A Day Out in Essex

 Andrew Fenby's ordination at Chelmsford Cathedral

On Sunday 3rd July I was out earlier than usual on a Sunday - a group of us met outside the church to go to Chelmsford for Andrew Fenby's ordination as a deacon. You may recall Andrew as a member of St Mary's before he went off to St Stephen's House, Oxford to train for the ministry. We set off around 9:30am, in convoy, with Jane following my car. This worked well except when a couple of others cars got in between us somewhere on the borders of Essex, and Jane started following another red car, before realising her mistake. Fortunately, after a few mobile phone calls between cars, we were soon back on course.

We arrived in Chelmsford at about 10:30am - which seemed early for the 11:15 Ordination service, until we made our way to the Cathedral and found it nearly full. We were all seated about halfway down the north side-aisle.  Chelmsford Cathedral has the distinction of being one of the smallest in the country, maybe half as big again as St Mary's. Before the creation of the diocese in 1914 it was the town's parish church, a role it still retains. In the 1980's, I lived in Chelmsford and was a parishioner. During that period, the Cathedral was radically refurbished internally - all the dark wooden screens and the pews were removed, a light marble floor was put in, and lighter wood used for the seats. The result is a greatly increased sense of light and space, which I found quite striking as I walked in, even though the building was packed with people.

The Ordination service was quite long but uplifting, with a mixture of styles of music, but led with excellent organ music. The sermon, by the priest who had been leading the pre-ordination Retreat for the ordinands, was inspiring, pointing to the challenges of ministry - and very funny. Our own Fr Allan Scott was one of Andrew's sponsors, and we all met outside the Cathedral after the service for photographs. By now it was getting on for 2pm, and we were all rather hungry. We had been invited back to Andrew's house in the parish where he will be serving his curacy, in Leigh-on-Sea, so we set off again in convoy. After only a small, unintended detour around the Southend one-way system, we arrived to find an excellent late lunch which had been prepared by Andrew's family. Over lunch we also met some of the members of the local church, St Margaret of Antioch - it seems to be a friendly and lively community.

At 4.30pm we left, arriving home in time for Evensong after a drive through the Essex countryside. All agreed it had been a pleasant day out, and well worth the trip to support Andrew as he starts on his new life and new job.

Jonathan Gebbie

Sermon from Evensong 10 July (following the events of 7/7)

The world continues to shrink around us: we are reminded more and more often that we are all connected with a world of incredible complexity. It’s not as if it’s new, but the events of the last week – all of the events of the last week – show the different ways in which that connection can either flourish, or destroy.

     Last weekend – it really was only last weekend? – there was Live 8, there was the Make Poverty History march – a great outpouring of willingness to use the resources of the wealthy nations for the benefit of the poor. It’s an extraordinary thing – that people would be willing not merely to go on a march (still less attend a rock concert) – but to declare themselves willing to have less so that other people, whom they have never met, can have enough. Because that is what lies deeply at the root of the Make Poverty History events. It is people saying we already have enough. We don’t need to get every last penny, even if we are owed it. We can be generous to those who have little. Cynically, it’s probably helped by the fact that few of us feel any sense of personal engagement with the international debts owed by developing countries to our country. It needs to be backed up by personal action that makes a difference at the level of our own personal lives also. But it is real. Make Poverty History reaches out with hope and love across the distances of geography and poverty and says that we are all one, and we are responsible for, and to each other.

     And then there was the Olympics. What a great moment that was! Especially because it also gave a little chance for getting one over on the French – but primarily because it felt like an affirmation of what London is becoming. We are a great, multi-cultural city, a place full of many different languages and cultures and faiths: and most of us most of the time live together in a remarkable degree of harmony with one another. London for many people is a place with a future, buzzing with creativity and invention. And the Olympics offered two things: a chance to celebrate what is, and a chance to bring the benefits of new life and hope to a part of the city which has been largely left out, which has experienced little of the buzz, and a lot of the dislocation of the changes of recent years. The whole world will come to London in 2012, and we’re up to the job. We can embrace the world coming to us, because we do it all the time. We can help the world to enjoy being one human community together.

     And both of these things are still true, even after Thursday’s events. The bombings this week show more sharply than anything else that we are linked up in a small world. The anger and hatred, probably of a small group who are being left behind as the world changes around them, is not restricted to wherever it is they come from: it can spread like a virus round the whole world, it can attack like a virus where the system has no effective defences. There is no way of policing a public transport system used by millions of people each day; the rage which is really felt against world leaders, or just against the world for being different from how they would like it, is instead re-directed onto an easier target.

     Just being close to each other does not make us love one another. The shrinking of our world through communications and through transport systems just brings us nearer – and there are no fights like those of neighbours. The attacks on London are a rejection of relationship, not done from a distance but close-up; the outstretched hand of Make Poverty History is met with a fist.

     To love one another is not inevitable – but nor is hatred. Either can be chosen. Reaching out in love means using the shrinking of our world as an opportunity to love each other better, to include all people more fully in the circle of those who deserve our love. But if we are already filled with hate, then those outside our own circle deserve no sympathy and love – they are not truly human. The shrunken world just brings our enemy closer to us, and enables us to strike more easily.

     The most difficult thing in responding to atrocity, is to avoid the trap that is set by the one who has attacked. The trap is to respond with equal hatred – which means agreeing with the attacker that the world is a place of conflict. To respond in kind is to admit defeat.

     There is a sort of illusory safety in doing so, in withdrawing from contact with people who are dangerous or different (the two easily become the same thing). It feels so much better to be with people like me. It’s that sort of impulse we see being worked out on a grand scale presently on the West Bank, as Israel attempts to deny the existence of its neighbours by building a wall between them (and incidentally taking some of their land along the way). I don’t think the land grab is the main reason: there are lots of less costly ways of doing it. They are illustrating what the reaction of fear is like, can be like for all of us: they are putting their heads under the bedclothes so that the monster won’t be there any more. The same thing of course still exists in parts of Belfast – the wall built between Unionist and Nationalist communities, running along streets and round back gardens. They are concrete testimony to the failure of love: the complete inability to recognise the humanity of the one who is different. That is the perspective of the fanatic everywhere. As someone said to me this morning: what can you be thinking about as you prepare a bomb – what do you think of the people who will be killed or maimed? And my answer, as far as I understand it – you don’t think about them as human beings at all; that is the only way to be able to do such things.

     So we must, absolutely must, not give in to the temptation to dehumanise those who attack us, merely to hate them as they hate us. Because then we are playing on their territory, by their rules; then we are playing their game. We have to find responses which are not weak, but neither are they aggressive – the way that seeks both justice and peace, neither at the price of the other.

     God’s justice demands that we all give account of ourselves, that we all answer for who we are and what we have done. But God’s peace demands that whatever we do in seeking justice, we do in such a way that greater peace will result. There is no more powerful way of strengthening a cause than making martyrs: the church’s own history demonstrates that, both in the persecutions it has suffered, and those it has inflicted. The deeper reality within which we operate has to be the reality of life and hope which I started with; Christians must be realistic optimists. Because we know that people can be inspired to see the humanity in those different from themselves; because we know that there is no-one who cannot be redeemed by God’s forgiveness; because there is cause for joy in the world: because of those things we can bear the grief of Thursday’s bombings, and help to keep on building a world in which we reach out in love and trust until that love is reciprocated among all God’s children.

Fr Jonathan

The New Church

Its Organs, Music and Services (1)

The impressive new church, dedicated to St. Mary, 190 feet long and 80 feet wide, was consecrated on June 25, 1858. There was no choir (although one was formed soon afterwards) no choir vestry, no proper choir stalls, no permanent pulpit and no church tower – all these were yet to come. Architectural journals were quick to note the building’s ‘unusually grand and cathedralic proportions, with its graceful and open nave’. They were less approving of the fittings and fixtures in the interior. Most of the pews had doors, most were rented – and some even had upholstery! However, every one of the 1300 seats was filled by the large congregation at the consecration. Their singing was supported by the four-manual organ, which had been newly built by the  London firm of Gray and Davidson. It was sited on a gallery specially provided for it in the south transept. (As there was no electricity in the church, the organ was probably blown by a hydraulic system, in which water-power was used to drive powerful feeders, moving up and down, which then pumped air into the organ). The organ console, with its four keyboards, was fixed to the floor, next to the organ itself, with hundreds of half-inch-wide pneumatic tubes passing under the floor up into the organ chamber. 

     This meant that the new choir, in the chancel, functioned some distance away from the accompanying organist. Rector Thomas Jackson took the bold step of appointing a separate Director of Music and Master of the Choir, and for the first six decades of the  New Church ’s history, the posts of organist and choir director were filled by two separate people.

     During the four years that it took to build the new church, serious doubts had been raised regarding the type of services that would be held there. Dark glances were cast at the church of St. Matthias (consecrated in 1853), then fronted by Goldsmith Square at the end of Howard Road, with its six candles on the altar and High Mass on Sundays, coloured by elaborate ceremonial and probably overlaid with liberal amounts of plainsong.  Would St. Mary’s be the same?

     Tempers cooled after the consecration, but flared up again alarmingly when Rector Jackson introduced ‘an excessive amount of music into the services’ in 1864. This mainly centred on the introduction of sung psalms at Matins, which had been greeted with enraged Vestry Meetings, and resulted in the Rector being accused of ‘ritualism’. Matters reached a head when, during one of the services two years later, a deputy organist was attacked and thrown to the ground while playing, and this ugly scene ended with the protagonists in court. Gradually, however, normality returned, although the situation remained tense for some time. 

     At this distance, the extreme vehemence of the opposition can scarcely be imagined. But across the road, services in the Old Church were then described by an ‘outside’ observer as being ‘so low as to be bordering on Nonconformity’. We can forgive the cynical description, but it might help to explain why the mere sight of 20 choirboys and 14 men in starched white surplices, singing the psalms in the New Church, was thought, by many, to be ‘a step nearer Rome’. 

     We do have an extraordinary window on what was performed by St. Mary’s choir from 1873 to 1877. Parish churches often had notebooks, mostly kept by choirmen and written up diligently during the sermon, which logged service details of particular interest to them. (One church in Hertfordshire, for example, still has such a notebook containing sermon durations in the 1890’s – 25 minutes and longer!) 

     In the choir library there is a music book which lists all of the anthems sung by the choir from 1873 to 1877. The record is incomplete for 1873, lists every Sunday for 1874 and then begins to peter out (as most of these written records were wont to do). But it is enough to show us exactly what the repertoire of the choir was during this period. We know that the choir had rapidly acquired a good reputation; and the type of repertoire also indicates that it was obviously well trained and highly competent.

     The bulk of the anthems sung were mainly Victorian, together with choruses from Handel or Mendelssohn oratorios, used for festivals. For instance, on Sunday, December 7, 1873, the morning anthem was ‘And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed’, from Handel’s Messiah. ‘Glory to God’ was performed on December 21, and on December 28, 1873, the anthem at Matins was ‘For unto us a child is born’ and the evening anthem was the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ - all from the Messiah. 

     At this time, Matins and Evensong always began with the opening prayers sung both by the priest and the choir together. These were sung slowly to a musical setting which had the last words or syllables of each line drawn out. To take one line from the sung General Confession (BCP) – ‘That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life’… 

This was performed as: 
‘That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and--- sob-----er life’….

     The last four words were sung very slowly, swelling out to a crescendo and dying away at the end. Many of the responses were also sung like this, and an old chorister in another parish church, writing in the mid 1970’s, when he was over 90, recalls those times:

‘We sang the first few prayers with the priest, at Morning and Evening Prayer. It was all very drawn out, especially the bit about ‘sober life’. Slowness was the order of the day, because in those days, slowness was always equated with dignity’.

     With the exception of the faster Handel choruses, much of the Victorian repertoire was indeed slow and mostly written in long notes. Carol services were non-existent (except possibly for children), and only a few Carols were sung after Christmas Day, when the space for an anthem was used to include one or more. Their style and pace was normally sedate, never approaching the performance speeds of our modern up-tempo carols.

     It seems that there was always a service on New Year’s Eve. Amazingly, we do have a faint pencilled note, listing the details for one of these services, probably around 1878. It lists two Psalms, an anthem, and a hymn –

Ps. 39 ‘I said I will take heed to my ways: that I offend not in my tongue ……Lord let me know mine end and the number of my days: that I may be certified how long I have to live’

Ps. 90  ‘Lord thou hast been our refuge; from one generation to another’

Anthem ‘Lord let me know mine end’ (music by John Goss 1800-1880, organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral)

Hymn 288 (from Hymns Ancient and Modern, first published 1861)

 ‘A few more years shall roll, a few more seasons come; and we shall be with those that rest, asleep within the tomb ……  A few more struggles here, a few more partings o’er;  a few more toils, a few more tears, and we shall weep no more’

All this paints an extremely sad and sorrowful picture at the passing of the Old Year, and was intended to be a sober reflection on what the Book of Common Prayer called ‘this transitory life’.

DB (to be continued)

Using Incense in Church

St Mary’s congregation has a wide range of views about many things, including the use of incense in church. For some people it is a significant aid to worship; for others it is at best a distraction. I hope it will be helpful to both groups, and the majority who lie somewhere in between, if I outline some of the principles behind our use of incense here at St Mary’s.

God’s blessing, our prayer

Many and various arguments have been made about whether incense should be used, and if so, what it stands for. I’m not going to try to summarise them all, but just to pull out two themes which are important for me.

     Firstly, incense is used as a symbol of God’s blessing. God comes to us through the material things of the world, not in a disembodied form – but human beings always have a tendency to regard material things as somehow inferior, lesser than ‘spiritual things’. Incense is a way of reminding us that our God comes to us through the very things that people have considered inferior. God was incarnate in the possibly illegitimate son of a young woman in a peasant village, the sort of place time forgot to forget. It is through the death of this man on a cross that we are saved; it is in the resurrection of his body that we see the promise of our salvation. By blessing the physical things which are part of our worship we are recalled to the fact that ours is a religion based in the physical reality of the world. So we bless the altar, the gospel book, the bread and the wine.

     We also bless one another; the priest is blessed with incense, and so are the whole congregation, as a sign that we, here and now, are being blessed by God even as we are. That’s why I think it’s good to use something that gets up one’s nostrils: smells are more powerful than words; it’s difficult to drift away and forget what’s going on.

     The other interpretation of incense follows on directly from thinking about God’s blessing. Incense also stands for our response in prayer. Our prayers ascend to God (even if we don’t necessarily believe God is literally ‘up there’). Just as we are blessed, we bless in return, and it’s right that our offering of prayer should be mingled up with God’s blessing of us. Because that is what happens in the Christian life – our prayer is also the activity of the Holy Spirit within us.

Sign of celebration

Incense is traditionally used in more solemn services, or at times and places where a particular emphasis is being given to the presence and blessing of God in our lives. One way of expressing that is to use it as a marker of the ‘high points’ of the church’s year, the seasons when we are particularly in celebration mode. It was once the custom that Christians did not kneel to pray during the Easter season – as a sign that we are redeemed members of the family of God and need not approach with fear. What we do here is another way of marking that difference, and I hope helping us all to grow in our relationship of worship and praise of God.

Practically speaking …

Incense is used on 17 Sundays: from Christmas Day to the Baptism of Christ (2nd Sunday of Epiphany), Candlemas (Sunday nearest to Feb 2nd), Easter, and through the Easter Season, up to Trinity Sunday, Confirmation, Patronal Festival, All Saints Sunday, Christ the King and on some weekday festival days.

Is everybody happy?

I don’t suppose so for a minute. Those who would like to have incense used every week will continue to pine, and those who regard it as an annoyance will still be afflicted by coughs. One of the glories of being St Mary’s is that we encompass such a diversity of views; and not just that we encompass them, but that we recognise that the love of Christ is far more important than our differences. Long may it stay that way.

Fr. Jonathan

Music on Sunday September 11th

On the Sunday of our Patronal Festival, St. Mary’s will be visited by a German youth orchestra from Stuttgart, consisting of young musicians many of whom are hoping to go on to a professional career. As you will hear, they have already reached a very high standard, as well as brimming with youthful enthusiasm. Their conductor, Alexander Scherf, used to come to St. Mary’s occasionally while studying in London a few years ago, and even sang with the People’s Choir at one carol service.

  Members of the orchestra will be providing some music during the morning service, and we hope that these, at least will join us for lunch before the short concert in the New Church at 3.30. This will include works by Mozart, Haydn and Grieg and last about an hour. The festivities will conclude with tea and cake (if only to confirm stereotypes about England !)

A collection will be taken for famine relief in Niger and Mali .

Please give the young people a warm welcome and encourage your friends to join us at the concert. It would be very rude if they had to play to an empty church….

Tamsin Heycock

MUSIC NOTES

Sara-Deborah Struntz has been nearing the end of her studies at the Royal College of Music. Being on our list of cantors, she sang the Sunday morning psalm on July 6. In addition, during the distribution, she also contributed a violin piece, Biber’s Passacaglia, played solo from the back of the church. This was delivered with much conviction, resonant tone, and fine technical control. Her Final Recital at the College (in June) included a performance of the Prokofiev Violin Concerto.

     Rachel Dixon’s wedding on August 6 had the musical assistance of a string quartet, playing Pachelbel’s Canon as the bride entered the church, and Faure’s Pavane during the signing of the register. Soprano Angela Kazimierczuk sang Schubert’s Ave Maria, followed by Puccini’s ‘O ma babbino caro’ (‘O my beloved father’, from the opera Gianni Schicchi) in which her soaring high notes, supported by the organ, rang round the church.

      Last but not least, Kate Walsh’s wedding on June 26 had a contingent of the world-famous Philharmonia Chorus. At the entrance of the bride they sang Parry’s Coronation Anthem ‘I was glad when they said unto me” (a setting, for double choir, of Psalm 122, sung at every Coronation since that of 1902) with its stunning top B flats. The bride, having arrived seven minutes early for the purpose, waited at the west door in order to hear her colleagues sing it before she moved down the nave!

     During the signing of the register, the choir contributed two lighter items by Cole Porter and Vincent Youmans. In tight, high-powered arrangements, the choir excelled themselves in performances of panache and drive.                                                                  

DB

School News

For those governors who missed the announcement in church, here are the wonderful SATS results for year 6:

Maths               level 4   82%      level 5 24% 

English             level 4   95%      level 5 47% 

Science            level 4    95%      level 5 59%

Congratulations to all the children and staff who worked so hard to achieve these tremendous results.  

SAINT OF THE MONTH: St Birinus

Feast day (in some calendars) 8 September (otherwise 3 December)

If you travel down the Thames valley 10 miles or so south of Oxford , you find yourself coming out of the plain into the land between two lines of hills. To your right (the west) are the Berkshire Downs. To your left (the east) the Chiltern escarpment. Under the Downs , you will see two distinctively shaped hills, each crowned by a clump of trees. These are the Sinodun Hills – known universally in the neighbourhood as Wittenham Clumps. The clumps are not coincidence. They mark the site of two Iron Age hill forts, because this is a land which has been settled for a long time. If you follow the track down to the river (crossing it at what is now called Day’s Lock), you will pick up on the other side an extensive network of earthworks. This area between the Thames and the Cherwell was a place where three Iron Age tribes’ lands met. The earthwork is called the Dyke Hills and it marks a very large, 40- hectare defensive enclosure which had two substantial banks either side of a large ditch, probably an artificial channel linking the Thames to its tributary the Thame to form a defensive moat. Keep following the earthwork and it will bring you out into a small Georgian town with a young cathedral at its centre.

     This is the settlement of Dorchester, first an Iron Age village and then a Roman town and then, in the seventh century, the site of the first Bishopric in the ancient kingdom of Wessex . And the man who served as that first bishop was Birinus.

     Birinus is variously described as Italian or Frankish (which could mean what we now call either French or German). It is more solidly established that he was a priest and then a Bishop in Italy . He may have been consecrated in Genoa , or possibly in Milan – in either case by the Archbishop Asterius. He was sent by the Pope, Honorius I, in 634 to help with the follow-up to Augustine’s conversion of the Anglo-Saxon tribes of Britain . His original quest was, apparently, the conversion of Mercia – what we would now call the Midlands . However, to get there, he had to travel through the territory of the West Saxons , and Bede’s Ecclesiastical History tells us that he found such ignorance of Christianity among that people that he decided to stay and work among them. Cynegils, the King of Wessex, at that time held his court in a settlement up in the Downs a few miles downstream of Dorchester , on the other side of the river. The King received Birinus kindly, and agreed to hear him preach. He asked him to do so, however, at the site of an ancient burial barrow – which failed to intimidate Birinus at all.

     The King was fairly impressed; sufficiently so to let Birinus carry on which his work, but not enough himself to become a convert. At this point, however, more secular forces intervened. King Cynegils was seeking an alliance with Oswald, the King of Northumbria, and a noted supporter of Christianity, against their common enemy in Mercia . Oswald was very happy, for dynastic and political reasons, to enter into the alliance. But he refused to do so while Cynegils remained a pagan. Cynegils assessed his options and opted for conversion. Oswald offered his daughter in marriage to seal the pact, and Birinus was summoned to perform the baptism.

     The King offered Birinus the ancient town of Dorchester for his bishopric. As the royal party were travelling to it, many of the courtiers also expressed a wish for baptism, and many of them were baptised in the Thames just before they crossed over it. As a result, Christianity was solidly established in the kingdom. Birinus remained the Bishop, in Dorchester, until shortly before his death when the see was removed to Winchester (further away from the dangerous frontier with Mercia ). Unlike some of the northern saints, he seems to have been able to live a quiet life, ministering to his people. Few stories of miracles or particular ascetic practices are told about him, but he was canonised very soon after his death.

     Birinus died in 649 and was originally buried in Dorchester . However, the bones were removed to Winchester about 40 years later. In the thirteenth century, the canons who inhabited the Abbey claimed to have some of the relics. This was proved to be false at the time, but they did later acquire some. Dorchester became an important place of pilgrimage until the shrine was destroyed at the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. A few fragments of the shrine were found during a Victorian renovation, and were incorporated in the modern memorial. Local Christians hold a pilgrimage in his memory every year, starting at Churn Knob and finishing in the Abbey.

     The Abbey has a continuous history right back to Birinus’s time, although the present church was begun in the 12th century and enlarged in the 13th. It contains the only pre-Reformation lead font from a monastic foundation. It also has some 14th century wall paintings, and a magnificent ‘Jesse window’, in which the stone tracery takes the form of the tree while glass and stone figures show the descent of Jesus from Jesse, also dating from the 14th century. It served as the seat of a Bishopric briefly in the 10th and 11th centuries, but the diocese then became centred on Lincoln and it became instead an Augustinian Abbey. The buildings, although not the community, survived the dissolution of the monasteries because a local man bought the lead on the roof, thus meaning it was not stripped off for sale elsewhere. And it is once again the seat of a bishop, albeit only a suffragan.

     If you want to get to Dorchester without traipsing over Iron Age earthworks, take the M40 out of London . Come off at junction 6 on the B4009, head to Watlington and Benson where you turn right on the A4074.

Judith Simpson

When was the last time you thought about how you pray? It might have been last week, last year or sometime in the dim and distant past, perhaps as a child at Sunday School. Whenever it was there is a new opportunity to do just that this autumn.

     St Mary’s is to have a Week of Guided Prayer during the first week of October. You will have the opportunity of spending 20-30 minutes with someone who will listen to your experience of prayer: both those times when it seems very easy, and those times when it is completely impossible. You will meet with this Guide every day for a week and maybe try out different ways of praying, or maybe sharing what may be happening for you in prayer. It will be private, confidential and isn’t a test! Nobody will know that you fall asleep praying last thing at night, or that you get up at 5am for 30 minutes of silence with God, or that the only place for privacy is that small room with the lockable door, or ….  The Guide won’t have all the answers, but this is a time when you can explore together (with God) where God is calling you in prayer. 

     We will meet together with all the Guides on Sunday 2nd October for the launch, and say farewell to them the following Sunday. Each day: Monday – Friday is the time for your individual meetings, either during the day or in the evening. There will be the usual list to sign at the back of the Church and I am happy to answer any questions.

Christine Hall 

In this issue we decided to take a look at the tat with a tenuous religious theme that you can find on the Web. 

     If anyone objects, can I just say that anyone who does not think that religion should encourage consumerism should visit Rome. It is no exaggeration to say that within the Vatican there are gift stalls selling Vatican tea towels, books, icons and rosaries approximately every hundred yards. Seeing as the Vatican boasts some of the longest corridors in the world, you can see that that is a lot of stalls. And my other half found the best snowglobe (the former Pope on one side, St Peter’s on the other, with special gold ‘snow’) in his extensive collection in a souvenir shop a stone’s throw from the steps of St Peter’s.

     But I digress. Within one of New Prospect’s favourite websites, Ship of Fools, is a page called Gadgets for God which has rounded up items (not all of them really gadgets as such) with tenuously religious meaning for, amongst other things, the home, garden, car, pets, Christmas and your wardrobe.

     The gadgets include all kind of weird and wonderful things, most, of which, it must be noted, are sourced from the US. Most, but not all, include links to websites for purchase.

     Some gems to be found under fashion include t-shirts that proclaim the wearer to be a Calvinist, and flip flops with soles that spell out Jesus Loves You. With tongue firmly in cheek there is also ‘wash away your sins’ soap. For the garden you might want some 26 inches tall statuettes of St Francis and St Fiacre, or a 14 inch high granite reproduction of the stone tablet on which Moses inscribed the ten commandments. On that note, favourites for the home include a cotton blanket printed with the commandments or a wallpaper border printed with a text from St Paul .

     But top of the shops has to be the pictures that can have an image of you Photoshopped into a frame with Jesus looking over you. Take a look at heavenlyimages.com for images of beaming all American faces basking in the look of the Lord. I think the idea may often to be recreating the image in heaven. Note to my husband to be: some of the examples on their site show couples on their wedding day!      

Postscript - This reviewer is curious to know if members of the clergy ever receive this kind of thing as presents (you know, like you mention once that you like sheep and are doomed to a lifetime of receiving sheep themed mugs, t-shirts, pictures and cards, all coming with a note saying ‘I saw this and thought of ewe’.) Can the Rector or our new curate Susie enlighten us?

Emma Forrest

One evening recently I was sitting in church, quietly waiting for Evening Prayers to begin, when I heard someone come into church.  I then heard the rustling of bags and felt I had to go and investigate.  I walked towards the table where the "gift basket" is stationed and saw a man having a good old sort through the bags of food.  I greeted him with a cheerful smile, which he completely ignored as he was intent upon lifting one of the bags from the basket.  As he started to lift the bag, I held on to the bag, so began a see-saw motion - him lifting up, me pulling down.  I looked into his face, which was very badly bruised, and was shocked by the anguish I saw there.  He began speaking to me in Italian and I tried to explain as best I could about the Drop-in Centre.  He began to get angry, the see-saw was still going on and the bag was beginning to split.  I prayed for inspiration.  Suddenly out of the corner of my eye I saw a lone Fray Bentos pie.  With my other hand I grabbed it and offered it to him.  He let go of the bag, took the pie and stared at it with great puzzlement.  I kept saying "mmmm" and rubbing my tummy.  He almost laughed and then smiled.  In that moment our humanity met.  When he left with the pie I thought of when he was a child, probably eating beautiful pasta made by his mama - boy was he in for a culture shock when he ate that pie.

That evening I prayed hard for that man and all people in his position.  I felt so grateful to the person who had given the pie, and that our church community is so generous in reaching out to those in need on a weekly basis week in and week out.

Beryl Warren   

 The history I was taught at school was the history of kings and governments, battles and foreign policies. Ordinary people featured only as the anonymous masses who formed armies, suffered famines, and occasionally rebelled. Ironically, today we are deluged with information and news from around the world, but, due to the pressures of TV schedules and sound-bites, it is still difficult to understand what is happening to ordinary people, and the impact of events on their lives. In a time when we are aware of the power of “spin”, we need more than ever to see beyond the stereotypes. The best reporters – the BBC’s Fergal Keane springs to mind – can take us into the story of an individual in a different culture and help us to understand them, but this is a rare skill.

     Katharine von Schubert (then Katharine Maycock) was a member of St Mary’s for several years, and many will recall her singing and flute-playing in church. In October 2002, she joined a volunteer Christian human rights observer programme, run by the Quakers, in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories . Shortly after she arrived at her base in Bethlehem , she began a series of email reports about her experiences, under the heading “Bullet Points”. This series of reports continued for nearly two years, after she completed her observer assignment and then worked for an aid organisation in Jerusalem . The “Bullet Points” emails were widely circulated, as increasingly they were forwarded on by recipients to others. They appeared on St Mary’s web site and some were published here in “New Prospect”.

     The collected reports have now been published in “Checkpoints and Chances”. Katharine has a few advantages in reporting the situation there: she is a fluent Arabic speaker, and she is a woman, and so can talk to both women and men in that society. During the period of the reports, she travels extensively around the Palestinian Territories of the West Bank and Gaza , and also in Israel . She talks to many people – Palestinians with a wide range of views, Israeli soldiers and peace activists, people who have had their homes demolished or children shot, the parents of a suicide bomber. Many people she talks to are not exceptional, but ordinary people trying to get on with their lives in extraordinary situations: students on a long taxi journey avoiding roadblocks to get to their place of study, people allowed out of their homes for only a few hours a week because of a curfew. Their stories are the core of the book. Theirs are stories that never make headlines, but are nonetheless the stories we need to hear to begin to understand the conflict.  
 
Katharine has an observant eye and a compassionate ear; the different personalities emerge clearly from her writing. We are drawn in to appreciate their aspirations and daily concerns, hopes and fears, which are not very different from ours, but played out in very different circumstances: Can I get treatment for my illness when there is a military checkpoint between my home and the hospital? How will my children be educated when there is a curfew for days on end? Where will my children play when snipers shoot down the street?

     What is striking, given that the conflict has gone on for so many years, are the number of people on both sides who say the Jewish and Arab communities could peacefully coexist, if only the differences and injustices of the last 57 years could be addressed. There is a faint sense that it could all have been so different. Sadly, this is clearly not the view of those with power and weapons.

     Katharine’s reports also fill in the historical background, by noting the impact it is still having today. During the time she was writing, the so-called “security fence” was being built by the Israelis, ostensibly to prevent attacks by Palestinians, but, as becomes increasingly clear, its route seems designed to separate farmers from large swathes of their land.

     For those of us receiving her emails at intervals, it seemed each one opened a window to shed light on a different aspect of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. To read them all at once in a book is a more intense experience – we are taken quickly from hope to despair, from peace to outrage at what people are capable of doing to each other, from seeing violence and bigotry to small signs of reconciliation. Katharine writes of her own reactions and we sense her warmth towards people, and her frustration, anger and exhaustion in response to what she has witnessed. The book is not without lighter moments, but the humour is often dark.

     We also see Katharine’s increasing understanding of the Israeli point of view. At Hebrew classes she meets recent Jewish immigrants. Elsewhere she meets long-term Israeli citizens, and gets more insight into the Jewish story and their desire for a safe haven after the Holocaust.      

The conflict has been going on for decades. The grievances and bitterness it has generated seem to be at least a part of the underlying reasons for the attacks on New York in 2001 and recently here in London . To understand what is happening, we need to get beyond the agendas of the politicians and spin-doctors. Accompanying Katharine on her journey around “Checkpoints and Chances”, discovering the stories of ordinary lives, is an excellent place to start. If you have read little about the conflict before, you may be surprised, and possibly disturbed, at what is happening that never makes it into “the news”.

A word of warning – you may be so disturbed by what you read that, although Katharine doesn’t discuss it directly, you may begin to question what the leaders of the Western nations are doing in our name. You may be so discomforted that you feel a need to go and find out for yourself. That’s what happened to this reviewer – but that’s another story.

Jonathan Gebbie

“Checkpoints and Chances” by Katharine von Schubert is published by Quaker Books. We plan a group order – look out for a sign-up sheet at the back of church.  

Some of you will be going to your new school this month. Naturally you will be nervous, especially if you don't know anybody else. But remember, other people are just as shy and just as nervous. So if you feel “lost” or lonely, why not go and talk to someone else who is alone? They may be too shy to talk to you, and will be very glad if you talk to them. Some of your friends may be going on to the same school as you, if this is the case, you will not be so lonely, but don't forget that other people are. If you see people standing alone near you and your friends, you can make them happy by talking to them, bringing them over to join you and your friends.

     If you are staying at the same school, you can help others also, you can answer their questions, tell them where to go if they are lost.  Remember you were new once!

Moira Borris  (Moira is Gwen’s daughter and taught Sunday School)

This month’s book review is of a book recommended by Julie Farley, who was among the adult confirmands confirmed earlier this summer at St Olave’s. I was one of the confirmands too, so I am reluctant to say it – this book got on my nerves.  

     The Pursuit of Happiness opens with the story of a woman called Kate. Kate is in her late thirties. Recently divorced, and with a young son, she has been left somewhat bitter by the way life has treated her. This is a mindset she seems to have inherited from her mother, who, as the novel begins, has just died, after a life of stoic endurance on a low wage that did not reflect her comfortable WASP background.

     Kate has barely begun to grieve her loss when she is contacted by a woman who knows a disturbing amount about Kate, through a connection with her long dead father Jack.

     The action then shifts to this woman, Sara, taking us back to the end of World War Two in Manhattan , when she first met Jack. We see Sara as she shrugs off her conservative upbringing and builds a life for herself. It would be giving the game away to go into detail but suffice to say that her love for Jack is an ever present detail.  

     I should have loved Sara; she is intended to be the kind of strong woman that I heartily approve of. But she never came alive for me (maybe I was jealous; her career as a journalist seems to often fall into place in a way I can only dream of).

     Similarly, Sara and Jack are supposed to have the kind of all consuming love that only people in films and books actually have. Just remembering the descriptions of their sex life is exhausting. But I remained unconvinced. They are from different backgrounds and have differing beliefs, but this never comes up except when it has to, suddenly, to shift the plot towards tragedy.    

     Kennedy only seems to have a handful of adverbs and adjectives at his disposal; everything is ‘damn’ this and ‘damn’ the other, and whenever anything happens, whether it be laughing, sitting in silence, or waiting for someone, it is always for ‘a very long time’ or ‘very loudly’. For some reason this deeply irritated me. 

     What is achieved is some kind of sense of time and place. Most of the book takes place in post-war New York , and Kennedy does go some way in capturing the overwhelming sense of optimism of that generation. Later, when Sara and her beloved brother Eric find their lifestyles and livelihoods being picked apart without mercy by the McCarthy Un- American Activity brigade, their treatment seems fantastical, but we know that such nightmarish scenarios were lived out all over the US .   

     As you have probably guessed by now Pursuit of Happiness has not turned me into a Douglas Kennedy fan. But do not let me completely put you off; he has some well-known fans (including Kate Atkinson, a great author); it is very easy to read and would make a great beach companion

Emma Forrest  

Cory Beaumont, Eva Kitto and Eli Pettitt

We welcome you into the Lord’s Family, We are members together of the Body of Christ; We are children of the same heavenly Father; We are inheritors together of the kingdom of  God. We welcome you.

Here’s the picture just to remind you.  Our adjudicator chose no. 1 as the winner.  You know who you are – come and claim your smugness badge.  The other entries (all excellent) are in no particular order.