Tanks on the lawn

I never thought I’d find myself in agreement with Reform, but it’s hard to fault this statement:

“If priests really are out of sympathy with the C of E’s doctrine (as opposed to the battles we are having over women’s ministry and sexuality), then perhaps it is better they make a clean break and go to Rome. However, when they do, they will have to accommodate themselves to Rome’s top-down approach to church life, whereas the C of E has always stressed the importance of decision making at the level of the local church.”

Instead of the individual conversions envisaged by Reform, however, what we are being invited to contemplate is mass annexation, aptly summed up by Ruth Gledhill as the Vatican putting its tanks on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lawn.

How can any self-respecting Anglican, whether traditionalist or liberal, acquiesce in a situation which

·(a) has been brought about unilaterally  by the CDF, apparently  without consultation with the RC hierarchies of England and Wales, much less with the Church of England

·(b) has, according to the ABC, been sprung on him at short notice, precluding proper discussion within the CofE

·(c) will entail insult and humiliation to any ordained Anglican priest who joins the Romeward movement, as he (no she’s involved!) will have to undergo re-ordination, with the implication that his previous life as a priest has been a charade

·(d) will mean that any married Anglican priest who bows his head to re-ordination and who is subsequently widowed will not only be forbidden to re-marry without renouncing his orders, but will be precluded even from discussing the celibacy issue publicly?

If the arrangement goes ahead as it is apparently contemplated, it will be gall and wormwood to those fine men, some of whom I have been privileged to know, who were forced out of the RC priesthood because they wanted to marry.

I suppose it’s too much to expect that those who will make the move to Rome will worry unduly about the implications for attitudes towards women; but the signals that this development will send to the rest of the world mean that half the human race yet again has its humanity negated by an organisation calling itself Christian. This comment, by someone signing ‘palaeologos’ on the Thinking Anglicans website, really takes the biscuit:

‘The problem with women’s ordination is not that women are unqualified, but that they are not proper matter for the sacrament. You can’t marry your car, you can’t consecrate pizza for the Eucharist, and you can’t ordain women. It’s not a matter of an internal rule that prohibits something from happening, but an ontological impossibility.’

Those whom the gods wish to destroy…

…they first make mad.

Autumn

Seems as if we’re having a bit of an Indian Summer over the last few weeks, which compensates in part for a very soggy July and August. Nevertheless, we’ve reluctantly put away the garden furniture and accepted that it’s definitely autumn: we had our meal in the garden exactly twice this year. Hence the change to the seasonal header. It’s a picture of a cranberry harvest in British Columbia.

Shame!

…on Aberdeenshire Council, which has cravenly caved in to the unspeakable Donald Trump’s desire to take over large swathes of the county. In order to allow him to expand his colony even further, the Council has rejected an appeal against Compulsory Purchase Orders for four properties within its area, obliging long-term residents to leave their homes. It beggars description.

In defence of the NHS

I’m increasingly amazed at the visceral nature of the opposition to President Obama’s health care plans. Are people really saying that they view with equanimity the prospect of large numbers of their fellow-Americans (fellow-humans) suffering and/or dying because they can’t afford to pay for health care? Having recently undergone an operation in an NHS hospital, I can vouch for the excellent skill, care and cleanliness of the facility where I was treated. Give me ’socialised medicine’ any time!

What is to be done?

One of my friends commented recently, in a characteristically lapidary phrase: ‘the church [is] an institution with voracious direct sacramental needs’. This is perhaps more of an issue in a relatively ‘high’ branch of the Anglican Communion such as the Scottish Episcopal Church. As part of  my own ministry, I have from time to time spent a fair bit of time away from my own charge, covering in others where there are vacancies. To be sure, many of these congregations where there are long-term interregna (compounded by a chronic shortage of clergy) have, to their credit, kept themselves going with lay Worship Leaders and the like, and this has produced significant gains in the discernment and deepening of individual and congregational gifts. But there is still huge hunger for regular and frequent Eucharist, to the neglect of the potential spiritual enrichment offered by the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer.

This has two effects. It tends to make people like me feel sometimes like a ‘Mass priest’, being parachuted in to do the special bits that others are not authorised to do. More seriously, however, it has led to a generalised practice of Communion from the Reserved Sacrament, administered by a Reader, Eucharistic Minister or Worship Leader. I’m increasingly unhappy with this, because it commodifies the Eucharist, encourages an approach focused solely on individual devotion,  and takes it out of the integrated context of community celebration: Liturgy of the Word, anamnesis, epiclesis (at least in the SEC), and distribution. I have been taken aback on occasion when visiting another charge, when I asked if I should consume everything left over from previous celebrations, or reserve the sacrament for the sick, and was told, ‘Oh, we have plenty’. I have heard of instances where the consecrated bread and wine have been kept so long in the aumbry that they have become unusable. I have even heard of occasions when a new incumbent or a visiting priest found they were expected to step aside in favour of a lay administrator of the Reserved Sacrament, on the grounds that it was ‘Jack’s turn’.

This is clearly not a good situation, and it makes me want to advocate a radical re-think about the place of ordained presbyters in the spiritual economy, and consequently about appropriate procedures and principles for selection and training. In our diocese, there are four people in training for ordained ministry at the moment, all just completing their first year, so it will be another two years before they are priested, and there is no guarantee that they will stay in the diocese. On top of that, in a few years’ time, something between a quarter and a third of the stipendiary clergy in Scotland will retire. I’m not (yet) embracing the notion of lay presidency, but I do wonder sometimes if there is a way to identify people who might be suitable for ordination on the grounds of their personal holiness and other gifts, with a view to authorising them in advance of undertaking the theological training. If the SEC remains as ‘voracious’ as it currently is with regard to its sacramental needs, something needs to be done about this critical situation.

Remembering John XXIII

On Thursday, my Rector suggested at Evening Prayer that we commemorate Pope John XXIII, the anniversary of whose death in 1963 is on June 3. John’s short pontificate was a critical formative experience of my late teens and early twenties. My undergraduate years (1959-63, if you really want to know) coincided with the preparations for the Second Vatican Council and the first two plenary sessions. It was an exciting time to be a Roman Catholic. With so much change in the air, many of my generation hoped that those elements of Catholicism which were frankly intellectually embarrassing would be quietly allowed to fade away. It didn’t happen, or at least it happened with very limited results in some places.

John taught us to lay aside fear and be free. He gave us the courage to see that adventurousness in spiritual matters was a gift of the Spirit, not perverse rebelliousness or lack of faith. Unhappily, the springtime which he announced was not followed by summer, but by a return to winter under his successors.

Refreshment!

Until about three years ago, V and I were members of a small chamber choir in Glasgow, but had to leave when the rehearsal evening, which had been our only free evening in the week, was changed. We greatly miss our music-making, but try to compensate by taking advantage of opportunities to attend occasional workshops in Renaissance and Baroque music, usually under the umbrella of the Early Music Forum. Recently I attended one, and it was a real treat: friendly welcome, non-threatening atmosphere, splendid music (Josquin, Fuenllana, Peebles, among others). The joy of these occasions is that the whole is always greater than the sum total of individual contributions.

The day after, I had a call from an old friend whom I hadn’t seen for years, and we had dinner together: good food, wine, and conversation of the kind which is increasingly rare in our speed-driven world.

A blessed time of refreshment.

Loyal to what?

The Church of Ireland Gazette has this news item:  ‘The [Belfast] News Letter reported last week that the Loyal Orders have declined to take part in the intercessions at the General Synod service in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh (10th May) because a representative of the pro-gay Church lobby group Changing Attitude Ireland was also going to participate.’

Why were the so-called ‘Loyal Orders’ invited to participate in the first place? And what did they suppose that the representative of CAI was going to pray for?

Bread of life, life of bread

I was racking my brains to decide what to preach on on Low Sunday, which seems to fall to me almost every year. I was determined not to preach yet again on ‘Doubting’ Thomas, which I had done several times. Then I came across an article on how to make sourdough bread, which caught my imagination. You can read it here. What appealed to me was the cluster of metaphors that could be applied to the life of faith, especially in the week after the celebration of the Resurrection. The connection between bread and the life of the Christian community is obvious, but this specific kind of bread invites one to develop the possibilities of the other metaphors. The empty tomb is our starter, the living, breathing, continually regenerating mass of dough is analogous to the spiritual body of the risen Lord in the world, the Church. The fact that the same starter can be used indefinitely, however much new material is added, can express how our faith both rests on foundations of great antiquity and is ‘new every morning’. And bread by its nature connotes all that is wholesome, kindly, and companionable, full of rich blessings.