Through a glass darkly

Dem bones, dem bones: the Easter message

My first ‘grown up’ Easter was in Paris in the mid-1970s. We went to church on Easter Day in the Eglise Réformée in the rue de l’Ouest in the 14th arrondissement and heard a visiting African choir sing A Toi la gloire, words by Edmond de Budry, music by Handel. It is a great Easter hymn, confidently proclaiming the risen Christ, and has become almost the go-to anthem of the French Reformed Church. The choir sang with smiling faces and with great conviction. And then we went and had lunch at the Brasserie Zeyer at Alésia, almost certainly eating gigot d’agneau.

In spite of the confident celebratory tone of Easter hymns, Easter can be a difficult time in church life. Christmas is a much more straightforward, more accessible event; lots of people are coming together for family gatherings, and many of them are pleased to sing the familiar Christmas carols. It is a well-known fact that the church Carol Service attracts both regular members and visitors, and it can be the latter group who complain more loudly when their favourite carol is omitted. Or when it is sung to ‘the wrong tune’. [O little town of Bethlehem is the usual candidate for this.] Easter by comparison has a more ambivalent feel about it. Regular church families are quite often away. Visitors may find it difficult to buy into a sermon that plunges them into unfamiliar waters; the sadistic awfulness of the Cross and the difficult notion of Resurrection life. And Easter promises to be an even more difficult event this year, with church buildings closed and the fact of COVID-19 dominating our television screens and fuelling our fears.

When I was a relatively new vicar [I was never a young minister; I was ordained in my 40s] I used to think it was my job on Easter Day to convince those who were in church, congregation and visitors, of the truth of the resurrection of Jesus. Which I would do by rehearsing the story of that first Easter and by marshalling the evidence. I was no doubt helped by Michael Green’s little book The Day Death Died. In that book Michael Green, the energetic and persuasive one-time Rector of St Aldate’s in Oxford [whose daughter once passed on to us two incorrectly sexed baby rabbits] lays out very clearly the evidence.The rolling away of the stone. The empty tomb. The message of the [one or two] angelic young men. The evidence of the Roman guards. The fragmentary testimony of Mary in the garden, and of the couple walking on the country road to Emmaus. The transformation of the disciples from a frightened rabble into, in John Drane’s words, ““a strong band of courageous witnesses and the nucleus of a constantly growing church”. 

As the years rolled by it dawned on me that this approach was not wholly satisfactory. Easter was not the day to argue people into the Kingdom. What was needed was something that connected more closely to our own lives and the world we inhabit. Preferably linked to a news item. So I think I once preached in Duns from a newspaper story about a badly burnt cat that had rescued her kittens from a house fire at great cost to herself. [No, I didn’t descend to talking about Easter bunnies; not as far as I can remember.]  If I were preaching this Easter I would certainly want to make reference to the COVID-19 story from Italy; the parishioners clubbed together to buy a ventilator for their elderly priest in hospital, and he gave it away to a younger patient. And then died.

A tour of bones

One of the most interesting Easter-themed books that I’ve come across in recent years is A Tour of Bones, a book by an American woman, Denise Inge, from a Mennonite background. One day she goes down into the basement of her house in Worcester [the Bishop’s Palace, her husband is the Bishop of Worcester]; then further down through a trap-door and finds herself surrounded by bones. “There are no neat bones. Instead, there is notbing here but the chaos of death; bones heaped upon bones in disarray, indignity upon indignity, jaw upon pelvis, femur upon cranium …” For this is an Anglo-Saxon charnel house.

Living in close proximity to all these skeletons causes Denise to ask a number of questions.  Why are we so bad at talking about death ? Even those who spend part of their professional lives sitting at hospital bedsides ? Why are clergy sometimes so inept at taking funerals ? Her friend Rachel, a consultant in palliative care, tells her: “Death … takes place more and more in hospitals and less in homes. Therefore people, children included, have less experience of death and dying; it becomes something that happens behind closed doors – and what we don’t see, we fear.”

And this becomes not just a philosophical/cerebral but a physical journey. As Denise sets out to visit four European charnel houses; all in places that are unfamiliar to her: Czermna, in Poland, in former Silesia; Sedlec in the Czech Republic; Hallstatt in Austria, a place where salt has been mined since the 2^nd century BC; and Naters, an Alpine village, near the Simplon Pass in Switzerland. 

This is not the time or place to summarise the entire book. But the journey provokes significant questions.  “The power of the new, the shocking, the astonishing”, writes Stephen Cherry, in his book Barefoot Disciple, “is that it gets past our defences and starts to trouble us.”  Inevitably given her Christian background, Denise Inge starts to think about resurrection, wondering just what resurrection life might be like. Many people today who speak of ‘life after death‘ mean a life that follows immediately after bodily death. But this is not what it originally meant.  Scripture tells us rather that resurrection means ‘new life after a period of being dead’. In all these debates lies the basic tension between continuity and transformation – how much of the old is to be retained ?

Each of the sites visited provokes different questions. At Czermna the question is: Are the broken parts of your deep self being healed ?  At Sedlec: Have you found a lasting hope ?  At Hallstatt: What are the things for which you will be remembered ? These are not  questions which allow quick or easy answers. This is not the simple crossword puzzle. These are questions to live with. “The journey into bones has become a journey into the interior.”

When the travelling stops two things happen. First Denise’s father dies, of cancer of the liver. And then the baby she and her husband are going to adopt is taken from them. And then Denise herself is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Inoperable. Her questions about dying and living are thrown into a new and urgent perspective. 

For me the book is a poignant reflection on both dying and living. “During my travels bones have become for me a metaphor for the enduring and the essential, the deep things that remain once all the skin and the muscle of life is gone.” Paul Tillich has written about modern man’s fear of meaninglessness. “What I have been surprised to discover,” Denise Inge writes, “as these questions chase and wash over me is that preparing to live and preparing to die are in the end the same thing.” This book is not a sentimental tract. Nor is it an unambiguous declaration of faith

Fellowship this Easter

Like everyone else we won’t be doing any travelling this Easter. But thanks to Zoom, of which I had not heard just a month ago, we shall be able to join with Christian congregations in a variety of places. I was encouraged by Tim Keller’s message from New York this week, an exposition of Peter’s sermon at Pentecost in Acts 2. I was pleased to share in a virtual eucharist with Bishop Ian Paton and Carrie Applegarth from St Andrews on Maundy Thursday. And another with John Wilkinson and Paul Vrolijk later the same day from Holy Trinity, Brussels. We much appreciated the All Age Worship led by Natalie Jones in Brussels on Good Friday morning. We hope to look in again this Easter at Trinity, Lyon. And we hope to join in with St Marc’s, Grenoble, on Easter Day. I think Alan Golton will be preaching. And I’ll be praying for him and everyone else preaching that day, for the Easter message to be proclaimed with confidence and with imagination.

Easter Saturday, 2020

Cold Turkey

Turkey doesn’t mean much in our life other than Christmas lunch. So Susie and I were pleasantly surprised to spend six wintery weeks in Turkey at the end of last year. I was locum chaplain at St Nicholas of Myra, the Anglican congregation in Ankara. But I soon learnt not to introduce myself with those words as lokum means Turkish Delight in the local language. For us, it really was Turkey for Christmas.

St Nicolas is a small, cosmopolitan congregation, which meets in an attractive chapel in the grounds of the British Embassy. It is a very security conscious country, and entrance to the embassy grounds is through an airport-style security gate. Those attending Sunday services need to register by the previous Wednesday, and all passports have to be checked at the gate. Last year there were some unfortunate tensions within the sizeable Iranian diaspora which had formed a substantial part of the Sunday congregation. As a consequence all Iranians were banned from the compound and the congregation shrunk dramatically. Numbers at Sunday services were quite small, a nucleus of British, South Africans, Dutch and Poles, all grown-ups, all staying afterwards for coffee and cake. There were more people at a family-friendly service on Christmas Day. And during our time there three different Ambassadors worshipped with us, which doesn’t happen here in Edinburgh. There was also a very moving afternoon service with the Iranian refugees held in the chapel in the former French Embassy. We sang in both English and Farsi, which may well have been the language of the Magi, the visitors from the east in Matthew 2.

Ankara is very much not a tourist city. It was just a tiny village, basically a railway junction, called Angora, until it became the capital of the infant Turkish Republic in 1923. Now is an enormous city, all built since 1926, currently somewhere between 5 and 6 million people, and is is extremely hilly. Our apartment was in Çankaya on the south side, quite high up, and with views north across the centre of the city. There are rolling waves [hills] of pale coloured, modern, apartment blocks; bisected by four-lane urban highways.There is much building going on. Where the ground is too steep to build there are vacant plots of grass and stones, often inhabited by big, wild dogs.

We took the high-speed train down to Istanbul for a few days. Just long enough for a trip up the Bosphorus and visits to Hagia Sophia and the enormous, sprawling Topkapi Palace. I was last there in 1964 as a hitch-hiker before university. In those days it was a faded, black-and-white, run-down city with a population of roughly 1 million.  It is now a huge, vibrant metropolis of between 15 and 16 million. My accompaniment in Istanbul was reading Orhan Pamuk’s melancholic, but seductive, memoirs of growing up in the city, Istanbul: memories and the city. He was born in 1952, so the dilapidated Ottoman city which he describes is more-or-less the city that I dimly remember.

Susie and I also managed a day trip to Konya, on Turkey’s other high-speed train; a couple of hours across the feature-less Anatolian plateau. It was a bitterly cold day as we travelled there at speeds of up to 250 kph. Konya is the Iconium visited by Paul and Barnabas in Acts 14, but there is little trace of its Christian history. It is better known as a place of pilgrimage for the Muslim world, a city that is dear to the hearts of pious Turks. It was the adopted home of Celaleddin Rumi, the 13th century Sufi mystic known as the Mevlana [the Master], and founder of the Mevlevi sect, better known as the Whirling Dervishes. Possibly because of the closeness of the word dervish to the word devilish, Susie and I were predisposed to be unsympathetic to the whole place. But the stone buildings were very dignified; a circular hall used for worship, surrounded by a latticed gallery, and a collection of pleasing, smaller mausoleums. And the extracts from Rumi’s writings spoke of an ascetic, prayerful rule of life, not unlike, say, the early Cistercians.

Back in Edinburgh our trip encourages me to read a few things. I started with Norman Stone’s Turkey: a short history. Stone was a Cambridge historian, an alcoholic, and a Thatcher apologist. [Question: Which was  his redeeming feature ?] It is short, an old-fashioned narrative history, enlivened by some striking phrases [Selim was a “cross between Moloch and Puck”]  and some entertaining diversions. I then ploughed through Atatürk: the rebirth of a nation, a lengthy biography of of the soldier-statesman Mustafa Kemal, who dragged his country from the Middle Ages into the 20th century. It is a favourable, but not uncritical account. Patrick Kinross notes his ambivalent attitude to women; his drinking habits; his intolerance of opposition.

And now I’ve just finished reading Giles Milton’s Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922. [Giles Milton is the brother of Guy Milton, of Holy Trinity, Brussels.]This is a readable, well-paced, detailed account of the events that unfolded at Smyrna in September 1922. Smyrna was a prosperous, civilised, very cosmopolitan city. The city included European, Greek, Armenian, and Turkish quarters, and survived the 1914-18 war intact. But the Greek army, with the support of Lloyd-George occupied Smyrna in 1919, and then invaded Anatolia with the view of creating a Greater Greece. When the defeated Greek army fell back on the coast in 1922, Turkish troops and irregulars fell on Smyrna, slaughtered tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees, and set fire to the city. It is an appalling story. From which  few people emerge with credit.

Now I’m going to look at Meander: East to West along a Turkish River by Jeremy Seal. According to the blurb, [the great] Robert Macfarlane says “This is a wonderful book by a wonderful writer”. So I think I’ll take that as a recommendation.

April 2020

The daily round

Arthur’s Seat is the volcanic plug which we can see from our house on the south side of Edinburgh. I walk round it most days during this time of COVID-19 lock-down. These photos were taken on Saturday, March 28th 

1. Arthur’s Seat from our garden

2.  Dalkeith Road – no traffic on Saturday morning

3.  The entrance to Holyrood Park

4.  Swans keeping their heads down at St Margaret’s Loch

5.  Dunsapie Loch looking south

6.  Dunsapie Loch looking north-east

7.  The jetty, Duddingston Nature Reserve

8.  The city of Edinburgh looking north-west

The daily round, the common task,

will furnish all we need to ask …

with apologies to John Keble

Have we been here before ?

Susie gave me Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: a new history of the world for my birthday. It’s a dense book of 600+ pages, so I’m reading it one chapter at a time. I’ve just reached the mid-14th century. As Frankopan tells the story, the Mongols had rapidly overrun the ancient Middle East and vast swathes of Asia, and had spared Europe only because there were richer pickings elsewhere. The Mongols were militarily dominant and politically astute. Under the Mongols trade blossomed: slaves, silk and cotton, frankincense, ambergris, glass, pepper and all kinds of spices, silver and other precious metals all flowed down the trade arteries. But something else also entered the bloodstream: disease. 

The arid and semi-arid landscapes of the Eurasian steppe were the perfect breeding ground for the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Plague was most effectively spread by animal hosts, sometimes camels, but more often by rats. Transmission to humans is most often the result of fleas vomiting bacilli into the bloodstream before feeding. Bacilli flowed to the lymph nodes, in the armpit or the groin, and produced swellings [buboes]  the size of an apple. Other organs are infected in turn leading to internal haemorrhaging and death. During the 1340s the plague flowed out of central Asia through Persia, the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt and Europe. The trading routes that connected the rest of the world to Europe became lethal highways of infection. A Mongol army laying siege to the Genoese post of Caffa on the Black Sea were struck by the plague and lobbed their corpses into the besieged city, It was an early example of biological warfare.

There was a widespread sense of coming to the End Times. Three-quarters of the population of Venice were killed by the plague. A French chronicler reported that “it rained frogs, snakes, lizards, scorpions and many other poisonous animals”. The King of England, Edward III, turned to prayer and fasting, and ordered his bishops to follow his example.  It is estimated that a third of the population of Europe died, some 25 million out of a population of about 75 million.This plague, commonly known as the Black Death, is sometimes labelled the worst single disaster to befall mankind since the Flood. 

Just over 30 years ago, as an Anglican ordinand, I was asked to write an essay: ‘AIDS is a manifestation of God’s wrath on present moral standards.’ Discuss. As a virus previously unknown, manifesting itself in previously obscure, opportunistic diseases, for which there was [then] no known vaccine or cure, AIDS was a phenomenon tailor-made for conspiracy theories. The Globe, an American tabloid, ran a lengthy cover-story in 1983 solemnly claiming that AIDS was part of King Tut’s curse, having followed a tour of Tut’s treasures to the United States in the late 1970s. Less fancifully we now think that AIDS was the product of a hitherto unknown virus from central Africa. As such it was not an unprecedented phenomenon. The American historian William McNeill has surveyed the history of infectious disease,, demonstrating the dramatic consequences of a ‘new disease’ circulating in human affairs. Writing at the end of the 1960s McNeill offered a prescient warning: “even without mutation, it is always possible that some hitherto obscure parasitic organism may escape its accustomed ecological niche … and expose the dense human population to some fresh and perchance devastating mortality”. Within a decade of his writing that, Dr Grethe Rask, a Danish surgeon came home to Denmark to die after working for four years in the primitive hospital of Abumonbazi in northern Zaire. She died of PCP in December 1977; almost certainly the first European to die of AIDS.

Are there lessons to learn from history ? About isolation ? The first public regulations for controlling the Black Death were only issued at Reggio in 1374. Only in 1383 did Marseille introduce a 40-day quarantine period; a period chosen for Biblical reasons. When the AIDS virus struck in North America, everyone said that “of course the gay bath-houses should have been closed earlier … of course the blood banks should have tested for blood sooner”. But by the time everyone agreed this, it was far too late. And about transmission ? The Black Death was carried by infected fleas and rats on a network of shipping throughout Europe. Improvements in ship design had made all-year-round sailing normal for the first time. The AIDS virus most probably originated in central Africa, as a mutant of an animal retrovirus. Its rapid global spread thereafter was made possible by the growth of inter-continental air travel. As Anthony Burgess noted at the time: “the world’s airlines are the great carriers of the disease”. Air travel is not only bad for the environment. It can have fatal consequences both for the passengers and for those with whom they come into contact.

Perhaps we do learn lessons from history. But, as Eric Morecambe famously said in another context: “not necessarily at the right speed or in the right order”.

Gratitude, and Desert Places

We are living in unprecedented times, and none of us know quite how things will end. One of the unwanted side-effects of the current pandemic is that too many people are wanting to offer us their interpretation of events. The most bizarre, I suppose, is the unspeakable Trump who seems to imagine that the COVID-19 virus is a sinister weapon developed by the Chinese in order to undermine his business interests and to sabotage his chances of re-election as president. A little less far-fetched is the conviction that the virus is God’s judgement on a world that has turned away from his ways. I am as happy as anyone to denounce a culture that is too often characterised by anxiety, self-obsession, and greed. But, as Richard Holloway told us decades ago, when similar suggestions were made about the AIDS virus, the idea of God as a bomb-throwing terrorist simply will not do.

Here are two things that bear in on me in week two of the UK lock-down.

Gratitude

The late Oliver Sacks wrote a little book before he died in which he urged us to develop ‘an attitude of gratitude’. All prayer starts with  thanksgiving. So, I am grateful for life in all its fullness; for eyes to see, and ears to hear, and legs that work – in spite of the passing years. At a time when our movements are necessarily restricted I am grateful for a comfortable house on the south side of Edinburgh, and for a lovely garden. I am grateful to be able to walk out of the house into the park and to walk round Arthur’s Seat with stunning views; first over the Forth looking out towards North Berwick Law and the Bass Rock; and then over Duddingston village and Duddingston Loch towards the Lammermuir hills; and then finally over the city of Edinburgh itself. It takes me an hour and twenty minutes to walk round the hill. And when I get home I’m grateful that Sainsbury’s self-delivery continues to operate through the crisis. And I’m grateful that I have more books that I will be able to read even if the lock-down lasts for a year. Currently I’m reading Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads, a long overdue corrective to my western-European-centric view of history. And I’m reading Leap over a Wall, the late [great] Eugene Peterson’s 1997 book on the life of King David.

Desert places

Peterson writes about David’s years on the run, living on the edge of the desert, fleeing from the murderous intent of King Saul. He writes specifically about David’s time at En-Gedi, a remote spring on the edge of the wilderness above the Dead Sea. We were privileged to visit the Holy Land back in 2013, and were able to take in Masada and En-Gedi, and the Dead Sea on a day trip out from Jerusalem. The wilderness for David was frightening, a place of danger; but it was also a place of truth and a place of beauty. A place where he learnt more about himself.

There are two other wilderness stories in the Bible: the forty years that Moses led the Israelites through the desert, during which they were trained to discern between idols and the living God; and the forty days that Jesus fasted in the Judean wilderness, during which he learnt more about the true nature of his Messiahship. Deserts are both a physical reality and a spiritual metaphor. For many of us the COVID-19 pandemic is a wilderness experience. We feel cut off from family and friends. We are not clear about the future path. We are aware of our limited, human resources. For David the wilderness was a life-enhancing experience. A time when he learned a new dependence on God. “Take pity on me, God, take pity on me, for in you I take refuge … until the destruction is past.” [Psalm 57: 1] My prayer is that this difficult time, this desert experience, will enable us to look differently at the world around us. And we pray that for world leaders too.

Shock ! Horror ! Retired vicar [b]logs on

As we move through the second week of the UK lock-down in response to the COVAID-19 virus, the world is moving into uncharted waters. We don’t know know what will happen next. We don’t know whether the awful scenes broadcast in recent days from Italy and Spain will be repeated here in the UK. Blustering Boris rehearses his Churchill impressions day by day on the telly, but he is not a man who inspires trust. I noticed a Guardian journalist yesterday looked nostalgically back to the days of John Major and Gordon Brown. Or even the days of Theresa May !

Here in Scotland shops and churches, pubs and gyms are all closed. There are very few people out on the streets. Even Arthur’s Seat, the volcanic plug which I can usually see from our windows on the south side of Edinburgh, has retreated behind a great mist. I walked round the hill earlier today, making a wide berth round other walkers, and reacting badly to joggers with plugs in both ears invading my personal space.

In this uncomfortable situation, I am grateful for a comfortable house and an attractive garden; for a loving wife; for Sainsbury’s delivery service bringing us food to eat [we seem to be old enough to qualify for preferential treatment]; and for enough books to read for the next several months. A blog for me is uncharted territory too. If anyone is reading this [aka Sid and Doris Bonkers as Private Eye used to say of the Neasden United supporters], then the likely threads will be a lament for our sadly diminished European links, some reflections on stuff that I am reading, usually history and travel, and some theology, and perhaps a few mordant comments on the current political scene. The little writing that I have done in the past has either been letters to family and friends or assembling church magazines and newsletters. I guess that what I write here will fall somewhere between the two. And so, as Doris Day used to sing many decades ago, Que sera, sera …

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This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
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The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.