BRICKS AND ICE

Confirm, O Lord

This morning I went to school. All sorts of unpleasant ghosts came back to me, and it evoked all sorts of uncomfortable memories as I waited for an early bus and then joined a throng of children heading for school. In this case St Marylebone School, the local Church of England girls' secondary, once a grammar school, now an academy growing its own subsidiaries. I was going to the school confirmation service. Now generally I don't really approve of school confirmations, because I think confirmation is about mature membership of a particular Christian community, and that should be the parish church where you worship on a Sunday, but I will put my hand up and say this was an exception which demonstrates the value of doing it this way. Because I had been alerted to this service by the school chaplain, who contacted me to check the baptism details of one of the candidates; it turned out that this was a girl who had been at St Mary Magdalene's School, and who we had baptized, at her request, when she was ten. I was highly delighted that she was now getting confirmed, because she is someone whose home circumstances never made it possible for her to come to church on Sunday when she was younger, but now that the opportunities of faith have been put in front of her at St Marylebone she has made it her own. By all accounts she is an enthusiastic worshipper and her charm has made an impression on the clergy there (who have every reason to be cynical). I hope that  we can continue to support her.

The confirmation was taken by Bishop Robert Ladds, who is a retired Bishop of Whitby, but who is also Provost of St Marylebone School. Those familiar with Anglican education might be aware that the Woodard Corporation  has a Provost; I can only suppose that St Marylebone has adopted the same title in emulation. The Woodard Schools are a group of Anglican public schools, originally founded by a cleric called the Revd Nathaniel Woodard, which remain much more self-consciously ecclesiastical than most Anglican schools, and include places from Lancing to Ellesmere. Being involved with the Woodard Corporation is the sort of thing that the more establishment high-church clerics have on their cv. I imagine that Bishop Robert has done his time there as well, but now he's St Marylebone's tame bishop, and so laid hands on a dozen girls this morning. He preached an entertaining sermon, involving an impressive chemical reaction, which is fair enough since he's a scientist by training, but I'm not sure how many of the girls were actually well-enough up on Star Wars to follow some of his references. Still, it all went very well, despite chaos being unleashed at the Peace. The Chaplain was flapping ineffectually, so the Rector bellowed the announcement of the next hymn, which put a stop to all the fraternization. It was a pleasure to be involved.


Ice Bound

London has been freezing for the past few days, and the Canal was frozen over yesterday and today. Yesterday I watched two Canada geese come into land and be surprised by finding themselves landing on ice rather than water. It wasn't so thick, though, as one of them managed to break the ice by merely sitting down rather forcibly and kicking a bit. Today I was told that the pond in Regent's Park was frozen, which is unusual.  It was a beautiful day for cycling on Saturday, but I had a heavy cold and so couldn't go riding, so I drove out into Oxfordshire and was impressed by places where the frost had clearly been lying for days, and was as white as snow on some roofs. Gloria was wearing her tee shirt for the Women's March which she couldn't go on.


Another Brick in the Wall

Last night we had the local service for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, at Emmanuel Church in Harrow Road (by the bus stop, opposite Iceland). It was commemorating both the five hundredth anniversary of the start of the Reformation, and the end of the Berlin Wall, and we used the symbolism of a wall as part of the liturgy, which would have been easier with almost anything other than the water-smoothed stones we had for the purpose. Still,  it was a strong idea, a wall built of prejudice, isolation, hatred and so on, being broken down and put into the form of a cross.  We sang Luther's "Ein Feste Burg", which was very appropriate, as well as something of Timothy Dudley-Smith's to "Danny Boy", which I enjoyed but found defeated the range of my cold-addled voice. The good people of Emmanuel even provided rice and peas. A genuinely diverse occasion, with a real variety of voices expressing something of the variety of Christian experience round here.