Church in Wales Centenary start

As it was a bright clear day today, my sister June's birthday, so I called her to sing her Happy Birthday and we chatted for half an hour. I wish I could go up and see her for the day, but the logistics are still a bit tricky. An overnight stop would make a visit easier, whatever my mode of transport, as a very early start travelling is fraught with practical difficulties  until I get the next op out of the way..

Clare and I walked along the Taff Trail to Llandaff North and had lunch in a cafe there, offering a nice selection of dishes. Thanks to a mild winter, families of long tailed tits could be seen and heard foraging on the bare branches of trees in places I haven't seen before. The number of them I've seen in the avenue of trees approaching Blackweir Bridge is greater than last year. We also saw and heard a couple of coal tits at close range as well. It helps that our parks and open spaces are managed in a way that encourages birds and wildlife these days. The environment doesn't look as neat and tidy with fallen trees made safe and large portions of trunks or big branches left to rot, but this naturally increases insect population and is good for other creatures that feed on them. There are more and more daffodil shoots growing tall enough to produce heads and it won't be long before they burst into flower, some species a month earlier than usual.

When we got back, I had a sermon to finish, and some more novel writing to do before watching this week's double episode of 'Wisting'. Unlike other Scandi-noir series it seems to be ten episodes. I think that's two too many. The pace of the story has slowed down but to no good efffect. It's not exactly agonising suspense.

This morning I celebrated and preached at St Catherine's, the first time for several months. Twenty seven Sunday School children came up for a blessing with their parents at the Communion. Since Epiphanytide started there have been seasonal liturgical changes, in line with the alternatives that the Church in Wales Liturgical Commission provide. Nothing unusual, except that I hadn't been warned of this until I got to church. Not even Clare remarked on the change, now in its third week.

Since last weekend's diocesan centennial inaugural service in the Cathedral, each church has its own 'Pilgrimage Candle' to burn, as the centenary theme is 'Pilgrimage'. There was a little blessing and lighting ceremony to insert into the service at the start. Fr Rhys came over from St John's to brief me about this beforehand thankfully. The presiding minister's lectern hadn't been re-organised from last week, and didn't contain all the texts I needed for this week's service. This wasn't immediately obvious when I got started, so I had to shuffle papers as I went along.

It's not unusual to have to do this as a visiting locum priest, if a church is a bit disorganised about these things. It's fine if there's a conscientious lay person whose habitual duty is to pay attention to detail and arrange things for a priest. Far too often, however, the incumbent does it for themselves, and if they aren't present nobody else bothers to attend to things which make things easy for a visiting cleric. It used to be so much easier when there was no more than two books to use - one for the Liturgy of the Word and another for everything else.

The Preface to the three English books of Common Prayer explains the rationale behind liturgical reform, not just in terms of the need for vernacular worship and simplicity of structure, but also in the usage of just Bible and Prayer Book instead of the plethora of complex liturgical text books in use at the time, which needed a separate user instruction book to ensure all is done correctly. It seem to me that we Anglicans have stepped back in that direction. The variety and beauty of many of the available prayers and liturgies is to be appreciated. I'm not so sure about a complexity which makes the whole liturgical offering of the church less accessible to every man than it has been for the past five hundred years.

An old friend's passing

I had an email this morning from the Bishop's Chaplain announcing the death of Fr Graham Francis, a good friend and colleague since we were at St Mike's together over fifty years ago. He's lived with an inoperable stomach cancer for several years, continuing with life as best he could with his strength and mobility slowly waning away, without giving up on performing any priestly activity he remained capable of. We were together con-celebrating the Sung Mass at St Saviour's a month ago. I wondered then if it would be the last occasion. Even so, Eleri and I agreed that we'd meet up for coffee again as a foursome early in this New Year, but it wasn't to be. He died late yesterday night

He was admitted to Holm Towers on New Year's Eve, and visited there by family and colleagues. Two priests he worked with closely over many years were at his bedside, along with family members in his last hours, saying the Rosary and Litany of the Saints to send him on his way, which would be exactly how he would have wanted things to be. As the commendatio animae was recited he slipped quietly away.

It was a good, peaceful Catholic death for a priest and pastor who adhered to traditionalist spirituality and convictions without compromise. He believed he could remain an Anglican Catholic as long as the integrity of traditional and liberal modern thinking were respected in the church of his birth. He was respectful of women clergy from whom he felt unable to take Communion, and gracious when working with them as colleagues. He was a committed ecumenist who practised ecumenism within the Anglican fold as well as with other denominations. Not only that, he was a mine of information about the history of church congregations old and new which existed in the city and further afield.

He will be best remembered for his encyclopaedic knowledge of every kind of liturgy, tradition and custom which has its place in the Catholic Church. He had a huge collection of liturgical books pamphlets and texts of every kind, collected since he was a teenager, a unique specialist library of material, for which, as I understand it sadly, no home has yet been found. His involvement in both liturgical revision and liturgical renewal in practice has exerted a positive widespread influence in the Church in Wales and further afield. For him tradition was a living dynamic affair, not just clinging to old fixed ways, but engaging pastorally and adapting to every social and cultural context without ever needing to compromise the truth of orthodox Christian doctrine. He understood that tradition is 'the life of the Holy Spirit in the church', and exemplified this in his ministry. He will be missed, but for those who remember how things once were, his legacy in the way sacraments are celebrated in many ordinary parishes is unmissable and lasting. May he rest in peace and rise in glory!

Clare's colleague Jacquie came to lunch today. She and Clare walked with me in the park afterwards, but left me to complete my usual longer stretch. Today I wore my new trainers, and these were fine for about the first five miles, and then the ball of my right foot began to hurt. I had to stop to rest it and stretch my ankle when I reached Blackweir bridge, and decided to walk as much of the remaining route as I could on the grass. To my surprise, after walking only a few yards, the pain disappeared and didn't return. This suggests that some of the bones in my foot are slightly out of alignment, but this only shows up when I walk over a certain distance, moving slightly awkwardly. My right leg suffers inevitably from the presence of the wound in the right side of my perineum. The knocks the whole of my body out of alignment. It's something I have to think a lot about and compensate for, including the occasional osteo-myologist visit.