Another cold dry mostly overcast day. After breakfast and prayers, I resumed work on transcribing my Jordanian travel diary after several weeks inattention. It was interesting to realise how much detail of that trip I've forgotten.
I finally received an email this morning confirming receipt of my messages about the incorrectly written cheque, asking me to return this to the funeral director at the crem. It turned out he'd not been briefed. The chapel attendant who briefed me on arrival I hadn't met before. She told me proudly that none of the staff at Thornhill had gone sick with covid over the past year, despite the throughput of hundreds of mourners daily. Kudos to the city's bereavement services team for staying on top of the Health and Safety demands in the work place.
When I returned from a funeral, I sent a message to the funeral arranger say I'd handed over the cheque, and received an email to say a new one would be in the post. I mention this in full, because it's the first time in decades of officiating at funerals that a glitch like this has occurred. All my emails carry my full name and contact details, so I wonder who slipped up?
This evening, I came across an obituary for Bishop Humphrey Taylor, who died on Ash Wednesday. I first met him when I was a University Chaplain and he became the national coordinator of Chaplaincy work in Higher Education in the early 1970s. He'd been a mission priest in Malawi, expelled by the authoritarian government for his pastoral work among prisoners. We met up again fifteen years later when I worked for USPG and he was a staff member, and then General Secretary of the Society. He went on from there to be Bishop of Selby until he retired. He was a quiet wise thoughtful man with a wry sense of humour, a passion for racial justice and he was a champion of women's ordination.
His predecessor as chaplaincy coordinator, John Dudley Davies had been expelled from South Africa for witnessing against apartheid. He then went on to be Principal of USPG's College of the Ascension on the Selly Oak mission campus at the same time Humphrey was in charge. John later went on to be Bishop of Shrewsbury. Co-incidentally both had done national service in the RAF. I'm still in touch with John, in his nineties, still writing books with a cutting edge, and getting them published. I'm grateful to have served alongside both, and in their company to have learned what being a missionary priest means for today.
I also learned this evening that church marriage registration is going digital in May this year. No longer will clergy have the painstaking onerous task of filling out church registers in duplicate, with a spare paper copy to send quarterly to the Chief Registrar's office, and all for a pittance. This will be replaced by a form containing all the legally required details, which will then be sent for entry into a national digital database.
Records in their present format date back to the Marriage Act of 1820, and maintaining duplicate church registers was always part of the cleric's duty when solemnising marriages. Prior to that there may have been a separate parish register of marriages maintained, or else marriage entries were made, along with baptisms, burials and regular worship events in one grand service register. Ancient parishes like Cardiff St John the Baptist have records dating back to the restoration of the monarchy, still kept in a great fireproof iron document safe in the vestry.
I very much regret that documentation of this kind becomes redundant in favour of an exclusive digital record. No doubt a signing the register ritual photo opportunity will persist, even if only a paper record is to be signed. I wonder what the carbon footprint is of a register which may have an active life of ten to fifty years depending on frequency of church weddings in a parish, and the combined carbon footprint of an equivalent set of digitized register entries, held on multiple servers in perpetuity? OK, let's say 400 years, as long as some current registers have been preserved. Just for fun, I have emailed the BBC Radio Four 'More or Less' programme team to pose this question to them.
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