What we Learn from Katie Price on Palm Sunday

I wrote last year (or maybe even the year before, I lose track) about the Palm Sunday "moral of the story" as made manifest in the life, ups and downs of Britney Spears (a woman for whom I have much sympathy, and therefore no small amount of affection). Take one celebrity, over-baste them in the light of our limitless adoration and tribulation, get bored, drop them like an inadvertently grasped poo, blame the celebrity, go home (mostly tutting). 

Regard this post as the Part Deux of that thought process. 

The woman whose face adorns this post is one Katie Price, aka Jordan, aka the former Mrs Peter Andre, failed Euro-vision singer, mammary-enhanced producer of children and their books, self-publicist extraordinaire and the product of the world that made her. 

I don't know Katie Price, mostly because I am not a cross-dressing kick-boxer, quasi pop-singer, and I am over 18 and therefore unlikely ever to be noticed or courted by one Ms Price of Brighton. I cannot tell you if she is a nice person, a loving mother (because I have chosen not to tune in to her personal TV Channel - known to the rest of us as ITV2). I am no authority on the real person of Katie Price - though to be sure I find her public persona to be grotesque and almost completely without any class. But like I say, she is the product of the public that made her - you and me. She has her body routinely re-built to keep our interests; her chest inflated with increasing volumes of silicone to enhance our ardors,  nasty retail ranges to keep us spending our cash and feeling fashionable, and a readily modified personality and publicly expressed private life to keep us entertained. Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?

It seems to me that Katie, dear Mr Beckham, his missus (Spindly Spice, or was it Snarling Spice?), One Direction and all that goes with them is a modern manifestation of a problem that has crept up on us for years: an increasing lack of "the other" in our lives. Kids screaming until they barf because a kid who happens to be famous passes them by - a kid, even months before fame, who wouldn't have turned a single head save for his mum's. As a society, we drool over fame - like one of Dr Pavlov's dogs. 

When we lose that due sense of God in our lives we have to be left with a large gap - a hole. Nature, I am told, abhors a vacuum (and I certainly don't like the hoovering) so we do what is inevitable in those circumstances - we place humans into that space and try to make them proto-deities. Then they fail and we are awfully disappointed. There is a danger too, for Christians. Because we live in a society that adores humanity over God, there are some who seem to pursue 'celebrity' in the guise of Christian ministry. Maybe blogging is like that, I don't know (though I am hardly a celebrity by any measure, thank God). However, in the Facebook world, people seem unable not to mention their last celebrity moment or that time when they were the centre of attention. 

This is Holy Week. If we don't or cannot do it at any other time in the year, this is the week when we set aside our own desire for celebrity or the celebrity-fix,  and instead focus on the life of a broken and apparently failed itinerant preacher who was subject to the fickle love of the Jerusalemite crowd; then remember who genuinely fills the Katie Price Space in our hearts and lives. If we get that wrong, the journey of our own lives will surely never find rest or its true destination. 

One Virgin, A Sweaty Vicar and the Pursuit of Normal

From 'Cracked Virtue' - another closed blog

Before I start, an apology. Life and its various needs  means that I am scarcely finding time to be a half decent dad, let alone an engaging blogger. I apologise for neglecting you, ever thankful as I am for your continued support. 

Well, the title may have you wondering what is about to emerge before your eyes, but be assured it isn't what you think, so go and wash your minds out with soap and water. 

Several things have come to pass in the last week that have given me cause to consider a line in the sand. Allow me to list those things:

 - Exercise

 - Heat Magazine

 - A kid

There you go; rich blog fodder if there were any. The 'virgin' of the title is the new gymnasium I have joined (Virgin Active Torture Chamber, if you please). Having sold all three of my kidneys to afford to borrow their towels to wipe the sweat from my ontologically changed brow, I can now pootle down there and run a little, sling some iron about, row nowhere and contort my reverential body into to shapes that would amaze you. Do I wish to be some oiled Adonis? Am I the next Iron Man? I am a little overweight, wheezy in the cold, flabby in my cassock and fast approaching 40. What I am pursuing is not excellence - just normality. I am below that standard at the moment, and I will work hard to achieve normal weight and fitness. 

Last week, I languished in a school staff room, not waiting to not be Father Christmas, and taking advantage of the reading material of choice of our educators: Heat Magazine. Scored across the cover of that edition were the semi-clad forms of three Slebs (those younglings who are the love-children of And and Dec, Bruce Forsythe and Obergruppenfuhrer Cowell). That they were half dressed (or half undressed, depending on your perspective) wasn't what drew my eyes (honest), it was that they looked, well, normal. Their 'crime' was that they had stopped dieting. Hold the press, wait a cotton-picking minute, what they are guilty of is enjoying their chow and their penalty is to look, actually, altogether more attractive than Miss Skellington on the next page. Normal shaped women are accused of crimes to femininity these days - shame (and let's face it, normal sized women do more for the feminine curve than a walking rack of ribs). Just saying ...

Then the little lad. After not being Father Christmas at a Christmas Party at the school where I now help out, and after climbing out of the outfit that I wasn't wearing when I wasn't being Father Christmas, I passed a ten year old in the corridor. "I like you", he uttered in passing. "Why is that, fella?" was my interested reply. "You're normal". His mum died a thousand deaths as only the mother of an inveterate heretic could, and apologized for her boy. "No", said I, "his words are a gift to me". And then I cartwheeled home, cock-a-hoop that I had achieved that mystical status after a single assembly.

Normality to some is to be scorned. It speaks, often, of mediocrity and the average. The Gospel, of course, is not one of 'normal', but ministry and life seem often to put some of us behind that line, not ahead of it. Normal? I'll have that!

Palm Sunday and Britney Spears

Today is Palm Sunday, this slightly anomalous blip of joyousness in the midst of Lent and Passiontide. Of course, those of us who creep around churches habitually will know that Palm Sunday recalls the story of Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Such is the joy of that occasion that we will hobble around our grounds nursing our newly blessed palm crosses whilst singing 'Ride on Ride on In Majesty' at seven different speeds, losing a verse between the front and back of the procession. It's tradition. It must be done.

The story of Palm Sunday has the implicit taunt of 'how the mighty will fall', and the uncomfortable semi-presence of unseen pedestals upon which we will place the soon-to-be-slain. Of course, we read the Gospel and we inwardly judge the perpetrators, knowing of course that we would never do the same. Oh no, not us, m'lud. 

Palm Sunday, for me, has taken on the tint of modern society and its ways, and dear old Britney Spears seemed always to be the poster girl for that tendency. I have never bought or owned one of her records, have no real desire to either. However, the fortunes of this young woman have always troubled me. She is no saint, and maybe even errs in the opposite direction at times. But we all do. I have to say too, that her fall from grace was painful and upsetting to behold. 

The tendency to which I refer is this psychopathy in all of us to raise people up so that we can enjoy the blood-sport of seeing them fall. Oh how we love to watch people fall into disrepute. Britney Spears, Billie Piper, Charlotte Church, Drew Barrymore, and many others - all relative kids who became idols in one moment, and the meat for the next press sandwich the next. In these cases, it was more to do with too much too young - but we have all enjoyed the parades of their retribution. This picture of Ms Spears summed it all up for me; a talented kid who had lost her way and the world itching to see her fall. Fall she did, watch we did. We bought the press editions too, watching our tellies tutting. 

Palm Sunday feels a little like that for me these days. Those who will eventually crucify the Bethlehemite carpenter will be guilty of not understanding what is really going on with Jesus. They were the ones who were so ready to elevate him to such celebrity in one moment only to haul him down the next. We in our third millennium churches will preach and heap curses upon the Jews of Jerusalem of the fourth decade - mere moments before we return to our newsprint and our internets to bay for the blood of the next hapless celebrity (or, in a fit of decency look away because it has nothing to do with us, of course).

The Curate's Egg I

Egg of the Day

Scrambled

It is not late in the day; it is fairly and squarely lunch time (if you are not of the view that 'lunch is for wimps'), and already my head hurts. In life, a man needs a spitoon, and today's post is that spitoon. Hoik-Petooee ... ding.

1. I have been fully exposed to the popular press of you wimmin  - oh my word; what are you doing to yourselves? I didn't realise to what level the female psyche obsesses about weight. Guess what ... no, really - Beyonce lost four pounds last week. I can lose more weight than that by vacating my olfactory canals with a digit. Four pounds - and it reaches the glossy gleaming pages of Grazia. Natalie Cassidy apologised to the world for looking a little more cuddly than last edition - and why might this terrible circumstance be? She is pregnant. Oh my word ... saying sorry for wrapping the miracle of life in an ounce or two of love ... I ask you! Peculiar Spice (or is that Posh, I forget) is now so thin that all can see is her pout hovering 5'9" off of the ground, in the vicinity of a floating handbag and some whacky oversized sunglasses. If you are  to be anyone these days in Sleb Land then you will have sweated your giblets to near-death and produced a 'Lose Fat Fast' DVD  - immaciation for in un-initiated. Ladies, STOP!

Speaking as a blokey, and with some idea what causes the male red-cells to course more nimbly, I can tell you this: what you look like in the transient delapidating shell that you call a skin is as NOTHING when compared to the light that shines within it. God knows - you only have to look at most fellas to determine that four pounds to a man is largely his wallet and car-keys. It is all to do with who you are and not what you look like - though if in the event you are taller lying down than you are standing up, fear only for your health, not for how the world through the Sleb Land lens regards you. Enough said ... ?

 2. A controversial statement now - but if I don't make it, I will pop. Ladies of the Priestly Charism: stop apologising. God chose you, the Spirit ordained you, and the rest can ... well, converse with their own consciences elsewhere. I sense that in some circles that I have been party to in passing recently that you wonderful women are the only ones beating yourselves over the head. Enough said ... ?

3. I am tired. We are now in Holy Week (and if there are any Christians reading this that didn't know that, please go and stand in the corner), and the work-load is reaching its climax. I am a person who feels every cut of the scourge and each nail - and I rarely get through the Liturgy of Good Friday without weeping. This year, with so much stuff to do, I think that Good Friday might just overwhelm me - not good given that I am preaching. The crushing weight of the Passion has been given an extra dimension today. I officiated at the funeral of a very nice man earlier, and as I walked to the flower garden, I saw the vast array of flowers for a little girl of four years old who had died. That is as close as I got to that tragedy, and yet I am winded by it. I saw her radiant face on a card and she was overflowing with life. I bet that she was overflowing with life as she breathed her last and I pray that her smile is still as bright somewhere else. Life can be crap at times - and my prayers for the rest of this week will be with that poor family whose name I will never know.