Funerals present and long past

This morning, I attended the Eucharist at St Catherine's, then returned home and changed, ready to be collected for a funeral service at Pidgeon's Chapel, then the crem. It was well attended, as the deceased had been a member of Canton Liberal Club for over forty years, and worked locally as a painter and decorator. It was an unusual occasion, as immediate family members made comments to me and each other during the service, in quite a participatory way, as they might if they were in the audience at a club stand up comedy event. There was no disrespect intended and it wasn't disruptive, it was just inhibited good humoured participation, as it does naturally in pentecostal churches as well as comedy clubs. It was a refreshing change from the stony passivity of congregations at most conventional funeral services. I think it encouraged me to be more relaxed and spontaneous, in my usual quite formal exercise of ministry among strangers.

When I got home, I started thinking about the router access problem, which has been bugging me for days. There was one thing I hadn't done, which I've had to do several times when attempting to log into wi-fi when first arriving at chaplaincy assignments in Spain and that's take a photo and magnify it to see if I misread anything. Sure enough there was. The ambiguous password letter wasn't zero or big O but Q with a tail printed so tiny it looked like a blemish on the label. Instant success revealing nothing out of order, normal functioning, confirming lousy connectivity. Thank heavens for this much at least.

Yesterday evening and tonight, Channel 5 has treated us to a feast of archaeological discoveries, excavation projects as they are happening this year. It's hosted by actor Tony Robinson who hosted the archaeology programme 'Time Team' for 25 years. He's an enthusiast for what he's presenting, and you're naturally drawn in by his fascination. The photography reveals stunning landscapes in gold green and blue colours, enough to get me pondering about a trip to Egypt. Tony talks straight to camera, and is followed into the most awkward of physical locations. There must be a strong bond of trust and mutual respect between him and his

Tonight's episode was filmed mostly at the Necropolis on the hill above the Nile at Aswan. Previous digs over the past century have uncovered many sites which indicate the grandeur and status of this city of the dead, but so much more is buried under drifting sand after twenty centuries. The site dates back 4,500 years and may contain thousands of tombs, some with grand processional entrances yet to be uncovered. I wonder what sort of ritual and ceremonies were carried out on the day a tomb received its occupant? What's so amazing are burial chamber walls covered with frescoes that have not seen the light of day for three to four thousand years and yet appear fresh and bright as they did on the day the tomb was sealed after burial, if not when it was robbed. I wonder if there'll be any more programmes to follow up, after this outstanding two-parter?

Baptism without borders

After this morning's Solemn Mass at St German's, I had another baptism to perform. This time there were two children, a boy of about eight and a girl of about eleven, children of two familiar of Czech Roma people. I remember baptizing the infant of a Czech Roma family on Christmas morning in St James', ten years ago, in the early days when they arrived and settled in and around Cardiff, taking menial food processing jobs to support themselves, and having an easier life of hard work than they would have back home, where they often suffer discrimination. 

I don't know if these families were related to my original one but it was lovely to see a group of ex-pats dressed up in festive attire, making a real effort to have a memorable family celebration - certainly one that the children would find easy to remember in later life. Whilst they spoke Czech among themselves, it was clear most of them spoke English, the younger ones certainly with a measure of pride. After a preliminary briefing by James, everyone joined in the liturgical responses with loud enthusiasm, bright eyed, attentive and smiling. I invited them to say the Lord's Prayer in their mother tongue - some of the younger ones seemed keener to show they could read English from the service sheet with confidence, but when I began, many of the older family members did pray in Czech. In different ways, both were affirming their sense of belonging - to family, to tradition, to this new place they found themselves in.

So often when large family groups come for a christening, it's hard to retain everyone's attention. People talk among themselves and behave in a distracted manner, even if they are trying to behave well. For so many Brits today, being inside a church for an act of worship is an rare experience, alien to them, so they don't know how to behave. Thank heavens there are still people who, no matter what the reason, want to bring their offspring to the font.

The highlight of the rest of the day was watching the final episode of 'Line of Duty'. While I was fairly confident that I'd worked out 'whodunit' when it got under way, the path by which the conclusion was reached was grippingly tense, and required much concentration to keep up with, due to the twists and turns woven into the plot. Brilliantly acted, brilliantly written, and the Twittersphere erupted with praise within minutes of it ending. 

I also managed to watch, during the course of the evening, the first of Alex Polizzi's travel series 'Spectacular Spain', featuring glimpses of Barcelona, Valencia and Benidorm. She even visited Isola Tabarca off Sta Pola, recognisable to us from our visits there. Mind you, to sail to Tabarca from Puerto de Sta Pola, home to one of Spain's biggest fishing fleets without so much as mentioning this, and nearby flamingo inhabited salinas is incomprehensible to me. And not to give viewers a ride through Benidorm and environs, but focus on a game of ex-pat bowls, undervalued the reason why it's such a popular resort all year round.

Polizzi's a charming enthusiastic presenter, but the selection of features relating to each place was a bit quirky and 'pot-pourri', hardly giving a typical impression of such lovely places and leaving a lot to be desired. How I'd love to have a crack at a series of programmes like this one, with the aim of bringing out more of the visual delights and key features of the environment and its rich rich history. 

Good Friday food for thought

When I got home last night, I parked the car in one of the few available spaces still left in the street. For the first three days of this week, getting in at eight, there were none left and I had to leave it across the main road in Greenfield Avenue. The space was almost too small, but I parked the car with less than a hand span of space front and rear. Clare was watching from the bedroom window and remarked on the feat. I'm not sure how I did it without touching or shunting the cars hemming me in. I decided to leave it there in case I had early morning hand eye co-ordination trouble trying to remove it for the drive over to St German's, and went by bus instead, taking advantage of more frequent services along Cowbridge Road, to drop me in town by half past nine, in good time to walk the second leg to church by ten to ten. I met St John's City Parish Church organist Philip Thomas on the bus, looking well and still playing there regularly. Our paths cross rarely these days.

I decided that I would offer a little improvised reflection at each of the Stations of the Cross today, now that I've got back into the pattern of conducting them and feel more relaxed about it. It's something that I recall other priests doing back in my youth, but not something I've ever done in a traditional framework. I wondered if I'd either dry up, or be too garrulous, but once I'd made a start, it came easily. I enjoyed this little experiment and a few of the sixteen people present expressed their appreciation and found it relevant to their experience. What more could I ask for?

We had coffee and hot cross buns in the church hall afterwards. Then I sat in the Lady Chapel, said the Office of Readings and Midday Prayer and enjoyed an hour of quiet (including a meditative snooze) before it was time for the afternoon Liturgy of the Passion, again with a full serving team. We had no organist to accompany the hymns, and I led unaccompanied singing. It sounds so effective in this church and enhances this solemn occasion. The dialogue Passion reading edited by James, the member of the congregation who read the narrator part, was a refreshing success, worth his effort. I hope it will get used again in future. He'd edited out the attributive statements i.e. all the 'He said..' mentions in the text. This causes it to flow more freely with greater dramatic intensity. With a natural tendency to visualise what I hear spoken, the Passion reading felt a little like watching a soft focus film with voice-over. It's extraordinary how the mind processes what it receives.

All went well until we moved to the High Altar for Communion. I discovered the reserved sacrament was not in the aumbry, looked puzzled and stepped back. When I was asked what was the matter, I said spontaneously "He is not here.", and thought what a strange thing that was to say on Good Friday. Then I went and checked in the Lady Altar aumbry, and it too was empty. At the end of last night's vigil, the Sacrament had been put in the sacristy safe, but nobody was aware of this, least of all me. Soon we were back on track, eighten of us communicated and we concluded after the final prayers singing 'When I survey the wondrous cross'. No Good Friday would be complete without it.

I walked back to the city centre and caught a 61 bus home, suitably tired and hungry, glad to have no further commitments, just time to relax and reflect. On Channel Five in the evening was a two hour long documentary called 'The Last Days of Jesus', presenting recent historical research into the political and social background of the Roman Empire at the time of Jesus, and proposing interesting and quite plausible theories about the timing of key events leading up to the Lord's Passion, being spread out over a six month period rather than three days, during which there was a major power shift in Rome which had ramifications for the political status quo in Palestine, a way of stating that Jesus was a victim of rapidly changing events in terms of the balance of power, which deprived him of popular support and drove him into the hands of his religious enemies.

Scholars interviewed expressed the conviction that nobody knows who the authors of the four Gospels were, and that they were all written late in the first century, and in a way that was self censoring in relation to the powers that be, and so don't give us a full account of the  historical record, which is in any case pretty incomplete. The question of whether John's Gospel is an eye-witness record, or at least had its origins in one man's personal eye-witness accounts, was not considered. And there, to my mind stands the un-addressed question when it comes to building a picture of available evidence about what occurred, and how Jesus understood his mission and the part played in it by the country's overlords. It may be time for me to bring myself a bit more up to date on contemporary New Testament study.