St Stephen's Divinity School - III

I was sitting out in a gorgeous vicarage garden not long ago up north, far beyond the smoggy confines of Old London Town, with a remarkable young vicar, who is trying to keep his whole country collection of small villages from lapsing into dreadful Geneva style Calvinism with all its sickly denials of things sacramental in our beautiful churches of the South Downs of the South Riding, south of York, when my esteemed and very youthful colleague on the handsome vicar calendar circuit pouted up and explained, as he was showing me his alianthas and gerberils and lilies and the like around his newly planted border, that blogs are like gardens - they need something exciting like a Venus Fly Catcher, and it thuswise occurred to us that this blog from the Rev Simon should now be rechristened and called not so much THE REAL CHURCH OF ENGLAND as THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

This was also the assertion of the Rev GG for whom it was not so much the assertion of the old medieval catholique church before that dreadful misanthrope Henry VIII got his disease-bag mits on it all that counted but rather the old church of England that all country vicars used to know and love in the old days of Nineteen Thirties Britain when it was all unspoilt by those disgusting german bombs all over our beautiful 1707 cities. It was a mistake, the Rev GG opined very solemnly, while pouring his second cup of regimental Ceylon tea, that we went to war at all against the das machine-like Germans, and that we should have listened to Edward VIII and so on and so on. I looked up into the azure skies and thought ruefully of dear old young Prince Charles and his inspiring reading from Ephesians 6 at the D-Day memorial Service in Normandie and the lovely speech of young Prince William too on that day with his pretty bride.

We reasoned it all out, over tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawns I would have you know, and there we have it - we both resolved that we would write an old fashioned letter of some import to our esteemed friend in foreign climes in the Med on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea and the beaches of Malta, the dear old Rev Simon, to this effect, a) that a calendar of handsome vicars and feminine canons at St Paul's be drawn up, but b) Germans should be generally apologised to for our being so overly attached to ridiculosities like cavalry-ridden aristocrat Poland, and c) more importantly for the survival of the churches, namely that the blog which everyone is reading as if a rage in Kensington should be renamed THE OLD CHURCH OF ENGLAND  - the church of england of daily anonymous tea on the eponymous lawns.

St Stephen's Divinity School - II

The Stephano Divinity School was a hive of the finest practical jokers that the churches ever did see. Say for instance the story of one now very senior leading cleric, now ensconced in that other place and possibly episcopal material forsooth very soon, who decided to relieve the boredom and grave intensity of the nightly vespers service which had been taken over by the young traditionaliste sicarii solemnly chanting their Nigra sum and Duo seraphims of Monteverdi - as president he clacked down the aisle with the formal solemn procession but in stiletto heels and when he got into his stall-sedilla, kicked off the shoes and said very audibly to the massed and murderous ranks of the riggie rigatonis - "thank God I can kick off these shoes - these heels are killing me!" Boy we have laughed and laughed and laughed at this story in his old posh rectory in the countryside near Didcot. So all good and all amusing stuff at the Oxford Divinity School in those happy days, in that golden age when all older men knew how to take the steam out of riggie style take-overs of public services. The good old Church of England - boy did we have some fun in those happy years. Red canons and psychological stereotyping as standard in the sausage machines we call divinity schools alas have taken over all such happy Brideshead quads. And all now wears sovman's smell and sovman's smudge, with enormous apologies the great jesuit poet Hopkins. 

St Stephen's Divinity School - I

Truth is, in these sad old days, when all the rectorships are being taken over by the glamorous ladies of the vicars like Canon Sandy or Canon Rachel or Canon Gillian, is that I personally miss the great fun and huge ripping yarns we used to have at St Stephen's Divinity School at some academic pile now called Oxonia. Yes those were the golden days. I fondly recall, and this is a story that my local vicar retells with gargantuan amusement, how one young ordinand from the Divinity School went to see the rector in his office about all the amusing camp jokes fired around those supine quads, and said, "there are too many camp clergy in this schola metaphysica Fr dear Fr." To which the wise old bird and eagle aquiline nose plus half-moon spectacles of the principal, who is now a learned divine bishop by the way in Britain, moved not one tittle or jot, and he looked over them at the young firebrand and zealot, and said, "Fr I am quite sure all these men will make fine husbands and fathers come the day of their ordinations - college is just college - the boys are only having a laugh." Oh yes, God be with the days when we had such fine principals and rectors who did not cow tow to the young sicarii of that time period nor did they cease ever to refrain from overly judging the superficialia of boys's college life in Oxon.

God be praised

Well glory be to God for dappled things. The sacrament of holy matrimony is something we can all be proud of in the good old Real Church of England, since many of our wedding solemnities are carried out with a certain gravitas and a certain bearing, replete with those fine and noble sentiments say in the wedding rites of Charles and Camilla at Windsor Chapel. With my body I thee worship. Like our proud posh public schools to China in these last few years, it is something we can export to other churches and faiths, even the enormously gifted Auntie Overseas, the Catholics of the old christian empire in Roma Eterna. Yes they have much to learn from us; our experience, our delicacy, our fine words, our elegant phraseology, in sum our whole demeanour as ministers in God's holy sanctuary, of enormous and grave respect toward any couple that falls in love and comes to us for the blessing of a priest or priestess - benedictio sacerdotalis. And why should we not also accord this grave respect to young gay couples? After all, Jesus like the Buenos Aires Bergoglio was enormously kind to young call girls and rent boys in the Graeco-roman empire all around Israel. His early faith gripped the imagination of the whole empire by not judging those of the temples of ISIS, as long as they undertook no longer to practise as temple prostitutes of porneia - the true meaning of the term rather than the later christian narrow reformation concept of simple before-marriage fornication. Oh yes it is time for a little latitude for young gay couples - and why should they not experience the salvation that Jesus accorded and extended to those couples who set temple prostitution behind themselves and embraced love at first sight with a single chosen belle or ball? Time to be open as a church, time to die to old fashioned middle-class and upper class attitudes that belong more to Hardy's Tess than to real on-the-streets industrial urban christianity.

Ahhhhhhh bisto adverts et al - !!

At the risk of walking on to the stage of history dressed in little more than a waterloo jacket, or worse a jacket from the Battle of Blenheim in the reign of Queen Anne, circa 1707, one is reminded in these halcyon days celebrating the magic and wonder of D-Day and the chicago invention that won the War, the Higgins Landing Craft, that it seems to me so much church discourse is a farrago of rubbish and trash compared to what should be going on - we talk too much about church and not enough about the rise of the soul to God. Where are the sermons about God as God; where are the homilettes about the angels; where are the anecdotes about ghosts where the British native mind is sensitive to the supernatural; where are the discourses about spirations of the Trinity; were are the addresses about the journey of God into the mind of a soul - where in sum is theology? Vacancies for Dustin Hoffman do exist and we are not talking about Mrs Doubtfire either. Hoffman in the last scenes of the Luc Besson movie Joan of Arc or what we would call Joanne of Acre. Anyway there is too much talk about talk, too much theology about theology and nobody in Britain has yet still responded to the call of Cardinal Ratzinger at Cambridge in 1987 to propose a theology of the human mind that explains the Holocausts of Auschwitz or Belsen or Dachau finally. Loads of philosophy of mind - but how many of the learned philosophers of mind of London Uni have gotten into the mind of Adolf???