We are rich

Martha Payne isn’t complaining about her school meals. She is celebrating her good fortune in having daily access to them.  This is something hardly any of the media reports of  her Blog about her school lunches has picked up.  Several media reports even say that she is counting how many hairs there are in her lunches, whereas her Blog actually records the way in which there never are any.

She echoes in my mind one of the speakers at our recent clergy conference who (talking of something quite different) slipped in a reminder of what we already know: we are rich people; we have ready access to everything from plentiful clean water to any emergency medical treatment we need, so we could not possibly count ourselves as being anything else.

Aware of her own good firtune, she is drawing attention to school children across the world who do not share it.  She had done some limited conventional fund-raising (such as a cake sale) for the charity Mary's Meals, and she thought a Blog about her own school meals would be a way to raise some more.  She set herself a target of £7 000.

The publicity around her local Council’s temporary ban on her taking and posting pictures of her school lunches could not have been more helpful.   By this morning, the amount given to the charity through the page on the on-line donation site  linked to her Blog was more than ten times her target; it has passed £80 000.

The money is to be used to feed children at Lirangwe Primary School in Malawi, which happens to be forty miles or so from where I was born.

Meanwhile, the picture was taken beneath my study window last week.

New to me last week

A campaign is under way to bring this mediaeval chess piece (which was discovered in Habrough churchyard, a little north of here, in the 1980s) to the museum at Immingham. It was striking to learn that it exists and how beautiful it is, and I’d really like to think it might be roughly contemporary with Rognvald jarl Kali Kolsson (who died in 1158) the first and second of whose poems in the Orkneyinga Saga which I’ve been trying to translate boasts of his chess playing prowess and tells of his being stuck in Grimsby on a trading trip. The archaeologists who worked at the back of St Michael’s, Little Coates a while ago told me that most work for people like him isn’t on major projects but is simply done following those digging a pipeline, and it turns out this is exactly the circumstances in which the Habrough piece was discovered.

The only surviving copy of the mediaeval text of an alliterative Morte d’Arthur is held in the Cathedral Library. It appears that a fifteenth century Yorkshire squire copied it, one of his descendant’s husbands gave his manuscript to Durham Cathedral in the hope of preferment, and a Canon of Durham brought it with him when he became Bishop of Lincoln; it isn’t the only work which would not have survived but for his copy. The opening of Simon Armitage’s new translation of it, about which we heard him speak when he came to talk in the Cathedral Library in the week, includes lines which I think would do well as a prayer at the beginning of my next sermon there is due course, and I look forward to reading further into it:

May words trip from my tongue at this time,
not hollow and vain but in honour of Him,
and which profit and please every person who hears them.

Hearing Armitage speak about translating poetry prompted me to spend part of my Day Off putting some of the things I’ve tried to translate and write in order, including having a go at creating a new haiku:

Half the blossom falls
half clings to the Spring branches
making a lace tree.

David Hockney remarked in a documentary about the way in which the invention of metal tubes for paint (patented in 1841) changed art. He said that Constable (who died in 1837) did most of his work back in his studio taking a long comfortable time trying to represent clearly what he had seen, while the Impressionists (who exhibited in the 1870s and 1880s) were able to paint in the open air and thus worked faster. I wonder whether art historians also speculate about the way photography was becoming common at exactly the same time; a sub-conscious reaction might have been that, since exact reproduction could now be done as it were automatically, art should move to a more atmospheric approach.  I like the way that factors in the 1840s and 1850s which were quite divorced from painting itself might have been what shaped its development.

New Scientist reports the discovery that, say, 2.5 million years ago a human genetic mutation which doubled a particular gene happened to enable the brain to make far more connections and thus made modern humans possible.  Reading this with my brain, it seemed disconcerting to be discovering something about this previously elusive step, as well as to know how much is richly new to me every week as a result.

Kay Mullins

I’ve been trying to write a piece about my aunt, who died last week, but, re-reading the first drafts, it is obvious how contrived it is and how badly it scans, so I’ve put it aside.

The central Jubilee conceit of the piece was that the new young Queen’s expressions of sympathy at the time of the Harrow Rail Disaster bound her to a sixty year task of repeatedly expressing her nation’s grief for Aberfan and Zeebrugge and all the places in between, while the loss there of her husband of sixteen months (an earlier Peter Mullins) set my aunt on a parallel sixty years of working out the implications of such losses in active widowhood; that she would have been widowed that long come October takes some comprehending.

But ‘active’ is by far the more important word than 'widowhood' - from many years of district nursing to commitment to her large local church in Bexhill including such things coordinating its pastoral care scheme. During over twenty years of retirement in South Petherton she has continued at the same pace - for example, the Community of St Francis (who until recently had a house near by at Compton Durville) has been remembering ‘her support, friendship and her wise and practical help’.

By good fortune we were able to call on her only three weeks ago when we were staying at Malmesbury, and we noticed then again a subtle Franciscan virtue: knowing for some years that she must be near the end of her life, she continued to divest herself of her possessions. On a previous visit I came away with her husband’s childhood photo albums. This time quite a bit of the best furniture had clearly vanished from her tiny bungalow (she spoke with affection of the person to whom one piece had gone) and we were given to take away a book stand he had made and a brass pot which had been my grandmother’s.

We give thanks for every remembrance of her.  There will be much sadness, story telling and rejoicing over the next few weeks of funeral and thanksgiving services.  I'm sorry I can't capture more of it in what I write.

Catching up

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.

Frustration

Any mild frustration with the Church of England or the diocese of Lincoln has been eclipsed in the past fortnight by banging-head-against-wall frustration with BT and Virgin Media which has dominated the last couple of weeks of my life.

The story may begin with the fact that we have sold my mother’s empty house in Northamptonshire. The repeated travelling there and back for final arrangements and clearance was inevitably consuming of almost all my available ‘time off’ and much emotional energy, but the good thing is completion of the sale has removed one of the significant sources of background anxiety from my life, and was achieved just before the heavy snow made travel so difficult.

The link is that my mother signed several copies of a standard letter saying she was now living in a Home elsewhere, giving the completion date of the sale of her house, and asking that final bills be sent to me. These letters went to those responsible for everything from Council Tax (who responded immediately and helpfully) to electricity (whose final bill is still awaited). BT, however, responded by cutting off my phone here. At least I am guessing that this was the reason they did so; nobody at BT can offer an explanation.

An e-mail from my internet provider popped up on 23rd November. Virgin Media said it was sorry I was leaving. I phoned to ask why. BT had told it that the phone line down which it provided my e-mail and the internet was to cease at the end of the day. I phoned BT. I was told the order to cease my line would be cancelled. It wasn’t. It would be unedifying to write pages about every stage of what has happened since. Suffice it to say that I have been on the phone to BT and Virgin Media sometimes several times a day since, and the story is not yet complete.

Neither has a customer care department which wanted to assist putting things right, let alone liaise with the other. Both treat my re-connection as the connection of a new customer seeking to receive services for the first time. I had a few days without a phone line, a week without my widely advertised phone number, and three weeks (until today) with no access to the internet; typed as one sentence this doesn’t look as life destroying or even occasionally tear provoking as it has felt trying to sort it all and not being able to use the channels of communication on which we’ve come to rely for everything from work to leisure, from accessing information to on-line banking.

It appears competition has achieved lower prices by ensuring a basic and inflexible level of service since no provider can afford to become more expensive than its rivals by providing anything better. A member of one of the congregations here (who staffs a different sort of telephone help line) had told me only a few days earlier that she had been on a period of ‘notice to improve’ because she was taking too long trying to be helpful and was thus not getting through her calls fast enough. So, I have discovered since, I am helpless in the face of what has even been contradictory but equally inaccurate answers and undertakings from those locked into set procedures and sometimes out of their depth at the same call centre on the same day. It has indeed been ‘like one of those bad dreams’.

Authentic performance

It is the ‘negligible details’ which make good art and drama, Jonathan Miller suggested when talking at Barton at the weekend.

He read Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts including suffering... takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along and the poem’s reference to Breughel’s The Fall of Icarus where people, animals and ships all seem to be looking elsewhere despite the splash of the white legs disappearing into the green water. He drew attention to the same phenomenon in a different Breughel painting (reproduced above): the Conversion of St Paul appears to cause a slight hold up on the busy road to Damascus rather than the drama of the moment (he said) which founded Christianity.

The highlights of his life story as he told it turned on close observation and on the diligent application of what is discovered by this close observation. It began before he was born birth with his father as a Great War doctor taking seriously the symptoms of shell shock. It continued with his own education, including a Biology teacher who got his pupils on an expedition to squeeze egg and sperm from fish and then observe under a microscope the single fertilised cell divide for the first time. It continues with current publications about and his own observations of the hand movements people make when speaking.

He repeatedly declared himself an enemy of the stylised gestures and cliches of many dramatic and especially of many operatic performances. He dwelt at length on the way humour works by revealing to us something we in fact then recognise. And I was particularly struck by his observation that, although he would often change the period in which a play or opera is set (provided he had researched the negligible details with care), he could never do so when the writer or composer had set it in his own day (where the original negligible details would be unconsciously intrinsic).

Fully alive

How appropriate is it to say of someone with dementia that part of him or her has already died? This was one of the things talked about when the diocese’s Safeguarding Adviser ran a trial study morning for four clergy yesterday; I went to help me reflect further on a subject about which I blogged on 14th July and 1st August.

In one sense it is literally true. Brain cells have died. But we would not use the language of someone who had lost the function of a different part of the body; someone who is blind, or has lost a limb, or who lives without a kidney.

In another sense it is metaphorically true. Something almost essential to our relating has been lost. But the metaphor makes more sense from the perspective of the one relating than it does to the person with dementia.

It is language with which many carers and partners are not only happy but actually find helpful. We heard more than one say this. But we heard one take a step further speaking of ‘watching someone die’ which might even appear to place care of those with dementia on the hospice rather than the care home side of a line.

The majority view was that the way the language made sense to carers and partners clearly made it appropriate. It would seem quite cruelly in their faces to challenge them about it. But the majority recognised why I remain deeply uncomfortable with language which open up a door to thinking of people with dementia (and thus in some ways relating to them) as anything less than fully alive people fully in the image of God.

Meanwhile, the light on the flowers in St Nicolas’ illustrates a side benefit of a move I made a little while ago to rationalise the random proliferation of furniture in the sanctuary there; the more simple arrangement only fitted together when the flower stand was moved from the north side of the altar to the south side, but ever since I have enjoyed the occasions when the light has fallen on them from the south facing window.

Need for identity?

Seeing how mistaken it is to place value on people by their contribution, gifts or response confirms an instinct about the full humanity of the stillborn (my reflection on 26th July) but may also help make sense when faced with dementia (my post on 14th July, where I was puzzled by the absence of significant theological reflection on the predicament).

I now keep noticing that there are in fact people visible wrestling with the issue. Last month, the Church Times had a composite review of three books, one of which I’ve ordered, and another Blog quoted Christian Bryden (who has Alzheimer’s) making just this point in a newsletter of a Scottish Churches’ project:

Where does this journey begin and at what stage can you deny me my selfhood and my spirituality? As I lose my identity in the world around me, which is so anxious to define me by what I say or do rather than who I am, I can seek an identity by simply being me, a person created in the image of God. My spiritual self is reflected in the divine and given meaning as a transcendent being.

As I travel towards the dissolution of myself, my personality, my very ‘essence’, my relationship with God needs increasing support from you, my other in the body of Christ. Don’t abandon me at any stage… sing alongside me, touch me, pray with me, reassure me of your presence… I may not be able to affirm you, to remember who you are or whether you have visited me. But you have brought Christ to me. If I enjoy your visit, why must I remember it? Why must I remember who you are? Is it to satisfy your own need for identity? If I forget a pleasant memory it does not mean it was not important to me.

Meanwhile, although my mother does not have dementia, her new doctor’s changes to her medication has made her much brighter, and at the moment the walnut tree by the entrance to St Nicolas’ churchyard is heavy with what appears to be fruit.

Stillbirth reflection

Last month I found myself having to say something at another such Funeral, this time following the cot death of a girl of three months. Her parents wanted a short and simple service and had prepared some beautiful things about their daughter which they wanted to say, so I suggested that there might not need me to add very much. ‘No,’ they said, ‘we want you to say something proper.’

What I found myself saying was this. It seems to me that we get our own sense of meaning from those who for some reason appear to value us. They may well do so because we are attractive or witty or successful or useful, but we know that doesn’t count, because either now or in the future we may find that we are unattractive, uninteresting and of little achievement or help. So we really get our own meaning from those who value us without cause. Many of us are lucky to get that from different places: from among our family and friends; from total strangers; and from God.

What I tried to say was that this child had all three: in her distraught parents, in the NHS and in her Baptism. We know her life had meaning because her parents loved her, because we bothered directing our taxes towards her care, and because God’s activity was made visible around her. So it seems to me her life had no less meaning and no more meaning than any of ours.

Obviously, hardly anyone at the service could be expected to follow a line of intellectual reasoning like that, but at least her parents were thankful that something proper seemed to have been said. I have no idea whether the reasoning would stand up to serious scrutiny anyway.

Nevertheless, I even dare to wonder whether such things would be true about the stillborn child for whom I will take a service tomorrow. I know her life had meaning because she was valued without cause - in being loved unconditionally by her parents, in being dealt with without charge by a firm of Funeral Directors, and in being owned openly before God in the same hospital’s Chapel.

And the extra thought I would say to those of you who come to a summer Evensong in a Cathedral is that all this might alert us to an important reason why we are taught that we should not value people by how attractive they are, what good company they are, how successful they are, or how useful they are. It is that if we place meaning in those wrong places, we find that we are denying our instinct that the life of such a child has meaning.

I've been spending time over the last week with another family who have suffered a stillbirth, and I've dug out again for myself these words which I prepared as part of a sermon when preaching in the Cathedral almost exactly four years so.

The picture is a different view of the recently vandalised cross on the 1927 grave of fifteen year old Bert Davis in St Michael's churchyard. I've noticed that the three burials in the churchyard in the month after his were of a 12 year old (whose address was a Mental Hospital outside Lincoln) and children aged 8 hours and 5 years (from the streets adjacent to the one in which Bert lived).

Bells on her toes

This lady rides her horse across the road from the modern market cross in Banbury. I took the picture yesterday visiting my mother in hospital and discussing with her residential homes I’d been exploring for her. It is all a strange to stage to be at (much more for her than me, I realise) made all the more difficult by the way I can only realistically get down there once a fortnight, don’t have the capacity to support managing her affairs and house at this distance, and am far from sure we ended up making the right decision.

The only highlight (other than discovering the statue) was that a very old friend of hers, who was a colleague of my father’s in Africa fifty years ago, called at the same time; he told me his last clear memory of me was when I was aged two bouncing enthusiastically in my cot despite having my eyes bandaged over following one of the early operations on them.

The situation with my mother, the angst evidenced in this Blog about the ministerial situation we are in, and much else including difficult and time consuming things in some of the governing bodies of which I’m a member, was all picked up in a Ministerial Development Review in the week, a trial run for the system the diocese is seeking to put in place alongside the new clergy terms and conditions. The reviewer was perplexed at my trying to cope with all this at once, but nevertheless supportive and encouraging. It will be interesting to find out whether repeating this exercise each year and communicating the results to Bishops will clarify or develop what I do and what they pick up.

Driving back from Banbury yesterday for three hours with the radio on in the car meant I heard substantially similar tributes to Alan Plater in turn on the obituaries programme, the news programmes and the arts programme; the first of these startled me by praising him for managing to ‘insert some comedy’ into his TV adaptation of Trollope's The Warden and Barchester Towers which confirms that not everybody who contributes to Radio 4 knows what they are talking about.

Town supporters

Supporting Grimsby Town turns out to be the perfect preparation for following the World Cup. We are almost unique in being fully psychologically prepared.

Getting a good goal early but then giving away a stupid or easy goal and ending up with a draw? The most common story for the first part of last season.

Having a ‘must win’ game against a weak opponent but not even ‘turning up’ on the day? The constant experience through the middle of last season.

Reduced to intricate calculations about unlikely combinations of results which just might make things alright? The major preoccupation of the last part of last season.

For the rest of the country this may be an agonising trauma, but for us it is simply our normal way of life.