I drove to St German's at ten to celebrate Mass for Our Lady's birthday with five others. It seem that the couple who came last Sunday to enquire about a wedding may have been motivated to return after many years by the baptism of one of their children here long ago. The procedure for arranging the wedding of non-UK citizens was complex enough in times past but this has changed altogether recently. Thanks to Brexit, unless a couple have 'Settled Status' they can't be married in church either by Banns or Common License. A church wedding is now authorised by Superintendent Registrar's Marriage Schedule (SMRS) once they can show they have fulfilled the qualifying requirements if they don't live in the parish.
If only the church would stick to its essential role of blessing people's marriages after civil registration and surrender its traditional status of registrar of church marriages. The erosion of the traditional priest's role is already advanced by the digitization of marriage registers. Since July this year, an officiating cleric now has to fill just one wedding register for the church's archive, plus a form with the details copied to send to the civil registrar's office for entry into the national database. Once digital registration is confirmed, a marriage certificate can be issued.
The couple must collect their certificate from the civil register office a few days later, not from the priest. I wonder if there are any arrangements for express delivery in the case of needing proof of marriage in an emergency? A priest can no longer issue a legal marriage certificate at the end of the wedding service. So why not break the spell, and go all the way to celebrating and blessing marriage after a civil ceremony? It would mean one less stressful piece of bureaucracy for a parish priest to cope with.
As I arrived home Clare was heading out for the shops in town, so I cooked lunch ready for her return. I then walked around the edge of Bute Park and back. On my way to the museum yesterday I took photos of the remnants of a summer exhibition of replica dinosaur sculptures behind a large fenced off enclosure on Cooper's Field, fenced because there was an entrance fee. The Ice Age mini-theme park finished last week, so the theme park 'take-down' is now well under way. Most of the large life size sculptures have been dismantled into component parts and gathered at collection points for transporting elsewhere. The visual impact is surreal if not comic. I took a dozen photos yesterday and another half a dozen today. The results are here
Yesterday I chatted with a Zimbabwean woman taking photos of the scene with her phone. Today a man in my age group was doing likewise. He noticed the cross I wear and asked if I believed this exhibition represented our ancient pre-history. Of course, I replied. I've never been a denialist. Awe and wonder in science gave me the foundation of faith in God after all. He said you didn't have to believe in God to experience awe and wonder. I agreed. His childhood experience of Sunday School interpretation of scripture literally led him away from faith. It never captured my imagination, but then I didn't go that much to any Sunday School when I was a kid.
I watched a couple of episodes of an Eastern European international crimmie after supper, called 'The Pleasure Principle'. It's shot on location in Odessa, Prague and Warsaw, and switches between Ukranian, Czech and Polish, three Slav languages but when the separate investigations cross borders, the common language is English, and it's spoken with the respective accents of each country, slowly and deliberately. It's well produced and active, though the plot is very dark and bizarre, as well as complex. Despite being interested in Orthodoxy for nearly sixty years, and singing in a Russian Orthodox choir as a student, I've never really felt drawn to explore Slavic countries. Eastern Mediterranean and Greek expressions of Orthodoxy have been of much greater interest to me over the years.
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