HOLY WEEK

Good Friday

On Good Friday I led a children's service at 10, then helped with the ecumenical service at Maida Hill Piazza at 12.15, and finally presided at the solemn liturgy of the day at 2pm. That's been the routine here for years, along with the service at St Peter's at 11, which my colleagues kindly look after. It seems like a lot of effort, but actually each of these meets some sort of need, and I'm not sure what I would change. Next year, when St Mary Mags is out of action, we'll have to come up with another plan, and see how that goes. In any case, being in church rather a lot seems appropriate on Good Friday. In fact this year I ended the day by going to the Barbican to hear Bach's St John Passion, which might be thought excessive, but I found a tremendous conclusion. As it happened I only heard about it because one of my congregation was playing in it, and he apologised that he wasn't around much for Holy Week, as he was playing it in Norwich and Cambridge as well as at the Barbican. I checked on the website, and found there were still tickets, so I just went along and got a nice central seat right at the back, and could afford a programme as well, which was, to be honest, pretty much essential. It was a lovely experience, with the excellent Mark Padmore singing the Evangelist and Simon Russell Beale reading T S Eliot and a psalm in an effort to make it feel a bit more like the act of worship that Bach wrote it for.

A moment of striking epiphany on Good Friday afternoon. It was bright sunshine, and I was looking out of the kitchen window. A goldfinch flew down and settled on the clump of santolina outside the back door. For several minutes he perched there, plucking off little shoots. I'm not sure whether he ate them or took them away for nesting material; if the latter, he will have a nice moth-proof nest, as santolina is a traditional insect repellent. The goldfinch is, in western Christian iconography, an indicator of the Passion of Christ (because of the little splash of red which brings to mind a wound) and so to see one, close to, on Good Friday was particularly memorable, and spiritually appropriate.

At the ecumenical service I was dressed as usual for the occasion, in cassock and cloak, with a little black hat. A woman I know slightly (she used to sing with Helen in the Community Choir) came up to me and said she hadn't seen me "all gussied up" before. I just laughed, but thought of saying, "You want to see gussied up? Come to church on Sunday morning!" When our repertoire extends to lace and brocade, being all in black doesn't feel gussied up! The hat, incidentally, was a Libyan chechia, bought in the souk in Tripoli some years ago, which has a distinctly square profile, rather like a Canterbury cap (which used to be worn by Archbishop Michael Ramsey, but which I haven't seen anyone wearing for years). The chechia folds up like a biretta and so can be slipped in the pocket if not needed, but no-one ever queries its appropriateness as clerical headgear. I confess I still choose the biretta if it looks like rain, as wet felt is not comfortable.


Public Witness

The Good Friday ecumenical event is meant as a piece of public witness, and we were about a hundred people from various churches demonstrating our faith to the market traders and shoppers, though even by lunchtime it's still pretty quiet on the Harrow Road on Good Friday. Last year we had a complaint about noise, but I think the complainer must have gone out this year, because we had no such attention this time, and we were certainly no less noisy. It was a lot quieter on Palm Sunday morning, when we walked in procession as usual from St Mary Mags to St Peter's, but we were stared at by people on an 18 bus as it stopped outside Betfred. We don't make a big deal of it, with marshals in high-vis jackets and so on, and we try not to be a nuisance, as we keep to the pavement, so it might be thought a fairly low-key piece of witness, but witness it certainly is. We process with cross and incense, and robed servers (and obviously clergy) with palm branches, and the congregation carry their palm crosses. For the ordinary congregation member it is standing up to be counted in a way that normally never occurs, as they demonstrate their Christian commitment very publicly, walking past mosque, betting shop and off-licence. Just before we came out onto the Harrow Road we stopped for prayer, praying for all the people going about their business, and I hope we all held the passers-by in our prayers, because it's quite easy for something like that to feel confrontational, which is not the idea at all. We are walking to enter into the spiritual experience of the last week of Jesus's life, and so an indifferent or hostile crowd isn't necessarily a bad thing, but we mustn't slip into an "us and them" view of the crowd, because we are all living together in this place, and we are all part of the humanity Christ died to save. The danger is that public witness can seem like aggression or provocation (and can feel like self-assertion) when in fact it should be proclaiming the presence of Christians in a community and our commitment to that community. We should be going out holding the community in our hearts.     


Catching the sun

I came back from a week in Jordan without any discernible effect from the sun. Last Saturday I went to Lords with my brother, to watch Essex playing Middlesex, and came away with my face completely sunburnt. My brother remarked that he had feared for my blood pressure until he looked in a mirror and found he was the same. Admittedly we were in the front row of the grandstand for eight and a half hours, but the sun seemed very weak, and it was never warm. The result is that I must now endure the ignominy of all the skin of my forehead peeling off in rather unseemly fashion. It wasn't a bad day's cricket, but not cheery for us Essex boys, as our fast bowlers were made to look very harmless in comparison with Finn, Murtagh and Roland-Jones. Play was really very slow, which was not helped by Roland-Jones starting his run-up somewhere in Maida Vale, and we were there until 7.30pm. The previous day they had gone off for bad light at teatime, which was frankly very surprising, but that meant we had to get through extra overs in the day to make up for those lost, but also that they couldn't start until the umpires' light meters showed a brighter light than had prevailed when they came off on Friday afternoon, so we were twenty minutes late starting. Discussion of bad light seems odd when you are looking at the Lords floodlights, but the planning conditions imposed by Westminster City Council mean that they can only be used for a limited number of scheduled occasions (such is the power of the St John's Wood Society) and so are purely decorative for county matches.