TRINITY SUNDAY
3rd June 2007
Graphics and cartoons appear only in the printed version
NEEDLING
A highway patrolman pulled alongside a speeding Nissan on the freeway. Glancing at the car, he was astounded to see that the blonde behind the wheel was knitting! Realising that she was oblivious to his flashing lights and siren, the officer cranked down his window, turned on his bullhorn and yelled, “PULL OVER!” “No,” the blonde yelled back, “it’s a scarf!”
TRAVELLERS’ TALES (10)
Andrew Neaum (2000)
While at Invergowrie I celebrated the 25th anniversary of my priesting. We marked the day quietly and with little fuss, first with a family celebration of the Eucharist in the lovely little chapel at All Soul’s. We remembered as we did so the Cathedral in Harare where the priesting took place and the Bishop who performed the priesting, six feet four inches of Paul Burrough, the delightful bishop of Mashonaland at that time. We remembered too the two priests ordained with me, Mike Stebbing, now a member of the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield, near Leeds and Jonah Gunduza, an elderly and saintly African catechist. We then headed off to Scone (pronounced Scoon) Palace which is just outside Perth. Before exploring the castle we ate smoked salmon sandwiches in the company of two greedy peacocks (they were given bits of crust, but not of smoked salmon).
A surfeit of beauty
The Palace has an ancient core, but for the most part is early nineteenth century and very lovely, beautifully set out for wandering around and viewing. It is notable for lovely furniture and a variety of exquisite collections, for example many ivory carvings from the 17th to 19th centuries, porcelain from all the famous names including Meissen, Derby and Limoges, all of which is beautifully displayed behind the glass doors of the shelves of what used to be the library. There are some truly remarkable and beautiful paper mâché objet d’art, mostly great vases, as well as Chippendale chairs, ormolu clocks and a fine looking early 19th century organ. In fact lots and lots of well displayed and lovely examples of mankind’s artistry, but far too much of it, so that we ended up filled with gawp-fatigue and began to rush past exquisite stuff as if our aesthetic sense had been swamped by a sudden onset of philistinism. I suppose that if we were really aesthetically sensitive and fine-tuned we would have been prepared to linger for hours and hours and hours.
Brutish bottoms
Scone is where many of the kings of Scotland were crowned, almost all of them violent and unpleasant brutes. They were crowned sitting on the Stone of Scone, which for centuries (since Edward the Third) has been in Westminster Abbey for the crowning of real kings ( I speak as a chauvinistic Englishman)! However the stone has now been given back to the Scots, which is a bit of a joke really, because many Scots have insisted smugly that the stone that Edward pinched was in fact a fake and that he had been duped! If so the original remains lost and there is a returned fake in Edinburgh Castle, made famous not by the royal behinds of Scots monarchs but by those of English monarchs.
After touring the palace and being photographed sitting on the replica of a fake stone, we wandered round the very lovely gardens and grounds, under its great trees and over its thick lawns, attempting unsuccessfully to lose ourselves in a maze before heading for our car and home. We abandoned a proposed trip to a garden in Crieff because not only were we weary, but also because there were showers about. At home I cooked a fine fillet of plaice each, which we ate with new potatoes, parsley sauce, broccoli, and a bottle of champagne.
The sweetest music
Though it is hard to believe, Invergowrie gets less rain each year than does Wodonga! Rain tends to fall very lightly there. Over on the West Coast of Scotland, on the Island of Mull, the annual rainfall is eighty inches! Only once or twice while we were at Invergowrie did we get anything like real and heavy rain. Carsemohr, the house we lived in, has a slate roof and so we hardly ever heard the sweetest natural music that there is, namely the sound of rain on a roof as you lie cosily in bed. The rain was rarely hard enough. However, over the stairwell there is a skylight, and even light Scottish rain can be heard on that. Because the skylight is placed on the east facing slope of the roof, on sunny mornings we awoke to great floods of golden sunlight, which was lovely.
Buddhism and evil
One of my encounters in Scotland was with a Buddhist who had little affection or admiration for the Christian faith. Many educated people seem to despise Christianity. This is not a new phenomenon. In 1925 one of the precious and dilettante Bloomsbury intellectuals reacted to the conversion of T S Eliot to Anglo-Catholicism by writing: “There's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God”! There is a kind of intellectual snobbery behind much of this. Clever people don’t need God, their intellect can provide all the answers to all the questions life poses, they imagine. There is also an element of the familiarity breeding contempt. Buddhism or even Islam have got to be superior to Christianity because they are exotically foreign. The situation is not much helped when the brand of Christianity that best advertises itself and makes the biggest noise in our society is of the fundamentalist and intolerant sort. Too often, then, the depth, beauty and profundity of the Christian tradition is rejected without even being explored or known, and more exotic faiths are embraced in ignorance as preferable.
A liberal Christian of a relatively “high church” sort such as me, when meeting members of other faiths concentrates, on similarities rather than differences and therefore on dialogue rather than confrontation or proselytism. Indeed, I am an admirer of what I know of the Buddhist faith and am well aware that it has much of profit to teach us. But I remain proudly Christian, considering Christianity, at its best, to present a more complete picture of the Truth than any Faith I know of. It was only afterwards that my conversation with the Scottish Buddhist caused me to reflect a little about the differences between our two faiths, as well as the similarities. Consider, for example, the problem of evil. This, in the Christian tradition, is a central problem. How can we reconcile a good God with an evil world? There is a whole branch of theological thought devoted to the problem, it is called “theodicy”. As far as I can tell, however, there is no problem of evil in Buddhism, certainly at a theoretical or theological level, because the doctrine of Karma asserts, does it not, that all suffering is earned by misdemeanours in previous existences. Therefore, whatever happens to oneself or to anyone, no matter how monstrous, can only be one’s just deserts and so God remains just!! There is no room for the likes of Job in the Buddhist faith then. Nor, when you think about it, is there any compulsion to better the lot of humankind, because works of love and mercy would surely be interference in the meting out of just deserts to people? Perhaps I have got it wrong! Even if I have though, it does seem to me that the Christian’s less than neat or satisfactory answer to the problem of evil, (which, in the last resort, admits to there being no complete answer, but which, in Jesus’ crucifixion sees in God a loving solidarity with us which provides some sort of consolation and hope) is more honest and true.
Perth and the Black Watch
Scone is very close to the fair city of Perth which is only twenty two miles or so up the Tay valley from Dundee. So one grey Monday we decided to look around Perth. Our first stop was Balhousie Castle. This is the Regimental Museum of the Black Watch. It is a beautifully and lovingly set out museum which I thought I would find boring, but which in fact was fascinating and at times very moving - so much incredible bravery and pride on show, so much sadness and tragedy. It offered a real insight into what pride in a regiment means, and why this would be so necessary to foster in a successful army. It is surely just such a sense of tradition and pride in a regiment that is one of the most important reasons for the British army being arguably the best in the world. A British soldier’s loyalty is as much if not more to his regiment as it is to his country. A particularly memorable display was of the Dido, a ship strafed and bombed in the Eastern Mediterranean with great loss of life among the members of the Black Watch regiment who were being transported on it. As it docked in Alexandria and the wounded, dying and dead were being taken off, a kilted piper appeared high on the top of the bridge and piped every one of the injured off the ship. All the searchlights in the vicinity swept round and on to him, lighting him up until all had disembarked.
From there we went on to the Caithness Glass Works and saw the very beautiful paper-weights that are one of their specialities, many of them costing over four hundred pounds to buy, though a lot of seconds and smaller items are much cheaper. They also produce some lovely vases. We watched paperweights being made in a very Dickensian setting, lots of noise, furnaces full of molten glass and smaller furnaces for reheating the glass as it is being moulded, shaped, decorated and polished, all in very hot conditions for those working, though fans blew on them most of the time. After this we took a bit of a stroll round the town, looking in some interesting shops and admiring the many beautiful hanging baskets of flowers that adorn all the main streets of the city.
Parish Councils and reconciliation
Parish Council Meetings or Vestry Meetings are an essential part of being a parish priest these days. When I was a curate at Harare Cathedral I was asked to preach at an Evensong which included a little ceremony of inauguration or installation of the year’s Parish Councillors. I offended some of the more stuffy of them by recounting my mother’s father’s opinion of Parish Councils. He was a priest who was ordained before parish councils came in to being and when they were introduced he said that they marked the beginning of the end of the Anglican Church! The vestry meetings at Invergowrie were no problem at all. They rambled on a bit, as is always their wont, but were amicable enough and we only held two while I was there. The fact that I had missed five in Wodonga by the time I got back grieved me not at all. What we dealt with at Invergowrie was mundane, typical parish stuff, including a row with a local Play Group which wanted to use the parish hall, were allowed to do so, and then withdrew because of a dispute over where to store their equipment. Upon such disputes hang all sorts of momentous seeming consequences. Attempting to decide what action to take took up a fair bit of time. The parish of Invergowrie survives with so small a congregation because the diocese provides the house and the Province supplies half the priest’s stipend - for the university chaplaincy component of his work. So all that the parish provides is half a stipend. I discovered from reading the Parish Constitution that “The Trustees” of All Souls’ Invergowrie are responsible for the selection of a new Rector “in consultation with the Vestry” and with “the concurrence of the Bishop”; no one seemed aware of this, and although the Trustees pay for some of the repairs to the fabric of the church, no one seemed to have any idea as to what assets and resources the Trustees have at their disposal, nor even how many Trustees there are, or who they all are. A disaffected parishioner is one, Lady Kinnaird they assumed is another, and the Bishop..... No member of the Vestry belongs though, which is an odd business. I later learned that there are at present only four Trustees (though there is provision for five) and they are the Bishop, the Dean, Lady Kinnaird and the aforementioned parishioner. So the diocese has an all but controlling say in what goes on, though the Dean and Bishop of the diocese, while we were there, were at loggerheads. Indeed so great had the disagreement between them been that they had travelled all the way to the United States to be reconciled by no less a figure than Archbishop Tutu, who at the time was resident over there! The reconciliation effected seemed somewhat fragile. As John Howard would say, there is more to reconciliation than saying sorry! To be continued
The Editor was away on holiday this week and so the rest of this week’s pewsheet is unavailable.