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. 

Sticky Liturgy

During a nimble browse through Blogdom yesterday, I picked up on a sentence typed by the excellent Labradoodle-loving Curate's Wife. She pondered, in passing, how odd all this holy Week stuff must be for kids, and how they might cope with the panoply of perpetuated praise.

I am, as you may have gathered, a liturgical kinda guy. I love the 'doing' of liturgy. There are likely to be many explanations for that, and why we all fall into ecclesial pigeon-holes when it comes to such stuff; but for me, it is all bound up in good liturgy. It might be to do with a slightly extrovert nature, a pragmatic style of learning, a tendency to see the world in image and not, say, in words or numbers. It will have a little to do with the 'nurture' argument too - though perhaps less, because I found my own way to liturgy. 

Another thing that is also true to say, is that liturgically minded Christians tend to 'do' Holy Week and the Triduum well. This week is, in many ways, a show-piece of living liturgy. And I can also say with absolute certainty that it was that aspect of worship that hooked me into faith. Most kids who have ever been near a church will be familiar with Palm Crosses, and in my experience, a good many will know what they represent. For me the most chilling, haunting, beautiful, stunning, affective liturgical moment is the desecration of the church after the catastrophic key-change in the Maundy Thursday Eucharist. We enter the church in white, we leave the church is disarray into a silence of vigil-prayer. We rip every thing beautiful from the place, leaving the altar naked, defiled. With the words of either Psalm 31 or 22 being intoned or read-gently while this stripping takes place, there is no moment in church life that more connects me with the agony of the Passion. And it was so for me as a child. Wide-eyed, dumbfounded, awe-struck - in every sense, a believer. 

I can illustrate my faith journey and maturation not in encounters with people, but in encounters with God through beautiful liturgy. I do not speak of professional-ceremonial though - liturgy and ceremonial, while very closely related, are not at all the same. Beautiful liturgy can happen in the midst of 250 kids all making noise together. The joy of liturgy is that it is, by definition, hands-on. Being caused to process, to wave palm-crosses, sit in drowsy vigil in the Garden of Repose, tear a church apart - all of things demand an action, a committed involvement.

In this post, I  also disclose my plans for the rest of Holy Week. As a personal devotion, and for use to you if you want it, I shall blog the Stations of The Cross all week. There are a few of them, so it will mean three or four posts a day. They are my prayers and thoughts - I offer them humbly, and ask that you do what you will with them. 

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.