Worship away from home

After my late night walk, I started writing and stayed up later than intended. Not such a good idea as I was already tired, but there was no obstacle to sleeping late, so it was nearly ten by the time we had breakfast. The church we can see from out harbour facing window is Holy Trinity Parish Church, so we joined the congregation of two dozen there for the Parish Eucharist, and received a friendly welcome. They have a curate who's going to be ordained next Sunday. The Vicar has to be there to support her, so there won't be service in the Parish - that's how short of clergy we are to fill the gaps, although there may be a reason behind this. 

For the past forty years this parish has been influenced deeply by charismatic evangelical renewal, as have many other parishes in the West of St David's diocese. It's a lot less conventional in its liturgical offering of worship that we're accustomed to. Some parts of the Church in Wales modern language liturgy have been given quite a constructive makeover, I suspect above and beyond what the Bishop or the Welsh liturgical commission would approve of, but the changes are carefully thought out and aim to teach.

As with many churches pandering to modernity, digital display technology trumps aesthetics, with a huge screen obstructing the view of a beautiful Edwardian east window. As books are banished from worship as a result of covid precaution, everything is done on a carefully crafted Powerpoint presentation. Anyone asked to stand in for the Parish clergy has to be up to speed with the customary way of doing things in a church, and that can't be easy if you're unused to these innovations or extempore prayer during the set form of the liturgy.

I'm not at all averse to using choruses and ad-lib prayer in the liturgy, but when is enough enough? When there are no pregnant pauses or periods of silence to absorb the words of scripture or prayer, we risk lapsing into being 'poor little talkative Christianity'. Saying more than is needed risks hindering the action of the Spirit. I too am guilty of this - too many words when fewer would do. 

I guess the problem is that we're less than certain nowadays of the shared knowledge foundation of church going audiences. No RE in schools, fewer kids going to Sunday school and confirmation classes, far too much religious twaddle propagated in print and on the internet, as if your opinion or mine is as equal to the mind of the church expressed in two millennia of evolving tradition. In some ways we over-teach and in other ways, under-teach the essentials of disciplined moral and spiritual thinking. 

Back in the seventies much effort by different was put into developing approaches to catechesis, dialogical as much as didactic - Alpha courses, Cursillo, Catholic Catechumenate, Ignatian retreats etc, and these have proved effective where it has been possible to support them with suitable people and resources, but in an era of declining support it's much harder to sustain. 

Internet resources may be helpful, likewise literature, but they are no substitute for person to person conversation in search of divine truth. How do we earn the right to speak of God and share the Word that leads to life with family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, strangers? After sixty odd years since I realised the importance of this, I'm still trying to find a working answer.

After lunch, we went for a long walk north along the coast path to the lovely village of Llandewi Aberarth a feast of natural beauty, with a small river descending through the village from the escarpment above into the sea. We covered five miles and were pretty tired by the time we returned, but revived after an ice cream made with. honey. I took sixty pictures today, uploaded them and started writing. Neither of us had energy to watch the third and final episode of prison drama 'Time' tonight. A therapeutic dose of unpolluted sea air and sheer beauty has such a tranquillising effect.

Cardiif Christmas story

Late last night I started working on my own e-greeting Christmas card to send out with out annual round robin letter, when a newsy email arrived with a photo of a Nativity scene which caught my attention and ended up being used to complete the greeting. 

The email was from Sally Jumble Jackson, the dynamo behind the Cardiff Nativity story initiative, a  pageant put on by a group of volunteers she recruited. It started the year I retired. St John's City Parish Church was asked to host an event in which children from schools around the city would visit the church to see this happening with an all adult cast of presenters dressed in traditional biblical garb throughout Advent. A hugely ambitious and seemingly impossible project to realise, but not one which St John's could make space for given the demands made to use the church for institutional carol services and charity concerts in December. 

Fortunately Tabernacl Baptist church just down the street on the Hayes was able to offer hospitality, and each year for the past decade it has been a huge success, drawing thousands of children and catalysing similar events in churches across the region. This year it's not been possible for a repeat performance to take place, but with a wonderful spark of imagination, a half life size puppet show version has been staged and toured around schools, at times when covid safety restrictions have been imposed. It's an inspired piece of creative thinking, and very much a grass roots creative initiative by Christian lay folk.

Sally's motivation at the outset arose from realising how little the bible is taught in schools today, and how ignorant of the Christmas story the majority of children not raised in Christian families are, even if the schools put on a Nativity Play, which few do anyway, giving multicultural secularity as an excuse for tackling something 'too hard' to achieve in a pressured curriculum, even at Primary level. 

It's been a grey damp day. I've started on putting together the Christmas cards and letters for posting and I still have to make a start on sending the digital equivalents, but no progress has been made today. I had a funeral this morning at St John's, my first in church during the covid era. The distancing arrangements work well there as the seating is flexible. Though I asked people to leave by the west door and not follow the coffin out of the north door, the congregation was on auto-pilot and did what they habitually do. I had to drive the car to church first and then up to Western Cemetery for the burial. 

Being a bit nervous about this and wanting to be at church early, I walked out of the house with neither of my phones and without a face mask. Fortunately one of the funeral directors had a couple of spares in his car, which saved having to send out the a nearby shop to get one. And all this because it was raining. It meant I had to revert to wearing a raincoat from wearing my old ski jacket (oddly it was also six degrees warmer than yesterday) and my masks were in the coat I was wearing yesterday, not the raincoat. I was rather annoyed with myself, but pleased, given how little driving I have done in the past year, at how comfortable it is to sit in the car without a support cushion these days than it has been at any time in the past two years. That's progress. 

It rained in the cemetery, and I was loaned a big golf style umbrella in purple with Pidgeon's the funeral directors name running around the rim. Stylish colour to go with an alb! One of the cemetery attendants told me was on holiday in Benidorm when the estadio de alarma was pronounced. The tour company did well to rearrange home flights pronto, his tour group's main hassle was getting a coach willing to take them to Alicante airport with roadblocks in place, and at that early stage lots of enforcement action on the autovia. I guess right at the start, permits paperwork and an inspection regime were only just being introduced, enough to make any commercial driver nervous indeed. But they got home OK, and he came back to his sad job of course, as a key public sector worker.

By the time I had lunch the rain stopped, for long enough to allow me to complete my afternoon walk in the park before it started again. After supper I spent a couple of hours weeding out redundant emails to increase my Google free space available, rather than pay for more storage. Then I watched the second in the 'Nordic Murders' series before writing this and turning in for the night.

School R.E. a question for today

Fine weather for a drive to Kenilworth yesterday morning, arriving just in time for lunch, and some catch-up time with Kath and Anto. I'm here for the weekend to look after Rhiannon, while Mum and Dad go down to Bournemouth for a couple of Sunday performances of their show 'The Colour of Me'. leaving me to provide meals and keep an interested eye on my delightful 12 year old grand-daughter. 

Last night we walked out together to Kenilworth old town, where the Christmas lights were switched on with the arrival of Santa's sleigh, not to mention the local police paddy wagon. There were several stalls selling mulled wine and snacks, and the shops up the old High Street were open late. The most unusual feature was a roadside enclosure where a man had his collection of ferrets on show, and he was running ferret races through long sections of drainpipe. A ferret handling photo opportunity for some, sheer mystery to others.  

Rhiannon is at the age where she likes spending lots of time in her bedroom, communicating with her friends on social media, and listening to music on her dad's old iPhone, but she enjoys meals together, even breakfast/ After lunch today, we walked into town together, then she went off to meet a friend at a coffee shop, and I sent to a greengrocer's shop to get some garlic. She returned at sunset, and went back to her room, while I cooked supper, which we ate together.

She was asked to do Religious Education homework on the question 'Why are you a Christian?' but was left to her own devices to interpret it and respond. I'm not sure if this question was meant to be addressed to a third party, or to herself. There are so many ways in which it could be answered. I offered her a few ideas about possible approaches, but I felt she was rather bemused by the question.

Maybe in this middle class area of middle England with a couple of local church primary schools, more than the national average of two out of ten people are baptized, as opposed the average of seven out of ten when I was born. What is the common understanding of 'Christian' as an adjective these days? Someone baptized? Someone who attends church? Someone who adheres to a certain established moral code and conventions of moral behaviour, but isn't necessarily baptised or a churchgoer? It seems that children have been introduced to other religions in the classroom. 

This is predominantly a 'white highlands' area, although multi-cultural Coventry is only a few miles away, so there may only be a small minority of people of different faiths attending school. It's right and proper to introuduce pluralism and cultural diversity. Hopefully it won't be at the expense of the historic legacy of religious faith which has shaped British society and our entire environment over the past two millennia.