Em

Gosh, am really gobsmacked at the appearance not a few days ago of Emma W on one episode of the Vicar of Dibley TV Series with Dawn French as the vicar and Emma now as a trendy young vicar too all decked out in a nice Kensington grey and purple uniform, espousing nice trendy views and calling for the candidacy of much more interesting bishops of the protest song and protest poem, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen style bishops of the streets who at least would be more interesting and more exciting than the present stock of the usual fly by nights, of the usual conservative stuffy kind. It was such a glorious hoot to see her in action as a young trendy vicaress, and so cool and so sexy too, fabulous idea. Dawn French excelled too in this episode when she articulated the feelings of ordinary people, especially now that the usual suspects have been outed among the prelates as per once upon a time in ages past. Can the Old Church of England recover from a glorious Emma W attack of gargantuan proportions, she is such an intellectual giant without even trying to be, so nice. Such a tonic to see a young girl in action as a trendy trainee vicaress. Makes it all worth all the hassle of these last few years since 1992. The olde worlde of anglican prelates of the old kind cannot continue especially of the kind that now afflicts the leaders what with bishops caught with their pants down. The Real Church of England would salute this kind of girl, this kind of nice and trendy young lady vicaress. Met with one myself in a nice Spanish hotel not long ago. No hassle, no problem.  Even stuffy and snobby old Constantinople might actually concur if there were more girls like Emma Watson in the ranks of the glorious lady vicaress kind. The people concur.  

Wit

The outgoing prime minister was often pulling his hair out when decision time came up say around the ratification of treaties a la Chagos and the like or the Falklands, and his two Fathers in God, York and Cantuar, had to be consulted about such things as voices of the public christian conscience, but think what poor old new prime minister has to say to young Prince W of Cantab about consulting his new Fathers in God too - dilemmas, dilemmas, especially when such prelates have been red canons in the distant past, a terrible ordeal. A bit of a bind as Calvin the C often says, and he is compassionate. But such men are of a lean and hungry look yon Cassius, God knows what is going on in those old red minds - help, these might be wreckage artists from within - nobody would re-assign nowadays unless they were mischievous. So it is all too much tonight for the new prime minister who now desperately needs a jolly good skiing holiday, maybe with Bella and her sister Madison over yonder in Kirchberg, who knows. But calm your nerves, for it is all otherwise in the Real Church of England where stringent vetting takes place and lawyers are preferred vicars. 

Pondering

Am pondering the fates at the moment like a pensive Vespasian atop his throne in far away northern sees like York, much like the statue of Constantine the Great up here, and thinking as to how the Old Church of England can survive the latest scandals at Canterbury, what with the Welby story now circulating, since in 1850 there were large scale defections from the Old Church of England in that time frame, as many ordinary rural people walked away from an impossibly posh church that was only interested in the new urbanised populations of the rich and powerful merchant classes and the like and which dominated the churches in that period. Impossibly posh, stilted voices, artificial liturgies, abstruse sermons, pious hyperbole, nothing about the gospels, little about the real Jesus, so it was not going to be easy to recover from another 1850 in this year of 2024, since there is a little bit more to reveal about the Welby scandal maybe helas helas. Bp Welby has much to confide and confess in this story possibly, so we have not heard the final chapter of this whole story as yet, more canings around the evangelical sector maybe to surface, since there was more to it than meets the superficial eye. A catholic scottish Cracker is needed. Am not suggesting that the whole fate of the whole Church hangs by a thread upon the whims and fancies of one individual since the fate of the Church is bigger than just one person, but we shall see what emerges. There is however the Real Church of England that is more than the sum of the parts of the Old Church of England to be sure, and if anything is to be recovered from the Old Church of England it is that maybe there is room for a Celtic style rapprochement of the natural law based candidates of once upon a time. Caning boys as an expression of some strange fantasy is not going to be the foundation or basis for future candidates for clerks in holy orders maybe, methinks. The Celtics can teach us a thing or two about screening out those kinds of vicars and jurists, vicaresses too with their feminista pliars, of an overly strict kind of once upon a time since they too had their moment of infamy as well in medieval times when the invasion force of the Normans under licence from Henry II and also the pope at the time Adrian IV went over there in the 1100s and imposed order on an unruly kingdom of bolshevik and gay clergy and the Norrman king took a nice pretty Celtic girlfriend to be his wife called to signal to the unruly clerics that the age of the rabid anti-natural law cleric was over, anti-naturam clerics were now history. Even the mild mannered English pope at the time was concerned about what had happened there. The council of Trullo in 600 AD in our beloved Constantinople too was concerned about such developments when it imposed marriage on all future clerics. So too Elizabeth the First imposing marriage on the dons of Cambridge and Oxford. So it does happen from time to time. Canings are history for us in the Real Church of England, how those poor boys suffered. It cannot happen again, evangelicals or no evangelicals. Our own reformation judges of the civil kind already had occasion to warn of the extremes and excesses of evangelical schools of the Baptist kind in the 2000s and 2010s when suppressing the right to discipline children by private teachers then, the "spare the rod and spoil the child" school of thought, or rather instinct. Male evangelical teachers running schools .... .... just like a bad episode of Cracker. So the Old Church of England can survive this public very public meltdown but there will be a price to pay. Boys cannot be allowed to suffer so grievously.We in the Real Church of England can take steps.

While

While the kerfuffle and ferment goes on back home in Canterbury I have quietly retired to my country retreat for some tea and cucumber sandwiches with the crusts taken off and quietly resigned myself to books like the Diary of a Country Vicar a la James Herriott. Somewhat more consoling than the usual bill of fayre.

C

C for compassion, p for patience, When God made these he made plenty of them. God is already patient with the human race, we might have to learn the various ways of his compassion. God has to balance the forces of good and the forces of evil at times in order to allow for freedom and yet also variety in his universe, so not easy to know when to intervene, as the noted biblical scholar Dr Bergsma outlines the problem of such cases in his commentary on the figure of the Son of Man or filius hominis in Daniel 7, God as the patient presider over free solar systems. Some bishops genuinely felt that they should not impose the chapter in the old western codes called De sanctionibus, preferring to wait until there was some sign of a conversion, some basis for hope, we cannot blame them for that always when things go wrong, a human sign, as Sir Elton sings it in his song "Sacrifice." It is just that the boys were suffering in the meantime. There is the rub. Caught between the rocks and the open sea, not easy to balance these values. But maybe the said bishop could have gone back to credit control and finance in order to learn the lessons of those workplaces about patience. 

Hmmmmm

Judgement can follow such scandals around. There are two opposite poles of opinion in these debates, on the one hand the idea that one if liberal should not judge as much as possible, while the other pole apart urging some judgement that is severe, while in the middle somewhere civil judges do intervene and opine that any temporal crime of due gravity without legitimate excuse requires some temporal punishment as a sign to others in society of what not to employ one's time in, so that is the overall schema of these debates, ease of judgement vs severity of judgement. The midway course followed by many CoE judges if not most judges is a difficult path to tread in terms of punishment vs remedial care for the miscreant or mishapped individual caught between a rock and a hard place. Bad example though is often not far from the forefront of their minds, and many judges will seek to deter others from following such fatal courses of action. Learned bishops too must consider these roles of the judge, remedial therapy vs temporal punishment, for social sins and crimes in the public and objective order. So on the one hand a judge will try to tease out if there were any mitigating excuses or keyword factors in the offending deportment and also to determine what level of gravity was involved and whether full consent and full freedom were enjoyed in the act, in this case a negative act of not positively doing x or y or z. A curious case. We must abstain from judging this particular cause and recuse from the case, not just because it is an ecclesiastical one that the King might wish to reserve to himself, but also because ratione suspicionis, we esteem the reus and are friendly with the said bishop in question, or ratione amicitiae. Judges can at times recuse. As Lyndsay Graham has pointed out before at senatorial hearings. 

Christ and the Christians

Easy to judge though. And whether we like it or not, we do tend to judge others on the standards of our own comportment, so we can be a little transparent to an experienced eye. Sad business as the Bishop of Newcastle says it all, nice lady, nice to have her on board, a great icon of the luminous. But we shall press on regardless and learn to learn our lessons from such unfortunate events around a cup of Darjeeling. Snow on the ground so tea on the vicarage lawn not a good idea today, so we shall see what the good lady housekeeper if not the wifey has in mind for the cucumber sandwiches.