Sunday duty again - in Spain

After a good night's sleep, I got up at sunrise, did some Chi Gung and had breakfast. Val called for me at eight thirty, to show me the way to Benalmádena for the first Eucharist of the day. We parked the C3 outside St Andrew's Los Boliches, then drove in Val's car along the coast road in bright sunshine to the neighbouring town's huge church of Nuesta Señora del Carmen.

The undercroft chapel of San Josep is used weekly for Anglican services, Eucharist on first and third Sundays, and Morning Prayer led by a lay Reader second and fourth. It's a well, kept nicely decorated chapel with seating for eighty. Twenty people were present, and they sang with such gusto they could have been twice as many.

We then returned to Los Boliches in good time for the eleven thirty Eucharist, attended by forty people, another lively welcoming and sociable congregation.

St Andrew's Church and the Chaplaincy office are set in the ground floor of an apartment building 'Edificio Jupiter', property leased to the church and well adapted for liturgical and pastoral use for up to a hundred people. There's a little cafe next door, but refreshments were served after the service from the little kitchen/bar in the nave / community hall section of the church building.

Only a few stayed on this occasion, and after parting company with people, I was taken to the nearby home of Jim and Della for lunch, stopping for coffee at a bar on the way. Della has recently stepped down as church administrator and was able to brief me about how the church runs. I was also given the opportunity to Skype Clare and Rhiannon in Kenilworth from their computer, having not succeeded in hooking up to the office wi-fi earlier.

It was late afternoon when I left them, to return to base. I was taken to the vacated Chaplain's house to collect the returned Citroen C4 to use from now on. It's bigger a livelier, despite being diesel powered. I spent some time trying to figure out how to operate the official Chaplain's phone, a Sony Experia - also Android driven, but somewhat quirky in comparison to the Samsung, and the operating system language is Spanish. However, it does have all the vital parishioner contact numbers I'll need, once I get used to it. I added some chorizo and rice to the other half of the meal I prepared yesterday, and ate watching two very interesting BBC Four documentary and discussion programmes raising debate about the concept of Exile in Jewish history, spirituality and politics. It was based around the excavations of the site at a village in the Galilee district, where there was a first century town called Saphira. Findings there indicate close integration between different Jewish and Pagan communities remaining under Roman rule at the time of the first and second century 'Jewish Wars'. 

The point strongly made was that through trade even more than conflict, Jews lived dispersed throughout the world, and so exile spirituality had long been part of their culture. The fall of Jerusalem, and the subsequent destruction of the Temple was a landmark event, and as a result more Judean Jews were forced to join the diapora, but throughout Palestine especially Galilee, co-existence of Jewish communities with Christian and Pagan communities as established fact. It was part of Judean Jewish history and mythmaking that Palestine was exclusively theirs, other Jews saw things differently. Yet, 19th and 20th century Zionism re-invented this notion of Jews entering a possessing the land, not only right to return but right to take over and exclude, and this was the the ideology that governed the foundation of the land of Israel and its subsequent separationist policies. 

Documentary make Ilan Zev sought to make the point that the dominant foundation narrative is not the only possible intepretation of Jewish history. It could be beneficial to explore alternative perspectives in resolving the Palestinian 'problem' founded upon the overlooked facts of multi- cultural Jewish history in Israel itself.

Quite an unexpected and stimulating conclusion to my first Sunday of locum duty.