A diagram

I keep tinkering with this diagram, which makes a lot of sense to me but may not be much help to you as a causal reader without a more detailed introduction than I can put here.

And I now find that making it bigger (so it can be read) cuts off one edge, so this may not be my most helpful post of all time.

Anyway, fro what it is worth, the further left you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends on genuine knowledge of what is going on on the ground.

The further right you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends of stepping back far enough to get the big picture.

The further down you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends on clear and definite spelling out.

The further up you go, the nearer you are to the truth that proper understanding depends on being open to things you haven’t yet taken into account.

But if you get to an edge (or, worse, into a corner), you are likely to be in a seriously distorted place; the nearer you get to the end of any line, the more likely you are to lose the balance you need.

What else? The bits in square brackets (about Myers Briggs on the edges and about Learning Cycle theory in the middle) are only vague correlations and not substantive parts of the diagram at all.

Normal service will be resumed next week.

Inter-faith hospitality

A reflection written for a Cleethorpes audience (which appeared in the Cleethorpes Chronicle on Thursday):

At the time of the Gulf War, a Cleethorpes man was the Anglican Bishop in the region. John Brown had been a boy in the choir at Old Clee church. He eventually retired back to Cleethorpes and died here a couple of years ago. In between, he first worked in places like Jerusalem and the Sudan where he learnt Arabic, so he was well placed eventually to take on the incredibly sensitive job of an Englishman being a Bishop in the Middle East.

He was always proud of being the subject of a fatwa – a formal ruling by an Islamic leader. The fatwa was issued by the Grand Mufti of the Yemen. It followed much patient work. It allowed Christians to worship in Aden. “It is our duty,” the Grand Mufti’s fatwa said, “to allow members of the Christian community to exercise their religious rites as is the case in our mosques and Islamic centres all over the United Kingdom”. The collection taken at the service in St Peter’s, Cleethorpes in thanksgiving service for John’s life was for the work of the medical clinic at Christ Church, Aden, which continues as a result; it serves those of every faith.

Of course, Christians and Muslims are not always so tolerant of each other. I recently visited one of the largest and most beautiful mosques in the world which is in Cordoba, Spain; it is now used as a Christian church and Moslems have not been allowed to pray in it for centuries. Meanwhile, in some other parts of the world today it is Christians who are the ones who are badly treated – we are not allowed to worship in public in Saudi Arabia and we are often attacked at worship in northern Nigeria.

So which story would be the best story about North East Lincolnshire today? Would we like people to report that we take the same attitude as the Grand Mufti of the Yemen? Or would we like people to tell others that we take the same attitude as the Christians in Cordoba?

Thankfully, there has been one consistent answer for many years. I have been reading about the opening of the Grimsby Synagogue in 1885. The report says there were cheers when a speaker referred to the generous donations made by Christian friends of the new growing Jewish community to help them build their place of worship. Over a century later, it was the Methodist Church (which still has a dozen churches open for Christian worship in North East Lincolnshire) which allowed the Moslem community to take over a former chapel so that it could have an Islamic Centre here.

A reflection with some of the same material and intent written for a Great Coates audience (coming out in the Village Council’s magazine for August and September)

At least one of those buried in St Nicolas’ churchyard in the 1920s was born in Hamburg. Edward Lewis was German, was naturalised as a British citizen in the 1870s, ran the Wellowgate Brewery in the 1890s, and lived for a short time at the Manor in Great Coates.

I hadn’t realised until last month just how many people travelled through Hamburg and Grimsby in the nineteenth century. The two ports sit on estuaries exactly east-west of each other. If you wanted to flee eastern Europe for the United States, it was to Hamburg that you would be likely to go. From there Great Central Railways could sell you a single ticket to take one of its boats to Grimsby and then to transfer to one of its trains to Liverpool. Among the huge numbers who did so were Jews being persecuted on what is now the Polish-Russian border - think ‘Fiddler on the Roof’.

A small fraction of these people travelled no further than Grimsby, and I’ve been learning that this is mainly from where the Grimsby Jewish community sprang (including the Goldberg family in Great Coates). The new community needed a place of worship. The future Lord Heneage (a Christian) gave the site, and, when the foundation stone was laid in the 1880s, there were reports of cheers when Christian donors were among those thanked for their contributions to the costs.

This all puts recent history in a very interesting context. One of those convicted recently for calling for the burning down of Grimsby’s Islamic Centre is reported as saying his blood boiled knowing that it was a former Christian church building. I wonder what support he is giving to his own local church to help keep it open. I wonder whether he realises that the Methodist church (which has a closed Chapel converted into a house in Great Coates as well as the closed Chapel converted into the Islamic Centre in Weelsby Road) keeps as many as a dozen Chapels open for Christian worship in North East Lincolnshire today. But how I wish he knew the story of the foundation of Grimsby’s synagogue.

There are things which should make our blood boil - including the way Christians, Jews and Muslims have often treated each other and sometimes still do - but making space for new communities to worship in our town surely isn’t one of them.

Edward Lewis was the father of the Herbert Lewis who has featured in the last two posts on this Blog; I have just obtained copies of his naturalisation papers which give his original name as Eduard Anton Louis Riemenschneider.

The picture was taken in the St Michael’s tower last week.

Biscathorpe

The pictures come from a recent visit to a disused church in the Lincolnshire Wolds.

Meanwhile, a footnote to my last post, I discover (initially by the simple stratagem of a Google search) that ‘General Paralysis’ isn’t a wide open term which could cover things like the post-traumatic stress disorders but rather a consistently used and precise albeit euphemistic term for tertiary syphilis (that is the final stage long after initial infection when the brain is attacked).  I have been guilty in at least one case of over romanticised assumptions when telling the stories of our war graves; historians recognise the phenomenon of the amateur being distracted by what he wants to see and not pursuing things far enough to challenge his own initial assumptions.

Great Coates churchyard yesterday

Queen bees dancing together as one hopes to attract the support needed to establish a new colony.

Tips of fresh growth on churchyard yews.

We continue to investigate First World War stories including that of Herbert Lewis who may have been a victim of shell shock; we have now obtained a copy of the certificate of his death at the Lawn, Lincoln (a mental institution) which gives the cause as ‘general paralysis about fifteen months’ seventeen months after his unit was involved in the hideous attack on the Hohenzollern Redoubt in 1915.

And, inside the church, a sailcloth full of unclean beasts ready to be let down from heaven as family worship for Petertide progresses.

Cutting back complaints

The annual big cut back of Great Coates churchyard took place this week (and we remain grateful to Community Pay Back for its support year after year), not soon enough to prevent the annual complaints about our brief deliberate over growing, and a little too soon to save the last of the meadow flowering from which these pictures come a few days earlier (19th June).  Here is a version of an e-mail I sent about the same time as I took the photographs.

I'm sorry you are so upset with the way we manage the churchyard, and I am particularly sorry that you have such unhappy memories of the way we handled the setting for a wedding you attended a while ago. I can only reassure you that we are trying to do something important and creative with our management of the churchyard, and that we now have volunteers who make sure the areas either side of the main path and around the north door are kept neat all the time including when there is a wedding.

We happened to have the Yorkshire Wildlife Trusts' "Living Churchyard" Project Officer visit us last month to assess what we are doing. She was able to highlight the way those who manage churchyards as we do preserves an invaluable habitat for plants and animals. She pointed out to us in particular the way the catapillars of the Red Admiral butterfly are making 'tents' in a nettle patch and the way less common plants such as pink violets flourish, things which are increasingly rare in sprayed hedgerows and intensively farmed fields across the countryside.

The truth is that the churchyard looks fabulous and much admired from the moment the first snowdrops peep through until about the middle of May It is true that we do then deliberately let the churchyard over-grow until this time of year (every year it looks at its worst about now as inevitably tall weed takes over) to allow these plants to set seed properly; if we did not do this we would simply lose the spectacular spring display which is one of the real features and pride of Great Coates.

Over a couple of weekends Community Pay Back then come in and cut it all back for us (although we have no control over exactly when they are available to do this). It is then kept neat by our own volunteers for the rest of the year. I well remember the year that a fire destroyed Community Pay Back's sheds and equipment shortly before it was due to come to us, and the way we were suddenly faced with the almost unmanagable task of doing the annual big cut with no suitable equipment of our own and only a few volunteers - which inevitably then took place much later than it should have done. If you were one of those caught by this, then I can only apologise again for something which was totally outside our control at the time.

We are just developing a small National Lottery bid to help us do things like work on trees (in addition to thousands of pounds worth of essential tree work which we have had to do over the last couple of years) which will include opening up the view of the east end of the church (something the Village Council asked us to consider some time ago) and putting up bird boxes. In this process, we also want to develop small discreet wooden signs and also print a guide to the churchyard so that visitors can really appreciate what is being achieved here and get the most out of visiting.

We are working really hard at things like this. The church itself is one of very few which is normally left open during the day, and we are also just developing material about those commemorated on Great Coates' War Memorials, and about the War Graves in the churchyard in particular. At 7.30 p.m. on 3rd July, we will have Sixth Form students running an evening in church about First World War Poetry which will include a tour of those War Graves.  We hope to do more things like this.

I'm sorry you are so upset by the seven weeks (on average) in the year when the churchyard overgrows, and I understand that you would personally prefer a totally different approach to its management, but I hope I have typed enough for it to be clear that the churchyard is neither unloved nor uncared for. 

Never cease to chant them

Common Worship begins daily prayers with Psalm 51.15 and Psalm 70.1 because Cranmer’s did in 1549.  Cranmer did because mediaeval monks did.  Mediaeval monks did because the Rule of St Benedict  told them to in about 530.  Benedict told them to read John Cassian to find out why.  Cassian wrote in about 400 about the earliest monks in the Egyptian desert from about 270 ceaselessly turning such verses over in their hearts .  Begin ‘Open our lips and fill them with your praise’ in case you are tempted to think that it is you who begin.   Continue ‘Come swiftly to my help’ because, as Cassian says, this verse has been picked from all scripture for this purpose, that the downcast do not despair of saving remedies and the spiritually successful are reminded that they cannot last without God; ‘do not cease to chant them’. 

The pictures of meadow flowers are from Mayflower Wood, Immingham on Saturday.  One of two full-time nature conservation officers who work for industry on the Humber bank showed us round, and it was particularly interesting to find out that such people exist; the wood is provided by the Oil Refinery next door to it.

The text is another of my attempts to provide answers for the Questions column in the Church Times and was published there last week, and draws on material included in this Blog before.

The screw tightens

The number of people seeking support from our local Citizens’ Advice Bureau (CAB) and our local food bank (‘Community Larder’) has soared, several multiples of the figures from a couple of years ago. This was the uncomfortable news at the Annual General Meeting of Churches Together in North East Lincolnshire (CTNEL) last week.

CTNEL has been in the habit of having a ‘justice and peace’ agenda at its AGM rather than one dominated by discussion of, say, how well united worship on Good Friday had gone the previous year, and most usually this is achieved by having a visiting speaker.

CAB was invited this year in the hope that it might brief us about what concerns are most pressing in our particular community, partly in case we were missing something. It turns out that debt stands at the top of the list, which isn’t something we had missed – CTNEL had in fact been behind the creation of the local Credit Union a number of years ago.

One dramatic very recent factor is the benefit changes which came into play at the beginning of April. The cut in benefits paid to those deemed to have a spare bedroom has affected over 500 households (about 6% of the households) in this parish alone.

Given that there simply isn’t a supply of one and two bedroomed flats and houses available for let in North East Lincolnshire on anything like this scale, few of those living in these homes has a realistic prospect of reducing rent by moving to a smaller property, so there is no wonder that the numbers seeking support has soared.

There was one piece of encouraging news. CAB’s national social action approach means it tries to fed back to Government where policy is making a significant impact. The discovery in Grimsby (reflected elsewhere) of how high a proportion of limited income some people were spending on phone calls relating to benefits issues did result in a freephone number being made available.

Meanwhile, a further piece of encouraging news is how grateful the local Islamic Centre has been for the way churches, neighbours and the police have reacted to the recent attacks on it. Apparently there is a display board inside covered in the greetings it has been sent and members say what a welcome part of the community this makes them feel.

The picture comes from our sitting room window sill last week.