Cleethorpes Bank Holiday

The Stamford Nose cont

There has been a minor flood in one of the archive stores at Brasenose College, Oxford. All seems to be well now, but sorting it all out has been the main preoccupation of the part-time Archivist. Nevertheless, just before Christmas she did reply to my query about the College buying Brasenose, Stamford and its mediaeval door knocker in 1890.

No, she doesn’t think it likely that Bishop Edward King played a role. The house wasn’t sold by his acquaintance Mrs Johnson, and the advertised particulars for the auction make something of the door knocker and its association with the College, so the Archivist assumes that the College heard of the sale by this more prosaic route.

What of Mrs Johnson? She did not own the house - it was sold by Thomas Tertius Paget of Humberston, Leicestershire. She probably had been Paget’s tenant - the particulars indicate the property was available for immediate occupation and College’s Agent at the time mentions a local Estate Agent called Johnson as being ‘a son of the late occupier’.

Meanwhile, although all the roads were clear to drive along through the snow and bad weather before and after Christmas, our greatest challenge was getting out of our drive (as pictured) on Boxing Day.

Happy Christmas

It occurs to me (and thus, perforce, to those to whom I preach today) that the Bishop who alerted us to the danger of broadcasting a cosy ‘Happy Christmas’ sentiment from within our own cocoons of well being, heedless of how vacuous such unproductive greeting must seem to the distressed, might be helped by the Sermon on the Mount.

The English name ‘The Beatitudes’ picks up the repeated declaration of those who are ‘blessed’. But the word makarios, most often translated ‘blessed’ in these texts, is most often translated ‘happy’ in other texts (‘happy the one who does not lose faith’, ‘happy are you, Simon, because this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood’, ‘happy the servant whose master finds him at work’). The English sense of knowing oneself to be profoundly fortunate could embrace both being joyful about it (happy) and being aware of it as grace (blessed), and there may be no way to unsplice the two in this particular piece of Greek.

So, perhaps the greeting ‘Happy Christmas’ actually turns out to be particularly apposite for the drained, bereaved, hungry and persecuted: ‘it is this incarnation which pledges God’s makarios to you, however irrelevant and vapid the tinsel laden greeting may seem to you at this moment’.

Of course what this (and my Christmas sermon) does not go on to ponder (especially in the year when St Luke’s Gospel is the principal source for our readings with everything from the Magnificat to the woes which follows his version of the Beatitudes) is whether it can then be appropriate for anyone to say ‘Happy Christmas’ to those like me who are wealthy enough, comfortable, well fed, laughing and even respected today.

The truth eludes us?

At the beginning of the month, a Bishop wrote that Advent is not meant to be comfortable and warns that a totally blanket use of the greeting ‘Happy Christmas’ can trample on those for whom there is no chance that it will be so; he is castigated in the press for liberal trendiness and being out of touch with the celebrations around him.

Since then, a teacher sent into the home of ill children is reported as being sacked for offering to pray, something offered as further evidence of anti-Christian bias; her own account reveals that she actually took the opportunity of being in one vulnerable non-Christian home to give her testimony about Christian healing two visits running.

This morning, the objective BBC’s flagship radio news programme reports the SNP’s case that any broadcast election debate in Scotland should not ignore the fact that there are four main parties in Scotland; the item concluded that the BBC is unlikely to wish to unpick the agreement it has made with ‘the three main parties’.

Today, it does seem a fair cop that a priest is reported suggesting that the most vulnerable should shop lift; he turns out to have been talking about the impossible situation those who fall through the benefit net are in and was encouraging them to avoid prostitution, burglary and mugging, and says ‘the observation that shop lifting is the best option that some people are left with is a grim inditement of who we are’.

But, while spotting these things, I find strangely that my main reflection is about being in the same boat, and how difficult it is to observe, think or write objectively myself.

For example, how honest and open or self deceiving and spin laden is a blog like this?

Does it manipulatively seek the admiration of any readers there might be? In this way, does it share the unreflective implicit boastfulness of many Christmas circular letters?

Does it unconsciously betray less admirable things this innocent writer doesn’t even suspect? In this way, does it share the distorted selective reporting of the media accounts I've spotted recently?

Would any published column, public speaking or parish pewsheet stand any better chance of avoiding these traps?

Would any private diary, personal conversation or formal confession do so?

Walter Tapper

An enthusiast for the architect Sir Walter Tapper has just put up a new website about the churches Tapper built. John Whitworth’s interest began with his home church of St Erkenwald, Southend (now demolished) but has since spread. He came to see St Michael’s, Little Coates a little while ago to take some pictures which now appear on the website. We were able to share with him then Tapper’s original ground plan and a photograph of how the church looked when newly opened in 1915 both of which now also appear at http://www.sir-walter-tapper-churches.co.uk.

Once I’d remembered to click on the + signs to open up wider options, I’ve enjoyed spotting cousin relationships, the most striking of which are between St Michael’s and The Ascension, Malvern Link where the family resemblance includes the nature of the chancel vault and the shape of the east window as well as details such as the light fittings, chairs and pulpit. When he is able to put up pictures of St Mark’s, Whiteley people will be even more struck by how similar the tower there is to the one at St Michael’s.

But the picture above doesn’t come from his website. I’ve just pulled out the small collection of papers in the church safe to check some details for him and noticed again this memorable slip of paper from about 1912. Clearly some recent burials had taken place on the ground north of the old village church where the new Tapper church was to be built. The slip records the permission given by the relevant next of kin for four of these burials to be moved. The first signs with a mark. The last says:

I agree to my baby being removed but would very much like it buried in the same grave as my other one. C Nicholls.

Sunday morning texts

Look towards the east, O Jerusalem, and see the glory that is coming from God.

Arriving for Matins at St Nicolas' it looked as if the church itself was already saying the Advent antiphon for the Benedictus.

Let us put away the works of darkness and put upon us the armour of light.

Arriving for Communion at St Michael's it appears that during the night someone had lifted all the trees the Council had recently planted on the green outside the church.

Some men don't get it

What has Starlight Express got in common with Thomas the Tank Engine? It is a question which it has amused me to ask ever since we saw Starlight Express at the Grimsby Auditorium some time ago, and I’ve had some grudgingly tolerant answers when I have labouriously trotted it out.

Both have a master figure in charge, and this figure has the same name (Control in one case and the Fat Controller in the other). In both cases, steam is good and diesel is bad. And in both, the engines which drive everything are male and the carriages which trail along behind are female.

It appears that a Canadian Professor has spotted the last point, and is being roundly castigated for highlighting it. One of the pair of male presenters on the objective BBC’s flagship Radio 4 news programme introduced an item about it by saying ‘you are not going to believe this’ and finished by saying that it was ‘not surprising’ that she is being taken to task.

Her basic point is that there are no neutral standing places, and that what children assume to be normal is absorbed among other places from the unspoken assumptions in the books they read and the media they consume; it would have seemed an uncontroversial point to make a generation ago, but somehow it is now greeted with incredulity.

But do the subliminal norms of this sort really make enough difference to make a fuss? Well, they appear to do so in the church. Last week unsolicited I’ve had two different female priests totally independently tell me the debilitating way some male priest have treated them and what it has felt like; I’m sure that some of the opposition to women’s ordained ministry is principled, but it is so difficulty to disentangle this theological context from the non-neutral background assumptions which appear to fuel this sort of behaviour.

And it is endemic. Last week I was also at an almost exclusively male meeting of Rural Deans and watched the face of the only woman present squirm as one of them chortled while described an able female priest as ‘a stunner’.

Meanwhile, the picture is the Kingsway Printers’ Band playing at a Christmas Spectacular in St Michael’s on Thursday.