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???

Evans

Evans to murgatroyd, much water has passed under the silken bridges this weather, what with the local vicars all announcing they are just vicars or literally vicarii - seconds in command - to the local bishop who is the real rector of the parish, making them all rectors in commendam, as it were, which was the situation on the eve of the great Boleyn and Aragon reform in 1524. Yes local vicars were just that in those days, what with distant cardinals and bishops and even popes being rectors ex distantia for these little country parishes, such as St Peter's or St Lawrence's, in those cases Benedetto Gaetani and Emmanuele Sarto, a fact which compels some of the locals to exaggerate when they have a real dashing francophiliac vicar between their knees such as the local Rev Peter, fluttering about in his French style cassock. He worked for the Rev Rachel who was also a rector in commendam and the president of the local beneficium, but helas has flown away to the Antipodes after one of the local lassies at St Lawrence reported a chelsea bun on the rise in the proverbial ovens of winsome desire in the locale. Her lady boss was much taken with the news though slightly miffed that more chelsea and less bun did not make it to that privileged altar, where young Rosie had very publicly and very vocally worshipped the local vicar in his uniform. What some chelsea girls will do for a uniform - my oh my - it is like a scene from Vanity Fair or Sense and Sensibility - chance would be a fine thing. And to think that I used to flutter in there to that chantry cafe with my boy choristers from Windsor and salute the fine thing of many girls's fantasies. Anyway the Rev Peter has fled the island and taken some other fluzie with him, and not Rosie H-W, much to the consternation of the local chelsea girl guide brigade who had hoped to have a nice public wedding by summertide, if not to Gabriella then certainly to Rosie N in the absence of Rosie H-W. Golly gosh - what some young girls will do for a chelsea bun when surrounded by a nice flash in the pan uniform. Anyway off to the choristers for another round of Wachet auf.

But what

Well now we know what bishops are for. While the rest of the world is logged on to the good old Dalai Lama's website and web-blog, and the Crimea is teetering on the cliff-edge of some very hard decisions, the bishops of the CoE and the RC communities in GB still haven't even registered that there is a world out there begging for someone to read the signs of the times !! Where are the universal prayer services for international peace and global fraternity and sorority by the way? While Rome is burning, all these civilist Neros are twiddling their thumbs and talking to each other about their latest purchases from Watts and Wippells haberdashery departments!! Shame on you all for not confronting your bishops and your deans of chapter - when there should be a world peace shrine where true believers can light josticks to peace in each and every cathedral, and a world peace cafe in every cathedral coffee shop where the great and the good can listen to songs of world peace or CND action such as John Lennon's Imagine - shame on you all. Pagoda.

Oh the lex coelibatus

Well the lived experience of holy celibacy as the Romans practise it though is not a great advert for an integrated caste of dons let alone for priests. To begin with it often amounts to institutional aloneness, clerics hiding away in their presbyteries not daring to come out and socialise in constructive ways; participating in gender nullifying misogyny; cracking each other's whips by anticipating departures; breaking news of each other's compromises with good form; serving slavish reductionist ideals such as quadraginta annos et non pulchra; appointing then ugly housekeepers, getting a name for themselves as purveyors of the ugly; appointing large and fat and ugly co-workers from the female domain so as not to cause scandal among Jansenist or Agricolan or Febronian parishioners who are never at any point challenged in their vicious commentaries on young energetic curates; never correcting an official hermeneutic of celibacy as just misogyny pure and simple; failing to curtail the activities of official celibates who are really just gay actives oppressing women through old fashioned moral injunctions on contraception; appointing bishops who are a safe pair of hands because they never go out to socialise especially with young pretty women; Holding up as ideal those clerics who are good with boy scouts; anointing as seniors and leaders those mealy mouthed dripping silica led mean clerics who observe an official coldness toward young single women; marking the cards of curates who do dynamic work among youth groups and the female; cynical commentary on those that fall in love as if this were a public disaster; marking as defectors the records of those who compromise with women through heavy duty therapy; parking the notorious straights into vast bureaucratic self-help vocation retrieval facilities; questioning the vocations of those who venture out for a coffee with the occasional pretty young housewife; casting aspersions on cardinals even who have women as friends; dumping on bishops who go on holiday with female religious; so nothing is really safe in that world of old men's clubs which the lex coelibatus has become; and then they wonder why youngsters and children think they are minor abusers? This is the concrete praxis of the lex as lived out in holy huddles hiding from the world of women; I wonder if anyone can help out these poor buggers among superstitious Romans? Rev Hughie Jones.

Oxana

Like they say at Oxford these days - in between their elegant graces - there is of course that other place, referring to the other place of Cambridge. And so too if things should ever fail in that other place for us as ecclesiastics, namely Rome at the heart of the papal alliances and papal states, then we do have something resembling ancient christianity here in the twin islands, the church anglicana et hybernica of the old celtic world, or as Dio Cassius puts it, in the Celtic Elvish Islands - in insulinis fatulis. In those days there were many more islands around these shores. Something like the organisations that are constellating around the old English Roman Missal among the ernest Romans, though it wasn't very Roman at all in its poor theology, yet ACTA and ADVENT show us that mildness can be a rebuke to human intensity and excessive dogma in ritual matters of religion. No dogmas of the First 8 oecumenical Councils were involved surely in personal defection and abandonment of the flocks of once upon a time? Why not re-ordain men who have fled their flocks for some pretty housewife or re-ordain women into the ministry they once partly enjoyed in early churches like Alexandria, if this will calm such organisations among Romans down? Surely they cannot all be heretics on matters of mere discipline? Am I wrong? Answers on a postcard to Lord Cecil at Sarum College, nr Winchester.