bradley

2011-12-22T12:28:00.002Z

A little while ago, I did a sheet for St George's with a paragraph for every century for the last thousand years. This week the Chair of the Parish Council asked whether I had anything similar for the village itself. I didn't realsie how much I'd picked up over the last twelve years, but, with a little help from books on my shelves and the obvious places on the web, I was able to come up with the following initial draft. I took the picture is the churchyard cross this morning.

Before 1000. We don’t know when the first settlement took place here, but the name (perhaps‘broad wood’ or ‘wide clearing’) dates from before the Vikings came and established or took over a port at ‘Grim’s by’.

1000s. In the Domesday Book, Laceby (apparently the Manor centre), Bradley and Scartho are listed together. Anglo-Saxon Swein, Erik and Tosti held most land, one of the Conqueror’s brother’s had taken some, and nearly a hundred others (‘villans, bordars and sokemen’) had tiny bits. The Manor had some interests in Grimsby, Clee and the Clee thorpes.

1100s. The name Bradley was used as the name of the meeting-place for a wider ‘wapentake’ (roughly a ‘weapon take’ - the administrative sub-division of the shire from which things like military service or tax could be required). It is just possible that the stump of a mediaeval cross in the grounds of the present Manor house is associated with this.

1200s. Ralph of Bradley was paid for materials for building the King’s castle in Grimsby, that he later killed a man in Grimsby, and that his son Geoffrey was at the siege of Lincoln. (References in the Gillett History of Grimsby.)

1300s. It is likley that the Black Death dramatically reduced the population of the parish, and there was evidence of an old village site in the fields south of the present Manor site.

1400s. The Borough of Grimsby owning the Manor of Bradley, on which Lord Wells had claims, and which the Wright family was to ‘wrest from them’. (References in the Gillett History of Grimsby.)

1500s. There is no real evidence for the well loved story that Henry VIII hunted boar in Bradley Woods when he stayed at Thornton Abbey in the 1540s. From the 1580s a James Wright was systematically buying up the Manor and lands (at that time divided into nine parts), some of it known as “Lord Well’s Manor”.

1600s. Hustwaite Wright buys a further two portion of the Manor in 1626. He sells the whole Manor to Richard Nelthorpe in 1633, and both are held criminally responsible for depopulating the village soon afterwards. The Nelthorpes (of Scawby) later acquire things like the woods and the patronage of the church, and the family owned the land for nearly three hundred years. The present Manor House is built in the 1680s (although it contains some features of an earlier house).

1700s. The land was formally ‘enclosed’ (parcelled together into fields suitable for modern agriculture) at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but only eleven families lived in the parish in the 1720s. (References in Ellis & Crowther’s Humber Perspectives.)

1800s. Modern census returns finally bring all the villagers to light. In 1851 there are nineteen houses (two uninhabited). Apart from five farmers (William Phillipson had most land, Samuel Gooseman lived at the Manor, and there was Robert Richardson and both a John Kirk and a Thomas Kirk) and a number of agricultural labourers, the only other ‘heads of household’ are the Rector (ecclesiastical reform had just led to the building of a new Rectory for a resident parson in 1849) and a Grocer.

1900s. In 1914 the Nelthorpes sold their 1 500 acre Bradley estate for £35 500; the Borough Grimsby bought what is now Bradley Playing Fields (at that time it wanted the land for a future cemetery) and Bradley Woods (for public use). First residential developments were at ‘Bradley Hollow’ (along Laceby Road) and this part of the parish (along with the whole of the parishes of Little Coates and Scartho) became part of the Borough of Grimsby in the 1920s. Most of the sixty or so houses in the remaining village have been built since then - even in the 1940s the arrow on the road pointing ‘to the village’ on a plan of the churchyard points south, and the suburban developments along Bradley Road and the first part of Church Lane are post-War.

A Very Heavy Christmas

2011-12-19T14:12:00.000Z

She isn’t actually biting Rudolph’s head off. This is the answer I had already prepared should this publicity shot have fallen into the hands of the less sympathetic parts of the media.

The picture is of our Curate. She is possibly the first one the parish has had who is a Heavy Metal fan. She also did some writing while training for ordination about the unexpectedly large number of similarities between Christian community and Heavy Metal festival communities. This means she was in her element when a different sort of Carol Service was suggested for Grimsby.

A new active leader of the local YMCA has been gathering an ecumenical group to plan engagement activities with young people in the town for a little while. It was from a member of this group that the suggestion of the Carol service emerged. Something like three hundred people were in the Minster at the weekend for A Very Heavy Christmas, with traditional carols rendered loudly by a live band, along with video clips, and George’s sermon, so they are clearly onto something. There should be some of it up on You Tube soon.

We are seconding George one day a week to provide some chaplaincy at the local College of FE and HE, so I’d hoped the service and the chaplaincy would be to able to feed off each other fruitfully. I’ve also been encouraging her to take time out of the parish to work alongside those further away who are pioneering Heavy Metal ‘alternative worship’ and those who have been providing chaplaincy at some festivals.

Drought and salt

2011-12-12T14:25:00.000Z

The worst news is that there is the prospect of drought in south-western Zimbabwe. An e-mail yesterday from the parish we support there has this stark message. We have not received any significant rains and so we have not planted anything. Usually by this time of the year the maize crop should have grown up to 30 centimeters but this season there is absolute nothing. We hope the rains will come but now it seems like there is going to be a devastating drought. We continue to pray for the rains.

Meanwhile, these deposits are appearing at an extraordinary rate on what were damp patches on the inside walls of St Michael’s. The encouraging suggestion (I hope it is true) is that, as the walls dry out following our recent work on the roof above them, these are salts which have until now been held in solution in the wall.

Millionaires wanted

2011-12-05T11:29:00.001Z

A ‘Secret Millionaire’ handed over £50 000 or so in Grimsby’s East Marsh area on the television last night; he was rightly impressed with quality of the individuals behind projects to support families with disabled children (which meets and was filmed in the school in which my wife teaches), to raise money for machinery to help those who suffer asthma (in memory of a child who died from an asthma attack), and to equip ‘difficult to reach’ young people in motor repair skills.

The East Marsh ‘scores’ as one of the most deprived Wards in the country, and the church based Shalom Youth project has been mentioned on this Blog before. Nevertheless it (and Grimsby as a whole) looks a great deal better than the backdrops the documentary makers chose for much of the programme on one disused part of the docks and a street boarded up ahead of regeneration redevelopment.

For me the most telling moment was when the leader of the Motor Project reacted with surprise to the cheque he was offered saying ‘This sort of thing doesn’t happen to us - usually funders come to look around, say how impressed they are, and we never hear from them again’.

I’m involved with a media project which has an outstanding record in engaging young people ‘not in employment education or training’ across the whole of North East Lincolnshire which has had a very similar experience, and I was briefing one of the Council’s Cabinet members about exactly this last week, so there is no surprise that the remark stood out for me.

I told her that it seems to me that, for voluntary groups, the level of professional application making, the time available to wait for responses and funding rounds, and the ability to respond to requests for detailed accountability thereafter, means that the smallest probably cannot access any Big Society related funding at all, the small invest a quite disproportionate amount of energy in doing so, only the biggest manage to do so by employing the specialist staff needed to do it well and systematically, and each stumbles from uncertainty about the future to uncertainty about the future.

On Friday the Council had a day ‘beginning a conversation’ about how it works with the voluntary sector in a rapidly changing climate (a climate which will include further major local cuts to come). This seems a good thing - although I’d rather hoped that the Council’s working with the local Voluntary Action organisation and its working through the Local Strategic Partnership might have made it think that a conversation was already under way. Our new Area Dean and the project worker at Grimsby Minster were both due to have been there, and I await with interest feed back from them to the local churches.

Meanwhile, the diocese has helpfully investigated how it might reconnect water just to the outside loo and external tap at St Nicolas’ Vicarage and I’ve just heard from that it has agreed to do so; such little steps bring delight enough even without a sufficient supply of spare secret millionaires.

Remembrance wreathes

2011-11-29T15:22:00.001Z

We are all finding Remembrance better attended and better observed. At one time observations had shifted exclusively to the Sunday, and it might have been assumed that even this would fade as those with direct memories of the two World Wars died off. Now silence is being observed mid-week again, and things such as the repatriation of those killed in places such as Afghanistan is persistent in our consciousnesses.

At Great Coates we had a service at the village War Memorial for the first time in a number of years. I’d asked about this when I arrived twelve years ago and was told that those involved in the British Legion and in other ways joined in the larger commemorations in the centre of Grimsby so there was no call for a service in the village. Twelve years on and a particular request for this observation comes in, St Nicolas’ shifts its service an hour earlier to make way, and we find local radio wanting to do an interview, quite a number extra people attending what became the 9.30 a.m. service, and perhaps as many as a hundred people of all ages at the War Memorial at 11.00 a.m.

This week the wreathes laid then were moved from the private land by the War Memorial into the churchyard. The position was chosen because it is close to a number of graves associated with the World Wars - one of two standard Commonwealth War Grave Commission stones, commemorating Ernest Reeve who died as a result of the Second World War, can be seen at the back centre of the picture. The large memorial at the front is also a First World War war grave and I’ve just discovered (prompted by Rod Collins website) that the Herbert Lewis buried there died in the Lawn mental institution in Lincoln which makes me wonder whether he was a victim of shell shock.

I’d actually put together some basic information about all those named on the War Memorial or buried in the churchyard. The village magazine reproduced this and an updated copy of it is left out in church. I am gradually amending this as fresh information, such as that about Herbert Lewis, comes in.

St Nicolas' steps

2011-11-24T15:09:00.001Z

Tree surgeons have been in St Nicolas’ churchyard for the last three days and have finally tidied up branches and whole trees in which dead wood had gradually accumulated or which had become dangerous last winter or which threatened to interfere with neighbours roofs. With this, and with the support of two volunteers (one long standing from Great Coates village, and one recruited this year through a local volunteering scheme), we have also been able to put the churchyard to bed for the winter in a safer and tidier manner than we might have hoped.

But, with two steps forward, there are also two steps backwards. The diocese has drained down the water in the empty Vicarage next door as required by its insurer to prevent burst pipes this winter suddenly depriving the church of the use a loo and an external tap. And the crack in the south aisle wall which we thought we’d put right earlier in the year has opened up again so we have had to get the Archdeacon’s permission to engage a structural engineer to make a more substantial investigation. Neither is that important in itself, but these sorts of things add to the slight sense the church has that the odds stack up against it.

Caedmon's cross

2011-11-21T15:52:00.001Z

I’ve been engaging with our Saturday evening alternative worship for the first time. This monthly event has been the baby in turn of different colleagues until now, but, as they have each moved on, it is something I'd like to try to build up myself. There were just eleven of us there: five adults and six children; six of St Michael’s stalwarts and five people for whom this is their one regular service. It was St Hilda’s Day, so we recreated the memorial to Caedmon (the lay brother in her community who wrote the first surviving hymn in English). This involved climbing round on a nine foot high memorial in the churchyard here to measure it and get the size of our reproduction right before working together at our own version of the Whitby monument. Then we sat around it first to eat and then to pray.

Dementia creativity

2011-11-14T07:52:00.001Z

Conducting worship in Homes for the Elderly has become a much harder and more subtle task in the last few years. This was the clear message when most of the lay people from this parish who are involved in this ministry had supper together here recently.

The feeling was that the costs involved means that increasingly only those with acute needs are admitted. The experience shared was that ten years ago the majority of more able attenders at worship might assist the minority who found participation more difficult for physical or mental reasons, but that today those who find it difficult to follow what is going on are in the majority. The creative responses evident included much less reliance on printed sheets to follow.

One of those involved has been assisting with recollection events: discussions alongside props with those with dementia of childhood and domestic life activities. One suggestion which emerged was that we should work with what people might in similar circumstances say about things such as the Sunday School which they attended.

I shared some of the things blogged here in the past about dementia, including the false moves of valuing people by their attractiveness or accomplishments. I had also picked up a further recent reference to the weakness of our sometimes instinctive defining of personhood by memory itself: it was pointed out that there is much we forget and much false memory which we create, so that even defining personhood by what those of us without dementia remember is in some ways mistaken.

Although I had thought that offering some training opportunities might be a result of our evening, those involved, alongside these sorts of reflections, were able to share a whole range of their own exploring and resources, and one has already come back since to talk about subtle changes in her approach at the most recent such service as a result.

Meanwhile, the picture is an indication that the cracking between the tower and south aisle at St Nicolas’ has not been resolved by the remedial work earlier this year as we had thought, so we have a structural engineer booked to come and do more extensive (and no doubt expensive) investigation soon.

Patron for fish filleters?

2011-11-11T10:36:00.001Z

St Raphael ought to be much better celebrated in Grimsby - something which had never occurred to me before. We are already a principal home to the skill of individual filleters as well as to huge amounts of fish processing. He is certainly everywhere in Cordoba, and usually with a fish close at hand (wonderfully grasped by the gills in the top picture) from which he is able to make healing ointment. Perhaps I’ll start a campaign; it is a pity our ‘St Michael’s’ isn’t one of those known as ‘St Michael and All Angels’ to give me a head start.

Donna Nook today

2011-11-09T16:08:00.001Z

The first seals in the annual breeding colony came ashore a couple of weeks ago; there is actually a splodge of afterbirth in the middle of the top picture. We learnt that the deep scars round the neck of the adult in the middle picture come from being entangled in a net ten years ago, and that she has been easily recognised returning to about the same spot on the beach almost every year since.

Meeting St Hugh

2011-11-07T07:38:00.000Z

Lincoln has its own ‘widow’s mite’ story. The Swineherd of Stow gave his penny towards St Hugh’s rebuilding of the Cathedral; Hugh had one of his palaces at Stow. So the life size figures high up on the two pinnacles of the west front are the swineherd (north) and the saint (south).

Last week I had the opportunity to go up and meet Hugh (and look across at the swineherd) as scaffolding is up there for the first time since the 1930s. The masons think he is a statue from the 1700s, last repaired in the previous scaffolding of the pinnacle in the 1870s. He seems to be in good enough condition not to require attention this time beyond multiple layers of protective lime washing.

Bishop John Brown

2011-11-05T16:12:00.000Z

We said farewell to Bishop John with strong Easter hymns this week. Few people really realised the stature of man living among them in his retirement in Cleethorpes, but then he was the last person to stand on stature.

Before I was born, he was serving in Jerusalem (there is something special about his having been ordained there) and becoming proficient in Arabic. Twenty-five years later, having served in Sudan and in Berkshire parishes, he was my Archdeacon (and may well have been the one at my ordination in Reading who read out the formal assurance I was a suitable candidate, but I don’t recall that sort of detail about the service).

Quite soon afterwards the Anglican Communion needed someone, ideally an Arabic speaker with rare diplomatic and leadership skills, to be Bishop of Cyprus and the Gulf, and it was on the then Archdeacon of Berkshire that they gratefully lit.

He served there for just eight years (1987-95), but those were the testing years of Terrie Waite’s captivity and release and of the Gulf War when the quality of our Bishop for the Arabian Peninsula was telling. At the thanksgiving service for his life this week people spoke of both his patient building up of the chaplaincies of the diocese and of his regular high-level encounters with the leaders of the countries across which they are scattered.

His knowledge of Arabic and local culture was crucial. He recalled one instance when he was aware of what was being said to him in Arabic (nothing less than a Muslim reflection on the theology of Martin Luther) was quite different to what the translator was attempting to express in English (not least because the translator misunderstood the subject to be Martin Luther King), and there must have been many others instances when his knowledge and careful attention was equally fruitful.

He was proud of being the subject of a fatwa - a formal religious opinion, patiently courted, which allowed Christian worship and the reopening after thirty years of Christ Church, Aden; it was for work in the clincic there that collections are being made in his memory.

He was a local lad who had sung in the choir at Old Clee, and his retiring back here was returning home (where, among other things, his elderly mother was still living), where he got stuck into bread and butter ministry without any pretensions (although, on feast days, in a spectacular pink cope); he often offering me as Rural Dean a range of Sundays when he simply hoped he might be quietly used.

A month ago, he called me over when he saw me pass the end of his cubicle in hospital. He was being given blood because people were alarmed at his low blood count; his cancer was clearly running away at that point. He was full of kindly enquiries and of understatements about his condition which he said he had been keeping quite. We heard that he had died when we were in Cordoba during Half Term, and the ancient Islamic art from there somehow makes an appropriate picture for this post.

The Mezquita, Cordoba

2011-11-02T07:41:00.000Z

Catching up

2011-10-21T20:13:00.000+01:00

I’ve been taking a bit of a rest from the internet; a productive fast which, among other things, has left more space to spend time with the poems in the Orkneyinga Saga. I don’t expect to be blogging again this month.

Among things I haven’t blogged about is having a Vicarage number listed in the phone book against not only the name of the Vicar and also the name of each of our three churches. Previously this has been provided for free. Now BT has written to say it will charge £167 a year if we want to continue - a little over £1 a week for each church name. I don’t think we’ll be doing that.

Then there is engagement with the local Hospice, providing some cover during the vacancy in the Chaplain’s post there. I was with a day group this week and was invited to stay for their relaxation exercise. We were taken through what was (of course) an entirely secular meditation a substantial part of which was attention to our breathing, and it was interesting to chat afterwards to the Complementary Therapist about what this appeared to have in common with some of the mediation and prayer technique of Buddhists and Christians.

And a trip to Lincoln for a Theological Society lecture on the Historical Jesus by Fr Joseph O’Hanlon. He made the point early that it is often observed that individuals’ reconstructions of the historical Jesus usually end up looking quite like themselves. He went on to dispute at length the pictures painted by a couple of other scholars, especially the Pope. He finished (answering the final question) by suggesting that we put aside the Gospels’ trial narratives as implausible and think instead that Jesus’ death was primarily the result of his disputes with other scholars and religious leaders.

The picture is another left over from Orkney in the summer.

Mary of the Cross

2011-10-05T08:03:00.000+01:00

Sweet Mary, distraught

distraught and keening,

keening at the death,

the death of her child,

her child once taunted

taunted now herself,
herself at the place,

the place wet with blood,
with blood which now stains,
now stains her tears red,
tears red on her breast,
her breast tight with grief,
with grief like none since,

none since, Mary sweet.

I’ve followed up my interest in the Orkneyinga Saga by splashed out on the first published volume of the critical edition of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages - it is Volume VII, published in 2007, and covers Poetry on Christian Subjects. This poem is my first go at writing or ‘translating’ something from it.

The original of the poem is verse 5 of the fourteenth century Heilagra Meyja Drapa (Poems on Holy Maidens) and the literal English rendering in the critical edition (by Prof Kirsten Wolf) preserves something of the way in which a version of the final word of each line is repeated at the beginning of the following line:

Sweet Mary, overcome with weeping
cried at the death of the son;
the conduct of the Jews mocked the woman;
the woman looked at the red cross.

The reddening stream of tears then flowed
and streamed down the mother;
the mother’s chest, tight with grief,

bore the grief like no one since.

Northern Progress

2011-10-02T16:17:00.000+01:00

Henry VIII never came to Grimsby. This may seem an unnecessary statement since few people would think about the topic at all let alone believe he might have done. But a local seventeenth century antiquarian (Gervaise Hollis MP) briefly said that the King did so as part of his great Northern Progress of 1541, and from this single reference alone (it seems) romantic speculation continues to wash around including persistent references which I hear to the King hunting boar in Bradley Woods in this parish (the very boar which are on Grimsby’s coat of arms).

We went to a local Civic Society lecture in the week when the idea of his visit was firmly squashed, although both a questioner at the end of the lecture and a reporter in the local paper a few days later continued to treat it as an open question, indication enough of how attractive the idea seems to be and how difficult it is to let go.

The court records are clear and are all that is needed. His party (the 51 year old King, his new 21 year old wife indulging in sexual indiscretions on the way which were to cost her her head within a few months, the half of the Privy Council not left in London, and about four thousand retainers and soldiers) crossed the Humber from Hull to Barrow Haven on 5th October, stayed three nights at Thornton Abbey, and then three nights at Kettleby Hall (near Brigg and Caistor, the home of the Tyrwhit family one member of which was part of his household), and then on to other local Lincolnshire gentry at South Carlton and Nocton (either side of Lincoln).

The culprit for spreading Hollis’ misapprehension that the King stayed in Grimsby seems to be a nineteenth century clergyman, the Revd George Oliver, whose Ye Byrd of Grym combines as reliable history as he could manage in his own voice with flights of fancy based on it in the voice of a raven - at least this is the lecturer’s interpretation of Ye Byrd of Grym, and I’d be fascinated to follow it through. The raven gives a substantial account of what the King’s (non-existent) visit would have been like, and later writers copied him establishing the myth with substantial circumstantial detail.

The King’s only Northern Progress appears to have been part of an abortive attempt to meet and make peace with the King of Scotland at York (James V, his nephew, didn’t turn up), and to demonstrate authority over the gentry who had been on the edge of the Lincolnshire Rising in 1536 (another member of the Tyrwhit family was one of them) and the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537.

His stay at Thornton intrigues me. The Abbey had been dissolved in 1539, put in trust with its former Prior, and re-established as a College for good works (with Dean and Prebendaries) perhaps in 1540 before his visit (the date on its seal) or in 1541 after his visit (the date on its Charter); the College, discussed in this Blog before, survived through his reign but was dissolved in 1547 as soon as his reign was over (when it was the Tyrwhit family which took the land).

What was it like staying at a recently dissolved Abbey with some of its former members? Was the King simply using a base for work (the Privy Council met each day he was there)? Did his stay help inspire, develop or secure the College foundation? Was it his personal interest which made him chose to visit (it certainly provided protection only as long as he lived)?

The picture was taken at some of my wife’s family graves in Aberdeenshire in August.

Oxburgh Hall

2011-09-29T07:53:00.000+01:00

A higher gift than grace

2011-09-24T11:13:00.000+01:00

‘A higher gift than grace’ is how Blessed John Henry Newman wrote about the incarnation (he puts the words into the mouths of angels in his poem The Dream of Gerontinus). This is how we sing of it when we use the relevant section of the poem as our hymn Praise to the holiest in the height. At least, most of us do.

At the licensing of our new Area Dean last week we sang instead ‘the highest gift of grace’. I heard the two Methodist Ministers who attended the service marvelling afterwards at the confidence of those willing to ‘correct’ Newman in this way. We suspected that the Fathers of the early Councils would have gone along with Newman's indication of the primacy of the physical incarnation over subsequent human experiences of grace, and anathematised a formulation which characterised the humanity of the Lord as if it had been conferred by grace however superlative its degree.

My books shelves and the internet haven’t proved sufficient tools to trace this one backwards. I find one evangelically edited hymn book already had 'the highest gift of grace' in 1982, so the amendment is not new and may well go back much further. I’m reminded that when Elgar set the long poem in 1900 many Anglican Cathedrals wouldn’t allow it to be sung or would only allow adapted versions of the text to be sung to avoid the Roman doctrines in it including that of purgatory, but I’d be surprised if this particular amendment goes back to those adaptions.

Several internet sources suggests a fear that Newman was really on about the Eucharist, which the context shows he patently was not. Certainly I see the official hymns books of the major Free Churches (Methodist and United Reformed) are happy to print what Newman wrote. Perhaps hymns for diocesan services are sourced from on-line hymnals the theological agenda of the editors of which the diocese hasn’t quite spotted.

The picture of the Lord with Mary and Martha is from Blankney Church and is one I took on a walk while on retreat at Metheringham recently.

Strange blessings

2011-09-21T15:42:00.000+01:00

... famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love...?

The other Orcadian poet was Edwin Muir (who had tutored George Mackay Brown), and I spent some of my time on Retreat with him. In the process, I rediscovered this restatement of one important feature of the endless debate about the ‘problem of suffering’; it is close to something I’ve thought it important to try to express but have always struggled to do so satisfactorily

The thought cannot be thrown around too cheaply near those most grief-striken, yet in the Queen’s message about the 9/11 attack the line was, I think, ‘grief is the price we pay for love’, and here Muir invites us in to something similar.

The poem is One foot in Eden; the other foot, of course, being in this world as it is, and the two are (as the Gospel parable suggests) totally entwined:

... strange the fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time’s handiwork by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown...
Evil and good stand thick around
In the fields of charity and sin...

The poetic invitation is to see not simply that the two cannot now be separated but that eliminating the source of one would eliminate the source of the other. So he ends

Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from those beclouded skies.

The picture was taken from Broch at Midhow on Rousay.

Scattering rose petals

2011-09-18T14:57:00.000+01:00

The Church Times is less acerbic than I am.

A questioner recently wrote:

Why are brides suddenly demanding that the bridesmaids precede rather than follow then down the aisle? Should it be allowed? Should the priest lead the bridesmaids, or follow the bridesmaids and lead the bride? I think the latter, but brides have (crossly) told me to go in front of the bridesmaids so as not to impede the congregation’s view of the dress!

Among the replies printed this week was mine:

If the questioner made so much of a fuss about his own status and place, no wonder the bride was cross. Why do we get requests for bridesmaids go first? For the same reason school balls are now called ‘proms’: this is how the Americans do it. Where should the priest be? What about waiting at the chancel step smiling and ready to tell the bride how wonderful that dress looks (even if it doesn't)?

But this is an edited version of what I actually wrote:

If the questioner made so much of a fuss about his own status and place, no wonder the bride was cross. Why do we get requests for bridesmaids go first? For the same reason school balls are now called ‘proms’ and schedule is often pronounced 'skedule': this is how the Americans do it. Where should the priest be? What about waiting at the chancel step smiling, and ready to tell the bride how wonderful that dress looks (even if it doesn't)? What about (just this once, as a penance for putting an exclamation mark after 'so as not to impede the congregation's view of the dress') walking backwards before her scattering rose petals at her feet?

The picture was taken as the Bishop and clergy emerged from Grimsby Minister after the licensing of the new Priest-in-Charge and Area Dean yesterday.

Retreat sonnet

2011-09-15T15:55:00.001+01:00

The Drawing Room, The Old Rectory, Metheringham
now the Community of St Francis’ Chapel

From throws of prayer, it seems ripples are born
which flow through bay window, retaining wall,
and wide expanse of leaf and twig strewn lawn,
to a strong circling boundary of tall trees
rippling in the light behind them, then borne
on to hints of a field, a path peopled
by those walking dogs or else come to mourn
at graves glimpsed beyond, and the setting sun.

The play of light dis-orientates, shorn
of the long grown coat of meaning found in
facing east, weaving something to be worn
facing west: the stone has moved behind us;
we are no longer looking for the dawn
but look across the waves the moving makes.

Kali's song

2011-09-11T09:49:00.000+01:00

We’d wasted five weeks waiting,
our feet festering in filth.
mired in mud in the middle
of Grimsby, grimly grounded.

Now, let loose, we laugh aloud
on the gulls’ moor’s mounds, mounted
on elk-back, bounding breakers,
our bow’s beak set on Bergen.

I’ve come up with this version of the earliest poem to mention Grimsby. It comes from the twelfth century Icelandic Orkneyinga Saga, the history of the Jarls of Orkney. We have been reading everything from this to the contemporary poetry of George Mackay Brown - we take our holidays that seriously! It was fun stumbling on a reference (albeit not a totally complimentary one) to our home town.

The original has what I learn are called ‘kennings’, almost crossword clues. So, instead of ‘sea’ we get something like‘the moor of the gulls’, and, instead of ‘boat’, something like ‘beaked elk’ or ‘prowed elk’. I’ve very kindly been offered part of the £163 critical edition of such poetry to check, and the author of the section has even invited me to a lecture on how to translate them in her department at Nottingham University next year.

The challenge is to have an appropriate level of alliteration without artificial diction, and the kennings without total obscurity. I’m quite pleased with it so far, but we’ll have to see what perspective the critical text and then the lecture have.

The first English version (from the nineteenth century) gave:

Unpleasantly we have been wading
in mud a weary five weeks
dirt we had plenty while we lay
in Grimsby harbour
but now on the moor of the seagulls
ride we oe’er the crest of the billows
gaily as the elk of the bowspirits
eastward plough its way to Bergen.

The Penguin Classics version is:

Five weeks we’d waded through wetness and filth,
mud wasn’t missing in the middle of Grimsby:
now our spirits are soaring as our fine ship skims,
its bow bounds, an elk of the billows, to Bergen.

The picture is pointed roughly at Bergen, but from the Brough of Deerness in Orkney.

Stuck back in

2011-09-08T10:07:00.000+01:00

The first get together of local clergy of the new term was more reflective and mutually supportive than these ‘Chapter’ gatherings sometimes are.

A well known alcoholic man has been imprisoned for breaking the terms of an ASBO which excluded him from the town centre. He was going to the Minster which knows how to deal with him without fuss and where he has traditionally found support. I presume the trouble he has caused for town centre businesses and visitors must have been substantial enough for people to have bothered putting an ASBO in place to begin with, but nevertheless it seems strange that nobody outside the church says publically that there is something wrong with this result.

It has been St Aidan’s turn to have a shock from the five-yearly architect’s inspection we are each required to have: half of the quarter of a million expenditure recommended is regarded as urgent. I’ve highlighted the parish here before: huge century-old building opposite the football ground two thirds of which was substantially developed across several new floors for community use in the 1970s or 80s at the centre of the often neglected but needy Sidney Sussex Ward. We kicked around the contacts, community funding and lottery possibilities which might exist even today for what is the only real facility in an area which has not had as much investment of this sort as others.

St John & Stephen’s, whose substantial youth work in the most deprived East Marsh Ward I’ve also highlighted here before, gained a diary item mention in the Guardian (which I haven’t been able to trace) about whether or not it is surprising that a place which does this work like none other should attract the level of police monitoring which it appears to do. We chatted about the way there had not been local looting; the church trusts that early attention to disaffected young people is an element in the non-development of gangs, and is not surprised that those arrested elsewhere usually have prior police records given how many of the responsible older young people who help here have something like this too.

The inscription is above a door in Stromness, and we enjoyed the confidence with which the carving began and the success in finally fitting it in.

Brough of Birsay

2011-09-05T10:04:00.000+01:00

Wideford Hill and Tomb

2011-09-02T19:19:00.006+01:00

Neolithic Orkney

2011-08-30T19:56:00.005+01:00

And it was the concentration of neolithic sites which was one of the highlights. Here is the dig going on at the Ring of Brodgar (free talks each day by one of the archaeologists involved; the large hall like building narrows to an apparently ceremonial fire place), a small house at Skara Brae (part of a coastal village village uncovered by a twentieth century storm; the domestic fire place at the centre and beds built into the walls), and the entrance to the Unstan tomb (one of many left unattended for tourists simply to let themselves into). This is without starting on Maeshoe (the entrance passage lit up by the setting winter solstice sun; I feel a Christmas sermon developing including 'to satisfy which instinct are we brought to church this Midnight?') and the neighbouring Barnhouse village and Stones of Stenness (between which the central fire place stones appear to have been moved).

Voles

2011-08-27T10:08:00.004+01:00

This vole run was pointed out to us by the Ranger at the neolithic Ring of Brodger. There is evidence that voles were present and eaten in neolithic Orkney, but there are none in the Shetlands. There are thus also vole predators such as hen harriers and short eared owls in Orkney but not Shetland. Unlike the voles, other animals such as fox and snake have not crossed the Pentland Firth, so Orkney also has many ground nesting birds.

Bethel

2011-08-24T14:19:00.006+01:00

Jacob named a place Beth-el (God’s house) because he’d had there his vision of angels moving on a ladder between heaven and earth and then God had spoken to him. ‘This is none other than the house of God,’ he said, ‘and this is the gate of heaven’. Thus many Chapels are called Bethels and many churches (the latest I noticed on our recent holiday in Orkney was St Magnus’ Cathedral, Kirkwall) have this text above their doors or in their porches. But it strikes me yet again reading the story at Matins for St Bartholomew’s Day this morning how wrong headed this is. Jacob is terrified when he wakes to think ‘surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it’, and, most crucially of all, the encounter with God came while sleeping out in the open air in a stony place. Surely the name or the text, if either is used in a church building at all, should be on the inside of the gate or somewhere similar where it can be read on the way out; there is a soemtimes terrifying challenge always to recognise the outside world as God's house. Meanwhile, the easily eroded local red and yellow sandstone with which St Magnus’ is built creates these effects around its main door.

Matinlight (revised)

2011-08-03T08:00:00.003+01:00

I've tightened up the poem so that it now reads:

On rare days, light falls slant though the east window
catching the plain north wall and playing with it:
the leaves of an ash tree almost brush the glass
so dapplings of colour take the breeze’s lead
and pools of liquid light baptise the lime-wash;
then I find that I’ve stopped piling on new words,
like those moments when a phrase in the Psalm
unexpectedly become translucent.

Meanwhile, Anglian Water was digging up the green outsie St Michael's yet again yesterday. The workmen told me that it was to do with a metre monitoring the flow of the main pipeline into town.

Whiteley Village's gain

2011-07-31T20:48:00.002+01:00

We announced this morning that my colleague Terrie Stott is on the move; she will have been a half-time Team Vicar with us for just two years, and I shall be sorry to see her go along with her insightful challenges about what we do and her creativity. She is to be Chaplain of Whiteley Village (near Cobham in Surrey), an experiment in retirement living created a century ago through the legacy of a department store owner; it is a single community where a huge fan of cottages sits alongside facilities like a nursing home. In many ways it is more like a College than anything else. One member of the congregation at St Michael’s this morning said she already knew lots about it - she’d often stayed there when her cousin’s husband was the Chaplain there in the 1980s.

There are two very striking things for me about Whiteley Village. One is that I remember discussions some ten years ago on a Housing Association board in Grimsby about the real need for groupings of provision so that residents who came to need extra care would not have to abandon the supportive community of which they had become part. It seemed a formidable task to consider creating independent accommodation, sheltered accommodation, residential care, and nursing care, all around one site, and to find ways of negotiating progression between these, but it looks as if Whiteley Village was well ahead of this game a century earlier.

The other is the fact that St Mark’s church there was designed by the same architect as St Michael’s church here (Sir Walter Tapper), and at almost exactly the same time. She brought me back from her interview a pamphlet about St Marks’ with this illustration on the cover, and it is like recognising resemblance of different members of a family. Those who know St Michael’s will instantly recognise the shape of the tower and its roof, will think St Mark’s tower’s turret for its stairs resembles the north turret at St Michael’s, and the pattern of the tracery in St Mark’s south window imitates that of St Michael’s east window. I also notice that one of the screens and some of the stalls inside look as if they’ve come out of the same catalogue. We may be sad to lose Terrie, but I am looking forward to seeing St Mark’s when we go down for her licensing.

Matinlight

2011-07-26T07:35:00.003+01:00

There is a time of year at Morning Prayer,
when light falling slant though the east window
catches the plain north wall and plays with it.

As the leaves move on the ash tree close by
dapplings of colour take the breeze’s lead
dancing, laughing and weaving together.

Pools of liquid light flow across the wall
splashing it in eddies, ripples and waves,
baptising the flaking off-white lime-wash.

Then I find I’ve stopped piling on new words,
like rare pauses when a phrase in the Psalm
unexpectedly becomes translucent.

The poem builds on my post on 3rd September 2009, when there is a picture of the north wall of the chancel of St Nicolas', Great Coates which doesn't to justice to this phenomenon.

The picture is of the poor exit for water from the Lady Chapel roof at St Michael's, Little Coates discussed in the last post.

Roof work

2011-07-23T10:30:00.003+01:00

The work is well under way on St Michael’s roof.

The first picture shows the valley gutter soon after the builders had begun to uncover the area on which they need to work. You can see how most of the rain which falls on the church’s roofs (including that brought down from the tower roof) is channelled into this space; it makes a six foot drop into it in doing so. What you can’t see is that the water which accumulates here only has one exit which (because it makes a quick and narrow dog leg movement around a buttress) is easily blocked; when there is a blockage water rises in this valley as if it was a retaining tank, and, once above the flashings (which had been removed by the time this picture was taken), gets under the tiles and seeps into the church. This was a bad bit of design when the main part of the church (on the right) was built in 1913-15. At last we are doing something about it.

Incidently, this picture also shows a hint of the older shallower roof line on the gable of the mediaeval part of the church (on the left) which I had not seen before; creating a new much higher pitch was part of the 1913-15 work, which, I guess, reused stone from the north wall of the old church (which was being taken down at the time to allow the new church to be sliced on to it). You can also notice that the new part of the church simply has a brick wall at this point: this wall is invisible from ground level so they never bothered putting a stone face on it.

The second picture shows the valley gutter yesterday half way through re-modelling it; the new woodwork and the areas either side of it are yet to be covered. The water which comes into this area will now drop a much shorter distance and flow across this much broader platform. What you can’t see is that, because it is at such an increased height, it will then have a much more direct and simple exit (above the troublesome buttress), and the hopper on the new downpipe will even have a weir at the top so that water could still shoot out if it ever got blocked.

Imagining the future

2011-07-20T20:06:00.005+01:00

The Church of England could soon be ‘no longer functionally extant at all’. It is a phrase used at this month’s meeting of the General Synod which has briefly caught the attention of some of the media, including those hostile to what we are doing.

It isn’t an original thought, any more than it was in the form in which it appeared in almost the first post on this Blog three years ago:

The demography of our congregations is such that the presence of those who were formed as present and future members of the Church of England in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s has masked the startlingly smaller number so formed in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, but as the former begin to die a huge gap is exposed... the numbers of those committed will simply not be able to sustain anything like our present provision of buildings or stipendiary ministry.

That early post (and quite a few others over the last three years) was really about the way in which people do not want to begin putting alternative plans in place until we are face-to-face with the non-viability of our present structures, so it is also consistent that the First Estates Commissioner responded to the remark by saying ‘I wish all of us would have a sense of real crisis about this’ and added ‘I have seen large companies perfectly and impeccably manage themselves into failure’.

Interestingly, our Area Bishop’s initiatives around designating a Minister for Grimsby, settling the nature of the appointment of a new priest and deacons based there, and initiating a review of ministry around it, is precisely an attempt to put new structures in place well ahead of any collapse. I’m not sure that many of those who received his letter about some of this in April spotted that this appears to be exactly what he meant when he wrote:

Much of what we are exploring through appointments is an attempt to establish patterns of ministry and leadership which will serve us for the future. It is an inexact art, especially when we may feel that at the moment we don’t need them. It is a difficult one to get right and, as so often, our reaction to novelty depends how far into the future we are trying to imagine.

There are already at least some urban estates and some groups of rural villages where the claim that the Church of England is present in every community is no longer true in terms of a church building used for regular worship and in terms of the residence of lay people (let alone a clergyperson) committed to such worship and to service of neighbour. The ‘no longer functionally extant at all’ phrase identifies these as just the first cracks opening up. The ‘how far into the future we are trying to imagine’ phrase invites us not simply to allow market forces to dictate where and what sort of surviving functioning Anglicanism will follow.

Having (at the beginning of this academic year) stepped aside from roles which attempted and failed to make a difference in this sort of area locally, it is also interesting (at the end of this academic year)to find how helpless I feel in being unable to see the immediate future let alone engage in this longer term re-imagining process: the Area Bishop hasn’t yet taken us into his confidence about the terms of reference for or the potential for our involvement in the review of ministry locally he proposes; it was only at the beginning of this month that the Archdeacon was able to provide us with the diocese’s official statement of the 2010 financial outcome for our immediate area, and she hasn’t yet been able to respond to questions this raises for our budget for 2011 let alone beyond; the newly appointed Area Dean has declined the invitation to an early meeting with our PCC, perhaps understandably wanting to get his feet under the table first; and, although I believe the open Mission Forum for the two local deaneries has continued to meet through the year, an attentive local parish priest hasn’t heard anything about its meetings dates, topics, suggestions or conclusions.

The picture is another taken at Normanby Hall when there again last week with a school.

Normanby Hall animals

2011-07-17T07:53:00.004+01:00

Mite, and might not

2011-07-14T15:59:00.005+01:00

This looks like Walnut Leaf Gall Mite. It isn’t grubs on the leaf, but raised parts of the leaf indicating that a tiny mite has been living underneath. Apparently, although unsightly, it isn’t harmful, which is just as well as I’m told it is almost impossible to eliminate. The leaf is on the young walnut tree near the entrance to St Nicolas’ churchyard, and I’ve spotted some similar leaves on the one slightly older and the two really ancient walnut trees along the southern boundary. The trees have appeared in this Blog before; I am very fond of them, enjoy introducing them to others, and am sad that a number of their leaves are beginning to look like this.

My attention is also on the isolated plot of land on to which the three older trees look. This has just been put on the market this week for the first time in many years. I simply can’t make up my mind whether, if we were able to buy it, our successors would praise us for our foresight (since it is the only place where things from a church car park to a churchyard extension could go in due course, and since it would prevent anyone else from doing something unwelcome on the land) or curse us for having landing them with even greater maintenance problems.

It probably matters not at all because, if St Nicolas' or a benefactor had the money available, we’d probably want to put it into the project to renew the church's heating system rather than buy land, especially land which, if it was to be really useful to us, would require some sort of pedestrian bridge across the ancient moat which separates it from the churchyard. But none the less, I thrashed round it again (it is very overgrown) with a planning official this morning , and hatched an unrealistic scheme to develop something like a natural burial site there. The pictures I posted on 27th March were all taken on the land in question.

Neighbourhood Management

2011-07-10T17:44:00.009+01:00

I fear North East Lincolnshire’s Neighbourhood Management approach is in danger of unravelling.

The idea has been outlined here before. Each of fifteen Wards should have a Councillor-led open ‘Forward’ group. Here issues can be aired and, it is hoped, resolved, with the help of the Council and a whole range of other agencies from health providers to the Police. The Wards are grouped into five Areas each with an Area Action Group (AAG). This is attended by officials from the agencies (senior enough to have some clout) where the over all picture emerges and problems which cannot be resolved at Ward level are tackled. This should make the one North East Lincolnshire Council more accountable and responsive, and a better place. The tag has been ‘15-5-1'.

I’ve had queries about how truly representative the Forward groups are. I have no criticisms of those who turn up regularly to them and seek to contribute to the well being of their area. I merely observe how self selective we are. The situation at the Great Coates end of the Freshney Ward illustrates this. Just two residents have come to the last few meetings, and they have a real commitment to and handle on some of what needs to be done for the village, including substantial points of apparent disagreement with the Village Council. But no member of the Village Council comes, so none of those with a democratic role in the village nor anyone else from there hears or responds to, agrees or challenges what the two active residents say or want. There are many other such illustrations.

I’ve also had queries about how engaged the AAGs can be with the whole variety of the somewhat random and extensive Areas they serve, and a concern that there is very little representation at AAG level other than Councillors and officials. I have no criticism of those who go - I’ve now represented Freshney Forward at a couple of AAG meetings so have seen the commitment of those who attend and the detailed action plan which has been developed as a result. Now, quite suddenly, after a review which showed up just these sorts of concerns, this layer is simply being removed - things will be ‘15-1' rather than ‘15-5-1'. This may well be an over reaction as I don’t see the one Neighbourhood Management Board having the capacity to hold or engage in depth with everything emerging from fifteen Wards, but we shall see

And then I have foreboding about the Yarborough Ward (which covers the half of this parish not covered by the Freshney Ward). Several meetings were held last year (the first beginning with an introduction to the Neighbourhood Management approach) sponsored by the three Councillors all of whom happened to come from the same political party. Now, following the election of a new Councillor from a different party, suddenly invitations have just gone out to Ward meetings from two of the three Councillors with their political party named for the first time. I have contacted them to ask about this, and an initial reaction was to deny that last year’s meeting were part of Neighbourhood Management at all; we’ll have to see how this conversation develops, and I may be over reacting, but I have a bad feeling about this.

If Forwards don’t come to be seen as in some way fully representative of their Wards, if AAGs don’t exist in any form, and if some Ward Councillors go their own way independently of the Neighbourhood Management approach or of fellow Councillors of different political parties, then I could indeed see the whole thing unravelling.

Meanwhile, scaffolding has just gone up at the east end of the old nave of St Michael’s and work is just about to begin to remodel the valley gutter between the mediaeval and twentieth century parts of the church. Somehow things have got worse in the last few months, and a smell of damp and damage to the stone floor have become a real worry, so we very much hope will eliminate a recurring problem of water getting in.

Charterhouse explorations

2011-07-07T10:52:00.003+01:00

Both St Hugh and St Augustine Webster were Carthusian Priors, and, entranced by our visit to Mount Grace Priory in Half Term, I’ve been exploring a little of this world.

The first monasteries were really neighbouring hermits’ cells (mono and mon-astic, and solo and sol-itary, come respectively from the Greek and Latin for ‘alone’) around which some elements of common life and rules developed, so it is not surprising that one particular later reform (at the Grande Chartreuse at about the time of the English conquest) established a pattern of mediaeval monastic life in which the main focus was monks living in their own cells for most of the time although emerging to share some worship and occasional meals. The film Into Great Silence gives a flavour of the Carthusian life which continues there over nine hundred years later.

The first English Charterhouse (the Anglicised name for Priories of the Grande Chartreuse) was established at Witham in Somerset as part of Henry II’s public penance for the murder of Thomas a Becket, for which Hugh of Avalon was head-hunted from being Novice Master at the Grande Chartreuse to be an early Prior when things were not going well for the new foundation. It was from there he was elected Bishop of Lincoln, where he initiated the rebuilding of the Cathedral (subsequently extended to house his shrine, at which I was able to pray when there for the Ordination on Sunday).

Only a scattering of other English Charterhouses followed, but the 1390s foundation of Mount Grace on the northern edge of the North Yorkshire Moors was one of them, and the one which suffered least destruction during what a Guide in Grimsby Minister recently referred to as the Disillusionment of the Monasteries. Pictures posted here last month include those of the huge cloister round which the cells were arranged and a modern reconstruction of one of them (which is on the scale more comparable with a comfortable country cottage than a small almshouse).

At exactly the same time, also in the 1390s, another was founded locally in northern Lincolnshire. The site (between Epworth and Owston Ferry on the Isle of Axholme) is on private land, but our physical visit to Mount Grace prompted me to make a virtual ‘visit’ by satellite mapping. There is nothing surviving comparable to Mount Grace, although one farm outbuilding is Grade II listed because it has elements of a mediaeval undercroft (perhaps the only listed building which is pebbledashed and has a corrugated iron roof). What there is are three sides of a square moat, and I was intrigued to measure the space this encloses as being very close in size to the great cloister at Mount Grace. The pictures for this post show aspects of the very advanced water management at Mount Grace, including the outside privy at the restored cell, so the moat may indicate similar skill in drainage of the swampy Axholme land. I discover that detailed records of an archaeological investigation of the Axholme Priory are held in Swindon, and have developed an ambition to seek these out.

Augustine Webster was the penultimate Prior here. He was one of three Carthusian Priors who went to Thomas Cromwell in 1535 to attempt to negotiate some leeway around the oaths required by the Act of Supremacy. Their consequential execution at Tyburn on 4th May (alongside that of a prominent Brigettine monk) was the first of its kind, and originally provided the date of the Catholic Church’s commemoration of its Reformation Martyrs and now provides the date of the Church of England’s commemoration of the Saints and Martyrs of the Reformation Era.

Ordination

2011-07-04T09:42:00.004+01:00

Our Curate was ordained priest yesterday alongside ten other and then emerged into the sun through the great West Door of the Cathedral.

Evil to which we are prone

2011-06-30T10:04:00.004+01:00

How did things like the Taliban’s banning of music and destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan differ from Josiah’s classic and celebrated purging of Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, sacred poles and carved images in the 620s BC? In a number of ways, I am sure, especially if Josiah’s action including ending corruptions or worse which had crept into Jewish worship. Yet each time we read about Josiah (as we are doing at Matins each day at the moment) I am deeply uncomfortable at what following religious convictions means (which must be the opposite of what attention to scripture at daily Matins is intended to achieve).

I’ve blogged once before (in 2008) about how

The Taliban are not the only ones to have destroyed religious statues through puritan zeal. There is evidence of such destruction all around us. One of our churches (St George’s, Bradley) actually has surviving Reformation records of the Churchwardens taking down and burning the rood screen there, and this mentions in particular the statues of Mary and John standing at the foot of the cross. The absence of almost all mediaeval glass and brasses in our Cathedral is a monument itself to the Commonwealth soldiers who trashed the place over one weekend a century later.

After Matins this morning I was looking back further to the first sermon I preached (in 2003) as a Canon in Lincoln Cathedral (in a week when a funeral had taken place of a policeman who had been murdered in Manchester by a Moslem terrorist) saying

... how important it is for me when leading pilgrim groups in this Cathedral to include proper reflection at the tomb of Little St Hugh, a centre of thirteenth century antisemitic propaganda and then a tool of persecution. And tomorrow is the third National Holocaust Memorial Day. We know how far some Christians have gone and can go when they allowed themselves to demonise those of another religion. We can see clearly that it is wrong when some members of another religion make the same devastating mistake, but we can hardly be surprised at the phenomenon. How different it is to say ‘we can see exactly why you are wrong because it is something we are prone to ourselves’ rather than ‘your evil is unique’.

Area Dean announced

2011-06-27T11:37:00.003+01:00

We are going to have to relate quite differently to our neighbouring town centre parish. The appointment of a new Priest-in-Charge and Area Dean was announced yesterday when I was covering the main service at what is now Grimsby Minister, and the people there were told he should be with us in September. We look forward to welcoming him.

Three of the phrases in that opening paragraph are significant, and appear to be part of a cumulative plan by the Area Bishop being put in place piece by piece with different levels of consultation and collaborative planning.

Designating Grimsby Parish Church as a Minster built on the work of the previous incumbent’s commitment to the civic role and world facing ministry of the church and his work as a valued member of the local authority’s Local Strategic Partnership. Momentum hasn’t been lost during the vacancy and taking forward things like a new shop and major art displays have been impressive. There are quite different models of Minister out there from those where a centrally based ‘college of priests’ sends out resources to a wider area to those where central specialist provision complements the work of neighbouring parishes, and it will be interesting to learn what the new incumbent thinks the role of this particular Minister should be. Those involved in the Minster’s educational outreach have written to at least some of the Primary Schools in this parish not only advertising things we could not offer but also things which we do, which was an unfortunate small cloud on the horizon.

We are told that suspending presentation of a Rector to the whole Great Grimsby Team and appointing a Priest-in-Charge instead is to leave open the possibility that a review of the use and deployment of ministry in the parish and how this affects ministry in the town might result in proposals for pastoral reorganisation. The legal process of consulting about the suspension hadn’t been completed when the advert for the post as Priest-in-Charge appeared, which I assume is a little unusual. Sensitive readers will understand that I’ve been expressing more anxiety about being properly involved in developing and being part of the review process.

The new post of Area Dean for the whole unitary authority of North East Lincolnshire parallels an appointment just made at the largest church in Scunthorpe for the neighbouring unitary authority of North Lincolnshire. The job description (which we were sent for comment just as it was going out to applicants) highlights two roles. That of representing the church in the civic, commercial and third sector life of North East Lincolnshire sits very well with the potential role of the Minister, although it will need handling sensitively alongside the job description of the Industrial Missioner (although not as much as in North Lincolnshire where it is in fact the Industrial Missioner who has been the valued member of its Local Strategic Partnership). That of being part of the creative strategic development of mission and ministry across the area as we respond to changing patterns of church life is again one about which it will be interesting to learn what the new incumbent thinks as he develops it alongside well established neighbours.

The Area Dean job description refers to a fourth part of the cumulative plan. It says the new priest ‘will be “released” from their pastoral ministry by the Grimsby Team becoming a “hub” for the training and formation of those new in ministry... the formation of the curates is being designed to model collaboration within the [two North East Lincolnshire] deaneries’. This is something well worth a separate post at some point. He would, of course, also be further released from his pastoral ministry if the review process results in detaching responsibility for the wider Team Ministry (including 30,000 parishioners, three daughter churches and some of the most deprived areas of town) which may well be part of the cumulative plan.

Rather than be defensive or destructive, and rather than gossip and speculate, the Parochial Church Council in this parish recently agreed to offer him an early invitation to come and talk about what he thinks he has been asked to do and how we might best work together as he begins to do it. Interesting times.

Meanwhile, the latest fallen gravestone in St Michael’s is this one from 1943 near the south door. Lily Hubbard died in 1943 aged twenty-four and is buried next to her sister Alma who died in 1940 aged nineteen. The fall of Lily's gravestone drew my attention for the first time to the fact that it has words in Dutch on it: ‘Wel te rusten, lieveling’ (‘Sleep well, darling’); there must be a story behind that.

Academy experiment

2011-06-23T14:40:00.003+01:00

North East Lincolnshire is about to become part of an accidental educational experiment as all of its Secondary Schools become Academies, each independent of the others and of the local authority, and essentially each in competition with the others and of any new schools which might be created.

Each can to do its own thing, and there should be positive outcomes from this freedom to be creative. But there will be lots of unintended consequences, some of which may well sort themselves out, and some of which may continue to irritate or worse as time goes by.

For example, most Academies will continue to set the same term dates as the local authority sets for the Primary Schools, but some will not, and there is a possibility that some parents who teach may even end up seeking to juggle three quite different sets of dates for themselves, their Primary School aged children and their Secondary School aged children.

I tripped over another one today when I went to take an assembly in a Primary School to find that all my preparation was redundant (grr) as they’d inserted a special assembly for those in their final year about to leave for a particular existing Academy which takes in its new pupils for the last few weeks of the Summer Term. The Primary School is left to sort out for itself how it creatively rounds off work with a year group some members of which leave early and some others of which remain for the rest of term.

Not quite related is a further frustration a couple of Headteachers have mentioned to me recently. I hadn’t realised that ‘part year’ funding does not follow a child who moves between schools. You may find a school which quite readily excludes pupils who are difficult to deal with; it will keep the whole year funding for each of those pupils. You may find a school with spare places in which a disproportionate number of those excluded children are placed; it will not get any funding for the extra work involved for the rest of the academic year.

One attempt to ameliorate this problem is for the local authority to administer a ‘Fair Access Protocol’, and I’ve been glad to look over one recently agreed for North East Lincolnshire which aims (among other things) not to end up sending a disproportionate number of excluded pupils to any one school. I wait to hear what the answer is to the question about how the local authority funds its residual educational responsibilities which includes administering such things. At present this is funded by ‘top slicing’ the money which comes in for each local authority school, money which would all be due to be paid direct to the Academies.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

2011-06-20T10:33:00.004+01:00

Shouting at MPs

2011-06-17T10:22:00.002+01:00

It gets worse. The MP responsible for links between the Church of England and Parliament writes in today’s Church Times acknowledging that Lambeth Palace sent the full text of the Archbishop’s editorial to every MP but opines such sharing of what he really said is ‘no good’ because it is ‘what is heard that matters’. So it is inevitable that any attempt at careful complicated engagement will fall into the ‘no good’ category, and all malicious circulators of out-of-context sound bites and all third-hand commentators on those distorted perceptions will fall in the ‘what matters’ category.

The headline and thrust of his article article says ‘don’t shout at us’, but he doesn’t seem to have made the obvious connection. He also doesn't reflect on where the approach of shouting at one another as an appropriate approach to political discourse may be most clearly observed.

Meanwhile, the orchids along the Cleethorpes sea front are in full bloom and we enjoyed a walk among them earlier this week.

Poisoned wells

2011-06-14T10:33:00.002+01:00

I’m tired of how predictable, sterile and unproductive most public political (and religio-political) ‘debates’ are.

I was mildly interested last week to hear a pedestrian lecture on the rule of law (the annual Magna Carta Lecture in the Cathedral) by the Deputy Leader of the House of Lords. But the first question after the lecture was a cheap political shot about his move from Labour to the SDP years ago, and the last was a Suffragan Bishop’s drawing attention to the effect of cuts on the marginalised which was batted back with a lazy ‘the poor have the choice not to commit crime’.

I’ve long believed and sometimes said that Radio 4 is complicit in ‘poisoning the wells of democracy’, and was a little bucked up when Graham Linehan was reported as saying so: ‘the style of debate practised by the Today programme poisons discourse in this country; an arena in which there are no positions possible except diametrically opposed ones, where nuance is not permitted, where politicians are forced into defensive positions of utter banality - none of it is any good for the national conversation’.

But his saying so makes no difference. I’ve now read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s New Statesman editorial. Its purpose is to explain why an issue he edited has quite so much in it written by coalition ministers: ‘it seems worth encouraging the present government to clarify what it is aiming for in two or three areas, in the hope of sparking a livelier debate about what is going on, and perhaps even discover what the left’s big idea currently is’.

Fat chance. The reports of selected phrases in the editorial (which were not, for example, those which strongly challenge the opposition to provide something worthwhile to talk about), and the endless comments on it by those who have never read it, hardly relate at all to what he wrote. ‘The political debate in the UK at the moment feels pretty stuck,’ the Archbishop writes in his editorial, and we need ‘a long-term education policy at every level that will deliver the critical tools for democratic involvement’. Wish on, say I, since the wells of debate have been poisoned and drawing water from them for an healthy national conversation is now impossible, as the response to your editorial makes abundantly clear.

Anyway, the real reason I was in Lincoln was for the surreal experience of electing a new Bishop by the College of Canons (HM The Queen wrote to us and kindly provided a shortlist of one, the man whose appointed has already announced). I took this poor surreptitious photograph of some document being sealed as we sat in our places round the outer wall of the Cathedral’s Chapter House. It was, of course, good to be part of the historical theatre and to pray for him.

Skinningrove

2011-06-12T13:33:00.005+01:00

Upleatham

2011-06-11T14:37:00.005+01:00

Saltburn

2011-06-10T09:38:00.004+01:00

Mount Grace deserves more than a few days posting, but we had to move on in Half Term, and we spent a night here. The Teesside steel industry grew out of local nineteenth century ironstone mining, and water from one flooded mine has broken out into the stream flowing from the left into the bottom picture.

Our Lady of Mount Grace

2011-06-09T11:51:00.004+01:00

Reconstructed cell

2011-06-08T12:18:00.005+01:00

Mount Grace Priory

2011-06-07T11:35:00.005+01:00

Monkwearmouth

2011-06-06T14:06:00.003+01:00

Having reawoken an interest in the Saxon features of some local churches, we took the opportunity of staying with friends in Durham during Half Term to visit some of the most important Saxon churches. First, Escomb, one of only a handful of totally Saxon buildings, with its consecration cross inside and its sun dial (with beast and serpent) outside. Then the sites of the twin monasteries of St Paul at Jarrow with its statue of Bede and its modern urban setting, and St Peter at Wearmouth where more survives such as this doorway through which Bede would have walked).

Jarrow

2011-06-05T17:19:00.004+01:00

Escomb

2011-06-04T17:02:00.005+01:00

Glass full

2011-05-30T12:31:00.004+01:00

The steady drizzle has fallen all Bank Holiday morning and does not give any hint of giving way. I haven’t quite recovered from a few days in which I allowed too many call centre conversations (for everything from a leaking toilet cistern to a misfunctioning Sky box), funerals, hospital call outs and weddings to crowd out even a Day Off. Now I open up my on-line banking to find that someone has repeatedly used my bank card number to lift £1200 or more from my account over the course of the last couple of weeks.

We have the rain we need, and it falls in the gentle persistent way which does most good. Help is usually available at the end of phone line. I have access to everything from a secure safe water supply to multiple forms of modern communication and media. I’m employed, and appear to be in demand to do worthwhile things. We saw these orchids in Roxton Wood when I did have Day Off last weekend. I’ve got the money I need, and someone is there to be helpful at my bank’s fraud department even on a Bank Holiday.

Roxton Wood

2011-05-24T10:39:00.004+01:00

We took part in a guided walk on Saturday. Without the guidance we would not have come across either this fox's den (we could see why it is called an 'earth') nor these newly planted oak trees (apparently the land owner is paid a grant for the first forty years but won't then be able to 'harvest' for more than a hundred years after that, which is why only major country estates can be expcted to go in for such things).

Churchyard workers

2011-05-21T19:38:00.003+01:00

Lots of people, most of them welcome, have been working in St Nicolas’ churchyard.

The regular volunteer who quietly mows the new cremated remains area and around the main paths is much more appreciated than he realises. A new volunteer, who has come forward as a result of an advert we placed at Voluntary Action, has begun adding real value to this and earned the gratitude in particular of those who tend plots in the old cremated remains area. And over the last three days Community Pay Back have been in to make a splendid job of the annual mammoth cut back; this is perhaps a couple of weeks earlier than ideal as just some bluebells as the very last of the spring flowers had not quite died off and set seed, but the Bank Holiday weekend brides will be grateful we didn’t wait until early June as normal.

Meanwhile the top picture shows new kerbs and stones on a grave just two yards from the 2003 sign appealing to people not to make changes without permission and not to allow things like this to spoil the rural feel of this corner of Great Coates. What does one do (even assuming one can even trace the next-of-kin from a burial over twenty-five years ago)? End up on the front page of the local paper as the those who persecute the bereaved? Or let it go and risk others beginning to copy the idea and rapidly lose the whole character of this part of the churchyard?

And the bottom picture shows where a neighbour has removed his fence and come in to do this work layering our trees to develop a new hedge. It looks as if he’s done a really creative and attractive job; if he’d asked, I’m sure we would have welcomed his initiative. Does one do anything about this either (it certainly isn’t the sort of things anyone would consider doing in the garden of the person who lives next door without permission)? My naughty thought was we could write a letter thanking him for joining the small team of volunteers and giving him the next couple of jobs which need doing, but I don’t expect we’ll do that.

Settling the margins

2011-05-18T14:17:00.002+01:00

It intrigues me that the name Grimsby is unusual in being a name of Norse origin on the Trent and Humber bank. This doesn’t seem to surprise anyone else; it seems obvious that a natural port on the east coast might have such a name, and it is.

But just look at the sequence of names from Gainsborough (where the Trent was first bridged) to North Cotes (where the Humber gives way to the sea): Gainsborough, Morton, Stockwith, Susworth, Butterwick, Burringham, Gunness, Flixborough, Burton, Alkborough, Whitton, Winteringham, Ferriby, Barton, Barrow, Halton, Killingham, Immingham, Stallingborough, Healing, Coates, Coates, Grimsby, Clee, Humberston, Tetney, and Cotes. That is 23 English names as against 4 Norse names. (I’ve left out East Ferry, New Holland and Marshchapel which are modern names, and Goxhill which it is difficult to determine, and gone with the consensus that Killingham is the original form of Killingholme).

Now look at the sequence a single parish inland: Corringham, Pilham, Blyton, Laughton, Scotterthorpe, Messingham, Yaddlethorpe, Brumby, Frodingham, Crosby, Dragonby, Risby, Normanby, Thealby, Halton, Coleby, Winterton, Horkstow, Burnham, Thornton, Ulceby, Habrough, Brocklesby, Keelby, Aylesby, Laceby, Bradley, Scartho, Weelsby, Waltham, Holton, Waithe, Thorseby. The Norse names (17 of them here) now balance the English ones (16 here).

I haven’t found anyone who has noted or commented on this so have been wary of promoting a hypothesis on slender evidence and without scholarly corroboration. Nevertheless, I have wondered whether there is at least some pattern by which coastal settlements were established and named before Norse invaders arrived, and whether those Norsemen who pioneered new settlements had to do so on less promising ground inland of these settlements. The English population was low, and it would have been possible to concentrate it on prime sites such as those which gave access to water and trade. New settlers (whether or not they had taken over the existing prime sites) would have found unused land which would not have been the first choice of those already there.

It was only recently reading Michael Wood’s The Story of England (based on the village of Kibworth in Leicestershire) that I’ve returned to wonder about this again. He comes to the point when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the over wintering Great Army stopped supporting itself by pillaging and instead shared out land and began to plough (first in Northumbria in 876 and then in Mercia in 877):

The East Midlands, between Trent and Welland, the Lincolnshire Wolds and Leicester uplands, were divided up, and members of a Viking army settled and took land alongside the English landowners... The pattern of... names shows us what might have happened after the share-out of the land by the Great Army... From the first phase after 877 are hybrid names like Grimston which combine a Viking personal name with the English word ‘tun’ (village)... which suggests the appropriation of already existing English estates and settlements by warriors of the Danish army... Second-stage settlements - those of immigrants who perhaps came from England in the next two or three decades - are indicated by another layer of place names. To the north-east of Kibworth a cluster of names on poorer land contain the Viking word for farm, ‘by’... Galby issurrounded by villages which kept their English names... where evidently the local native farmers were not dislodged. The Vikings in Galby then had to be satisfied with poor mariginal land... Bushby as its name says, was a ‘farm in the scrubland’; Thurnby, ‘the farm on thorny land’; Rainsby... was ‘a borderland farm’.

The picture is a pillar piscina at Swallow which we saw at the weekend; is in Norman work which doesn’t fit very well with this post, but there it is.

Early grave marker

2011-05-15T17:50:00.004+01:00

These grave markers are at Cabourne. The top one is pre-Conquest and the bottom one Victorian. We took the pictures yesterday when visiting three near by churches (the other two were at Nettleton and Swallow) each open as part of the annual West Lindsey Open Churches event and each with pre-Conquest tower arches and west doors, treasures under our noses that we hadn’t appreciated before. There does seem to be quite a cluster of these pre-Conquest towers on our door step with two even closer at hand at both Clee and Scartho on the edge of Grimsby, but I don't remember having come across such an early grave marker near by before.

The wrong issues?

2011-05-12T13:44:00.001+01:00

Giving power to local communities results in visible environmental issues being tackled better but has less impact on the way less visible social issues are tackled. People like to influence things like ‘crime and grime’, and are able to express satisfaction when noticing that these things improve. People may simply be less aware (or even totally unaware) of, say, issues of abuse or health inequalities, and are much less likely either to campaign about them or be visibly effected by any improvements in them.

This was one of the things shared at the most recent Central Grimby Area Action Group which I’ve begun to attend on behalf of Freshney Forward. It comes from an analysis of the ‘path finder’ areas for the sort of ‘neighbourhood management’ in which our local authority is now engaged. I outlined the principles (and some of my reservations about this) on 10 January 2010: each Ward has a Councillor led open Forward group where local issues can be aired and, it is hoped, dealt with; each group of Wards has an Area Action Group attended by people senior enough in bodies like the local authority and the police to deal with the issues which haven’t been solved at Ward level and where a bigger policy-making picture can be formed.

At the first Area Action Group I attended I was a little discouraged to discover that most of those there were Councillors and officials - only three of us where normal Forward members. I was also discouraged that at this particular meeting so much time was given to issues which professionals wanted communicated ‘down’ (e.g. helping promote breast screening - only 68% take up locally as against 75% nationally) that they never reached the bit of the agenda where the professionals were meant to hear what the Forward want to communicate to them - which is exactly the opposite of what I thought the meetings were for.

But the feed back from the ‘path finder’ areas at the second meeting I attended did make me think twice. It seems that the flow of information ‘down’ (i.e. agencies telling us what the situation is locally) may be more important than I’d thought when I champion the idea of the flow of information ‘up’ (i.e. elected Councillors and Forward groups presenting concerns raised by locals). There is a dilemma here which is, of course, the one which lies at the heart of issues of democracy and professional service.

The face is a photograph is left over from our visit to Marshchapel church before Easter.

Election swing

2011-05-09T11:54:00.002+01:00

All three sitting Councillors in the western part of Grimsby (two Liberal Democrat and one independent) have lost their places to Labour replacements. It is part of a swing which has made Labour the main party for the first time since the mammoth clear out following the Council’s major financial crisis eight years ago, and perhaps returns North East Lincolnshire to what outsiders might expect the ‘normal’ situation to be.

From a selfish local point of view, it is sad and a little disquieting to see people go with whom we had built a significant relationship and understanding. Dave Boylen in the Freshney Ward (covering half of this parish) understood and was encouraging about our plans for St Nicolas’. Les Bonner in the Yarborough Ward (covering the other half) had made a particular financial and personal commitment to the Littlecoates Community Centre. And Peter Barker in the West Marsh Ward (in our neighbouring parish) had been an independent Councillor for over thirty years and was an ally when Inspiring Communities was brought to the West Marsh Forward which he chaired.

But this parish has acquired two new Councillors of similar quality and with lots of experience. Ray Sutton (Freshney) has been a particular effective chair of the Forward group for the Park Ward in which he lives. Peter Wheatley (Yarborough), who took a Council seat by just sixteen votes, has many previous years experience on the local Council, and he now represents the Ward in which he lives. We will have to buckle down and begin building a new working relationship with them.

Meanwhile, I took this photograph at St Michael’s this morning at a grave in which we were about to bury the cremated remains of the 103 year old widow of the man for whom it was first dug forty-six years ago; the family found the combination of the tree and the sun quite as striking as I did, as well as the thought that she would have been five before building began on the major part of the church on which the grave looks and thus almost the last person left who would have been able to see the north wall of the old church instead.

Distant Water

2011-05-06T14:55:00.005+01:00

Grimsby’s prosperity was built on work undertaken over the most extended hours in the harshest of conditions. This is obvious to anyone who visits former fishing families at home or tours the National Fishing Heritage Museum on the docks. It was brought home to me yet again at the launch of a new book at the Museum yesterday evening.

I’m involved in the Board of Directors for CPO Media, which began its life as the Community Press Office publishing local community magazines which were supported by regeneration funding. It continues to engage with the regeneration agenda through everything from other community publications to training those otherwise NEET (young people ‘not in education, employment or training’).

Its first venture into recording oral history was the important Lottery funded The Women They Left Behind which told an essential but otherwise neglected part of the Grimsby story. Now its North Wall Publishing imprint has now brought out a companion volume Distant Water which puts historical research alongside accounts from nearly fifty fishermen illustrated mainly with pictures from an unused 1959 Sunday Pictorial archive.

It was quite an evening. I was arrested at the very beginning by a display about the sheer number of young orphans running away from ships into which they had been pressed as apprentices in the nineteenth century, and ended up hearing stories from one of the contributors about being boarded from a suspicious Russian naval vessel when off the north Russian coast; he was grateful that such stories and their context are not being lost, which is probably most of the point.

May Day in Dixon Wood

2011-05-03T07:34:00.006+01:00

Wedding Prayers

2011-04-30T14:52:00.003+01:00

If the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge had used the Common Worship Marriage Service wouldn’t that have enabled them to offer words which really focussed what they wanted prayed at their Wedding?

It is known that their closest advisers on such things (the Prince of Wales and the Bishop of London) are both fans of the Book of Common Prayer, so it wasn’t a surprise that they chose the 1966 (nee 1928) light revision of the BCP service.

It all seemed to work really well too in the setting, until, at the end of the sermon, the Bishop revealed that the couple had written a simple prayer as part of their marriage preparation. As he read, it became clear just how different the register of the service was, and, as the service continued, it became apparent then neither their prayer nor anything like it was going to be included in the actual praying at the service.

The thoughts they wished to express as prayer included:

In the busyness of each day keep our eyes fixed on what is real and important in life and help us to be generous with our time and love and energy. Strengthened by our union, help us to serve and comfort those who suffer.

Had they used Common Worship they could have included those words, and/or they could have included this part of the set prayers there:

May the hospitality of their home
bring refreshment and joy to all around them;
may their love overflow to neighbours in need
and embrace those in distress.

Instead, at just the point this might have happened, those leading the prayers ploughed their way through things like this 122 word sentence (including what is today its almost surreal final words):

O God, who hast taught us that it should never be lawful to put asunder those whom thou by matrimony hadst made one, and hast consecrated the state of matrimony to such an excellent mystery, that in it is signified and represented the spiritual marriage and unity betwixt Christ and his church: look mercifully upon these thy servants, that both this man may love his wife, according to thy word, (as Christ did love his spouse the church, who gave himself for it, loving and cherishing it even as his own flesh,) and also that this woman may be loving and amiable, and faithful to her husband, and in all quietness, sobriety, and peace, be a follower of holy and godly matrons.

Beginning to take Weddings twenty-five years ago in Berkshire not far from her home I’d always offer couples a choice between the traditionally worded 1966 service and the then modern Alternative Service Book 1980 service. I was happy to use both, and, given a genuine even handed choice, found couples as likely to opt for one as for the other; the two services appeared to speak equally to people’s expectations and needs in that time and place.

Well into the twenty-first century, and in a totally different social setting, it is now the Common Worship service I find I almost always use; most of those for whom I take Weddings here find much of the older service impenetrable. Nevertheless, yesterday, it was lovely to hear the old words again (and to remember that ‘with this ring I thee wed’ is more poetically balanced and performatively true than the reductionism of ‘I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage’), but, as the sermon finished, I did have a pang of regret at what they were missing by not benefiting from and showcasing the new.

The picture was taken fifteen minutes ago. We used the same reading as the royal wedding, and we used the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's prayer, but we used a different form of service.

Sham Marriage Precautions

2011-04-27T12:34:00.003+01:00

I fear that the Church of England is reacting too strongly to the problem of sham marriages. We’ve already seen the situation in which essential child protection precautions were being interpreted in such a way as to prevent parents sharing transport arrangements to and from sporting events. We are still in the situation where arrangements to prevent money laundering means that even a change in a signatory on a church account involves the church member having to go to the bank to prove his or her identity. We don’t seem to be good at taking necessary precautions which don’t involve new unnecessary blanket restrictions and burdens.

There is a problem about sham marriages and it does need to be taken very seriously. This blog has demonstrated how naive I’ve been locally about this in the past. Exploitation of the vulnerable is quite as much a problem as those seeking to go through a form of marriage simply seeking to gain immigration advantage. Great care needs to be taken if someone who does not have the indefinite right to remain here asks us to conduct a marriage which would assist him or her achieve that right. In those circumstances precautions to establish things like genuine residence in the parish are essential and genuine preparation for a real marriage are important. It is right that we are being strongly reminded of this and offered advice about good practice.

But the Church of England has actually had to apply for an exception to the Equalities Act to put in place new precautions, and the directions we’ve received are contradictory and (it seems to me) place unneccessary restrictions on those who wish to contract genuine marriages; in these ways we’re going too far. We’ve stood up for those whose race has made them disproportionately vulnerable to suspicion and ‘stop and search’, and yet we appear to be making the same sort of mistake ourselves.

Some documentation we’ve received in this diocese directs us not to use Banns for foreign nationals. Other diocesan documentation makes this direction only about foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area. Still other diocesan documentation makes this direction only where someone does not have indefinite leave to remain in this country. Still other national documentation seems to encourage us to conceal the right to Banns from such couples while going on explicitly to acknowledge that such people may in fact insist on their right to Banns. Some of these documents insist that couples attend the Registry in Lincoln to follow this through even if they are, let us say, migrant workers in the Fens a couple of hours bus ride away.

I attended a meeting before Easter for those who are involved in issuing marriage licences, and I expect that at least some of the discrepancies in the documentation will be ironed out as a result. But the meeting made me all the more anxious about the way in which we are casual about our freedoms and history. An official opined that people are so used to needing to prove their identity these days that the Church of England need not be squeamish about expecting everyone to do so routinely. A clergyman claimed that so much money is spent on marriages that it doesn’t matter if we add an extra small fee to this large sum. Another clergyman thought we ought to get used to thinking of our use of Banns as a ‘privilege’.

At the very least those to whom a fee is paid when a marriage takes place by Licence rather than by Banns are under a strong obligation to restrict direction that this should be so to circumstances in which it is essential.

The photograph of the entrance to the Ugandan Embassy in Trafalgar Square was taken when we were in London to see The Children’s Hour a couple of weeks ago; the crane is Uganda’s state bird.

Holy Saturday

2011-04-24T07:47:00.004+01:00

Love hopes all things, love hopes always, love hopes all ways. The French uses ‘hope’ although the subtitle domesticated this to a more conventional ‘Love is eternal’.

Last night we caught up with the film Of Gods and Men when it came to the Film Theatre housed in the Secondary School in the parish, with the story of the murder of French Trappist monks in Algeria in the 1990s. We’d prepared on Palm Sunday by giving those who came to St Michael’s and St George’s a copy of the ‘testament’ left behind by one of monks, Fr Christian de Cherge, and a couple of them joined us as a result.

The pace and atmosphere echoed strongly that of Into Great Silence, the film portrait of the daily life of the monks at the Grande Chartreuse, which we had had to go to Hull to see a while ago. But woven into this was the sense of the growing menace, and the gradually growing consensus among the monks that they cannot choose to flee. And endless small touches which witnessed to their approach and their struggle with its growing implications.

I do not see how I could rejoice if this people I love were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder. It would be to pay too dearly for what will, perhaps, be called ‘the grace of martyrdom’ to owe it to an Algerian whoever he may be, especially if he says he is acting in fidelity to what he believes is Islam. I know the scorn with which Algerians as a whole can be regarded. I know also the caricature of Islam which a certain kind of idealism encourages.

The picture is from the foot of the cross in Bradley churchyard on Good Friday.

Good Friday

2011-04-23T07:53:00.003+01:00

The cross itself is missing from the top of the churchyard cross at Bradley which is a listed building and scheduled monument all in its own right (picture taken yesterday) so I showed those who came for a service there yesterday a picture of what it might have looked like (picture taken in Berkhamsted recently). When I arrived in the parish there was no Good Friday service in the small village, but for the last eleven years we’ve had one in the otherwise unused 5.00 p.m. slot in the day and do it gathered around the cross; this approach has caught the imagination of some and there were seventeen of us there yesterday (which is about twice the size of the average Sunday congregation).

Maundy Thursday

2011-04-21T16:47:00.002+01:00

This slab (with its representation of a priest and his chalice) has been reused as the lintel above a window beneath the tower in the redundant church at Buslingthorpe; it isn't something we'd found before, but we were there again last week when we had a visitor and had it pointed out to us. I was going to type a reflection here but have run out of the space in which to prepare it between the Chrism Eucharist in the Cathedral this morning and our own Last Supper services this evening, so the allusive and elusive nature of the carving and its accidental preservation through reuse will have to be the whole of the meditation on priesthood and Eucharist for today.

Palm Sunday

2011-04-18T10:16:00.005+01:00

Fourth plinth

2011-04-15T10:36:00.005+01:00

Ten per cent of those on board Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar came from outside Great Britain. Nine of the seven hundred came from the West Indies, and there was one sailor from Africa. I pulled down one of the naval history books on our shelves to dig out the figures when we got home after two nights in London during which we enjoyed stumbling across the present occupant of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. The artist, Yinka Shonibare, said the installation was partly about the legacy of colonialism, and the sails represent patterns on African dresses; I hope she knows about the multi-cultural nature of the crew.

... and Marshchapel

2011-04-12T07:12:00.005+01:00

Donna Nook...

2011-04-11T07:53:00.006+01:00

The graveclothes

2011-04-08T11:58:00.003+01:00

I’m sure we should pay more attention to the graveclothes left behind in Jesus’ empty tomb.

It may seem strange to post an Easter thought just as Passiontide is about to begin, but we began to read John’s story of Lazarus at Matins this morning, and I’m just writing the notes I need to preach about the same passage when it is read again at the main service on Sunday morning, so the graveclothes are again at the centre of my attention.

John does not waste words or images, so it has to be significant that he says both that Lazarus came out of his tomb (from which the stone needed to be rolled away) still bound by the graveclothes and also that Jesus came out of his tomb (from which the stone had already been rolled away) leaving his graveclothes in a neat pile behind him.

At its most simple, the point must be that Jesus’ resurrection is something totally different to the mere revival of a corpse. Something new is happening here which doesn’t relate to any category of thought or reality we’ve ever encountered before. Mary thinks she sees someone else who’d she might expect to find there but she certainly doesn’t jump in surprise at a naked man walking around; it is the risen Lord she encounters and we are in new territory.

I’ve written before at Eastertide: I’m always puzzled by some plodding sorts of evangelical who think the empty tomb simply shows that Jesus got up and walked again. I’m equally puzzled by some sorts of liberal who aren’t bothered to begin plodding because they think other aspects of the story show it instead to be merely a profound spiritual experience of the disciples. Why should we think that our existing frames of reference (whether physical or spiritual) are going to help us cope with this new thing?

So I’ve gone back to a poem I revisit more often than almost any other. R S Thomas’ poem The Answer is about twilight and about the formidable and intractable nature of intellectual puzzles in which human living is embroiled. It finishes with the same image and resolution, lines I have also quoted here before:

... There have been times
when, after long on my knees
in a cold chancel, a stone has rolled
from my mind, and I have looked
in and seen the old questions lie
folded and in a place
by themselves, like the piled
graveclothes of love’s risen body.

The hare is at the foot of the Cowper memorial window, the link being the hares he kept.

Less easy than I'd thought

2011-04-05T12:59:00.007+01:00

Before the repair to the south aisle wall in St Nicolas’ (8 December, 27 December and 1 March) was completed serious questions arose about the state of some of the trees in the churchyard (10 February); a colleague has obtained a detailed report on all the trees and was talking again this morning about the process of quotations, Archdeacon’s approval and consultation with the local authority for varieties of work (the removal of those which have died, important work where there might be a danger, and other recommended work).

Meanwhile, the first complaint of the season about our not doing more to make the churchyard neater has come in (much earlier in the year than usual) so we’ve been back to those who’ve promised to give us a hand with such things to see what else we need to be planning to do.

Still at St Nicolas’, we had a helpful visit last week from the Open Churches Officer from the diocese looking at the plans we have for the development of the building for wider community use (16 February), but the Working Group has not really been able to progress things. First, both Parish Councillor and Ward Councillor elections come up in the next few weeks. Secondly, a group in Great Coates believe that a letter to our MP from the owner of the closed hall in the village saying that it will in due course be on the open market (at a value enhanced by planning permission for conversion into a dwelling) is a generously given opportunity to work for its re-opening. We’ll probably have to sit back and see how these two things work through before picking up the Working Group again.

Down at the Little Coates Community Centre (4 January) we had been hopeful that a newly established community group would take on formal responsibility for it; individual members of the group have done remarkable work getting it open again after the water damage at the beginning of the year and encouraging lettings. However, I’d rather over looked the costs involved in a formal lease (the diocese estimates up to £1 500) so we’re just beginning to look at where that might be found.

St Michael’s, which would be glad to be relieved of the anxieties involved in running this Centre if this could be achieved, is itself about to spend £12 000 or so on remodelling the valley gutter in the church in the hope this will finally eliminate the problem of water coming in there, although having completed all the necessary application and public notice we’ve now waited seven weeks for the diocese to issue the Faculty which would allow us to get started on this.

The window is a memorial to William Cowper in Berkhamsted Parish Church where his father was the Rector.

A tree and some frost

2011-04-02T15:35:00.002+01:00

... I’ll be asked: what helped us to live
When there were neither letters nor any news - only walls,
And the cold of the cell, and the blather of official lies,
And the sickening promises made in exchange for betrayal.
And I will tell of the first beauty I saw in captivity.
A frost covered window...

I’ve just tripped across this poem of Irina Ratushinskaya again. I’ve looked back and find that I referred to it in a post on 8th August 2008. I was only thinking about it the other day. Now I’ve found it again in Being Human, the new third volume in Neil Astley’s Staying Alive series.

When we were in Amsterdam during Half Term we found long queues outside the Anne Frank House, almost next door to the church pictured here. We decided to come back half an hour before opening time the following day and, not needing to read all the background information in the first few rooms, pressed on ahead of the smaller crowd who came in when the House first opened. So we found ourselves on our own in the annexe at the top and back of the house where her family had hidden and lived, about which we’d read so often and which we almost already knew. It was a privileged few minutes.

Just one of the things about the annexe was a skylight window which had in her day framed a horse chestnut tree (which I’ve since discovered came down only recently having been ravaged by the same canker which brought low the horse chestnuts in Bradley churchyard). The House highlighted extracts from her diary in which she takes pleasure in the tree, and that is when I thought of the patterns the frost made on the window of Irina Ratushinskaya’s punishment cell. And now I’m reading her description of it again.

... a blue radiance on a tiny pane of glass,
A cast pattern - none more beautiful could be dreamt.
The more clearly you looked, the more powerfully blossomed
Those brigand forests, campfires and birds...
That upheaval of rainbow ice...

Never let me go

2011-03-31T14:02:00.006+01:00

I don’t remember any recent film disturbing me as much. It opened last month and we went to see it last night, and I’m still unsettled. I’m not quite sure why this is. Some of the presuppositions of the plot don’t really work, and there have been equally unpleasant predicaments and tragedies in other films.

Perhaps it is a tribute to the way the story is told: there are enough clear indications from the beginning about the true nature of the story but these are developed and played out slowly and deliberately through the whole film.

The narrator speculates at the end whether all human beings also go through life not understanding what they are living through and feeling they didn’t have enough time, but I’m not sure that was it.

I suspect it may have been a little earlier when her former Headteacher observed that the wider population’s greatly enhanced well being meant it couldn’t afford to consider the full humanity of those whose predicament brings that well being about.

If that is it, it makes participation in everything from slavery to a lifestyle only really possible through the poverty of others more recognisable and believable, which is unsettling enough.

I’ll have to read the original 2005 Kazuo Ishiguro novel to see how far this is all played out there.

The picture is another of those I took at Berkhamsted School recently.

St Nicolas' from the south

2011-03-27T16:31:00.005+01:00

Rewarding outputs

2011-03-24T11:07:00.004Z

Attempting to manage school improvement by financial reward, league tables and targets has entirely predictable side effects as Headteachers cynically, unconsciously or reluctantly allow budget, public reputation and specific measures of ‘success’ to skew their planning. Measure which are intended to (and may often succeed in) ‘driving up standards’ will also be skewing what is perceived and delivered as quality education.

So a standard was set by the previous Government of what proportion of pupils achieve ‘5 GCSEs at Grades A-C including English and Maths’; a laudable aim to see how many achieve good quality basic qualifications in literacy and numeracy and at least some width in other subjects. But you then discover schools abandoning a rounded education in English by putting pupils through an early GCSE so that if they achieve a Grade C they can stop teaching them the subject to make room for extra intensive tutoring in Maths. Or you discover schools abandoning a breadth of education and concentrating on what are perceived to be easier subjects and on some vocational qualifications which ‘count’ as multiple GCSEs.

Now a new Government sets a different standard: a new combination of GCSE passes at Grades A-C is set (with what may be a misnomer as ‘the English Baccalaureate’); humanities (limited to ancient history, history or geography), science (not BTEC) and a foreign language is required. The aim is explicitly to make it easier to identify ‘those schools which succeed in giving their pupils a properly rounded education’. But straight away there is wide publicity about aspects of a genuinely properly rounded education (from art to religious education) where there will be sharp declines in GCSE entries and where the teacher redundancies necessitated by declining budgets are likely to fall.

I continue to wonder what behaviour by schools would be prompted if money, praise and box ticking was to be linked to ‘contextual added value’ in core subjects along with at least something imaginatively extra to them?

This is at the front of my mind because I attended a briefing yesterday from the Skills Funding Agency about developments in funding Further Education Colleges. A chill went through me when the official spoke of a possible shift towards funding ‘outputs’ rather than ‘inputs’ - paying Colleges in the future for how many qualifications are achieved rather than for how many students are taught. I could see the point - part of a ‘relentless’ (I’m sure the word would be used) ‘commitment to drive up standards’ so that the Colleges would only be financially rewarded for achieving qualifications. But, if this does turn out to be the direction of travel of Government policy, it is inevitable how some Colleges (most of whom are already having to take increasing care over appropriate advice and guidance about recruitment to the right courses) will behave by beginning to restrict recruitment even further to those who are certain to succeed. I simply can’t see that being a gain for the more vulnerable in our society.

An illustration of a Public School may be an unusual accompaniment to this post, but I took the picture of the chapel at Berkhamsted School (in which I was Confirmed) when I was there on Saturday for the Memorial Service for a former Second Master of the School; Peter Gibbs was a kind and witty man, a close friend of my father’s from the days when they were at the school together in the 1930s, and my House Master when I was there in the 1970s. The school taught me well enough to get good A-levels and a place at Oxford (and provided a wealth of extra-curricular activity) but the present Government wouldn’t label my education there as sufficiently rounded since my only Science O-level was in joint sciences which doesn’t count towards the English Baccalaureate.

St Margaret's, Laceby

2011-03-20T08:48:00.007Z

Do not call unclean

2011-03-16T11:38:00.003Z

My three ordained colleagues (Assistant Curate, Non-Stipendiary Minister and Team Vicar) happen all to be female, indeed I can count a dozen priests from this parish over the years who happen to be female (the three of them, five of their predecessors, and the most recent ordinands produced by the parish the fourth of whom is due to be ordained priest this summer).

There is such a quiet normality about this that I am always surprised when I trip over the conviction / prejudice (sometimes one, sometimes the other, and sometimes a strange combination of the two which it is difficult to unravel) that their ministry is unacceptable. One of the three tells me that she has never really encountered this, but I know that another feels instances of it keenly; I did have a rare phone call this week about arranging a Funeral for a non-church attender whose family ‘wanted a man to take the service’ and I have no idea what influenced this request because we got no further than establishing that I was already booked to take another Funeral at exactly the same time this new one had been arranged.

There are those whose conviction is that the Bible sets its face against such ministry, and who will presumably be shaping their whole way of life around faithfulness to every attitude equally evidenced in the Bible. There are those whose conviction is that the long standing tradition of the church sets its face against such ministry, and who will presumably be shaping their whole discipleship in equal resistence to all present cultural norms which the church has not previously inhabited. And there are those (like ourselves) whose Christian experience of the grace made known through their ministry means we cannot ‘call unclean what God calls clean’, and who presumably need to be equally alert seeking to discern the activity of God in other unexpected places.

And (most often totally woven into all this, which is why the conviction / prejudice strands are so hard to unravel from each other) there is the influence of the cultural context in which we operate. We have had a female ordinand from South Africa staying in the parish for ten days. Her choice of parish to visit has been partly determined by her awareness of cultural resistance to her future ministry in the rural area from which she comes. We suggested she visit our female Archdeacon who began a conversation with her about the way in which the English agreement to ordain women followed years in which the secular leadership of women was very visible in society (so it felt to many like the church ‘catching up’) but the South African agreement to do so has preceded anything like this (so it feels to many like the church acting in opposition to the norms around it).

I continued this conversation by wondering why the South African church had been such an ‘early adopter’ of this idea in the first place. My guess is that the history of apartheid has made what might otherwise have been a conservative church on this issue into a strong resister to any other form of apparent discrimination. If so, this might be similar to the liberal commitment of the American Anglican church where I observed before we may under estimate the degree to which being asked to hold back from acting on an emerging conviction that faithful homosexual activity is acceptable and moral is like being held back from acting on a conviction that slavery is wrong.

We found the pelican in her piety during Half Term on a wall in Amsterdam.

Revesby poem again

2011-03-13T09:23:00.004Z

This is nearer what I wanted to achieve.

The Mirror of Love

‘Even locals are hazy about mid-Lincolnshire’
was all he meant to say,
but somehow lit upon
‘nobody knows where Revesby is’,

so I had to bite back
‘where I once bought an ostrich egg’,
‘where Aelred wrote Mirror of Love',
‘where Joseph Banks kept his kangaroo’.

Where the Wolds abruptly become the Fens
as if the fold in the map between north and south was visible
just where the world agrees west divides from east;
at the cross hairs of England.

Where there are bumps in the ground above
where Aelred first tested out an Abbot’s role
and might just have written his great work on love
and reflected all he wrote about.

Where, a short way off, near the ostrich farm,
a country house assumed the Abbey’s name
with the first garden planted with antipodean trees and shrubs
which Banks, with Captain Cook, brought home.

Where, equally far from our two homes,
two of us were allowed to unlock the church
to pray for our friend before he died
and look into a glass darkly distorted.

The view is from our bedroom window last week. The land falls away to the Golf Course but the owners of a strip behind the bungalows wants to build four story apartments here and thus help secure the viability of the hotel next door.

Cathedral stonework

2011-03-10T09:20:00.003Z

These two dates (1746 and 2009) appear in the section of the Cathedral where major work is being undertaken at the moment which a group of us were taken to visit after the meeting of the Cathedral Council last week; this is where the modern statues posted here then can be found.

There has been Victorian work in this area in between the dated work; we’ve been told before that the cycle of work on the building means this sort of major work visits every part of the building once every century or so.

We were shown examples of where the Victorian work had used iron wedges and sandstone blocks the deterioration of both of which had contributed to the problems now being addressed. But the most significant engineering feat appears to have been managing to insert this new stone into a flying buttress in 2009.

Bleating

2011-03-07T16:12:00.004Z

... as an arch gives stone the power of flight,
the place where faith would give
the clay of flesh its flight...

The image is from an American poet standing in Chartres Cathedral, and it is in his first full-length collection (which comes from an Irish publisher which gives its address improbably as the Cliffs of Moher): Glen Spauls Find A Place That Could Pass For Home Salmon Poetry 2010.

I’ve had the collection with me during our time away in Amsterdam during Half Term and since, and I’ve marked up half a dozen poems in it in particular.

The more important image for him in this poem is not stone but human: a teenager at prayer

... his face hid in his hands, the muddle
of life outside pursuing him here as well...

and later exchanging the sign of the cross with a friend with dipped fingers from the Font, so that the poet too prays in the same muddle

... abject as any man is
in the weight of his faults, scanted
of hope, but who has seen at least the image
of what he desired: another like himself,
whose flesh he might inscribe
with the water of blessing.

I’m still dwelling on images such as this, and that of A Tree on Inishmore bent to permanent west with obeisance its trick for still being able to stand

... It leaves leaning
east against the wind to us.

But what remains with me most strongly is Sheep. He is in a Scottish hotel, aware

... hooves
that tap crossing the paved road
can stamp on fingers and will snap them
in a mothering rage...
... the thousandfold
brainless herd of the skittish...
... all you hear all night are the cries of the sheep,
the mothers and the young penned apart.

So far, so familiar. There are strong echos of the Ormulum (with its standard moral)

... it can cnawen swithe wel
it can know very well
his moder thaer gho blaeteth
his mother where she bleats
bitwenen an thusende shep,
among a thousand sheep
thoh that teg blaeten alle
although they all bleat
& all swa birth the cnawen wel
and so it befits you to know well
thin God & his lare
your God and his law.

Then I turn the page and find a simple connection which on its own made the collection worth buying and may change listening to sheep bleating from now onwards

... and who of us who have carried and buried
in the unnoticed ground of memory
all this miserable century’s images
of fences and separation,
the reaching hands’ failed attempts to touch...

I took the picture of the distant Cliffs of Moher six years ago from one of Inishmore's neighbouring islands.

On the Cathedral roof today

2011-03-04T17:00:00.004Z

Work in progress

2011-03-01T11:12:00.004Z

This poem hasn’t yet come out quite as I want, so probably needs putting in a drawer for a fresh look in six months time. I don’t actually know whether St Aelred wrote any of On Spiritual Friendship in the brief period he was Abbot of the newly planted community at Revesby (coming from being Novice Master of Rievaulx and returning to be Abbot there). Sir Joseph Banks (President of the Royal Society for over forty years) helped sponsor and sailed on the Endeavour; although his country house was called Revesby Abbey it isn’t on the ground where the mediaeval Abbey stood.

Revesby Abbey: at the cross hairs

He meant to say
few people know
mid-Lincolnshire,
but said instead
‘nobody knows
where Revesby is’,
naming a place
where bumps in fields
call out to me,

where suddenly
the Wolds become
the Fens as if
the fold between
the north and south
was visible
at just the point
a line divides
the east and west;

where Aelred wrote
on being friends
and practised it,
and Joseph Banks
indexed his finds
for Captain Cook,
and on a turn
today you find
an ostrich farm;

where two of us
found the mid-point
between our homes
so each could drive
an hour or more
to meet to eat
and pray to God
for our sick friend
before he died.

Meanwhile, work began today to fill in the crack betwen the tower and south aisle in St Nicolas', Great Coates.

Amsterdam

2011-02-26T10:40:00.007Z

Approaching Lent

2011-02-19T14:39:00.004Z

My ambitions to do something creative with the dead trees in Bradley churchyard are not progressing quite as smoothly as I'd hoped.

First, I posted the idea that the dead tress could be made into something new and thus be a parable of the Easter possibilities which surround all our failures. This bit the dust when the carver said the dead wood couldn't be carved.

Then, I posted the alternative idea (developed with the carver and some District Church Council members on his visit) that a pair of living trees might be carved to disclose an Easter Garden. This received provisional support from the Archdeacon, but not it turns out from some of the other members of the District Church Council who were not present when the idea was developed.

And now, even the very minor related act of moving the bonfire pile to a less prominent position has resulted in one of the dead trees catching fire and now looking even worse than it did before hand. (This is the tree in the centre of the picture posted on 16th January, but here seen from the opposite side.)

Heh, ho.

Developing St Nicolas'

2011-02-16T17:41:00.003Z

Securing proper community meeting space in the church building is something about which St Nicolas’ District Church Council and Great Coates Village Council are in the first stages of discussion with each other to see if they can establish a Working Group (and with any others who would be willing to join in).

People may be surprised at how extensive and varied the use of the building has been even with its present limited facilities. It was calculated that some 3,000 different people came through the door in 2008 (so an ordinary Sunday congregation of about 30 people would represent less than 1% of the year’s users of the building). This included: those who come in when the church is left open during the day; those who came for the national Heritage Open Day; a Bagpipe Playing Group (making a recording); a Brownie Pack (rubbing the replicas of the church’s brasses); Great Coates Nursery (which also has a key so that the church can be used as an emergency assembly point); Great Coates Village Council (for both an open consultation event and a social event); a regular Handbell Ringing Group; the Live Links Rural Touring Programme (three different concerts); a regular Parent and Toddler Group (since ceased partly because of heating problems), the Police (for an open consultation event); Willows Primary School; worshippers at Christmas and on other special occasions; worshippers at Baptisms, Weddings and Funerals; and Wybers Wood Primary School.

A model exists at St Michael’s, Little Coates where over time a new heating system, clearing meeting space, new kitchen and toilet facilities, and work to achieve full disabled access, means the building is now used weekly by an Art Group, a band practising, a Parent and Toddler Group, and Walk Well (a health promotion scheme). This is not a new approach: St James’, Grimsby told them that the town’s only school was housed in part of the church building at the beginning of the nineteenth century while at the same time the town’s poor relief was administered from the vestry and the town’s fire engine parked in a side aisle.

The first task would be to secure funds for a proper architect’s Feasibility Study (we guess that about £3,000 would be needed for this). This Feasibility Study would outline a variety of possibilities and include detailed plans and costings. These plans and costings could then be used for consultation, for bids to funders, and for the applications for permission to make alterations. We guess that the actual work would be costed at up to £200 000.

The work which would then be needed would be: making new gas, water and sewage connections; installing a new heating system (the church has already taken the first steps towards a £50 000 project for this); installing toilet facilities (including those suitable for the disabled) either under the tower or at the back of the church, and establishing enough open space for flexible use of the building. We would not anticipate any changes to the mediaeval fabric, nor any external work, nor anything which would detract from the continued use of the building as a church.

Would the church be able simply to gain from the improvements and then refuse community bookings? There are safeguards: at the moment St Michael’s is receiving annual forms from two different funders who financed work there seeking signed assurances that the level of community use agreed at the time of funding continues.

Would the church make a profit out of letting its improved facilities? Even the maximum amount of rent which anyone might anticipate would be small compared with the costs involved in maintaining the fabric of a large Grade 1 listed building with features dating back to 1200; one of the positive advantages of the partnership is it will increase the money available for such maintenance. St Michael’s operates a policy that community groups which can’t afford basic rent will not be excluded from use.

Are there things which couldn’t happen in the church? A Barn Dance was held in St Michael’s last year, wine is often served after concerts in St Nicolas’, and young people’s events have charged round both buildings in the past. An open consecrated church couldn’t be used for things which are unseemly or oppose the Christian faith, but it would be rare for anyone to wish to book a secular community centre for these sorts of purposes. We wouldn’t be planning commercial bookings for things like parties, and we wouldn’t anticipate the building being licensed for the sale of alcohol.

Would this exclude those who believe in conscience they cannot enter a church building, and thus be discriminatory? We do not know of any main stream non-Christian faith or humanist group which would encourage its members to take this position, and we have not come across complaints on this basis elsewhere. A very wide range of people of all faiths and none use the increasing number of community facilities in churches across the country, including those which now house a village Post Office.

So what happens now? The District Church Council and the Village Council will be asked to consider formally a proposal to establish a Working Group to secure funding for a Feasibility Study and then to consider it’s outcomes. Others in the community (especially those from Aylesby Park and Wybers Wood) will be asked if this is a project they would like to be kept informed, support and be involved.

The idea has been around for at least ten years, but this sheet circulated at the weekend brings it firmly back on the agenda. The picture of the church isn't one of mine; it was taken by a member of the District Church Council when helping clear out gutters last week.

George Skelton painting

2011-02-13T13:37:00.006Z

There is a painting of St Michael's in an upstairs room in the Fishing Heritage Centre. It isn't one I remembering coming across before.

I noticed it when at a meeting last week and took this photograph of it (or rather, of me taking a photograph of it). It was simply labelled 'Church - George Skelton'. It appears to be part of the local authority's collection; a couple of pictures by Herbert Rollett (see a post here on 14th February 2010) were also hanging in the same room.

It must have been painted at about the same time as the picture posted here on 13th October 2010. The identifiable gravestones and the absence of others pins the date down to about 1890. The huge bush growing in the space between aisle and nave also looks like being at the same stage of growth as in the other picture.

The view from this angle helps bring out how the roof of the nave of the old church was heightened when the new part of the church was built in 1913-5; before this change in pitch the line of the roof of the anve and of the aisle was continuous.

Retreat lengths

2011-02-10T10:00:00.003Z

For how long a period should any priest be away from his or her parish on retreat?

I’ve just booked five nights away in the autumn to give me four full days. My guess is that this quite normal, and it will hardly inconvenience any parish arrangements or cover.

I’d have to say that some years I’ve not made this provision at all, that such an annual gesture is quite a minimalistic contribution to deepening my spirituality, and that I can hardly parade my devotion when the number of days when I even arrive for Morning Prayer early enough for some silent mediation first is probably outweighed by the number when I don’t.

Neverthless, I wonder whether an expectation that we’d each regularly do something much more significant which disrupts our own life and parish life would be more fruitful and give a much clearer message to ourselves and to those to whom we minister about what we are about.

The question came to my mind when I was asked to do some proof reading or consumer testing on the new clergy handbook shortly before it went live on the diocese’s website at the beginning of the month; the process of introducing new tenure arrangements for most clergy on that day required the publication of such guidelines.

I just happened to notice that it says we are ‘encouraged to take time for an annual retreat’ but ‘it is suggested that this should not exceed six days’ whereas I know the national Guidelines for the Professional Conduct of Clergy developed several years ago in anticipation of the new tenure arrangements also speaks of ‘an annual opportunity to make a retreat’ but adds ‘of at least a week’s duration’. The subtle difference may actually be significant.

Meanwhile, we are told that it is the combination of the heavy weight of snow on evergreen branches a short while ago, the drying out in the weeks since, and the high winds of the last week which has made bits fall off many fir trees in particular, including these ones along the western edge of St Nicolas’ churchyard.

We’ve put up notices warning people to keep clear. We’ll have a tree expert in next week to assess the whole churchyard where little work of this sort has been done in the last few years. We’ll then need to begin spending money on anything which is actually dangerous making a further dent in the church’s limited Fabric Fund.