PAVEMENTS AND BIKE LANES
During the lockdown, the city council have been painting bike lanes on the Harrow Road
(and some other roads), which would be very good if they then made some effort
to stop cars parking in them. It really is no help to be
offered a lane which is then full of parked cars. They have also widened the
pavements in various places, by fencing off stretches of road, so as to offer
more social distance. This is good in places, but they have done it along long
stretches where few people walk and there is no crowding, while they cannot do
it at bus stops, which are the greatest pinch-points. In fact, during the
lockdown the Vale Café has built an enclosure in front of its café for its
clients to enjoy shisha pipes, which is exactly behind a bus shelter, and so
has created a brand new bottleneck. I imagine they were entirely within their
rights; it was just a thoughtless, anti-social thing to do.
OH NO, HE WASN'T
I have written before about how strange it feels when your
contemporaries attain high public office; now the new Archbishop of York, my
old group leader from college, has actually started work in his new job. He was
interviewed on Radio 4 and managed to say very little in a genial sort of way,
which I suppose is one reason he was appointed, because he’s quite good at PR;
he comes across as a friendly man-of-the-people, and doesn’t say anything too
controversial. In this he is rather unlike his predecessor, because Archbishop
Sentamu has always been combative and has sometimes seemed rather hectoring in
his public pronouncements. Archbishop Stephen will have a different tone.
However, he has also given an interview to the Sunday Times
Magazine, which, if not exactly a car-crash on the Prince Andrew scale, leaves
him looking a bit foolish. I do appreciate that it’s very easy to be stitched
up by journalists, but I’m not sure the clever PR instinct is on display. The
first thing is the photo, full page, half length, staring into the middle
distance with narrowed eyes, one hand on his pectoral cross, the other holding
his pastoral staff, dressed in full gear, cope and mitre. If the photographer
had asked him to look pompous it would have been very successful, but I bet he
didn’t.
I don’t want to go into the semiotics of it, but this
picture conveys a lot of meanings that Stephen probably didn’t intend. We’ll
leave aside the facial expression, but why have you dressed up at all? Cope and
mitre? It’s fancy dress as far as the readers are concerned. And don’t say it’s
not grand because it’s a modern design of cope, in a simple dupion fabric with
a manufactured orphrey, because it has still cost hundreds of pounds, and is
designed to attract attention. Underneath the cope, of course, he is wearing a
rochet, the odd linen garment that is particular to bishops, and which in the
Anglican tradition has very full sleeves, gathered at the cuff. In the
eighteenth century these “lawn sleeves” became very exaggerated and can be
admired in many episcopal portraits, but they have shrunk in modern times. The
gathered cuffs remain, though, and are prominent in Stephen’s picture, generous
pie-frills, somehow reminding you of how the young Lady Diana used to dress, a
piece of strange historical affectation, looking soft and feminine, but
embodying an assertion of historic privilege.
You also get a mixed message from the pastoral staff, which
is very noticeable in the picture. It is, naturally, a “simple” shepherd’s
crook, but it’s also a symbol of episcopal authority and jurisdiction,
prominently displayed. The simplicity of the design is as weighted an
ideological statement as the gothic silver of a medieval example (check out
William of Wykeham’s one at New College, Oxford).
Enough, then of his photo. What did Stephen actually say?
The interviewer says that Stephen is in no doubt that Jesus would have joined
in with Black Lives Matter protests. Really? Have you thought about that? I
think we can agree that Jesus would sympathize with the aims of the Black Lives
Matter movement, (though not some of their demands) but join a protest? Really?
The actual Jesus was quite determinedly apolitical; I find it hard to imagine
him on a protest. But then, Stephen is directly quoted: “Jesus was a black man,
and he was born into a persecuted group in an occupied country.” No. He.
Wasn’t.
I was expecting some sophisticated theological argument to
the effect that Jesus embodies all our humanity, and so he is (not was) black
as well as white, yellow, brown or whatever. Or perhaps an argument that he is
particularly in solidarity with the oppressed of the earth, and so, in that
sense he’s black. But, no, it’s a simple statement, which is just demonstrably
untrue. Jesus was a Palestinian Jew, that much is certain about him, so he was
not a black man. Probably of a darker complexion than he is sometimes portrayed,
olive-skinned like many Mediterranean people, and presumably a bit tanned since
he spent a lot of time out and about, but none of that makes him black, I’m
afraid. And no, he wasn’t born into a persecuted group, either. Yes, Palestine
was occupied, but the indigenous population was not persecuted by the Romans.
The Romans were not persecuting Jews in Jesus’s lifetime. Palestine was a
client state run for them by the privileged Jewish elites. In fact, Jesus was
born into a position of racial privilege, because the Jews of his time were
rigorous in excluding outsiders, and he was of priestly descent when the
priestly class were the dominant power in Jewish society. He could have been
part of the class governing the country as Rome’s clients had he so chosen. One
of the remarkable things about Jesus is actually the way in which he sides with
those who are persecuted or marginalized, the foreigners, the Samaritans, the
lepers, the mad, the ritually unclean. He is an insider who chooses to opt for
the outsider. I am surprised that the Archbishop seems to have forgotten that.
He has also forgotten when “Jesus of Nazareth” appeared on
the television, and is comically distressed when the interviewer points out his
mis-remembering. I remember the series (starring Robert Powell) too, and I can
date it because I remember discussing it with my first girlfriend, so it was
1977. Stephen seems to have convinced himself he was in his early teens when he
saw it, but since he is two years older than me, he was at least eighteen at
the time. Why has he never checked on Wikipedia? This is the sort of question
archbishops are asked all the time, so I’d have thought it was good to get the
details right, for the sake of PR if nothing else.
EVIL STRIKES THE PARISH
Nauseatingly, a teenage boy has been stabbed to death in the
parish. At present we don’t know much about it, but it is what we have been
dreading for months. The evil of a violent subculture where carrying knives is
routine has taken root here. So sad for everyone involved.
