Donna Nook...

The graveclothes

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

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

... 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

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

Rewarding outputs

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.