Story of a street name

Much rain overnight and showers for much of the day. I went for my 'flu jab at the King's Road Pharmacy straight after breakfast. Mother Frances messaged me just after I got back, flagging up a strange anomaly in the Mailchimp distribution, with her personalised email addressed to Jesse, not to herself. A web-server glitch? Or a catastrophic mailing list database failure? No other complaints so far, or a simple data entry typo from some time in the past? Fortunately that's what had happened, I discovered when I examined the mailing list in detail. I couldn't edit the entry however, and ended up removing it, together with two other email addresses of people who have died, one of them a couple of years ago.

Clare bought a salmon for freezing from Ashton's in the market yesterday. While I was writing a sermon for Sunday, she cooked a lovely fish soup for lunch with the head and bones left from filleting. She had a flute lesson after lunch, so I went out for a walk. It started to rain, so I took shelter outside Cafe Castan and had a cup of coffee, waiting for the rain to stop, then walked to the other end of Llandaff Fields and caught a bus into town at the stop near the junction. The bus was crowded with students returning from college so I had to stand all the way into town.  

I visited John Lewis to see if there were any bargains to be had, and chatted with a young woman in the tech' section, wearing a Chromebook tee shirt and hovering around the display. She told me she'd not long returned from a year in Hungary as part of her business studies degree. Now she has the travel bug and is wondering where next to look for work. I think she was slightly surprised to learn I was an early adopter of the Chromebook over ten years ago. On balance, I use mine for everyday tasks more than I use my two Windows machines, which serve mainly for easy audio and video editing plus mailshots. I am thinking of buying a device with more RAM to use for running Linux apps, now that Chrome OS has been enhanced to make this possible, but before I do, I need to find out how feasible this would be. I'd certainly like to be able to use Linux again on a daily basis.

I caught the 25 bus to the top of Cathedral Road, then walked into the park before going home. There, I bumped into Peter and Jan walking their dogs, and we chatted for a while. Jan is a member of the Church in Wales electoral college which meets in the coming week to elect a new Bishop of St Davids. I wonder who will be elected? Jan says changes in electoral procedure are now in place that have improved the process, with preliminary briefing papers on prospective candidates available before a decision on nominating a voting short list is made. This is, I believe, intended to inform decision making and refine the selection of possible candidates with sufficient support to be electable in the ballot process. Let's hope it works as it's intended to.

Above, I mentioned Cathedral Road. Rufus told me yesterday how he learned about the origin of its name from Peter, who I met in the park this afternoon, when he was at St Mike's. Cathedral Road doesn't lead to Cathedral Road, and never did. It was named after the prestigious Victorian Welsh Presbyterian Church that still stands at the west end of the road. 

In the nineteenth century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism was a major force in the social development of urban industrial Wales, said whether true or not, to have enjoyed the adherence of half the population. This building was its most prominent in the capital city, but why call it a Cathedral when its pastoral oversight is performed by a council of elders, not a Bishop? 

French theologian Jean Calvin, caught up almost by chance in Geneva's independence struggles in the 1520's made a  major contribution to reforming church and society in the city state, advocating a new form of governance that didn't rely on episcopal hierarchy, but a council of church elders. Two centuries later his way of thinking was influential in the Methodist revival in Britain, and especially in Wales. Geneva's St Pierre Cathedral was one of only three churches which wasn't closed for worship at the time. It's a place where his memory is still honoured, a mother church of the protestant reformation. The road was named after the church building regarded as the Welsh equivalent of 'Calvin's Cathedral'. 

Sadly, in the last quarter of the twentieth century Welsh Calvinistic Methodism went into steep decline, losing almost all of its buildings. Ninety years after its opening in 1903, the congregation moved into the church hall and the main building was converted internally into three floors of offices. For fifteen years it was the headquarters of homelessness charity 'The Wallich'. It's now been acquired by Red Rose school, an independent special educational needs establishment. No longer a place of worship, but still very much in the service of vulnerable people, in the spirit of Calvinistic social thinking.

Clare was out when I got home. She'd gone to 'Amser Jazz' at the Royal Welsh College. I watched the news on telly, listened to the radio and waited for her to return so we could eat together. Then, this week's episode of Norwegian crimmie 'For Life' before turning in for the night.

Eisteddfod - triumph over adversity

How good to awaken to blue sky and sunshine another day, a perfect summer morning. After breakfast I drove to St German's to celebrate the ten o'clock Mass with half a dozen regulars. I tried an alternative route around the city centre, to avoid traffic congestion generated by the Tudor Street traffic lights. It's only five minutes longer, better than taking nearly half an hour for a fifteen minute trip.

Today marks the Church of England celebrates St Jean Vianney Curé d'Ars, but not so in the Church in Wales calendar. I wonder why? I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in the committee when the revision of the calendar of saints was discussed, to know the reason for omitting this rather unusual 19th century holy man whose preaching and spiritual guidance touched thousands who visited him in Ars, a village at the west end of the French Jura during his ministry there. I visited Ars when we lived in Geneva 140km away. It's a special place for clerics as St Jean Vianney is patron saint of parish priests.

Ars was the only parish he ever served, perhaps he was sent to that rural backwater because his bishop didn't know what to do with him. He was a doubtful candidate for ordination as he was barely literate and needed coaching to take services in Latin. Thus, he had little 'book knowledge', but he did have an understanding of the meaning of the Gospel and the life of the Spirit to apply to the pastoral care of his flock that enabled him to reach the hearts of many.

Because this was so unusual his life was simply understood as filled with extraordinary supernatural gifts. By their fruit they are recognised, but I think there's something more to take note of here. A barely literate son of peasant stock, may have no access literary culture, but his intellectual life is steeped in oral culture and transmission of scripture, tradition and reason in a way that has been discounted by mainstream religious culture. This was common in ancient times, and still happens in some parts of the world today, where spontaneous evangelisation has spread the Gospel and planted the church by oral transmission. The hunger for literacy and introduction of the text of scripture occurred as a result of the message already being heard and understood. I wonder if and how this is working in our strongly audio visual contemporary culture?

On return from church I cooked lunch, and after a siesta walked for an hour and a half in the park. While writing, I listened to Evensong on BBC Sounds catch-up. The setting of the responses by Rose used by the choir of Holy Trinity Sloan Square was one I learned in Geneva, and one I love. It was uplifting to hear it, and some modern Latin canticles and unusual Psalm chants. Anglican church music has a long a rich tradition and is very much alive creatively speaking, in our time.

Ruth emailed next week's Morning Prayer texts as she routinely does in good time. My day next week is one when the Church in Wales celebrates the life of Ann Griffiths, the eighteenth century North Walian whose religious poetry and hymnody in the Welsh language is new regarded as among the finest in any European. She was a Welsh Calvinistic Methodist, a renewal movement with a devotional life of its own that distinguished it from English, Scottish and Irish expressions of reformed Presbyterianism. The Psalm set for next Thursday is too long, repetitive and dull, so I am going to use some of Ann's hymn verses instead, translated into English. They are steeped in the imaginative use of biblical imagery from both Hebrew and Christian scripture, so why not?

After supper Clare and I watched another on-line National Eisteddfod programme on S4C. This covered the festive ceremonial chairing and crowning of this year's bard Dyfan Lewis whose cycle of poems was a celebration of the city of Cardiff. This annual event has never taken place outside of the Eisteddfod Maes (field). Last year's Eisteddfod was cancelled due to coronvirus, but there were concert performances on-line. There's been a programme of competitions on-line this year. 

Tonight's bardic ceremony with a reduced socially distanced gorsedd wearing masks matching the colour of the robe, processed from Central Square into the new BBC Wales building where the whole ceremony was performed live to camera, except for a brief video of Dyfan Lewis secretly recorded beforehand, speaking about his work. 

It worked amazingly well as a television event, authentic in spirit and in detail, apart from the absence of a group of cute children dancing. I liked what the Archdruid said in his opening remarks "Tonight thanks to television, the whole of Wales is the Eisteddfod Maes." I felt utterly proud to be Welsh, even if my grasp of the language is poor.