Oh not that again

The flogging off of the household silver was a permanent gash in the side of a cabinet once, used to much cabernet, much like the Titanic that became the dying career of Mrs T, but some societies never learn from her demise until their good ship Titanica is way beyond the newfoundland banks, and under them, like the new moderne Church of England, guided by Rowan and the red canons of the old CSSR, turning old churches into the vending machines of bankers. Where's the soviet union now archbishop? Bishops - indeed. As if such apostles of mammon if not maimmonides might know what to do with a sacred space built by humble believers centuries ago, precisely on the understanding that these churches would have presbyters in them that would go on celebrating the christian passover for the souls of the poor in perpetuam and ad infinitum. Who gave these bishops the authority to sell off the patrimony of the poor? Especially to fat-cats rolling in other people's money, creaming off the food of the nation, banking huge bonuses in swiss bank accounts, auto-authorising huge private loans to themselves, and generally honking all the spare cash and quantitative easing in the nation for their own speculations and their 101 jobber boys on the floors of the stock markets of Hong Kong? Duffy's Stripping of the Altars and Voices of Morpeth might be read slowly with profit by all above us in our vicarages. Selling the church plate and building a king's fleet in 1525 might actually turn out to have bin a bit more honourable than flogging the bricks of the poor to the filthy and the rich in their banks. ATMs giving glory to God - show us how, dear old father to the commons? Guy - come back, all is forgiven.

Mmmm

Yass in the good old days of the good old CoE, Canterbury used to run summer schools in church and state, and everybody knew where they stood, what the crown was, and why the crown had had to intervene in church affairs to secure the common good. Ah yes those were the days.

Not again dearest Rowan

So their lordships and ladyships of the General Synod have resolved not to resolve, decided not to decide, defined not to define, and pronounced dogmatically that there is not sufficient grounds for a new dogma of sensible inclusivity, and promptly cancelled the next move into the future of the good old CoE. Oh I wish for the old CoE when men with real theological acumen could just make a decision without sociological politics and survey driven reports entering every theological debate. All this indecision will go up to the House of Commons for the usual parliamentary ratification to make all this stuff amount to GB domestic law, and then on to her majesty at Balmoral for the usual Royal Assent. And what then? And what then indeed my noble lords and ladies of the hesitant left? Doubtless her glorious majesty, long may she reign, will victorious all over the ladyships and lordships of her lower chambers, and remind them that if they can accept governance by the supreme governor who is by the way a glorious female and therefore a multi-tasker and therefore a superior form of life compared to the inglorious and monochromic dullard dull-witted velociraptor male, then why can't they authorise feminine and female bishops, for goodness sake? Besides, as Ian Hislop has said in his wonderful magazine, we have been ordaining them for years, darlings of the Za Za Gabor circuits! But, sincerely, as we like to do things in the good old church of england, what is the problem? The issue was never, women can do what men can do just as well honestly ma'am, but who ordained the male numbskulls in the first place, when there were perfectly superior multi-taskers around for centuries? Besides, if memory serves me correctly, the monarch was precisely brought into church affairs in the time of Queen Ann Boleyn to deal with the maladroit excesses vis-a-vis boys in 1524 of those apparently superior and better educated male dandies of the lower clergy and seculars to solve the problem of male witless celibates and give them wives who could keep them on the straight and narrow, and also to address their cataclysmic inability to resolve simple reformation debates in favour compromise and common sense. So hurry on now general synod, let us not trouble the Queen for too long with yet more indecision. We must resolve to resolve, and devil take the rest - besides all the naughty boys who have consciences of an over-sensitive antique kind can pop over to the dreaded catholic overlords, and take an early retirement package from us surely, n'est-ce-pas? It is all a simple tempete dans une tasse de the, methinks. The Queen is waiting now ..  for a nice cup of strong tea, and not endless simpid coffee from synod.

Well well

Oh and as I was wandering by the river and the canal at some remove from the fair meadows of glorious Oxon, and thinking of Brideshead Revisited and A Draughtsman's Contract, it must be said, with fond memories of the Sebastian Flytes and Fritzes that used to grace our memories in the old days of glorious evangelisation through film and Tv in the 1980s and 1990s, courtsy of the Merchant Ivory collections, I came across two charming, swish, elegant, and urbane prophets of the cloth, in their robes, two vicars of the Church of England, now much renewed in all the country parishes and monasteries and convents of the new CoE OSBs, and these spoke to me on the butterflies of the meadow, the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air. And there in their company revealed that they were talking about Canterbury. I asked them, "And what of Canterbury?" And they looked at one another, saying unto me somewhat astonied, "Surely you are not the only person in Britain and Ireland this last year who has not heard of the great things that have been happening this while in the Old Church of England, how the Archbishop had shown himself to be a great prophet, and how he had convinced many by his words and deeds, and how at last he had been handed over to the porterhouse bloggers of Cambridge? Our own hope had been that he would assume the throne of Cambridge as mighty chancellor and thus continue unabashed." I looked at them quizzically and asked who might succeed? They looked askance for a while and then said, "Oddly the local bishop of old Oxon town is but 64 summers in age, maybe he ten who shall not be named?" We shook hands, concurred, and parted company; I to the meadows with the butterflies and my butterfly net, with thoughts of meadows and A Room with a View, a la Mr Beebe, and they to the Greyhound pub not far away near Rockley Cumnor. Thus we parted. The Old from the New.

Of a muster

Some of the local kiddies nr Crick up here nr Lichfield and the Beaufort are wont to sing a little rhyme about one of my previous incumbents - the lovely Rev Simon - and his horse-riding hobby, because he was always seen on Boxing Day riding out with the men at fox-hunts in the past -

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things white and wonderful
The reverend kills them all.

A somewhat jaundiced and peremptorily judgmental position on the part of these kiddies who seems to forget that out here in the countryside little old ladies have to keep their chicks alive against the marauding and destructive foxes. The fox often does not eat the chickens, merely kills them, so there is little argument for the ethics of it all. Also townie kiddies have a tendency to adopt carte blanche townie attitudes to the country and so disrespect the rhythms of the same. So I would urge the townies to be less judgmental about vicars that ride out to the hunts with all the local huntsmen - it is his job as a vicar to do so and this has always been the case for vicars with cure of souls in the country. Especially after the decretals of the papal states banning clerics from becoming matadors on their days off.

Ah the scent

Ah the sweet scent of success. A royal regatta. A princess in scarlet. The bishops of the old soviet union active again. Anything to keep a revolution of rioters simmering for another pot-boil this summer. Of course if I were a mate with a few navy men or air force men, I might be tempted to visit a few episcopal palaces just to acquaint the camp incumbents with the seriousness of their remarks and their ululating phone calls to news editors, as more royal gossip is shelled out to the sewage farms of the modern internet based media. The royals did well, and the queen and the prince-consort and commander-in-chief stood for most of their voyage down the old river Father Thames. A nice extravaganza with lots of new flags to consider, but understated too with lots of ordinary folk and boatmen and boatgirls participating. Yes very nice indeed. But who pays the ferryman to shell out his Ussr sewage around Britain? We do need to consider cleaning up these foreigner soviet episkopoi. And a rich princess can always sue them. Not for their diocesan monies but for their private income. Via moscow.  

Oh eheu

Well actually, despite what people say up at chancery in the learned Dr Feever's office at the episcopal palace at Peterborough, your correspondent at Oakham and Melton is not just a simple anglo-catholic getting ahead of the pack. I do have a role and a mission here. Even if it is just to remind people of the good old days of Christ within Christianity, when he had not deserted the communists of 1992, when the faith was alive in Britain, and people liked a bit of the old customs, before Communist chinese style ideology came rooting in and upturning everything in the 1920s and then again in the 1990s. Yes the old faith, which the ordinary British punter liked, and did not repudiate despite the vituperations of well-meaning but largely unwelcomed low church types of the old Geneva kind - les protestants et hugenots du roi Edward VI. Not really welcome. Les anglais like their churches untouched, their altar rails, their statues and their saints dedicated on the church frontals. They even like antependia on the front of their altars. Not for them the luddite feeling for stripping altars and their dullard lollard passion for naked starkness or Edwardian communion tables and the ubiquitous flaggons of disrespect. No we in England like our holy customs. We like our Christ boy ni his Christianity.