Bishop John Brown

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

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.

Mary of the Cross

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

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

 

A higher gift than grace

‘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.